SPEAKER_00: okay everybody we've got an amazing guest in the second half of today's show it is gabriel weinberg he has joined us again 10 years after his first appearance on this week in startups that's right we're in year 11. he is running the search engine duck duck go and the browser and he cares about user privacy more than almost anybody in our industry and he has figured out

SPEAKER_01: how to build a competitive search engine to google a competitive browser to chrome and how to protect consumers privacy and i talked to him about partnering with apple and if he would consider selling to apple and why apple hasn't bought his search engine and kicked google out but first we're going to talk about the absolutely insane presentation that mark zuckerberg did rebranding facebook into meta and how they want to take over the next platform for humanity which most

SPEAKER_02: people believe will be ar and vr augmented reality virtual reality and the metaverse and i have some shrunk feelings on it as you might suspect this week in startups is brought to you by

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SPEAKER_09: conference that's the name of their conference that they're changing their name to meta and that they are going all in on ar and vr aka the metaverse here is 48 seconds with mark zuckerberg announcing the

SPEAKER_12: change i'll talk to you on the other side i believe the metaverse is the next chapter for the internet and it's the next chapter for our company too facebook is one of the most used products in the history of the world it is an iconic social media brand but increasingly it just doesn't encompass everything that we do we just announced that we are making a fundamental change to our company we're now looking at and reporting on our business as two different segments one for our family of apps and one for our work on future platforms and as part of this it is time for us to adopt a new company brand to encompass everything that we do to reflect who we are and what we hope to build i am proud to to announce that starting today our company is now meta it's almost like an snl skit i mean he's so terrible

SPEAKER_00: on camera i will say he's getting 10 better each time but he's just so awkward on camera uh that him doing these discussions really is just he's no steve jobs i'll just leave it at that uh but sure he can call the company meta what's really important here is that um the company is all in and we talked about this in previous episodes of this being source the company is all in on virtual reality and augmented reality and today you really got to see that i think zuckerberg shares uh my philosophy and i think tim cook's that virtual reality is a nice waypoint uh a great stepping stone but really the future is going to be ar vr is oppressive you know these things over your face are heavy not being able to see the real world sucks it's a very niche product all due respect to the oculus team and people who are into vr i believe that vr is appealing to no more than 10 percent of consumers and i think ar will be

SPEAKER_16: appealing to 90 of consumers or more and the overlap will be you know there's 10 of people who just don't like either uh mitigating their world but ar is clearly the big win if you want to know why with ar

SPEAKER_00: you see the real world and virtual objects are projected into it in other words you can turn it on

SPEAKER_16: and off and you're going to be very wearing very light spectacles uh like the ones that snapchat came out with or the sort of 0.01 uh version of ar glasses that zuckerberg came out with recently with ray band which are just a direct knockoff of what evan spiegel did five years ago another great job of

SPEAKER_00: zuckerberg stealing other people's ideas those glasses that just simply record that's a just a small milestone on the way there it's obviously going to take the miniaturization of your smartphone into your glasses now hold your smartphone in your hand feel the weight of it hold the sunglasses in your hand now imagine adding even more than your smartphone in terms of batteries uh or maybe not batteries but other processing chips and lenses to project there may be some things you strip out of

SPEAKER_16: course maybe a little bit of the battery and a lot of the screen point is there's a long way to go

SPEAKER_00: probably five years of miniaturization perhaps 10 for you to have sunglasses that would be chunky that can do ar properly if you want to understand where we are on this timeline simply look at microsoft's hololens they're big they're clunky and they feel more like a vr headset and they have to be because there's a lot of compute power in there for them to work and not give you motion sickness you need to have very high resolution screens plus you need a massive processor and a lot of bandwidth to

SPEAKER_01: make this stuff work without there being jumpiness when there's jumpiness what happens you hurl you puke you vomit you get motion sickness and then you take the thing off and you throw it against the wall and say this is stupid that's the main issue with all these products is the size of the headset and the compute that's uh necessary as compute costs go down and get miniaturized in the process and become lighter then the headsets get lighter and then this issue goes away so if you want to lower people's motion sickness and make it feel a higher fidelity you just put more processing power in what happens when you put more processing power in you need more energy what happens when you need more energy more batteries or you need to tether it to something and when you tether these things it sucks like the early

SPEAKER_04: oculus were amazingly inspiring but people were tripping over their computers and on the cables so uh just

SPEAKER_01: aesthetically looking at this conference i would say this is zuck's best performance and it's also the most scary in no way is it in society's best interest to let zuck own the metaverse or to make him a player in it in fact i think anybody who is in this space needs to fight zuckerberg and facebook from winning the metaverse and you can see already he's co-opting he's using the term meta he's stealing the term from the open source community and from science fiction before that and trying to make it his own and this entire conference was a list of other people's innovations and taken being credited for those by the facebook team truly disgusting and absolutely abhorrent but that's what zuck has always been he's an absolute expert in stealing other people's ideas and then scaling them and when you don't have to come up with the original ideas if all you do is steal them well then you get to spend all your time executing and on growth it's one of the great secrets of zuckerberg success don't come up with original ideals ideas let other people do that hard work in the laboratory and do that creativity just steal them the second they're ready to go into the wider uh populace and just spend your time on growth it is essential for humanity and for our industry to stop zuck and to boycott meta we'll get into that some more the performance was zuck's best i give him credit for that the production value was their best he's not charismatic he's stiff but he kind of added a bunch of jokes

SPEAKER_00: and corny jokes at that to kind of make fun of himself uh in relation to he's kind of self-aware that

SPEAKER_16: he's terrible on camera and he wears too much sunscreen so here are two of the cornier jokes in this 12 second clip stick with us i'll be there on the other side buzz that you of course it's me you

SPEAKER_23: know i had to be the robot man i thought i was supposed to be the robot you want to go again

SPEAKER_00: maybe later i'm gonna need a lot more sunscreen okay so zuck no zuck knows he's a meme he knows when he had all that sunscreen on people were like ridiculous he knows he's a robot or he comes

SPEAKER_16: across as robotic so the self-deprecating thing is you know it's great uh credit to him for doing that there was a little easter egg barbecue sauce on there so somebody internally in comms is doing a

SPEAKER_00: fantastic job of trying to humanize him somebody has the absolutely a thankless job of trying to

SPEAKER_32: make him a better presenter and congratulations he has reached the level of bad he was horrible he was

SPEAKER_00: it was uncomfortable it was difficult to watch him and now zuckerberg is just bad at presenting i think he might actually in another 10 years just be absolutely okay and passable as a presenter i don't

SPEAKER_14: mean to be cruel but since he's making fun of himself um i thought it was a good line i thought

SPEAKER_34: i was supposed to be the robot good well played before we get into the ad i just want you to go to linkedin.com twist right now linkedin.com twist and post your first job for free what a deal incredibly supportive uh of you linkedin to give that free job to our listeners and you know small business owners are busier than ever the time spent searching for and interviewing wrong candidates let's face it bad candidates takes away from growing your business that's why linkedin jobs has made it easier to get the candidates worth interviewing faster and they're giving you your first job for free create a free job post in minutes on linkedin jobs to reach the world's largest professional network of over 770 million people use screening questions to get your role in front of only the most qualified people then quickly filter and prioritize who you want to interview and eventually hire we love linkedin jobs at launch and inside and in 2021 we've hired a third producer a curriculum designer and a few more researchers and we're doing all that hiring on linkedin we love it and we're still hiring so here is your call to action one more time linkedin jobs helps you find the right candidates worth interviewing faster every week you know 40 million job seekers visit linkedin so post your job for free free f-r-e-e at linkedin.com slash twist that's right linkedin.com slash twist to post your first job for free terms and conditions do apply because they're giving you something for free all right let's get back to

SPEAKER_00: this amazing episode so they talked about their vr battle royale shooter population one uh which is a

SPEAKER_01: fortnite ripoff this is what zuck does he steals everybody else's ideas and he even mentions epic games right before it here's a 20 second clip and major platforms like epic are working

SPEAKER_40: to build out the metaverse starting with gaming have you played population one i mean yeah i love

SPEAKER_42: the game so much for those who haven't population one is a thrilling battle royale that is only possible

SPEAKER_44: in vr since its launch at connect last year it has become one of the highest earning games on quest and the biggest multiplayer fps on the platform you can have up to 24 people in at once for a match okay

SPEAKER_16: so here he is stealing uh fortnite uh this is one of the many moments in which he will steal other people's ideas and kind of take credit for them uh and then he also talked about hey he wants to bring one of the greatest games ever grand theft auto or he is bringing grand theft auto there uh so you'll be able to mass murder civilians in the most immersive way possible wow sounds like a great version of society 31 seconds see on the side there's one project that i'm really looking forward to yeah

SPEAKER_44: this is one of the all-time greats and we've been working for years to bring it to quest i'm excited

SPEAKER_40: to announce that the rockstar games classic grand theft auto san andreas is in development for quest 2. this new version of what i think is one of the greatest games ever made will offer players an entirely new way to experience this iconic open world in virtual reality that's it mark i'm moving

SPEAKER_53: to the metaverse all right thanks deb this is gonna be amazing oh my god deb this is gonna be amazing

SPEAKER_14: you're gonna be able to go into grand theft auto and run people over and beat up mailmans and i mean somebody should super cut this if you're a fan of the show super cut absolutely zuckerberg's excitement

SPEAKER_32: with this with the horrible disgusting sociopathic stuff that you actually do in grand theft auto to zuckerberg realize that he is just telling everybody in the middle of a scandal of their influence over young people and what terrible stewards of society they are that they now want to take our children and everybody else and throw them into the dystopian world of crime and violence that is grand theft auto really is anybody thinking in facebook's communication group i mean you guys are

SPEAKER_14: so incompetent or you're trolling us if it's the latter kudos to you because who reviewed the deck and

SPEAKER_00: said i have a great idea while we're being investigated for uh young women having body issues and getting anorexia and bulimia and depression and anxiety from instagram i have a great idea to christen

SPEAKER_32: our new product let's get young men to be influenced by living in a virtual world version of grand theft auto where you murder and beat people and run them over with stolen cars are you people insane the answer

SPEAKER_01: is they're not insane they are capitalists and they are just absolutely interested in the stock price going up and to the right they do not care about society they are liars they care about making money and let's face it grand theft auto where you get to be in an immersive world and beat people up and murder them and drive over them is going to be the dystopian insane running man future that will print money that's why they're doing it and somebody over there in comms needs to be fired for not sitting

SPEAKER_00: sucked down and saying are you crazy you literally want to tell people when we're launching this new

SPEAKER_32: vision that grand theft auto is a key piece of it and you think this is the best idea would tim cook do this would jeff bezos do this would steve jobs do this no they would literally say we're trying to

SPEAKER_00: make people think this is good for society grand theft auto is a parent's nightmare why on earth would we feature that and you notice they didn't show any highlights from gta because it would have been somebody like literally beating up a postman or running over you know a baby carriage

SPEAKER_14: oh my lord it's i mean you can't make this stuff up suck also talked about open standards in the metaverse which is even more funny to me because he has been on a jihad for decades to reverse all open

SPEAKER_00: standards and to steal and close off and destroy open source and open standards by forcing people to use his login and by not supporting open standards here's 51 seconds of an absolutely

SPEAKER_32: delusional and unselfaware clueless zuckerberg explaining open standards to us the industry that

SPEAKER_14: was built on open standards who absolutely hates and despises what zuckerberg has done to open standards

SPEAKER_40: play the 51 seconds teleporting around the metaverse is going to be like clicking a link on the internet it's an open standard in order to unlock the potential of the metaverse there needs to be interoperability that goes beyond just taking your avatar and digital items across different apps and experiences which we are already building an api to support you want to know that when you buy something or create something that your items will be useful in a lot of contexts and you're not going to

SPEAKER_53: be locked into one world or platform you want to know that you own your items not a platform the

SPEAKER_65: metaverse isn't something we're building so much as it's something we're building for across the industry

SPEAKER_66: we need to bring that same imagination and commitment to building for interoperability openness safety and privacy as we do for all the other product aspects of the metaverse these have to be fundamental

SPEAKER_00: building blocks oh my god it's so ridiculous this is like the guy like who just robbed your house telling you you don't need to lock your door are you people crazy you literally stole everybody's data you then let cambridge analytic and everybody else on the inside use that data you pulled the rug out from under people who bought pages and spent money building their follower count and then you deprecated

SPEAKER_01: their follower count you made people use your own cryptocurrencies you deprecate you know your own

SPEAKER_00: e coins back in the day mana in games and then you had an app developer program which you shut off and screwed all these app developers do you think we don't remember what you did to app developers for the first five years with the facebook platform can somebody please pull up the videos of zuckerberg saying this exact thing and then pull up the headlines after that point and do a super cut of all the developers he destroyed zynga and everybody else who he put the screws to and screwed if you

SPEAKER_01: partner with zuckerberg you will get screwed do not believe him and if he was absolutely um committed to this why isn't he doing it in instagram and facebook and whatsapp right now why are those not

SPEAKER_70: open source why is your data not portable why are the login systems not standard he's a liar basically

SPEAKER_01: he's a liar and he is now trying to convince us that this time it will be different when somebody shows you who they are believe them that it's that simple he has screwed over every partner he has worked with and even the people he bought companies from and he made billionaires hate him instagram

SPEAKER_00: founders whatsapp founders the list goes on and on they all despise zuckerberg can you imagine making people billionaires and making them tens of billions of dollars and they still hate you there's a reason people don't trust zuckerberg it's because he has not earned trust and then he's here telling us that this time it's going to be different and this time the metaverse is going to be open sorry you can say you had some big giant come to jesus moment about open standards and now he's trying to flip the script and kind of say apple is the closed system this is all like a high level

SPEAKER_16: leveling game of poker that zuckerberg is just not good at we all see what you're doing zuckerberg you're trying to put these digs into apple for charging a whole bunch because they blocked you from tracking users and you can't make as much money with app installs we see it from a mile away um if the

SPEAKER_00: metaverse is going to be the next platform it's essential that facebook not control it if you're a developer you should not support this if you're a user you should not support this if you're an entrepreneur you should not work for his platform davis should only support open standards in this regard and i think this is the area where cryptocurrency distributed systems and dow's and other non-controlled open source communities with financial incentives built into them can really shine if this is in fact the future which is a big question we can't let zuck win we need to hashtag boycott meta at all costs and if you're a developer why would you work to make zuckerberg richer when you could work on the open source projects own the cryptocurrencies own the real estate own the nfts if you do believe this is going to happen and that's not guaranteed why would you go work and be a peasant to zuckerberg's 50 billion dollars when you could go make 10 million dollars being an open source developer and just picking which currencies and in real estate you want to buy in the metaverse it's a terrible decision for any developer to go to work for zuckerberg as opposed to an open metaverse project

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SPEAKER_00: twist and they have the audacity to put facebook's global affairs at nick clegg in these uh discussions and him coming on and telling us that this time it's going to be different after what they're going with the facebook papers and how poorly they've acted and how many fines they've gotten just shows that nick clegg has no soul and is just there's a giant money grab for him

SPEAKER_16: he's just making tens of millions of dollars in all of this i'm sure i'm guessing but i would be surprised if he makes less than 25 to 50 million dollars uh working which is a lot for a pr communications person really like a pr communications person no offense making 25 or 50 million bucks i'm gonna guess

SPEAKER_00: that's the minimum he makes in a decade or two there he sold his soul to then try to get zuckerberg

SPEAKER_01: polished up so we fall for it again do not fall for it it's the key the key here is developers do not work at meta and do not go to work for this dystopian vision where this maniac gets to control

SPEAKER_00: the future if we in fact believe this is the future so here is a 65 second clip of zuckerberg realizing that he is going to get sued all over again and nobody trusts him so he's trying to do this preemptive

SPEAKER_01: thing like i'm sorry this time will be different this is like listening to like bp oil after they just poured oil all over through the gulf and that like we should let them draw oil again no here's 65

SPEAKER_40: seconds i'll see you on the other side privacy and safety need to be built into the metaverse from day one you'll get to decide when you want to be with other people when you want to block someone from appearing in your space or when you want to take a break and teleport to a private bubble to be alone

SPEAKER_67: with all big technological advances there are inevitably going to be in all sorts of challenges and uncertainties and i know you've talked about this a bit already but people want to know how we're going to do all this in a responsible way and especially that we play our part in helping to keep people safe

SPEAKER_84: and protect their privacy online yeah that's right this is incredibly important the way i look at it is

SPEAKER_67: that in the past the speed that new technologies emerge sometimes left policy makers and regulators playing catch up so on the one hand companies get accused of charging ahead too quickly and on the other tech people feel that progress can't afford to wait for the slower pace of of regulation and i really think that it doesn't have to be the case this time round because we have years until the metaverse

SPEAKER_65: we envision is fully realized so this is the start of the journey not the end i mean are these people

SPEAKER_32: that they think we're stupid you literally have them saying that we care about privacy and they've done nothing to protect people's privacy over the last couple of decades and here they are telling us this

SPEAKER_34: time it will be different this is like watching a serial killer and their defense attorney telling us like let this guy out of jail he won't murder and eat another three people no he is whatever happened before with the serial killing not not relevant he's not a serial killer anymore i'm telling you this time we're going to take care of your privacy you're going to be in control this time really privacy

SPEAKER_00: you're going to take care of our privacy you can have the most refined english accent flag but you are so loathsome and horrible for selling your soul so that this person can acquire more power over the next giant platform of computing we are not falling for it if you're a developer do not sell your company to

SPEAKER_01: zuckerberg oculus never should have sold to them that gave them a big head start and nobody should join this use it and build for it and really it's up to the developers to pick other platforms to develop for and to build this as open source so that the metaverse if it does happen looks more like the open web and the internet do we want the open web and internet with which facebook tried to compromise and build wall gardens do we want to fight that when we see him doing it again or do we want to let him run them up that is the key issue here i implore you developers do not build or participate or go to work for meta facebook whatever they want to call it uh they're working on some new hardware they have a luxury ar headset called a cambria this is when you know they're serious when they're putting 10 billion dollars into this they're spending apple and microsoft hardware level dollars on this they are going for it which means the open source community and the other platforms have to go for it as well we cannot let them win this uh check out this 50 second clip on their new headset cambria

SPEAKER_40: will be a completely new advanced and high-end product and it'll be at the higher end of the price

SPEAKER_91: spectrum too your avatar will be able to make natural eye contact and reflect your facial expressions

SPEAKER_40: in real time what about unlocking more mixed reality experiences i mean imagine working at your virtual desk with multiple screens while seeing your real desk so clearly that you can pick up a pen and write

SPEAKER_89: notes without taking your headset off or you're doing a workout with a virtual instructor in your living

SPEAKER_91: room we'll be taking this to the next level with high resolution colored mixed reality passthrough we essentially combine an array of sensors with reconstruction algorithms to represent your physical world in the headset with a sense of depth and perspective now we're still a ways away from exactly matching what i see in the physical world so wait great new headsets mixed reality you get the

SPEAKER_16: idea that this is uh you know where they're going is exactly what microsoft showed i think i don't know six seven years ago with hololens like they're literally just stealing the hololens presentation of multiple desktops etc uh he also talked about this project nazara which is facebook's version of ar

SPEAKER_12: glasses 42 second clip see on the side i want to show you an experience that we've been working on

SPEAKER_40: for project nazare which is the codename for our first full augmented reality glasses here you'll see you're chatting with friends on whatsapp and planning a game night you can select a game and then as you walk over to your kitchen you can easily just put your game onto the table and you're off that's the kind of experience that augmented reality will unlock there's a lot of technical work to get this form factor and experience right we have to fit hologram displays projectors batteries radios custom silicon chips cameras speakers sensors to map the world around you and more into glasses that are about five millimeters thick so we still have a ways to go with nazare

SPEAKER_16: but we are making good progress yeah i mean the amount of hand moving in that clip is it is is it just a huge tell that he wants to control us i mean that is some serious stage image of stuff i don't know what nazare uh stands for somebody look it up for me uh but yeah this is spectacles this

SPEAKER_00: is what apple is actually working on apple is going to skip vr and go right to this that's why you see ar kit and all their ar games they believe ar is the winner so they're going straight to ar they're not

SPEAKER_16: going to stop um i guess nazare is portuguese for nazareth which would be where jesus was born is that

SPEAKER_00: do i have my religion correct so are they saying that they are going to birth they're going to be the place where jesus is born is that what we're going for here is that uh is that sucks uh project naming strategy uh so apple will get there first i hope we can only hope that they get there and that's where

SPEAKER_01: this is going to get very difficult what the big tech companies have learned is own the hardware and own the whole experience so if you're um when amazon was making the bookstore they didn't just sell digital books they wanted to have the kindle apple makes the phone and the app store uh google realized they needed to make uh products like phones and then you had microsoft start to make surface and then they did xbox you know it's not enough in today's world to not control the whole stack it doesn't work as well so when you see somebody uh trying to build the whole stack that means open source is going to have a problem what we really need is open source standard for building ar glasses and vr glasses and that would be an open source hardware project where if anybody could build these things to an

SPEAKER_00: open source operating system that would be a huge win if the open source development community can work on that i would actually invest in a company that was working on the open source hardware spec and

SPEAKER_04: the operating system for these i wonder if that exists already for ar or vr if it does and those standards exist i would love to hear about it and if somebody wants to create the wordpress.com of the wordpress.org you know we have an open source project but a commercial project sitting next to it uh to help uh expedite it i'm into that but i hope that it happens as a crypto project where people just fund it with coins and you don't need venture capitalists and investors like me

SPEAKER_16: uh so they're going to also they also mention they're going to uh have a workaround between business accounts and ar accounts because they learned from their uh stealing slack another theft by zuckerberg when they stole slack they also uh created like a facebook for business or something but you had to use your same handle but zuckerberg has this very weird dystopian view that there's no difference between your private life and your work life because he has no life the rest of us might want to separate those things out a bit just to um give some quick reactions toby from shopify thought it was hugely inspiring i'll take the opposite side of that seriously this is one of the most profound and approachable articulations of how the metaverse might possibly come together you have to watch it yes i do think it's convincing i think he took together everybody else's innovations and made a just spectacular presentation toby but he's a thief who stole all of this and he's the last person i think you would agree that we want in charge of this and you have to wonder here uh like why don't they have

SPEAKER_00: clegg and like zuck in gta playing grand theft auto and they could be like hey clegg hand me that ak-47 let me what can you kill that family over there great yeah can you steal that cadillac and let me drive over that you know bunch of school kids like just own it guys if you're gonna go there

SPEAKER_16: you should totally do it uh what we'll watch today feels like a black mirror episode to me don't be fooled by the glossiness of it don't be fooled by zuckerberg's uh vision that he stole and you know basically stole from dozens of people and is now taking credit for and you know you judge people by

SPEAKER_04: what they've done and based on what he's done nobody should trust him you should have no partners involved in this and if you are part of creating the future just ask yourself do you want to give him more power over society or do you want society to have more power over people like him just ask yourself that if you're a developer if you're an entrepreneur and it's a it's a really serious question i'm asking would you like to take your work product would you like to take your creativity and have it create more

SPEAKER_01: power for facebook and specifically zuckerberg or would you like to take your creativity your skills and would you like to see that power be put in the hands of individuals and the open source community

SPEAKER_04: and if you know which is a brighter future for humanity just please take a moment and think about that if you're a developer if you get that offer from facebook and they offer you the extra 50 100 200 thousand dollars in rsu's just stop for a second and think about playing the long game because every

SPEAKER_01: line of code you write for zuckerberg every day you give him more power and every day you participate in his operating system and his platforms is more power accruing to him and more and less power accruing to the people and then you as a creator as an entrepreneur to make the quick buck are putting him in charge of

SPEAKER_02: the future of the internet how has he done so far as a steward of power objectively how has he done has he

SPEAKER_01: been a net positive for society i think we can all agree that this is a company that has not been a net positive for society and the way they operate is that foreign and that's why they've received the largest fines i'm not saying startups have to be perfect but they are so far from perfect and they have done such a poor job that they should not be given one more ounce of of power or control over the future and it really comes down to every line of code and every startup that's created and every startup and line of code that goes towards the open source community and that goes towards a

SPEAKER_04: decentralized version of the metaverse is going to be better for society than that person having any more control than he already has and speaking of open source and a better future here is my interview with gabriel weinberg of duck duck go which actually cares about your privacy

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David Friedberg: stripe.com and get started today all right the craziest thing you could do in the last decade or so would be to create a search engine and take on google how do i know this i tried with mahalo it didn't work out my idea was to do a human-powered search and kind of combine wikipedia uh with the search engine it did well for a while but uh you know it was just too tough well somebody who apparently has figured it out uh is gabriel weinberg he is the ceo and founder of duck duck go you can go to duckduckgo.com if you haven't heard of it and you haven't been around for the last i don't know 12 13 years he was last on this week in startups i kid you not in august of 2010 in episode number 72 so he's one of the founders who was in the first 100 episodes here we are 1200 episodes into the show and i thought what a great time to figure out what went so right with duckduckgo welcome back to the program over a

SPEAKER_112: decade later gabriel great to be back uh you were just a young pup at that time how old were you how old are you now and how old were you 11 years ago um i'm getting old enough where it's hard to remember

SPEAKER_115: my age i am 41. okay yeah so you were 30 years old when you were last on the program i was 39 i guess um

David Friedberg: um tell everybody um what has gone well for duckduckgo and uh how is the business doing in terms of what percentage of search do you have here in the united states how many people use it every day or month uh what's the revenue like how many employees where has the business gone to in the last 11 years

SPEAKER_122: yeah give us the update okay decade-long update um in a few words so we are beyond search now we you know we started off as private search but um our vision is wider it's uh really to be the easy button for privacy online so our current duckdeco product app and extension is the search engine plus all the features you need to have private browsing so tracker blocker encryption the mobile

SPEAKER_125: app is a full browser and on desktop you can get it as your browser extension and your favorite

SPEAKER_122: browsers um and together it adds up to you know ads not following you around the internet uh private search um you know filter bubble going away uh all the benefits you get for privacy so that's product wise kind of come a long way there um we've been growing pretty much exponentially since we talked about 50 60 percent a year um and that you know we don't track our users so we don't have like here's our maus what we do nowadays is do uh national surveys understanding how many people are using duckdeco

David Friedberg: every month so you literally don't have on your servers the number of searches that come in or

SPEAKER_131: the number of users or you just don't disclose it we don't have users so we don't have any search

SPEAKER_122: histories on duckdeco um and so when we survey the us we find um about 10 of the population uses duckdeco

SPEAKER_133: in some way during during the month um they're not all full-time users and so when you add up or or they're often full-time on one like browser like mobile or desktop and so when you add up actual search percentages we're between two and three percent right now of the full kind of search market by uh

SPEAKER_122: by volume how do you make money we make money hasn't changed in 10 years uh contextual ads so private search ads so on google and the ads that follow you around the internet those are behavioral ads they're about you as a person you know like they're you search for furniture furniture follows you around or whatever based on your interests and demographics and what they think they know about you on duckdeco you type in furniture you just get furniture ad based on that one word yeah just just that search

SPEAKER_142: results page uh there's no search history um and that's really it um you know all of our our money

David Friedberg: really comes from contextual advertising and so if a criminal uh organization or let's say just a

SPEAKER_145: criminal was typing in you know how to do something horrible in the world and the fbi came to you or uh and said hey give us your search logs give us the ip addresses we know that this person uses duckduco and they typed in how to build a bomb and they blew up the oklahoma city building you don't actually have that data you don't store that data you couldn't help the fbi out in that classic 24 television show

SPEAKER_131: instance correct yeah so just taking a step back we think privacy is just for mainstream people wanting

SPEAKER_125: to not be manipulated online so you know 100 we have on the order of maybe 100 million people across

SPEAKER_122: the world using it so it's definitely for anyone and everyone um that said yes we've never received any formal warrant of any kind uh for search histories because we don't we don't have any search histories so if anyone kind of reach out to us and say hey could you help us here we just reply like we don't have any ip addresses with searches or anything like that so there's no way we can really help you

SPEAKER_145: and that sets people away and that was a key innovation i remember when we first talked of how you architected the system you don't know my ip address if i type in an adult search if i type in i have cancer uh if i type in i have depression there's no way for you to know that this person jane doe john doe has depression or was com you know considering suicide whatever it is those ip addresses are not there the searches are not saved um so then i guess that next uh begs the question how do you make the

SPEAKER_155: search results better because google's claim has always been hey we we get that data and we can tailor your searches and to a certain extent that is true when i do a search on uh google they know

SPEAKER_156: that i've searched for certain things before they're going to surface them uh higher they know that whatever if i'm into poker and i type in a certain poker term maybe they'll customize that to me right uh they obviously know my location which i think do you know people's location as well because that's

SPEAKER_131: an important vector yeah so um first of all like i we've come a long way in search and our search is

SPEAKER_134: used by mainstream people as all the results you need we think the quality is is on par um and

SPEAKER_122: partly that's because most of what people think they need from personalization is really just localization like you said at the end just just like local results local weather local restaurants that kind of stuff we can do that in the same exact way like your location gets sent across automatically when you use the internet and we just don't save any history of that or really save the location at all um but we can use it in that one search to give you the information you need in terms of good results the other thing has changed in the last 10 years in terms of search is you know search is a lot more than links nowadays it's got 20 different modules on it yes and that was my original idea with

SPEAKER_164: model was to make comprehensive search yeah i got there just just couldn't figure out the model

SPEAKER_122: and each of those each of those modules now our big big companies have vertical great data sources

SPEAKER_125: there um you know like trip advisor and local and yelp that kind of thing and so our we work with

SPEAKER_122: those companies and we think the aggregation of those can actually be better than what google has

SPEAKER_129: whereas google you know basically decided to dominate and use their own stuff in every category so they

SPEAKER_156: went into google places instead of yelp so if i type in ramen near me i will see uh results that come i'll see apple maps uh is your default maps partner i guess and then i will see a bunch of places that

SPEAKER_170: are provided for me by yelp i'm assuming trip advisor some obviously use trip advisor as your yeah what's

SPEAKER_161: what's interesting about search is because it's as you know it's all sorts of different things we've had to

SPEAKER_122: create a lot of search technology so where we can get it with the best partner we will but like for

SPEAKER_172: something like local we've had to do our own calling use apple use trip advisor use different things in different countries you know how do you make the difference how do you make the decision to

SPEAKER_156: use trip advisor not yelp uh or make that a setting i can make how did you come to that decision is that just a partnership decision uh or does yelp not agree with your privacy concerns or do they want money how do you come to that is it just a business decision yeah in each case it could be all the

SPEAKER_139: above but it's generally trying to find the best partner who's willing to kind of work with us on

SPEAKER_129: privacy who also has really good results um that's kind of what it comes down to and then do you get

SPEAKER_156: paid by trip advisor for using theirs uh and featuring them each vertical is kind of different i mean the

SPEAKER_122: local is different from sports or or you know movies and because of the way the data is and if it's a monopoly in that situation you know all the dynamics can change but generally you know we have a lot of

SPEAKER_125: people coming to duck to go so it's you know brands like to work want to work with us because we're

SPEAKER_145: we're showcasing their content got it so all things being equal if trip advisor pays you more than yelp

SPEAKER_130: that's a revenue stream for you uh i mean it could be i mean our revenue mainly comes from the regular contextual ads we're on these type of partnerships we're focused on result quality so like we're generally

SPEAKER_145: focused on making dr go a good search engine and then how would you then look at something like

David Friedberg: say travel that's where google has decided to be incredibly sharp elbowed and they're just like we're gonna monetize the heck out of it you do a travel search now uh you know you see on the bottom

SPEAKER_155: like partnership partnership partnership i mean they are monetizing every click above the fold it seems how many organic results does google actually give you today in the travel search i don't above the fall maybe none maybe one so what's your philosophy of that because there is a thinking well if people

SPEAKER_156: are willing to pay then they're going to have uh a really good product but then there's also you know some people maybe who think differently how do you think about that especially specifically in travel

SPEAKER_122: yeah i mean we're we're like super user-centric right so search is arguably the biggest market on the internet obviously google makes over 100 billion dollars on it and we make a lot less but

SPEAKER_125: because it's so profitable we can be profitable without like squeezing everything out of the user

SPEAKER_129: so our goal is user first so we don't have a lot of ads we have some but not a lot um it seems like

SPEAKER_165: you go with two maybe i i don't know if i've seen three before but you have a general philosophy one two or

SPEAKER_193: three yeah um pretty much um and we don't even do three i don't think we do three um really just one or two

SPEAKER_122: um i mean to your point if you go too much more you take up the whole screen with ads and then it's and then it's all ads now ads can be useful i mean in certain situations where there's a lot of spammy content and brands are paying to be there and that can be a good signal um and that's generally our

SPEAKER_133: line is like we try to prioritize the number of ads based on how good they are on the page was the

SPEAKER_197: reason to do the browser because google's chrome became so ubiquitous that the idea of protecting

David Friedberg: somebody's privacy just you know google decided we're not just gonna collect your data in this in

SPEAKER_199: your search results and from your visit we're we're gonna monitor you everywhere you go even if it's not on our sites is that what google's doing with their chrome browser they're basically building my

SPEAKER_202: profile based on everything i do they are not just chrome you know it's youtube and even more

SPEAKER_122: important it's all the trackers they have embedded millions of websites so we we run kind of best tracker walker now by by crawling the web and understanding the universe of trackers out there and google is on about 85 percent of pages that people visit just lurking in the background so not

SPEAKER_156: even going to google these are just like you know those web pages yeah those web pages the retailer has decided i want to use google analytics for free they use google analytics google gets that data and they get to make decisions based on it is that what's happening most often yeah these these different

SPEAKER_122: data collection points are coming back into a big profile of you which then can be used both for the ads of all year round but also for the filter bubble on google search youtube etc and so the reason to go to the browser is we want to build a more comprehensive privacy solution right so private search is just one part of protect your privacy online but if you really want to stop like the filter bubble on

SPEAKER_125: the web and ads following you around you have to hit all three collection points that's search website tracking and encryption you know or the lack of encryption going across the internet and so our

SPEAKER_133: app and browser hits all all three of those and together in one package then you can actually stop

SPEAKER_156: those privacy harms so you're not blocking ads on a third-party site but you are blocking the track

SPEAKER_122: trackers if the users want to block those trackers yeah we are explicitly a tracker blocker that has the result of blocking a lot of ads because a lot of ads require tracking to work but not all ads i mean there are still ads you will see on our general philosophy there is you know advertising in and of itself isn't bad like we have private contextual ads on our website it's all the tracking that has come

SPEAKER_129: with behavioral advertising in the last 10 years and so on a legal basis and neither of us i don't believe

David Friedberg: you're a lawyer i don't think either of us are lawyers i'm not a lawyer not a lawyer but we can pretend to be one here on the pod um if i this is my interpretation of it the one i've heard seems the most reasonable if i choose to use and i call your website down i pull the data down it's my choice how i render that data in my browser therefore if i don't want to be tracked i can block it and if that includes blocking ads there's never been uh it seems any legal issues with this uh concept i know that there was some you know saber rattling let's say about it but it only seems to have gotten to 10 to 20 percent of users are blocking ads on the web is is that about right and do you think there's some tipping point in in the sort of legal uh framework where google says you know what uh if you use an ad

SPEAKER_220: blocker we're not gonna let you use our website i think what happened with ad blocking is that it was

SPEAKER_122: a quick and dirty solution and to be clear ad blockers don't always actually stop the tracking

SPEAKER_222: right they just maybe cosmetically block the ads and don't maybe say block google analytics and things

SPEAKER_139: like that that are doing most of the tracking and so our view is to get more of a nuanced you know

SPEAKER_122: come in with a more nuanced solution that can work more long term which is what people really care

SPEAKER_125: about is is tracking online and invasive advertising that's following them around um and so we're we're hoping to draw that line and not we we think that has legal backing in fact

SPEAKER_129: more and more of these things are being built into laws which we've been been a part of helping

SPEAKER_156: to write like ccpa and cpra and ccpa this is the california consumer protection act

David Friedberg: and then there's the european one uh and so we have a state here in the united states we have a a collection of countries in europe that are saying hey we should have comprehensive protection for people's privacy but the united states doesn't have that are we ever going to have a comprehensive uh nationwide privacy act for users in the united states i i believe so um i it might come with

SPEAKER_122: antitrust um in some kind of hybrid type of of situation but building on ccpa we think that there

SPEAKER_125: is a need you know we we we founded something in our browser or founding member of a standard called global privacy control which is a signal that you can send automatically as default on with duck.go to automatically opt out of the sale of your personal information in california so you know there's

SPEAKER_122: links you gotta you can click on and see if you use duck.go it'll automatically opt you out we think

SPEAKER_125: like something like that should exist in the federal law and would be an easy thing for consumers to opt into to then stop that first party tracking that's happening on websites yeah and uh when you look

David Friedberg: at apple seems to have been tracking duck.go uh over the years and watching what you're doing um they now have uh essentially a vpn or a relay i guess it's more of a relay right maybe you could

SPEAKER_199: explain what apple is doing with their relay which feels a little bit more like um the tour network

David Friedberg: than say just a classic vpn or maybe it's like a putting two vpns together so maybe you could talk about safari's new relay server and do you have that feature and what do you think about that as an option in terms of search because uh they're doing that to you and it doesn't seem to have affected your

SPEAKER_125: business yeah i mean apple's been a partner of ours since they put us in safari as an option in 2014 and in fact um we produce privacy technology that's built into apple's tracking products so if you look at the privacy report you get in safari and you click on more info it'll say trackers identified by

SPEAKER_133: by duck.go oh very nice and that's like our tracker blocking technology we're talking about

SPEAKER_122: identifying trackers um they've been leaning into privacy more and more um you know they introduced an email protection uh product and we also recently introduced email protection product that's available across all platforms um the the proxy that they have is another kind of network protection product similar to the encryption one that we provide the idea is to try to protect more of your information that's going across the wire so that network snoopers can't see it and i'm happy to get

SPEAKER_245: more and more technical with it but that's basically the idea um so basically i put in a search let's

SPEAKER_156: say i'm feeling depressed or i'm feeling suicidal let's just use depression maybe people have a little

SPEAKER_199: bit of privacy current concerns uh you know hey i'm feeling depressed i type that search into google now google is gonna put that in my profile they're gonna show me ads all across the web i'm gonna start

David Friedberg: seeing depression related ads on youtube etc um which could be pernicious it could just make you

SPEAKER_246: more depressed because you're being you know who knows what the algorithm is and that's kind of what

SPEAKER_124: the face some of the it totally is and that's somewhat it's related to facebook too i mean that's yeah the facebook trackers and the and the stuff on the hill recently about girls seeing you know

SPEAKER_222: things over and over again related to maybe searching for diet or something like that the inspiration

David Friedberg: you know all this like pernicious stuff sends you down this rabbit hole it probably shouldn't be going down so you do that search with let's say uh safaris they will then fire up another browser somewhere virtually in their cloud system ask the search engine for that use their ip address and then send you the result back is that kind of what's happening is that a description of it not not exactly and i

SPEAKER_124: don't want to misspeak on apple's product because that seems kind of complicated but um in general i

SPEAKER_139: think they're trying to help protect your ip address from when when you go to websites um that's one method

SPEAKER_122: of of tracking unfortunately to be like fully protected you really need um tracker blocker as well

SPEAKER_255: um because you know there's a lot of ways to get fingerprinted when you load up yeah explain this

SPEAKER_155: this is a critically important concept my understanding is your screen resolution your

SPEAKER_165: monitor setup your memory exactly a lot of other pieces uh to do with your browser and your desktop or your phone can be sent to build a profile of you explain how they build these modern day profiles if they don't have your ip address yeah it's a it's a bit counterintuitive um but it's true

SPEAKER_122: uh your computer is pretty unique it's really what it is um like the fonts you have installed and the combination of what version you're using and kind of exactly what model it is and what the screen size is when you add up all those little pieces and say you say you put it together in one long number

SPEAKER_125: your number is often unique to you and so you can use that as as a fingerprint uh which means that they could turn it into an id kind of like an ip address and follow you around with that or even easier you know you can just drop make up a unique number and drop it as a cookie um but like what happens is is as

SPEAKER_122: long as these scripts can load these trackers like say like google analytics they're gonna find a way to fingerprint you and so the key is actually blocking them from loading on the websites you visit you need that extreme level of blocking and that's what a good like tracker blocker like ours that component will do versus just like when you hear all this talk about we're just restricting cookies or you know we're just putting restrictions on these trackers that's not going to go far enough to actually stop the harm like they'll still be able to track you okay so apple has been doing tons of

SPEAKER_263: these privacy things you've been doing a ton of privacy things brave browser a lot of people vpns nordvpn

SPEAKER_199: tunnelbear everybody's really getting in on this trying to really protect people's privacy and i think your timing was great you were too early at the beginning and now it seems like consumers are catching up to this concept uh because of data leaks because of regulations uh and just all kinds

David Friedberg: of bad actors and what they're seeing in the world people seem to care about that what what percentage of people would you say are um concerned enough about privacy to take uh initiative get a vpn

SPEAKER_156: use one of these browsers versus people who maybe are you know more passive about it where are we

SPEAKER_131: at today in 2021 yeah that's a that's a great way to put it that's exactly how we um look at our

SPEAKER_122: market we call it the care and act on privacy group so yeah you don't just say you care but you actually took some action um that is actually just across 50 of the u.s uh people who are attempting to do

SPEAKER_125: something like you said some action um so it's a lot i think the the gap there is in the quality of the software and so it's our job to make that simple and seamless and that is our real goal is to be that

SPEAKER_129: easy button so when people are looking they can just download our product on any platform and get that

SPEAKER_165: basic protection so here's a candid question apple dot go you're perfectly in line you're simpatico you

SPEAKER_155: share the same vision yet apple gives gets 15 billion dollars a year from google to make them the default search engine it's a nice chunk of change it's a pretty penny um you purposely monetize at a lower level than google google makes about 30 cents a shirt search i think i'm guessing you make 10 of that

SPEAKER_165: my am i in the ballpark here that you monetize we definitely make a lot less so let's just go with

SPEAKER_156: that 80 less something like that because you just are not flooding the top with 20 links there and you're flooding with two one or you're putting one or two they're putting 20. so i'm just i'm going to say 10 maybe you make three cents per search on average to their 30 pick a number out there

SPEAKER_165: apple if they made you the default it means they would go from 15 billion dollars a year and you might generate uh 1.5 billion dollars if you had all those apple consumers or let's say you do really good you double that they don't need that incremental 10 billion dollars i don't think why don't they uh just make you the default search engine and there's been rumors and advocacy around them buying duck duck go what are your thoughts on a potential deeper collaboration with happen i mean we've been pushing

SPEAKER_243: for a third option uh you know both to partners but also just in a regulatory manner which is

SPEAKER_122: you know that deal is a deal of a default deal that google has kind of locked up not just an apple but basically all defaults on most phones and basically all of android through all of the handset uh deals

SPEAKER_125: and so what we'd actually like is instead of that is for there to be what we call a preference menu when you install the device or open up even chrome for the first time um you're presented with an option to pick the search engine so you know most people are using google now um never made a choice they just got google and that's what they've gotten for the last you know 20 years um but we think that if

SPEAKER_139: people really understood that there was another option and would be easily able to check it out like

SPEAKER_279: our our percentage would go up overnight and so from apple's perspective or anyone's it's more we think

SPEAKER_125: of more from the consumer perspective of giving users a choice that want it you know anyone who really

Chamath Palihapitiya: wants privacy make it easy this is a brilliant uh framing of the issue because what you're saying is let consumers choose and what google has done is because they are willing to uh compromise people's privacy at the highest level they then have the budget to pay off partners at the highest level because you do the right thing you make three cents a search i'm saying that i'm making it up to

SPEAKER_155: my estimate they make 30 cents therefore you could never offer an android headset maker apple whoever the same deal that google could so we've created an incentive structure here which means the more you invade people's privacy the more you build a profile of them that they clearly don't want even somebody like apple who has made it their mission the last two or three years to protect people's privacy even

SPEAKER_165: they can't say no to the massive buckets and wheelbarrows and just dump trucks dump trucks going from mountain view to cupertino these garbage trucks of a hundred dollar bills being dumped in front of the apple campus

SPEAKER_122: isn't that what's happening here i think that speaks to why you know the market is broken there

SPEAKER_125: it's a it's really a monopoly issue and it needs an antitrust remedy of you know getting rid of these

SPEAKER_247: search defaults and then letting consumers choose that that would be our goal even firefox um was making i believe i don't know if you know what the number was at the peak because they did so i think

David Friedberg: the order of 400 million per year from here yeah this this was an incredible thing for people who

SPEAKER_165: don't know the history of this net netscape uh had an open source project mozilla mozilla then spun out of aol aol made this incredible browser it got huge market share basically google uh knifed him in the

David Friedberg: middle of the night and did a secret chrome project but google bought all that search traffic and

SPEAKER_165: they were making 400 million a year uh from it which then gives them a really uh a hard um decision to make they're a non-profit they have no other way to make money so what mozilla has lost massive market share uh they still make hundreds of millions of dollars i guess from these deals but they can't care about privacy can they if they're taking that kind of money it's hard the the the way these deals

SPEAKER_122: have kind of captured the market here to your point and the incentive structure is aligned for google

SPEAKER_133: just to keep being the default everywhere and so that really needs to be broken up um you know we

SPEAKER_130: do think there's progress here so you know there are bills moving in the house and senate right now so

SPEAKER_125: literally like last week the american hit a voice innovation and choice online act that's a mouthful was introduced um and part of it makes google self-preferencing illegal um it has wide bipartisan support in the senate um and if that were to pass this default relationship uh at least on android and

SPEAKER_122: chrome would go away um it's not everywhere but that would be a big chunk right there i mean half of the

SPEAKER_129: us uses android as their phone and then google could say well we're just not going to provide

SPEAKER_199: google to handset manufacturers anymore that would be their response right you just don't get google we're gonna we're gonna charge you for android you can get it for free and we're the search engine and we got our apps if you don't we want 25 a handset because that's what we've been playing in europe right

SPEAKER_307: and so over the last four or five years yeah so there's a there's a preference venue in europe that

SPEAKER_133: we've been working on and that debate has been playing out i mean the reality is is that you know there are monopoly profits here from your point about private from privacy violations and so people will have to

SPEAKER_202: make less money a little bit less money um and exploit people less but that said or make it a

SPEAKER_199: different way i mean if if google said listen if you want free android if you want free uh then you just give us uh your search traffic as a default you can change it but we get the default and uh if

Chamath Palihapitiya: you want the android license it's going to be you know uh 20 bucks a year do you sell a handset for

SPEAKER_199: a thousand bucks 40 bucks goes to us or whatever every year the consumer or you have to pay us 20

SPEAKER_189: bucks so if you want to put into the cost of your phone and that would be just like buying any other

SPEAKER_313: software microsoft office yeah that's how windows worked for for decades it still does yeah and then

SPEAKER_130: additionally there could be rev share um deals that you get mandated by the regulation as well so if you

SPEAKER_139: have the preference menu you know many people will select google and that's fine and that could be rev share back to the back to the angela figures how many people work at the company now and i know

David Friedberg: you raised 100 million dollar round at some point uh you see all these facts going on you know you've obviously committed to making this a long-term independent strong company you see all these people going public seems to me like you're positioned perfectly to do a spack to become a public company to do a direct listing uh what are you thinking when you're seeing all these companies go public around

SPEAKER_130: you yeah i mean we we have we've been profitable 2014 so we've had no real pressure to do anything

SPEAKER_125: um we're not we don't need to raise the money say public market but to your point we could go public

SPEAKER_243: vs back or direct listing we're about 100 kids or other questions we're about 150 people

SPEAKER_125: ish um and you know we are definitely big enough both company size and revenue size to be a public

SPEAKER_322: company so it's just more a matter of whether we kind of the pros and cons to doing that and whether

SPEAKER_324: we really want to be public or stay private are you too conservative as a founder uh in terms of building this uh being profitable in a time when there's free money everywhere you know not going

David Friedberg: public keeping the company at 150 do you need to be more bold given the opportunity that's going on here

SPEAKER_139: i definitely think initially like when we first talked i was being too conservative um over the

SPEAKER_125: past few years i've tried to change that yeah and so we we've grown very rapidly since then both company size product vision um what we're trying to execute on we've been um very rapidly trying to raise

SPEAKER_322: our brand awareness and be the household name for privacy so we're spending tens of millions in you know just regular like billboard radio advertising this year yeah i didn't notice that what about vpn

SPEAKER_131: do you provide vpn so we we instead for uh network protection decided to make a better uh encryption technology if you're familiar with uh https everywhere an extension that eff made a long time

SPEAKER_133: ago we went in that direction and basically made that 10 times better and bigger by crawling the

SPEAKER_122: web and the reason we did that is because you still get a you get kind of the 80 20 of the network protection that you would get from vpn but it doesn't slow you down it doesn't break things got it

Chamath Palihapitiya: but people will pay for a vpn there's tons of vpn providers out there you're a big company you

David Friedberg: buy one of the existing vpn companies out there or you could build your own you're very good at

SPEAKER_199: building stuff it seems to me that adding the vpn layer would just make this you know some people would say i i sacrifice a little bit of speed for my vpn when i'm on the road uh especially i mean

SPEAKER_122: i think we're i think we were headed there i mean so this year we launched um a bit of email protection we're launching app tracking protection in a few weeks and we're working on a desktop version of our app um i think vpn could be next i mean i think higher level though like we've

SPEAKER_125: gravitated towards free products because we think it gets in the hands of more people

SPEAKER_199: and yeah but you can do a free vpn that would be i mean it would cost a little bit you could keep it only to a certain number of users in the beta or whatever but i i think the person who has the business model like you do and then puts a vpn for free on top of it could do tremendous

SPEAKER_161: business i mean yeah i mean it's a good point and that may be where we're headed um it's like

SPEAKER_122: when you dig into vpn a lot of it is used to watch video in in kind of non-drm ways and so we would want to do it just for privacy reasons at that point because the video is very expensive um if you

SPEAKER_161: offer it for free but yeah i think you're right from a privacy perspective if you're just using it to browse the web i think we could offer that uh additional as we get close to wrapping here just

SPEAKER_165: thinking about facebook uh and what we've seen from these leaked papers uh and thinking about algorithms algorithms uh have made certain things delightful the netflix algorithm telling us what movie to watch you know spotify surfacing the next singer songwriter that i'm going to fall in love with amazon telling me products like these these are incredibly awesome algorithms that make life delightful and awesome and efficient how do you view facebook's algorithm because there seems to be this uh i don't want to say double standard but there seems to be uh people believe that their algorithm isn't providing delight for consumers it's providing you know the way they've implemented it

David Friedberg: providing you know uh strife anger people being irate and then people look at youtube's algorithm and they also kind of feel maybe that's a little less harmful than facebook's uh and instagram's but still harmful because you watch one you know ivermectin and then you go to a hoax vaccine video and you know you can just basically go down that rabbit hole whether it's the alt-right whether it's racism whether it's extremism uh so talk to me about the algorithms from those two companies those two

SPEAKER_247: products those three products facebook instagram and youtube and why they're so different than the ones from that we all know and love from a spotify from a netflix yeah i think there's two two large

SPEAKER_125: kind of fundamental differences one is they're based on a surveillance uh advertising business model you know the data collection um is used to to power these ads that have both you know commercial

SPEAKER_122: kind of exploitation but also shown to be discrimination like in housing and job ads and just

SPEAKER_135: creepy following you around um and so that's one thing it's like it's tied to this business model

SPEAKER_243: where the other ones aren't the second one is is maybe a little harder to see but i think

SPEAKER_125: potentially more important is like you know what those algorithms do is put you in a filter bubble right so um you're not seeing the same results as everyone else it happens on google search too whereas like different people may see you know links and news articles more attuned to their

SPEAKER_172: political leanings and that creates polarization over time helpful not helpful google not helpful

SPEAKER_122: and so you know it's the context right so like if you're on a google search you're you're expecting to

SPEAKER_125: get more unbiased information if you search for a youtube video uh you know you're expecting to get

SPEAKER_131: kind of the most popular videos there it's kind of the difference of if you search um whereas then if you're you know you're searching on um netflix or amazon it's very much more clear that that is you know

SPEAKER_243: that is is it a completely different non-informational context um more of an entertainment or shopping context and also more clear that it's related to your history yeah and our all of our collective history

SPEAKER_199: listen if you uh i would say the the algorithm at amazon has caused me tremendous problems in my

David Friedberg: personal life because i just have many too many boxes coming here because when they say buy all three man i wondered why they had buy all three there and now i'm just frequently like yeah buy all three it let's go i'll get those other two things to to go with it uh listen continued success on the company uh it's great that you're out there fighting this good fight uh you're hiring um i'm curious ai seems to be what google believes their big advantage is you're a much smaller company they've got more people in a deep mind than they've got 10 times as many people at deep mind than you have at your entire company can you compete against that and how big is ai playing into search or is that overblown

SPEAKER_122: um i don't think it's it's overblown in the sense i think it is very important but the way that we compete as we were talking beginning is by working with you know other companies who are investing kind of vertically in those players so if you think of the wider duck to go team

SPEAKER_133: slash universe it kind of includes say all a trip advisor you know if you say yeah you have their ai

SPEAKER_131: people right exactly and so we have our own obviously not close to as many as google but but you really

SPEAKER_122: it's like the sum of all of our partners um but just to circle back on that yeah duck go has you know become way more than search now so if you if you want to just protect your privacy generally that's what

SPEAKER_199: we're trying to do download the app download uh the browser uh just type duck go into your app store uh and that's i'm guessing mobile 60 of your consumption these days something like that 70.

SPEAKER_122: yeah i think it's about 60 40 similar to google um yeah you know yeah so you're basically an app

SPEAKER_124: company now you have to just nail the app we're actually the number two downloaded browser uh on

SPEAKER_133: wow on mobile so and number number one on android because chrome is already there um yeah and so

SPEAKER_170: so chrome is number one on ios then yeah we've we've had a hunt since we redid our apps extensions

SPEAKER_122: and the mobile app became a full browser with all the pricing points it's been downloaded

SPEAKER_371: a hundred million times wow that's a game changer for the company yes and you believe in free so the

SPEAKER_199: idea that people would pay you for a premium service just not in your wheelhouse really i

SPEAKER_131: mean it's it's more than like it as we were talking about if the service has real marginal costs

SPEAKER_133: so we really need to charge for it that's fine but we would opt to make it free if we could

SPEAKER_122: it's not because it's not just the us right we're talking about the whole world and and the ability

SPEAKER_134: for certain countries to pay is much less do you have a lot of chinese users using the service i know

SPEAKER_189: they care deeply about privacy uh and do you index the chinese web so interestingly it does work in

SPEAKER_130: china as a you can search but we've been banned in china i think since 2013 right if you're using a vpn assume yeah we have still have chinese usage via vpns but because of that like wholesale ban you know

SPEAKER_125: there's kind of a max you can kind of get get to from china yeah millions of users or something but how do

SPEAKER_199: yeah are they are they uh but do you index the chinese web as well and how do you think about

David Friedberg: authoritarian countries and participating you know there's a lot of people seem to be working around them knowing that those countries are kind of soft allowing vpns or you know maybe they're not putting

SPEAKER_385: people in gulags all the time for using a vpn just for selling them yeah i mean our our approach has

SPEAKER_122: not to engage with any kind of authoritarian government in any way so you know for that

SPEAKER_388: you know we're not focused on we're not indexing the chinese uh internet you know we use

SPEAKER_133: it'll work but i think in that case we're relying on uh kind of microsoft's index whatever they're

SPEAKER_125: doing there um but we're we're not personally putting any focus on china all right uh i know you're

David Friedberg: hiring so uh is there a careers page or what are you hiring for what's the most acute needed go to

SPEAKER_113: your point about being um uh being not aggressive enough we are hiring in every area so if you

SPEAKER_122: you're kind of at all interested in in this you should uh you should come apply reach out yeah we

SPEAKER_125: have a careers page uh but basically engineering design product business anything yeah on behalf of your

SPEAKER_396: investors please don't make a profit just keep get that extra 10 percent of growth burn some money

David Friedberg: gave her some money gabriel all right listen continued success everybody out there if you don't know about duck duck go this is your decade refresher but uh you know what i think you speak on so many great topics can we book you for a year from now and maybe we just cut the 10 years

SPEAKER_401: down to every year you come on would that be okay sound sounds good all right nice to come back

SPEAKER_189: sooner all right uh continued success thank you for doing the work sincerely uh i think it's great

David Friedberg: and everybody go check out their uh career page and uh go work on good stuff is if you're working at google or facebook right now and selling your soul you know maybe you can do your penance and maybe make duck go even more successful that would be a nice thing for you to do and just think what your family is going to think about you when you show up for christmas or the holidays thanksgiving you show up for july 4th you're a facebook employee and now you work for duck duck duck go it's going to be a nice story arc isn't it thank you jason all right we'll see you

SPEAKER_38: all next time in this week it starts bye bye