[00:00:00] Luke: From privacy concerns to limitless potential, AI is rapidly impacting our evolving society. In this new season of the Brave Technologist podcast, we’re demystifying artificial intelligence, challenging the status quo, and empowering everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. I’m your host, Luke Malks, VP of Business Operations at Brave Software, makers of the privacy respecting Brave browser and search engine, now powering AI with the Brave Search API.

[00:00:29] You’re listening to a new episode of the Brave Technologist. And this one features Ryan Patterson, who is the CEO of Unplugged Technologies, a company dedicated to advancing commercial cellular privacy. With over 20 years of experience, he’s led innovative technology development and operational initiatives across federal and civilian sectors.

[00:00:45] Previously, he funded IST Research, where he developed advanced information systems for challenging environments, culminating in a successful exit in 2020. A two time DARPA veteran, Patterson played key roles in transitioning groundbreaking technologies to the Department of Defense, including deployments in [00:01:00] Afghanistan and Iraq.

[00:01:01] In this episode, we discussed his work at deploying at DARPA, integrating emerging tech into these challenging real world operations. We also discussed his current work at Unplugged, making a privacy play in the cellular market, and how AI is part of their future plans to enhance user privacy on hardware devices, along with new partnership between Unplugged and Brave that went live last week.

[00:01:20] Now for this week’s episode of the Brave Technologist. Ryan, welcome to the brave technologist. How are you doing today?

[00:01:30] Ryan: I’m doing great, Luke. Thanks for having me on.

[00:01:33] Luke: Yeah, I’m super excited for this one. Our listeners might not be totally familiar with Unplugged. You mind giving them a little bit of background on, about what Unplugged is and what the main mission is and what you guys are kind of doing to fulfill it?

[00:01:46] Ryan: Sure. Yeah. We uh, two and a half years ago embarked on this idea of like, we are getting so owned by data leakage from our own phones. Some of that accidental, some of that very purposeful. And we realized that. You know, most consumers [00:02:00] of telecommunications have no idea just how much of their personal data gets sent out and sold over and over and over again.

[00:02:06] And we set out to create a solution that allows for the everyday average cell phone user to get a little more confidence in the privacy that they get from using their phones. And this comes from stripping at IDs out, putting the. privacy functions right at their fingertips at the OS level, and we wanted to make it, you know, accessible to everybody.

[00:02:27] We’ve got lots of folks. I’ve got many, many friends that are from the privacy sector, and they know how to take a thing and root a thing and do some other weird things to pull. Some of their privacy back, but the average user just simply doesn’t have that. And so that was our mission. How do we, how do we return privacy to the, to the average phone user?

[00:02:46] Luke: And so the unplugged phone just, it doesn’t have Google play services or any of that kind of duopoly tech on it.

[00:02:54] Ryan: Yeah. So again, if you’re going to take a holistic approach of privacy or security or anything, you’ve got to [00:03:00] work across the full stack of things. And so there is a hardware component of ours, the unplugged phone, there’s our own operating system, Libertas, there is an app store and an app suite that has a VPN antivirus firewall wrapped into it.

[00:03:14] And some fundamental components of it. We’ve stripped out Google mobile services completely from the phone. We have brought those privacy focuses right to a single button click on the phone. And then you get access to everything. You can turn off, you know, data from your USBC microphone camera to factor authentication.

[00:03:30] Near field communication, you can turn all of that off so that nobody can get into your phone. And again, that goes from a hardware button push to the firmware. We’ve included a kill switch, a physical separation of the battery from the compute. You know, you and I are both old enough to remember when you can pull the battery out of your blackberry.

[00:03:44] I’m pretty sure was it was dead. That’s not the case right anymore. Right? You turn a phone off now. It’s not really off. It’s sort of software off, but they’re paying it. So we put that back in. Physical separation and again, then it’s then a suite of tools that after the first year come with subscription, when you buy the [00:04:00] phone, you get them free the first year.

[00:04:01] So, yeah, we tried to really put together a full package that a user can be confident in from the time they open the box.

[00:04:08] Luke: That’s really cool. I think like it’s a really, a really great approach to it too, because people really don’t understand kind of the degree in which the Google kind of apparatus, you know, tracks you across everything.

[00:04:20] I mean, like, we see this with having a browser where we can control. At the water’s edge where the four walls of the browser, right? Like, but we can’t control what Google’s doing with your device and everything’s kind of coming through their ecosystem. So, you know, you’re getting attributed all over the place.

[00:04:37] So it’s really cool to see a challenger coming to market. That’s like privacy focused. And also just trying to kind of like de Google you from, your device, like, because you bring this everywhere with you, you know, and then the kill switch is really cool to idea, like being able to have that separation.

[00:04:52] Of all the times to do this, why is right now the time you guys are making this play with the market?

[00:04:58] Ryan: Yeah, it was interesting. So, you [00:05:00] know, a little bit of my personal background. I built a company from 2008 and sold it in 2020. Took a couple years off. Eric Prince is one of our business partners in this endeavor.

[00:05:09] He and I’ve known each other for a number of years. He was one of the guys when I started getting bored, you know, not working, saying like, got an interesting projects. And he’s like, yes, cell phone guy. I do. Please come help me, help me with this, project. I had a ton of friends who would have said 10 years ago, nobody’s going to pay for privacy.

[00:05:24] Like nobody’s going to spend a, you know, you think about the EFF my friends from San Francisco, lots of folks that were very concerned when the Patriot Act initially went into place. After 9 11, they were like, Hey, this is a very slippery slope that at the time I was in the Marine Corps, I was like, yes, I’m all for the Patriot Act as the technology that’s in all of our pockets, increased in capacity and capability as advertisers and technologists began to work together.

[00:05:49] It was very clear that it was data and precision that the intelligence community would have and did pay billions of dollars for. And now it’s in everybody’s pocket. [00:06:00] All over the world. And so I think there’s a couple of things that have happened in the last three years. We started to see overstep where government entities were buying commercially available data that commercially available data was being used to get a probable cause affidavit.

[00:06:15] And then that was that was then initiating. warrants and subpoenas and all of those things. That’s not ever what the technology was initially designed for. The technology was really just designed to get the best advertisement to the right person at the right time so that they don’t have to sift through a lot of garbage, right?

[00:06:32] Like, you know, we, we absolutely understand the economic model that the, that the company’s put together, but there’s now no turning it off and it is available. There were two articles just out over the last couple of days. Wired just put an article out the other day talking about how precise They were a, you know, a group of researchers bought some data from one of the data brokers and they were able to map, you know, sort of all military installations in Germany.

[00:06:55] I mean, that was the, that was the thing that they took pattern of life where, where they [00:07:00] went to lunch, what time they came through the gate every morning. And, you know, we’ve, we’ve heard of them. It’s like, Oh, it’s anonymous. It’s just an anonymous hash, but all I’ve got to know is one or two other pieces of data about you.

[00:07:10] And. I’m in, I’m into your whole pattern of life. So, so, so I think there was, I think there were some of those, some of those things, we continue to see large breaches of data from big companies that we’re not protecting. And I, so I think the world of communications users are starting to realize that if they don’t take a proactive approach to their privacy, but it’s surely not the companies and the government are not going to do that for them.

[00:07:36] Luke: Yeah, it’s a really, really great point you bring up too, especially about the scale of time with this, right? Where you had like kind of that Patriot Act. One of the things that brought me to Brave initially was just that you had Snowden doing the revelations where you’re like, okay, the government’s plugging into all these things.

[00:07:50] But then right after that, if you look at the timeline, you’ve got programmatic advertising and then this whole vertical of business intelligence where then everybody started to have a [00:08:00] data warehouse, like all these major companies started to build data warehouses. And, and to your point now, The government doesn’t even have to do anything, you know, nefarious.

[00:08:08] They just go buy the data, right? Like, which is people don’t understand that at all. And that’s one of the things where I wanted drilling into that whole non Google point, right? Where if you don’t give the Google your data through their play store, then There’s nothing for them to buy. Like, which is one of those ways is the amount of data you’re not giving away is huge just from that one move alone, which is really

[00:08:30] Ryan: cool.

[00:08:31] I think not all of it’s Google either. Right. I mean, so Google creates the framework, they, they have the APKs and all that, but every app that’s out there installs these trackers. Like the fact that like, if you’re looking at any browser and. Any web page and you don’t have, you know, your browser open. So they’re blocking all those trackers.

[00:08:49] There’s advertisements that are 17 pages down of scrolling that are tracking everything about you. Yeah. All of it, your IP address, everything about you. And you never even, that never passes you [00:09:00] by. And I don’t think people understand just, just how much that is. And it’s, it’s, so it’s not just Google, right?

[00:09:04] There’s just the, the entire ecostructure of telecommerce. Community work surveillance

[00:09:10] Luke: economy, right? Yeah.

[00:09:11] Ryan: Yeah. The, yeah, the surveillance economy,

[00:09:13] Luke: you know, the apps are installed on your device and you’re giving them all of this framework level access, right? Where they can start to get much more precise data from you.

[00:09:23] And who knows where it’s getting what they can’t give you a cookie prompt on an app, right? Like they’re just going to doing their thing. But I think that’s a great point. And it’s something where, you know, I’m really glad that you guys are doing what you’re doing. And it’s something we started to notice too, like, okay, a lot of this used to be kind of constrained to a browser, but now you look at your look at a windows computer, you know, you’re, you’re authenticating into the operating system, and then, then, you know, it carries through to your browser.

[00:09:47] If you’re, if you’re using the same login, and it’s just like. These things are so embedded it now, it’s like Russian dolls, right? Like, like layers and layers and layers deep and having a device that can help you kind [00:10:00] of cut the head off right at the right spot, it’s like super critical. So really quick to you.

[00:10:05] I mean, like, I think you’re in DARPA, right? Yeah. You served in Afghanistan and give folks a little bit of background on, on that. Cause I think it’s, it’s a super interesting area. So much cool stuff came out of DARPA. Like how does it like working with DARPA help you when you’re launching something like Unplugged?

[00:10:20] Ryan: I did 12 years in the Marine Corps. One of the tours I went to Monterey, got my master’s in applied mathematics, ended up back in Quantico, Virginia, the crossroads of the Marine Corps at the Marine Corps war fighting lab. And that entity had the outreach to other, other organizations in the science and technology world of DoD.

[00:10:35] DARPA was 1 of them. I ended up there as an intern. Talked my way into as a uniformed program manager. And then I left the Marine Corps at the 12 year mark, went, started a company, started, you know, growing something, you know, Afghanistan had been going on for a bit and the administration change happened and some friends that I knew said, Hey, the new director of DARPA is keenly interested in figuring out how to do real time operational trials of emerging technologies.

[00:10:59] In [00:11:00] Afghanistan, because of the work that I had done the first time taking technology into Iraq, doing some transitions directly to military programs of record. People asked me to, you know, they asked me to come back and I did. And I set up, set up a forward organizations. First time DARPA had actually gone forward since Vietnam.

[00:11:15] We brought in a dozen or so programs over the, over the three to four years that that capacity was up, learned a ton. I think we, we, we absolutely changed some Some concepts that the military had, and I can’t get into a ton of specifics on that. One little project that we, that we looked at was a, was a crowdsourcing project and how can you get very precise response from a large part of the community that then came and spun into my, my second company and or we built on that and sold those things.

[00:11:46] And so, you know, my experience at DARPA, the thing that I loved about that agency was people didn’t get to come and stay at DARPA for a career. With a specific research agenda, you get to come to DARPA for four years, max every once in a while. There’s somebody that [00:12:00] stays for six, but you’re there for four years.

[00:12:02] You come in, you start a program, you try to get it almost to transition. You actually, because of the timing, you can’t ever see, most people don’t see the end of their program. Somebody else finishes their program form. Yeah. And then the agency sends you back, right? They come from industry, they come from academia, what have, what have you, but you know, what they don’t want is, you know, people to set up a.

[00:12:19] Yeah. An agenda that they keep fighting for research to do a thing like you come in, you prove that you can do it and then you move on. And then the technology has legs or it doesn’t have legs. And so, I mean, I think that for me. Both my previous company and this one, there’s no guarantee this company unplug is going to be around and, you know, three to five years.

[00:12:39] The only thing we can do right now is push as hard as we can and as fast as we can and take lots of external input from folks like you all at brave and others that have been giving us feedback.

[00:12:49] Luke: That’s cool. So it’s like almost like a term limits, right? Or something similar to that.

[00:12:53] Ryan: 100%.

[00:12:54] Luke: I’m not sure how familiar folks are around DARPA.

[00:12:56] Like, so you mentioned too, it’s like kind of a mix of like, you know, academia [00:13:00] and industry and governmental agency kind of cooperative thing. But a lot of interesting stuff’s come out of there too, like that everybody’s using in their daily lives, right? From, from DARPA.

[00:13:11] Ryan: Yeah. People will say like the very first TCP IP packet.

[00:13:14] You know, float across between two universities on DARPA funded research, right? You know, most of the early stealth technology DARPA was founded in 1958 as a response to Sputnik, right? And the mission has been the same since 1958 prevent us from being technically surprised by our adversaries and create the same technical surprise for our adversaries.

[00:13:30] That’s it. That’s the mission. It’s always been there. Their model is, I love the model that it just doesn’t let people camp and do things. But yeah, we did, we bring, we bring scientists and researchers and operational folks from all over. They mix in weird ways, projects come and go. Some are successful.

[00:13:47] Some aren’t. And I think that’s another thing that I like about DARPA is there’s, there is not a fear of failure. There’s something to be learned by failing and keeping a project going for 10 years, just because we don’t want to say it failed. This is [00:14:00] not part of their ethos. If it’s not part of the project, it’s just going to be

[00:14:03] Luke: gone.

[00:14:03] That’s awesome. No, it’s super interesting. What are some of the challenges you guys run into trying to do that at the device level, where everybody’s accustomed to like Google things or big tech things, right? What are some of the challenges you guys face with shipping a device that’s like a phone, where you have that kind of convenience need and paired with the privacy front?

[00:14:23] Ryan: There are many one roadblock is we’re small, we’re small, we’re self funded, you know, we’ve taken about 7 million of seed capital, about nine and a half million dollars in revenue this year when you go to a chip buyer on your buying at 10, 000 units. Like we don’t move anybody’s needle, right? We’re like, no, we really need, we really need 10, 000 more.

[00:14:43] And they’re like, so we’ve got to piggyback. We’ve got to piggyback on somebody that’s putting in a 500, 000 chip order. And we’re like, can you just add 10, 000 more? And they’re, they’re happy to do that, but they’re not going to spin a thing for us. Right? So that, you know, that’s, that’s one of the things that the convenience thing is tough.

[00:14:58] I wrote an article [00:15:00] about a month ago and I remember my shift when I left DARPA. And that’s why I’ve been a Blackberry user in a, in a, in a windows. Operating system inside of the government. And then I got out of the industry. I’m like, gosh, everybody I’d seen in industry was all on Apple products. And I tried to make that change over.

[00:15:16] And like two weeks after I got my first iPhone, I gave it back. Cause I was like, I, like, I, that does not work for me in business. You know, they quickly caught up, but I had to carry this paper thing in my briefcase of like, what is it on my Mac, right. That’s to remind me of what those things are. And there are, there, there, there are a ton of things that are there.

[00:15:34] When you take GMS. Out of the phone, there are a lot of applications that require it, like Google Maps doesn’t work without Google mobile services,

[00:15:44] Luke: right?

[00:15:44] Ryan: You can still get on the website. You can still find things. But that’s sort of real time tracking of where I am all the time. We all love that ability.

[00:15:52] Like, we came to meet you in San Francisco a few weeks ago, and it was just like, Here’s the name of a coffee shop. There was no address given, [00:16:00] no directions given. It was like this name of this place at this time. And, and, and you do, you count on phones to do those things. But I will tell you I navigate with Waze a lot.

[00:16:09] Waze works, no problem on the phone. We’ve been experimenting with micro G and some of those other things that allow you to have some Google experience without having yourself logged in and it collected everything about, or, you know, around your persona. And so, you know, I think some of it is folks will have to learn.

[00:16:23] Yeah. That a significant level of privacy comes with a little bit of friction, but I’ll tell you what’s happened to me is all of these apps that used to be a thing that I used. I just don’t use them anymore. Right? I use my phone to talk to people to navigate to get information on my fingertips. I’m not having any big, you know, any huge issues.

[00:16:40] There’s there’s a few things about integration with android auto. So, you know, getting to present on your phone. We’re working hard to correct. You know, track those things down. There are some frustrations that our users use. We’ve got an early adopters channel and I’m in the early adopters channel. Every morning.

[00:16:56] And so it’s, I don’t know, there’s probably three, 400 people in there. And I [00:17:00] try to get in and answer questions and I pick those out and throw them back to the engineering team. So, yeah, I won’t say it’s, it’s without, without friction for sure. But it’s also been my only phone for the last four months and I’m completely fine.

[00:17:14] Luke: Early adopters, right? Like it’s such a key thing. I know with Brave, we, we dealt with this a lot, especially in early days when stuff was a lot rougher and we broke a lot of things, a lot of things. So, you know, those early adopters were like key. And so you guys have a community of. Early adopters that, right, that are giving feedback and you guys are integrated with them.

[00:17:35] Ryan: We are. Yeah. So yeah, my entire QA team is in that channel. The CTO is in the channel. I’m in the channel all the time. It’s great feedback for us. They’re, they’re real. They’re like, Hey, this, like you, this update just went out and this thing no longer works. We’re able to like really quickly iterate on those things.

[00:17:51] And then, you know, just some really fun community things happen in there.

[00:17:54] Luke: Where is this taking place? Do you guys have your own kind of chat app or something like that on device? We do, yeah.

[00:17:59] Ryan: Yes. [00:18:00] Yep. So the, you know, I, I talked early about the fact that it’s, you know, hardware, firmware, software, right? So our application suite has the Unplugged Messenger, the Unplugged, VPN, the Unplugged antivirus, and the firewall.

[00:18:12] And so all of those things come together in this package. And so, yeah, unplugged Messenger is the place where that happens. It’s based on the, the matrix and element open source projects.

[00:18:21] Luke: So it’s almost like something where you can

[00:18:23] Ryan: think slack, you can think signal what have you, right? So you spin up a group.

[00:18:27] Yep, exactly. You make it open. You make it public. You close it for, you know, inside about 8 months ago. I said, we are going to operate the business inside of this messenger. Like, we’re not like, don’t tell me Microsoft teams. Don’t tell me this. Like, we like, I want us to feel any, any pinch points that our customers would deal with.

[00:18:44] Luke: Dogfooding is everything, right?

[00:18:49] Ryan: You

[00:18:49] Luke: guys are planning to ship Brave browser and search. We are,

[00:18:55] Ryan: we are. Yeah. We released our firmware version two, three days [00:19:00] ago. Awesome. Brave is now shipping as the default browser and the default device search. And so there’s 10, 000 phones that we had already manufactured.

[00:19:08] The next 10, 000 phones are getting. Manufactured in the next week and a half, they will ship burned in with, with brave as our partner on, on browsing. Right. We, we, we share so much. We share so much in terms of ethos that we can still serve a customer. What feels like a customized offering without having to collect all of their data and monetize it across a bunch of different channels.

[00:19:32] Luke: It’s so cool too. I mean, I think like we’ve never really had a, a situation before where you’ve got the hardware that ships with Brave and then also having the search engine there too. I mean, that, that’s such a, a cool thing for us to see. We’ll, we’ll have to spend some time in that early adopters group too.

[00:19:49] ‘cause I’d love to make sure that we’re engaged with the community on your guys’ side too, and that we can capture up issues and make sure that, you know, folks are there. So me, I’ll, I’ll I’ll go spend some time in that channel too. Which one? [00:20:00] All right. We’re thrilled about it, man. I think it can be an example too, for the broader space of how, I mean, when just coming into this space back in like 2016, just all of this was kind of in the abstract, you didn’t really have privacy tools that were usable.

[00:20:16] And the fact that now there’s both a, an Android device and so many people are familiar with Android. I mean, like I I’ve tested out the phone and it’s. It feels like an Android phone. It’s great. Like there’s nothing, you know, you got to make some adjustments, but it is not terribly difficult to use at all.

[00:20:31] And the fact that we’re brave on there too, I mean, like it’s kind of a cool combination. I think that’ll help to like really kind of improve people’s privacy footprint. So we’re super stoked that you guys are. Yeah. And to ship us there and, and we’ll be on brave side too. I think we’re going to be running some promos for you guys too.

[00:20:47] And so more and more brave users can find out about unplugged and, you know, kind of take that journey if they choose and give us lots of feedback and all that good stuff.

[00:20:55] Ryan: Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. You know, and you know, some of the conversations we had when we met in San [00:21:00] Francisco that I’m excited about for, for 25 and onward.

[00:21:04] Right. So like, how do we get to be very clear? The personalized ad delivery is. Really convenient. Like, I don’t like, I don’t really. Right. So is there a possibility for that to happen on device in a large language model between our system, your browser, things that have happened, right? So somebody gets that feeling of very personalized delivery of experience without any of that data having to come off device or out of browser and back anywhere else and monetize.

[00:21:32] And so I think that’s one of the most important exciting things that I’m looking forward to in 2025 is how do we embed some of that stuff on device and not let it come off, you know, protect it with everything we have, but still give folks that, that very personalized feel with those models built into the phone.

[00:21:50] Luke: Yeah, and I think there’s lots of territory around this to get kind of like early, early legs on to like we ship with a I, you know, assistant in the browser and and all of those things that are be [00:22:00] now on the device, which is super cool. And 1 of the things we’ve been talking to you guys, it seems about and this is just a need for us because our research team spent a ton like years, right?

[00:22:08] Like developing Privacy preserving methodologies for everything from like accounting and a bunch of other things and reporting and targeting all these things. And we haven’t really run into a ton of cases where folks are coming to us and saying, look, like you guys did something with brave, like, how can we do that with what we’re doing?

[00:22:25] And that was one of the really cool things about working with you guys is that. You guys are one of those first folks that came to us and said, look, like we have privacy needs, you guys have been doing R and D. And so I’m excited to kind of get our teams together on that because, you know, the stuff we put out, we actually just released another paper yesterday about this reporting protocol that we have about Boomerang that our research team’s been working on.

[00:22:43] And I’m sure that was some of your guys and stuff, but like, I think this is really an exciting time for that reason. Right. Like, and, and for, for ways that we can kind of bridge these two things together, especially as you guys grow too, because I mean, that’s no small feat. It’s one thing to make a piece of software, but to put the hardware out too, it’s like a Herculean [00:23:00] effort, right?

[00:23:00] Like, and it takes some courage to kind of get into the market like that. I had plenty of, plenty of friends

[00:23:04] Ryan: that said, you’re crazy. Like you’re crazy. Hardware is hard. What are you doing? What are you doing? I don’t know what I’m doing. That’s sort of been the story of my career. I never, I never know what I’m doing, but like, you can figure it out as you go.

[00:23:17] Luke: Yeah, and I think what’s also nice is that the privacy side of things is kind of a mixed bag, right? A lot of things we try to do is make it so that, you know, you can have really, really strong privacy, but not break the entire web, like a break as little bit of it as possible. But then there’s kind of like this, this element of the privacy community that are so hardcore that like, If you’re not using something that breaks like 60 percent of the internet, then you’re not like in our club or whatever.

[00:23:43] And are you guys like, it’s tough to navigate, right? Like, but that’s one of the things I like about what you guys are doing, where I tried the phone, you can use so many things on it that you could use. Otherwise it’s just a different way of going about it. It

[00:23:54] Ryan: is to be very frank, sort of about that, that part of the community, we’ve gotten some pushback that we [00:24:00] haven’t open sourced anything, right.

[00:24:01] And it’s, it’s not, it’s not that we don’t. That we’ve got something to hide. It’s just, you know, we’re a very small team and like, there’s nothing worse than putting something out open source. That’s not well documented, not we’ll talk about, right. And this is a thing by the time this airs, we will have published the kernel to the OS, we’ll publish the entire antivirus and we’re going to hire somebody to, you know, specifically full time to push publish back into the matrix elements project, right?

[00:24:26] Because it’s, it’s core to what we are and our messenger.

[00:24:29] that’s

[00:24:29] Luke: fantastic,

[00:24:30] Ryan: Luke, that’s, that’s one of the things that’s prevented us from, you know, being taken seriously by the community. Like my friends at the EFF got to talk and they’re like. Why aren’t you open source? Right. That’s, that’s, that’s coming. That’s, that’s, that’s coming.

[00:24:44] Luke: No, that’s great to hear, man, because we’re all open source here too.

[00:24:47] So that’s, I think it’s also one of those strengths about like working together on this is that like, you know, I, we know, I mean, starting a company is incredibly hard, you know, especially with as much as many [00:25:00] inputs and outputs that go into having a device and software company together. You know, we, we haven’t done hardware.

[00:25:05] Like, I mean, it’s not been something we’ve ventured into just for that reason, but so I can totally understand how the resource part of that is difficult because there’s all this management and overhead that you have to deal with, with, you know, maintaining the open source side of that. So it’s really cool to hear that that’s coming out, but also hopefully like the open source.

[00:25:21] Things we do hopefully help benefit too since we’re shipped on the device and and, you know, can help kind of alleviate that, but I’m really excited to start seeing stuff from unplugged users come into our get hubs and, and into the community and stuff like that too. So that’s super cool to hear that you guys are planning on that.

[00:25:36] Cause yeah, I’m sure the public wants to know about that. They do. They do. How are you guys getting the word out about what you’re, what you’re doing? I mean, I imagine that’s a whole other wing of challenges, right?

[00:25:46] Ryan: It is, it is, you know, we’ve had this tug of war of, Hey, do we go to enterprise sales? We go like I’ve, I’ve, I’ve sold to governments for a long time.

[00:25:56] It’s sort of the opposite of what we’re trying to do here. And so, you know, [00:26:00] the, the nine and a half million in revenue that I talked about, and that’s just, that’s the last six months, you know, has been, has been nothing but earned media. So, you know, when we sure we’re, we’re running some social media ads and things like that.

[00:26:13] And one of the things we’re most excited about with the partnership with brave is to have some. Visibility there, we’ve got another announcement that if we were this much closer, I would say it today, but it deals with deals with a retail partner. That’s going to bring us in and we’ll have a sort of an exclusive retail agreement with 1 of the bigs that will announce that will help.

[00:26:33] But again, you know, 9000 phones out the door at this point. It’s been a grassroots thing again. Eric’s 1 of our partners, 1 of the founders. He’s got a, you know, he’s got a very, Yeah. Structured following piece of friends with Tucker Carlson and Sean Ryan and some of these like very big podcasters since we’ve been on their shows.

[00:26:50] We’ve talked about the issues of privacy. We’ve talked about the phone and the launch and that’s sort of how we’re getting out there. The advertising thing, marketing thing, like you could just pour millions of dollars in. We’ve talked to others [00:27:00] that are spending that are spending millions a month.

[00:27:02] Luke: It’s insane.

[00:27:03] And yeah, I mean, and it’s, it’s really cool to hear too. I mean, like 9 million at this stage, it’s company, it’s like amazing revenue to bring in. And I think it’s probably one of the cool things it seems like about starting this now is that you can actually kind of, you know, do that type of model where.

[00:27:20] You’re, you’re not having to over invest in way too many devices and you can push it with single time and, and all of that. It’s kind of a, a cool way to be able to, to go about it. And, you know, it seems like a real organic grassroots a way of doing it. How are the users liking it so far?

[00:27:36] Ryan: The reviews we’re getting seem to be great.

[00:27:39] I think, you know, this entire early adopters group, you know, they were really sort of bought in on the mission of what we were trying to do. And, you know, when you’ve got a good group of early adopters like that, there’s a lot of grace that’s extended to you. I don’t know. You guys remember from your early days too, right?

[00:27:52] So when you’ve got people that are excited for something, for something that’s different, they will deal with some of the things and realize you’re [00:28:00] small, realize you’re trying to do this. We’re not back. Yeah. Like we’re not backed by any big money.

[00:28:04] Luke: That’s awesome. And we’d be so lost without them. Right.

[00:28:06] Like.

[00:28:07] Ryan: Yeah, no, we would absolutely be lost without them. And yeah, many of, many of them have direct lines to me and we have some very, very funny exchanges about things. But yeah, it’s we’ve got a bunch of reviews that we put up on the website. You know, it’s, it is, again, it’s, there is friction at the change.

[00:28:24] It’s getting better and better every month, you know, sort of the, being able to synchronize everything from your previous devices on to ours is, I think, is, I think one of the, one of the things that’s, that’s causing the most frustration and I think it’s going to be right after the new year that that’s going to be, that’s going to be launched so that, you know, from an iPhone or an existing Android and ability to pull everything, everything over to the, over to this phone will be there and automated and available.

[00:28:49] Yeah, I think that’s, I think that’s the biggest one. You know, there’s, there’s some carrier certifications. We, you know, we’re, we’re, we operate well on T Mobile and AT& T and all their MVNOs. Verizon’s been a little tough. The, the cost of [00:29:00] entry for them to get certified on their networks is quite high. And yeah, we’re, we’re going to have the unplugged version two will be, will be out, the phone version two will be out in September of next year.

[00:29:11] And so we’re, that’s, that’s, that’s our target for Verizon.

[00:29:13] Luke: Oh, cool. Is it U. S. only now or where can people, U.

[00:29:19] Ryan: S. and Canada. We’ll ship anywhere. We’ll ship anywhere in the world. We have that ability. Yeah. I travel. Mine is on AT& T. It roams everywhere in the world. I carry a second, second unplugged phone with me.

[00:29:30] Whenever I go anywhere, I buy a local SIM card and I. You know, go through the whole thing with, with all the, all of them. We haven’t found any issues. No certification, there’s certifications right in Europe. You’ve got to do CE in Mexico. You’ve got to do nom, right? So there, you know, we FCC here in the U S so those things are there.

[00:29:46] We’re approved at that big federal level in, in the U S and Canada. But again, like it’s an unlocked phone. And so a user can buy it and try it. We just, we don’t have any guarantees and the reverse logistics. When you start going. [00:30:00] Into lots of different countries is like that. That’s an enormous investment that we’ll have to make.

[00:30:05] Luke: Yeah, that’s something. I mean, each one of these things are such a thing to wrestle. You got enough hours or hands in the day. I think it’s smart to kind of go, go with the US and Canada market. And you know, people will buy it from other places too. Gosh, we covered a lot of ground here today. Is there anything we didn’t really cover that you want people to know about?

[00:30:25] Yeah.

[00:30:26] Ryan: You know, I think the biggest thing for me is, is for, and again, your audience is already attuned to privacy. And, and the thing that we continue to try to convince people to do is to really do some research in, in the vulnerability, the device you carry in your pocket does for you. Right. There’s tons of people who will tell me, right.

[00:30:45] This article that just came out on wired was about, you know, using this data for, you know, to track us soldiers and national security interests. And I was like, Oh, well, I’m not a national security interest yet, but, but you are a target for. For malfeasance. Right. I’ve had my, my personal identity stolen a couple of times.

[00:30:59] And right. [00:31:00] The same data that, you know, these guys are using their national security threats could absolutely be used for identity theft, parents of kids. that’s the thing for me. When I joined the company, I was like, why are we not? Targeting parents of tweens and teens, right? Like, why would they not want their kids, right?

[00:31:17] The, the amount of data that could model a kid’s behavior that’s available for purchase by anybody with a credit card. And, and so, you know, so, so that’s 1 to get folks in there. Then the 2nd is there’s no 1 piece of technology, the brave browser, the unplugged phone graphing, whatever the, you know, whatever the privacy tools are, there’s not 1 thing that’s going to solve this problem.

[00:31:38] And a lot of it. It falls on us as users to, to have some understanding of and, and limit what we decide to share those, those, those, those things for us, we’re interested in hearing from all kinds of people from potential new investors, new customers. Channel partners that would be interested. Of course I’ll take any of any of those inbounds for sure.

[00:31:59] I answer [00:32:00] them all.

[00:32:00] Luke: Awesome, man. Yeah, no. And great, great point about the family too, with, with the kids and all that, like they get such a cesspool of advertising to those kids to hate on their devices. It’s a, it’s a parent of young children. I, I, I relate on that one for sure. Well, you, you’ve been, you’ve been incredibly gracious with your time, Ryan.

[00:32:18] We really appreciate it. And are super excited about this new rollout that both, both of us are going to be. Part of where can people find you online or find unplugged that want to learn more?

[00:32:28] Ryan: Yeah. Unplugged is easy. It’s unplugged. com. We were very lucky to actually grab that to grab that domain.

[00:32:33] So unplugged. com is where you find us, but the only social place you’ll find me is on LinkedIn. So I’m a, I’m a one T Patterson, one T Patterson. You can find me on LinkedIn. If you want to reach out to me directly.

[00:32:42] Luke: Fantastic. Awesome, Ryan. Well, we’re excited to have to be part of your guys’s unplugged ecosystem and love to have you back to, to kind of check back in on things and, and see how things are going in the future.

[00:32:52] And, and really appreciate you making the time to come on the show today.

[00:32:55] Ryan: Yeah. Well, thank you guys to your, the, the partnership and engagement we’ve had with the entire brave team has been [00:33:00] really one of our shining highlight this, this last quarter of the year. So we really appreciate it.

[00:33:04] Luke: Yeah.

[00:33:04] Fantastic, man. Well, thanks a lot, Ryan. We’ll talk to you soon.

[00:33:07] Ryan: All right. Great. Thanks.

[00:33:10] Luke: Thanks for listening to the brave technologist podcast to never miss an episode, make sure you hit follow in your podcast app. If you haven’t already made the switch to the brave browser, you can download it for free today at brave.

[00:33:21] com and start using brave search, which enables you to search the web privately brave. Also shields you from the ads, trackers, and other creepy stuff following you across the web.