[music] Hi, I'm Chris McCabe. I'm one of the co-founders of Session, which is a decentralized private messaging application. So, what does privacy mean to me? I think it means everything. A lot of people love to say the phrase, uh, I've got nothing to hide, but I think that's an absolute thing that people say.
[laughter] Like, I don't want to walk around naked all the time. That's a silly concept. I don't want you looking at my browser history, my internet banking history, um what I say to people in personal conversations with people. It's who I am. Privacy is what separates me from you.
And we should all have a real sense of ourselves and be rooted into uh what we can bring to the world. So privacy for me is just having this bubble of selfness that I'm I have the I have the ability to protect uh and I shouldn't have to share with the world. So it's very important. My favorite privacy tools. Uh, so my favorite privacy tools, uh, I love Brave browser.
Uh, I love session, which is what I build, but I'm not going to self chill. Uh, but Brave browser is really cool. I love the concept of consent when it comes to advertising. So, that's my like number one thing. Uh, certainly, and I think if everyone moved to Brave browser, uh, it just like frees your cognitive mind of being bombarded by advertisements and gives data less data to sort of Facebook and your Google's Mark Zuckerbergs.
And every time that happens, it brings me a little bit of joy inside. What does it mean to be a neo cipher punk today? I don't like to put myself into any sort of boxes. Uh I don't live by other people's manifestos. I think it's really essential to sort of follow your heart and build what you think is right and do what you think is right for the right reasons.
Uh and the only way to justify that is what feels right to you. Um so I think it's shifted a lot between then and now. But at the same time, I'm not one to study manifestos and I like to make my own. So yeah, I I assume it's changed a lot. Um, but I would never want to be boxed into a particular ide ide ideology.
I just think that if you're if you really care about humanity and people, then you'll make the obvious choice to help protect them uh and and let them, you know, be self-s sovereign individuals. So that's like the core preface for me. Um, but yeah, it's it's not it's not something that I live by. I I think the more you analyze what you're trying to do, the less you become what you are. So I just try to do me.
What's my take on decentralized messaging now? Um well as a builder in the space of uh decentralized private messaging as one of the founders of session um I think the state of it is is relatively good. Uh for instance like session has 1.7 million monthly active users. So we're doing something right.
Uh growth is great. 5 to 10% growth month which means people are waking up to um the value of actual privacy. not just privacy on the can but the entire uh input of of a product actually just being what you want and not selling you short uh to big tech. So I think there's a lot of growth towards private missing applications. I think it's a slow process for people to shift across uh unfortunately uh as a maybe the leading decentralized private missing application.
We are in a exceptionally difficult position uh in terms of funding. Uh but I'm very optimistic that things will work out and we'll be able to keep building and delivering a optimal private solution for everybody. Yeah. Cool. So some of the key challenges of building a decentralized private messaging application is because you're not controlling everything people do.
I'm not controlling who you can talk to, how you can talk to them, not controlling the infrastructure that's running it. Uh, and it's also highly encrypted and it's not full of trackers and uh like data analyzing uh um little things that give information back to the builders of the tech. It actually makes it really hard to make sure that the experience is amazing. It makes it hard to, you know, profit because you're not selling people's data like many of the others. Uh so like financially gets more challenging as a user feedback um like loop it gets a bit more difficult.
Uh and when you're trying to communicate to people to get more traction because there's so little information that a good private messaging application has on users uh it it is harder to get more traction externally because we we respect people's privacy so much it becomes a bit of a bottleneck for our growth. How do I solve a funding issue? Uh ask people for some money. Hey guys, we need some money guys. Uh honestly um we've been trying to raise money for the last two years and so Vitalic thankfully gave us a nice donation at the end of last year which we're so grateful of uh receiving but right now we've been trying to raise money and trying to sort of get the project um to a sustainable point.
We're ready to launch features in session that make it more sustainable like premium subscriptions and premium features. Uh but we have like two weeks of runway left right now. So we're doing a humongous global like campaign asking for help. We don't want to die. We want this technology to live on.
So, um, being really genuine, honest, speaking from the heart and just communicating that like if we go away, I really think there's going to be this huge void left in the world in terms of private communications. So, I'm just going to do my best um, ask for help and hopefully people hear the message and and help us survive and help us help people stay private. I'm an optimist, so when I'm looking at the future, it's always bright and shiny optimism. I just have to tone it down for other people so they don't think I'm crazy. So, I do think we're going to have this utopian privacy future uh where you have these networks running on current infrastructure networks in a way that keeps the data away from the tech and people who want to use it against you.
So, uh I feel like we're going to have uh like like wallets and like open- source uh phones like uh I'm excited about graphine moving to Motorola and then that opening up this whole new community of privacy tools and applications that are relying on the gatekeeping control of Google and Apple. Um so I'm excited about that. I I am looking for more like decentralized networks that can run autonomously. I think that there's a lot of fear in AI, but I actually feel like you can in the future you can create a a company or like a decentralized technology that can be run by uh maybe like local AI agents that's improving applications, running infrastructure uh and operating in a trustless setup uh and they can be autonomously rewarded for doing those perform like performing those tasks which is really cool. So like I'm really excited for um AI in a way that's really respectful to privacy.
It's not there right now. It's also not helpful enough right now to do this all autonomously. But I'm looking forward to this uh like trustless uh opportunity in every area which can be pretty much vibe coded. Uh there'll be so much vibe coding privacy tools that uh you can't stop it. It'll be sort of like a flooding ocean of of privacy and sort of human rights respecting technology.
And that's that's what I that's what I'm excited about.
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.