The following is a conversation with Brendan Eich,
creator of the JavaScript programming language,
co-founder of Mozilla, which created the Firefox browser,
and now co-founder and CEO of Brave Software,
which has created the Brave browser.
Each of these are revolutionary technologies.
JavaScript is one of the most widely used
and impactful programming languages in the world.
Firefox pioneered many browser ideas that we love today
or even take for granted today.
And Brave is looking to revolutionize not only the browser,
but content creation online and the nature of the internet
to make it fundamentally about respecting people's control
over their data.
Quick mention of our sponsors, the Jordan Harbinger Show,
Sambaska Mule Delivery Service, BetterHelp Online Therapy,
and Aidsleep Self-Calling Mattress.
Click the sponsor links to get a discount
and to support this podcast.
As a side note, let me say that there's a tension
between theory and engineering
that I've been thinking a lot about.
I tweeted something like,
good execution is more important than a good idea,
but one helps the other.
I think the wording of that sucks,
but what I mean is a good idea is a must,
but in my experience, good ideas are in abundance.
Good execution, on the other hand, is rare.
I think some mix of good timing, good idea,
and good execution is essential.
Getting that mixed right is tough,
and Brandon, somehow, multiple times in his career,
did just that.
I'm starting to believe it's more art than science,
like most interesting things in life.
If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify,
support around Patreon,
or connect with me on Twitter, Alex Freedman.
And now, here's my conversation with Brandon Ike.
When did you first fall in love with programming?
I didn't program a lot when I was in high school,
but I had a friend who had a Commodore pet.
And after we saw Star Wars, he said,
hey, let's make a basic program
that does the Death Star trench run.
And it was just simple 2D graphics.
And I didn't know what I was doing,
so I just talked them out on the math and stuff like that.
I was a math and science kid.
I was really into the HP calculators of the early-mid-70s.
These were the RPN.
They were really strongly built,
and are a gold digger, instead of gold, divinely heavy.
There's probably some gold in them, too, gold metallization.
But they were awesome calculators,
and they had all the scientific functions,
so I was really into that.
So I aimed toward physics.
I was a little late for the 20th century golden age,
and I read a lot of science fiction,
so I was like, yeah, it's on to hyperdrives and warp drives,
and physics was not going to get there quickly.
And I started hacking on computers
while I was studying physics as an undergraduate
at Santa Clara University.
And I dodged the Fortran bullet
because I was in the science department,
instead of the engineering department,
where they still did Fortran card decks.
I think they had an autocollater.
But we were using Pascal,
and I got one of the first portable C-compilers ports
to the deck many computers were using.
And I fell in love with programming
just based on procedural abstraction, Pascal,
just what now would be considered old school,
like structured programming from the 70s.
Niklaus Wirt, the creator of Pascal,
was a good writer and a good pedagogue, right?
He always at ETH would do these courses
where it's like, build your own computer,
build your own compiler, build your own operating system.
It was gratch.
Yeah, kind of.
And I know some people who are grad students under him
and said he would torture the students
with things like this custom email system
that had 25 word limit and things like that.
I unfortunately dodged both the Pascal and the Fortran bullets.
Could you maybe linger on the Pascal?
Like what kind of programming language was it?
What is the reminiscent of today?
Because it sounds like it may have had an impact
on your own trajectory.
Yeah, it was in the Algoel family.
And Algoel was the big successful language design
and compiler project in the 60s.
It had a successor called Algoel 68,
which was ambitious, but not as successful.
But Pascal was kind of a wordy procedures and functions
language.
It distinguished between functions
which are a turn of value and procedures which don't,
which just compute.
And you could say that whole Algoel family went into ADA.
Pascal had a second life thanks to Borland with Turbo Pascal,
which was hugely successful, I think in large part
due to Anders Helzberg, who then went to Microsoft
and did C-Sharp and done that with his team there
and has done really well, doing TypeScript, Type JavaScript.
So yeah, there's a lineage here.
But I was also interested in C and Unix
by the time I was an undergrad, because people
were bringing Unix up on all sorts of hardware.
I had some friends who were doing their own wire wrap
computers, 6820 maybe.
And I was wire wrapping for my engineering course,
6809 or something simpler, building a computer on a board.
And I wanted to build a more ambitious one and port
Unix to it, but I picked the wrong processor.
I picked the National Semiconductor NS-16032,
which was this amazing, you know,
SISC complex instructions that computer and not
the reduced instructions that computers that were just
being contemplated into the mid-80s.
And RISC ultimately went out.
RISC-1, in some ways, it dissolved into that you have both.
Now you have these superscalar architectures
where Intel has kept probably too much backward
compatibility at the instruction level,
but there's a front end that parses that
into these wide internal instructions.
So the very long instruction word research
that was also interesting at the time
kind of became the micro architecture
inside the backward compatible Intel.
But I picked the National Semi-Chip,
and it never got made successfully.
It was full of bugs, and I never could have brought it up.
But I went on out of physics after three years
into math computer science.
And like I said, I did it because I saw,
I was being sort of childlike and naive about physics.
And I thought, meanwhile, the Valley is go-go for computers.
The Apple II, the PC, the Intel, 8086, 8088-based PC,
the IBM gave Microsoft the future for in a somewhat fishy deal.
So it was wide open in the computing space,
but in physics, you were as optimistic about physics
as it would be.
I mean, I was one of three brothers
who were all in the same grade.
I have a twin and a younger brother
who skipped second grade and was with us the whole time
after that.
And he went on.
He actually studied under Kepp Thorne at Caltech.
But he also ended up in software.
He did talk about physics.
Does it make you sad that theoretical physics,
even with string theory, hasn't really
had any foundational breakthroughs in the latter part
of the 20th century and today?
Yeah.
In fact, I'd say the problem is theory over experiment.
I would say we need more Aristotle and less Plato.
Mathematics is not all physical.
There are lots of mathematics that cannot be realized
as far as I know in this world.
So to understand the world, you need to do experiments.
You need to not just dream up inductive theories that
could have lots of alternative theories competing with them
with no way to decide between them,
except aesthetics, which is not a good guide, in my opinion.
I don't know if you are friends with or have
a relationship with Elon Musk.
Where's the, in terms of what you
would love to see our society investing in, building up,
is it closer to Elon or is it closer to Feynman and Einstein
and those?
Well, those gentlemen are no longer with us.
And I think that's noticed.
So like I said, the real glory day is physics,
the famous pictures from Germany before the Second War
were just a fantastic assembly of brains, Schrodinger
and Einstein.
And physics, I think, took a wrong turn
than maybe all of, I would say, Western science
took in going for models over reality.
You see this in all sorts of fields.
Now, we can build models that are very predictive and generative
and then we build actual devices or semiconductors,
things like that.
That's good.
I'm not dismissing that.
We need good models.
We need to experiment and prove them and test them.
But the problem I've seen in physics, which
you see certainly in economics, the dismal science,
and you see surprisingly in other so-called hard sciences
is models that don't really have to be tested against reality.
They can instead become policy tools
or they can become, like I said, one of a large family
of alternate theories that could be as predictive,
but nobody's doing the winnowing out.
That's such an interesting tension in society.
You see this in even the software sciences, which
have a deep love for psychology.
You see this in epidemiology, now the virus.
Absolutely.
It's this tension of how much of the world
can we understand through just a beautifully fit model?
And then at the same time, my main work
is a machine learning, where it's like,
there is no provable thing usually.
It's all about just getting the right data set
and getting tricks and so on.
And there's this tension, even in my own soul,
of I grew up on theoretical computer science.
I loved approximation algorithms.
All of that different complexity classes,
just those little puzzles.
I mean, I don't know.
Do you, as somebody who was in math and computer science,
and then ended up going into places
where you engineered some of the most impactful things
in this world, do you see the P versus NP,
all that whole space as interesting at all?
Yeah, it's not that useful in practice, right?
People are using it with sort of crypto analysis
or asymptotic arguments about, can we
have a quantum-resistant crypto algorithm, things
like that, which may not be practical, right?
If you follow Mikhail Diakonov or Gil Kolay,
there are big questions about how quantum computing will
scale up, how practical it will be.
Is that something that you think about quantum computing?
Not except for spare time.
Like you said, I'm not using this kind of computer science
in practice because almost everything now is engineering
and finding ways to get computers
to be more useful for people, which
goes from design problems, which are really kind of an art.
Like Knuth said, anything you can't automate is an art.
Well, we can have machine learning compose music,
and it can imitate.
You can train it.
It can sound kind of decent, but maybe lacking
that je ne sais quoi, but user interface still, I think,
requires human art.
So speaking of things that didn't follow a perfect theory
and model, JavaScript, so there's two things.
One had an impact on the world at a huge scale, obviously.
And it also still is one of probably the most popular
programming language in the world.
So can we go back to the origin story?
Can you tell the story of how JavaScript was created?
Yeah, I was at Silicon Graphics after graduate school
for seven years, and it got to be big and successful
and divisionalized and political.
And I thought kind of boring.
And a friend who'd been there went to one of the last
of the super companies, the super startups in the early 90s.
There were several.
I suppose General Magic was a little after that
around the same time.
But Micro Unity was that company that I went to,
and it was because my friend, Jeff Weinstein,
had gone there from Silicon Graphics.
He recruited me, and Micro Unity was doing everything.
So this was like the ultimate sort of pretend grad school.
It was doing a new fab, new semiconductor process.
It was doing new analog and digital circuits
on the same, very large, but not way for scale chip.
Originally, it was five centimeters on a side.
It was really hot, too.
So I needed a water cooler.
It was a Craig Hiller.
And then they shrunk it, and they tried to do a home sort
of media processor that was essentially a barrel processor.
But you could think of trying to do all the things that we now
see in modern architectures with short vector instructions
and sort of wide instructions or multiple issue.
And doing a lot of the stuff in software,
because the second iteration, the set-top box,
was really for avoiding the cost to the cable company
of rolling the trucks out to replace your garbage
general Atlantic set-top box with a totally
newer, less garbage-y one.
So if you could have software-gradable set-top boxes,
the cable companies thought they could save a lot of money
and add features.
Is this assembly?
Or which level of the software?
It was like we were using GCC.
We were writing C++ and C. Somebody I worked with there,
really very smart guy, hired from Wall Street, Hot Shot,
Programming Consultancy, did his own hardware design
as well as software.
And we were working on how to make not only short vector
units, but general bit shufflers and promoters
so you could do things like crypto algorithms efficiently.
And you could do demodulation of the cable complex quadrature
amplitude-modulated signal.
So you're basically taking A to D converters, dumping things
in buffers, and then doing the rest in software, all the framing
and the Reed Solomon and Viterbi and all
that error correction.
So that was really great learning experience,
but it was not going to work.
It was doing too many risky things at once.
If you, as Jim Clark said to me when I hopped in Netscape
after three years at Micro Unity, he said, oh, yeah.
You do 10 things each, one in 10 odds.
It's going to be one in 10 billion.
The multiplication principle.
So Netscape was already a rocket,
and I passed the chance to go there in 1994.
I knew the founders because I worked at SGI with Clark's company.
Could you pause for a second in Netscape?
When was the launch of this rocket?
1994.
1994 was the launch of Netscape?
And I went there in early 95 in April.
OK.
So you said you missed the launch.
Well, I missed the first floor employment opportunity,
but the IPO was August 1995, so I was there for that.
How obvious was it that Netscape was like world changing?
What was the layout?
Was Netscape one of the first big browsers?
Yes.
So when I was at Micro Unity still in 93,
we saw a browser called Mosaic.
And up till then, we'd used email,
and we'd used Usenet, the NNTP protocol.
We'd used Newsreaders.
We used FTP.
We used all these old internet protocols,
all relying on the DNS and TCPIP and UDP, for that matter.
When I was at Silicon Graphics, we
brought up the whole stack.
We had to discover how to find the ethernet addresses
on your network, and then find IP addresses for them,
ARP protocol, all that stuff.
And it was great because nobody knew in the 80s
what was going to win.
All the proprietary stacks like IBM, SNA, and Decnet,
and all these other protocols were saying,
we're going to do it, or it's going
to be heterogeneous future.
Instead, it was Berkeley Unix and the TCPIP stack
that dated back to the ARPANET that won.
And I think we knew it.
We all knew it at SGI, but the salespeople didn't.
And so they kept trying to get multiple network stacks
into operating.
But in the end, it won.
And so that was the internet.
And it was email and texty, and it was used in, very texty.
And then Tim Berners-Lee did this thing,
but I don't think I was paying attention.
And I think the date when he first did it,
or when he wrote the famous emails,
was pushed back to 89.
But I noticed Mosaic in 93 because one of the things
that Mark Andreessen and Eric Bina did at NCSA
was they innovated on the early HTML standard.
In particular, Mark sent this email saying, hey, everybody,
we think you should be able to put an image in a page.
And you know when he sent that, Eric Bina had already
written the code.
And I talked to Tim Berners-Lee more recently,
just a few years ago.
And he was like, oh, we had another way of doing it.
It didn't work out because Mark shipped his in Mosaic.
And this convinced me of several things.
One, the internet meant there was a huge first mover advantage.
And being fast, getting on first mattered a lot.
And so Richard Gabriel of Scheme and Poetry fame
has written about this, the famous assistant.
Poetry.
What's poetry?
Well, he's a poet.
Oh, actual poetry.
Is that what he thought was the kind of something?
I mean, he's the founder of Lucid,
which is where Jamie Zewinski worked before in Netscape.
And Lucid was doing compilers and Lucid Emacs,
which was a fork of Emacs.
Famously, Jamie fighting against Richard Stallman.
Stallmax.
And so Richard Gabriel, you know, very, very brainy computer
guy, but also a poet.
But he wrote a nice essay that gets abused all the time.
In fact, Jamie's put a kind of warning
in front of his version of it on his site,
JWC.org, called Worse is Better.
And this is about survival advantage of software
in the network world, in my opinion.
It's about Unix.
It started out being framed as Unix and Lisp,
good news, bad news.
Because all the Lisp people, the MIT people, were like, oh,
you know, the crown jewel, right?
Scheme, this Faberge egg, or common Lisp, this giant
cathedral, of course we're going to win.
This is civilization.
And those farmers in New Jersey to borrow from the Sopranos,
those hicks down at Bell Labs, they're just, you know,
there's nothing sound there.
It's all hacking.
Well, guess what won?
Wow, so you're saying this is a fundamental principle
of the internet is moving fast wins?
You could say in almost any network system,
like in biological evolution, you
see successful alleles, sweet populations.
And they don't always have, you know,
they aren't free of flaws.
They're heterozygous advantage, right?
You can get both parents, give you the gene variant,
and you get sickle cell anemia, right?
But if one of them does, you're more resistant to malaria.
And so this isn't a beautiful process, except at large scale.
And then you realize that because it moves fast and can adapt,
it can win.
And people still struggle with this.
I used to struggle with this.
Because JavaScript was done in such a hurry,
and the force of web compatibility
meant early mistakes couldn't be fixed.
And even the standards process injected new mistakes,
as it will.
But often standards bodies go back
and making compatible changes.
You can't do that with the web.
It's more like, again, like biology,
you preserve what still works.
You don't want to break ATP, metabolism, or whatever.
So you have to kind of resign yourself
to the reality of, versus better, being
enshrined in actual design points you might not like.
And that happened with JavaScript.
And I'm way over it.
But it also, I think, was a huge advantage.
It's why JavaScript has kind of swept a lot of programming
domains.
People will say, oh, it's not because of merit.
Well, you're right.
But we also improved it over time in the standards body.
I spent 20 years doing that.
And you don't get that choice.
I'm not saying that that was the best language.
I'm just saying that was the right time to do it.
And I like to say the alternative was not to do it.
I could have told Netscape, I can't do this.
It's too rushed.
And it would have been visual basic script.
And it would have been bad.
So that's a good way to present the alternative.
But so it was a Netscape.
And you have written it in how many days?
And why was it only that many days?
And what was the goal and the underlying principles
in your mind?
So the whole, I'm sort of describing worse
is better in a frenetic way.
Because it fit the model of Netscape.
When it was known that Jim Clark and Mark
and Rios were founding Netscape and they did the first release
in 1994, that browser took over from Mosaic.
In fact, that's why Mozilla is called that.
It's the Mosaic Killer.
It's like the giant monster that kills Mosaic.
That's awesome.
And they knew that it wasn't that, again,
it's not like you're doing advanced scientific research
that is changing the world.
You're more like taking down the last iteration
than the browser Mark did, which had images.
And other affordances before you stopped working on it.
And you're making Netscape the new thing that has images,
plug-ins, which was the way to do video back in the day.
It had something that's kind of died now for tiled windows
called frames and frame sets.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
HTML tables.
That was new.
Eric Bina did tables in Netscape 1.1.
So when I got there, they were heading toward IPO.
Clark wanted to IPO early.
I think his instinct was right.
And that kicked off the whole dot-com era.
There was a recession in the US in 1991.
You can see old law and order reruns
where they talk about the recession, how hard it's
hitting New Yorkers.
And after that, Greenspan really goose things
at the Federal Reserve.
And technology had been sort of fermenting in a way that
came together with the internet.
And Netscape made it possible to do pets.com,
to do eBay, to get people to recognize a URL on a billboard
and then type it in when they get home.
And that was huge.
That was so fast-moving a rocket that Mark and the engineering
team there thought, we need to make this a programmable
browser, not just a document viewer, not just a video.
It was all HTML with images and tables.
And also, like you said, frames.
Really plug-ins.
There's no dynamic element at all.
Yeah, the most dynamism we get was from a plug-in,
which there were a few of them then.
Flash didn't exist at that point.
It was, I think.
Java applets yet, or no?
Well, that's the thing, we did the deal with Sun.
And in fact, I was recruited to go do scheme in the browser.
Remember Guy Steele and Gerald Susman's beautiful list
variant?
I was going to do it in the browser
because my friends from SGI thought, hey, we like scheme.
You like scheme.
And I'm like, I hardly ever use scheme.
It's not really used in industry, except in sort of silos.
But I like it.
OK, I'll come do scheme in the browser.
I have a slide from my 2017 talk where Bruce Willis crawling
through the duct in Die Hard, and he's like, come out
to the coast, have a lot of fun.
Come on, do scheme in the browser.
But when I got there, there was no scheme in the browser
because they'd started a deal with Sun Microsystems.
And my best contact there was Bill Joy,
who I admired as a Berkeley Unix founder and Sun founder.
And Bill got the idea of making the browser programmable too.
And so the main idea was to put the Java VM, which
at that point was not really easy to embed, into Netscape.
Including the Netscape version of Windows
that was still most popular, which was the 16-bit Windows
3.1, which was going away.
Microsoft was coming out with Windows 95,
and everyone was afraid they were
going to do Internet Explorer, I guess, 2 at that point, 3
the next year.
They already bought or invested in somehow Spy Glass,
this other company that shot out from NCSA at University
of Illinois.
And in fact, Microsoft had tried to buy Netscape in late 1994
before I got there.
And I heard about this later, I heard
they offered way too little money.
And so Jim Barksdale and Jim Clark said, get out of here.
Pound sand.
But then they realized, oh, this is going to hurt us
because now they're going to copy us.
It didn't happen right away.
I'm not sure when Gates' internet title wave memo was written.
That's the famous memo he wrote when Bill Gates realized
that Microsoft was going down this old copy AOL path,
or copy-compuser path.
A project called Blackbird, presumably
after the SR71, I don't know.
But they were going to make a dial-up service
with a custom content language stack and custom rendering.
It wasn't the web.
They could have content partners.
They have a lot of money.
But it still wasn't the scale of the web.
It wasn't going to be compelling.
And Gates realized this, and he turned the company on a dime,
and they couldn't buy Netscape.
Again, I'm not sure of the timing,
so they decided to copy it.
And once we realized that, everybody inside Netscape
felt even more urgency and more of a frenetic mood.
And so my chance to do scheme disappeared when the Java deal
started brewing.
But there was still a chance to do a companion language
to Java, because Java is a compiled language.
It's evolved and improved quite a lot since then, too.
But it was for sort of serious advanced programmers
that cost a certain salary or hourly rate.
And people observed.
Bill Joy observed.
And Mark Andreessen and I observed
that in a mature stack like Microsoft,
you really benefit from having a scripting language
like Visual Basic, which became Visual Basic Script in IE3,
but didn't take over and kill JavaScript,
that you need two languages.
One is for the component writers who are higher price
and more expert.
And the other is for descriptors, certified public
accountants, graphic designers with some programming
inclination.
Anybody, amateurs, doesn't matter.
There's a much more demotic approach there
for programming the components together,
gluing them together.
Some people will say duct tape language,
which I don't really like.
But we saw Bill Joy and Mark Andreessen
and we saw the need for companion language.
And the gleam in our I was to call it JavaScript.
I didn't like it.
That was marketing's plan.
Mark called it Mocha, which I liked.
And Netscape marketing, I think, didn't like that.
So they said, oh, there's some trademark and some software
somewhere that uses Mocha, so we can't use that.
And they tried LiveScript in August and that didn't last.
And then finally, we got the trademark license in December
1935.
But the work I did to prove that it could be done
was important because I came in in April.
And even then Netscape was growing so fast
that they couldn't find an open hiring
requisition in the client team for me.
So they hired me into the server team.
And I worked for a month on server team on what became HTTP11.
So I had done protocol work at Silicon Graphics
with Greg Cheson, former Bell Labs intern, grad student
intern, who knew all the UNIX founders.
And Greg was very interested in taking protocols
to the next level with VLSI because he thought
that CPUs wouldn't scale up.
He was mistaken in that, unfortunately.
Moore's law more than kept up.
And you have gigabit ethernet running
with conventional processors.
But I worked on protocols at SGI as well as UNIX kernel
hacking and NFS and things like that.
So I came into Netscape to work on the server side for a month.
But I was thinking the whole time,
what should this language be like?
Should it be easy to use?
Might it syntax even be more like natural language,
like hyper talk, which is Bill Atkinson's language
in hypercard, if you ever used hypercard on an early Mac.
And I thought, well, I'd like to do that.
But my management is saying, make it look like Java, which
looks like C from a distance.
What does that mean?
Is it braces?
We're talking about visually.
Does it mean like management?
Do they understand what you think?
Marketing didn't know, but management
did, like Richelle, the VP of engineering, knew.
And we had a plan even that was, if you have this companion
language, you're going to glue things together
between Java and JavaScript.
So you're going to have commerce in memory in the heap
with data types.
So you're going to want some of the data types in Java
to reflect in the JavaScript.
You're going to want the primitive types
that Java unfortunately separated from objects.
So at least some of them, number, double, let's call it,
in Java's terms, from the C term for double precision,
floating point, or strings, or Booleans, and objects.
And so right away, there was this constraint
looking like Java meant kind of a C curly brace syntax,
but also some of the data types and objects.
Like objects and so on and on and the kind of stuff.
Thought it called.
Comparison operated all the time.
Garbage collection, all that stuff.
Yeah.
Even the bitwise operators and the shift operators,
including the unsigned right shift, which Java had,
because it didn't have unsigned integer types.
It said, if you want to do unsigned operations,
use an operator.
And that turned out to be important much later.
I'll tell that story five time.
But JavaScript inherited a set of operators,
the expression grammar, the statement grammar,
up to a point from Java.
But I wanted a functional language.
I wanted a little bit of scheme, even though it wasn't
as clean as scheme.
So you had a love, sorry to interrupt.
You had a love for scheme and lisp,
but that functional language last case.
Yes.
I wanted first class functions.
Because I saw the need for callbacks in the browser,
where it's a single threaded program.
Wow.
All the early browsers were single threaded.
And it's the right model for users.
Most users weren't ready for mutual exclusion and threading.
So in a single threaded world, you cannot block the user
interface.
So you have to use a callback and run later.
And without getting too fancy in trying
to capture the continuation like call
CC does in scheme, I thought, I'll
just make it easy to have fun arcs.
First class functions, you pass downward,
and it can be called back.
And Java didn't have that at the time.
It took forever to get proper first class functions,
lambdas, now into Java.
Java 7 or 8, I think.
It did have concurrency, right, from the very beginning.
But you were thinking that a JavaScript in the browser
would not have the luxury of being concurrent.
That's right.
And the reason was Java was going to run in a plug-in.
So it could fork threads and go to town.
But the main action in the browser
was in the single threaded program, the single Unix
process on Unix or Windows.
And it was where you had to service the event loop
and then go do things, respond to the network,
lay out some HTML, render it, turn widths into heights
by filling containers, boxes, the early, what became
the CSS box model, and run scripts to make the thing
livelier, respond to user input.
And all that event-driven programming
was, in part, like HyperCard, because HyperCard
had this on event name syntax.
And so that's why you have, in JavaScript,
on click running together as the name of the event handler.
And there's some funny ones, on mouse over and on mouse out.
People still complain about those.
But there are many more events now over the years
standardized.
But it was a mix of event-driven single threaded
programming because it had to run in the main thread
of the browser where the action is.
And Java never got there, which meant
Java could not interact easily or quickly
or in a nested way with the document,
with the objects reflected from the HTML document,
with the tables and forms and so on.
And that is one of the reasons, I think,
JavaScript survived and Java kind of died.
Java was in this plug-in prison.
It essentially was confined to a rectangle, the Apoid
rectangle.
And while we even built a next year,
Nick Thompson, a friend from SGI who was an intern grad
student at CMU at the time, built the first version of Live
Connect to glue Java and JavaScript together
to deliver on that vision where you do have commerce
between the data types and the heap.
Did it work?
It worked.
But Java was in charge.
JavaScript was in charge.
And Java was just these components, these helper
objects.
You might as well do everything in JavaScript.
What happened over time?
It's like an evolutionary filter.
It's just kind of who needs the plug-in.
And in fact, Sun mismanaged Java as a plug-in.
They thought, oh, Netscape is giving us the distribution
vehicle.
And we don't care about the browser.
It's just about getting Java out there.
And that was a big miscalculation.
They then tried, because Microsoft's killing Netscape
after a few years, they tried getting into Microsoft.
And you may remember there was a Sun-Microsoft deal, which
famously blew up.
And Microsoft kicked Java out of Windows.
And that's when they really pulled the trigger.
I think they already evaluated it and liked it on Anders
Helzberg's.NET and C-Sharp and decided,
we're going to just not have Java.
We don't want any of that Sun stuff.
We don't want the patent risk.
I'm not sure what all fights were about.
There was some patent angle to it, I think.
And up till then, Microsoft had been using Java components,
like in Outlook Web Access, which had a lot of JavaScript
to be a webmail-like, hotmail-like user interface.
They had to call the mail server through HTTP.
And they used a Java object to do this.
And when they gave the boot to Sun,
suddenly, the left hand gave the boot and the right hand
said, we better do something else in Outlook Web Access.
What are we going to do?
And they said, let's just add an ActiveX component, which
is their own native way of embedding things in languages.
And it'll be what became XML HTTP Request, which is now
a web standard for calling asynchronously.
And it's been replaced by the Fetch API in HTML5 or HTML
living document.
But this whole lineage goes back to Java being
successfully the loser and getting kicked out.
And after Microsoft kicked it out, it was a plug-in.
And you would find it required for smart card banking
in Nordic countries where that was mandated by law,
but really didn't get used much.
Or there were pilots who used it for flight information.
But Flash, which Netscape could have bought,
but fortunately, didn't.
Fortunately, it didn't.
Yeah, we would have screwed it up.
What year were we talking about with Flash?
I think after the IPO.
So it was probably late 95.
Flash was around.
Was it Adobe?
No, it wasn't.
No, it was called Future Splash.
And it was these brothers, Jonathan Gay, I think his name
was, and he came knocking.
And the marketing guy at Netscape,
who was screening the technology partners
or wannabe acquisitions, was brutal.
And just everybody wanted to get in on the Netscape stock
gravy train.
And he sent them packing.
And they ended up selling to Macromedia.
And Macromedia was where Flash was created.
And the good thing about Macromedia was it was a tool
company.
So it invested in the best ideas, I think,
which are still somewhat lost to us of Flash.
The timeline animation has sort of been a mutable function
over time.
They had the tooling around that, too, like the Dreamweaver.
There's a Flash.
Flash director.
There were a bunch of them.
I mean, yeah, that was a great.
Flash builder was one of the last ones.
These tools were used by real artists and special effects
people and designers.
All the restaurant websites around 2005
were done in Flash, which was, we
were trying to do HTML5 at the same time.
That was the Firefox era.
We were trying to make the web capable enough
you didn't need Flash.
But if you recall, you'd go to a restaurant.
It's like, this is kind of like a game or something.
It's like a Flash.
All the font looks small.
You didn't like Flash from the beginning.
This doesn't feel right.
Not really.
I actually admire Flash's technology.
And I'm pretty pragmatic about these things.
And I realized that it doesn't matter
if your Delta bad hand, like JavaScript, was a rush job.
Or if you have Flash as a plugin and you can invest in the tools
and make it pretty good, you should make it better
for your users and grow it as best you can.
And what happened with the browser
due to Microsoft's monopoly abuse, for which they were convicted.
And even after that, until I think Firefox and then Chrome,
was people kept saying, oh, the web can't do X.
It can't do Y. We'll have to have a plugin.
We'll have to have a new approach.
We'll clean the slate and have a new web.
And everyone who said that failed.
And the reason they failed is because there's
too much value in the web, this huge network.
And the worst is better principle means
that you can not only start bad, which they all sneer at,
but get on first and get wide distribution,
get sort of an evolutionary advantage in priority of place.
But you can also improve it over time.
And so if you're going to improve Flash,
and for some reason Flash is now out of favor,
Steve Jobs said you can't have Flash on the iPhone.
That was probably the death knell.
Put your energy into JavaScript.
And that happened.
So we did things at Mozilla with Adobe
to improve, which bought my Macro Media, to improve Flash
and to improve the version of JavaScript that was in Flash.
We tried to standardize that.
Oh, that's right.
I'm getting ahead of myself.
It was ES4.
You can program Flash.
That's right, that's right.
Can we just rewind to the magical?
It's a special moment in the history of all of computing.
We'll talk about it later, but it's arguable.
It's possible that the entirety of the world
will run in JavaScript at some point.
So it's like those days, it would
be interesting if you could just describe, actually
zooming in on how the cake was baked from the several days
that you were working on it.
What was in your mind?
How much coffee were you drinking?
Were you nervous?
Why are you freaking out?
I'll try to remember it.
I mean, you're right.
There are these pregnant moments you see in hindsight.
Maybe they're overrated, but like Hegel sees Napoleon
on horseback at Yena and says, there's
the world spirit on horse.
And I knew that there was a chance to do it.
Mark knew, and he was my executive sponsor,
and he was the one brainstorming how the JavaScript should
be right there in the page.
That was important for him to say that,
because I thought so too.
But a lot of people were like, well,
you can't write programming language
in the middle of the markup.
And indeed, there are problems.
If you did it naively, you'd see the code laid out
as random gibberish.
So I had to figure out how to hide that.
That was a challenge.
Is that a breakthrough idea?
I mean, so you and Mark, thinking about this idea
that you just inject code in the middle of the markup?
Of the web page.
Yeah, it was considered kind of heretical.
There was an SGML guru.
I forget his name, but he corresponded with me.
And at first, he was angry.
He's like, you should have used a marked section.
Why didn't you use a marked section?
And I said, well, SGML marked sections
are not part of HTML, by the way.
And they're not supported in the browser.
And so I did some hack that was equivalent.
And over time, you could do the proper SGML thing.
But it eventually came around.
And it was, again, sort of a revolutionary necessity.
It was almost like introgression.
The idea, which Lynn Margulies, I think,
helped get across, that we have to consider mutualism biology
that maybe mitochondria were ancient prokaryotes that
got into the cell and became beneficial.
Somehow, the same sort of thinking
applies, you have to embed JavaScript in HTML.
It's going to be a good virus.
It won't hurt you.
The code becomes data, in a sense,
it just gets carried along.
But is there the side of the, you
were focusing on the Netscape at that time.
Doesn't the browser have to support, interpret correctly
this mix of HTML and whatever code?
I had to hide it from old browsers,
including Netscape 1.1, which was predominant then.
So I used an HTML comment.
But inside the container of that comment
lived in the script tag, which is a new element,
I could make different semantics in Netscape 2,
where those HTML comment limiters,
instead of being multi-line brackets,
became one line, or essentially one line.
So you wrote, so JavaScript was written,
the programming language was written as a comment.
A comment for old browsers and a set of brackets
that were ignored with real code for new.
And it was this two-way comment hiding hack,
as I called it, that was absolutely necessary for us
to get off the ground.
We couldn't have bootstrapped JavaScript without it.
We didn't have scripts that were loaded from a separate file.
The only scripts in Netscape 2 were inline in the document.
What were the challenges here?
Like what typing, what were the choices you were thinking about?
Garbage collections?
Garbage collections?
I didn't have time to write a garbage collector.
So I didn't at first.
So the thing was using, essentially, arenas,
or what GNU calls object pools.
And it just would run out of memory eventually.
And I added reference counting in a hurry
after the 10 days in which I hacked.
So after I was in the server team doing HTTP.1.1
and thinking about the language, I finally
got transferred to the client team in early May.
And that's when I got the go sign from Mark.
And it was like, we can't wait.
Because people inside Netscape are doubting.
Even people inside Sun are definitely doubting.
Bill Joy was the champion.
But he was alone in that, seeing that there
was a role for JavaScript as the, as I call it,
the sidekick language, robbing the boy hostage.
Frank Miller put it in The Dark Knight Returns.
There was this silly little language
that would be the glue language.
It could become important over time.
And you were better off having that complementarity,
that pairing of languages, just like Microsoft
stacked it with Visual C++ and Visual Basic.
So what was the big moment of I'm done?
So I had to do a demo.
I forget the dates.
I think I, for a history of programming languages,
paid for the Alan Worsbrock, did with my help.
He did a lot of the writing.
I think it was the 10 days from Thursday evening
through to the following weeks, the whole of that week,
and then into the Monday.
Did you get sleep?
Not not enough.
And I was really going fast because I'd already
used a lot of C compiler and front end compiler knowledge
that I'd gained from undergraduate school.
When I started getting into computing
as a renegade physics major, people
were formalizing more efficient bottom up
grammars, parsers for bottom up languages,
really, LALR1 was the big thing.
And I studied all this and learned how to parse them.
And in the end, if you're doing C languages,
you often do what Dennis Ritchie did anyway,
which is the recursive descent parser you can hand code it.
And I did that for JavaScript in a blazing hurry.
Mostly got it right.
I didn't have precedence inversion problems or other bugs,
but I copied a lot from Java NC.
And I tried to keep things simple,
like the quality operator in those 10 days sprint
between two objects of different dynamic type said,
no, they're not equal.
Their types are different.
And then after that, I had internal early adopters.
And they were using JavaScript to match a number
against a database field that had been stringized.
And they said, oh, can we just have implicit conversion?
And like an idiot, I agreed.
I gave them what they wanted.
I was trying to please them and get adoption.
And that broke what equivalence relation nature
there was to the double equal.
There are some edge cases with not a number
that break that up too.
But it really broke it.
Having implicit conversions in the operator
is something that people still roast me over.
So let's talk about two things.
One, it sounds like the comparison operator,
the quality operator is the thing that you regret.
So maybe you can.
Making it sloppy.
Making it sloppy.
So what is the biggest thing you regret in those 10 days?
And what is the biggest thing you're proud of?
So that making it sloppy came after the 10 days.
And my lesson there, which I've tweeted,
is when people come to you saying,
can you please make it sloppy or add this cute feature,
the answer should be no.
And I should have known that because I think
Nikolas Veert, one of my heroes said,
the essence of design is leaving things out.
But during the 10 days, I also, like I said,
I was in such a hurry, I left out garbage collection,
came back to haunt me, but I got reference counting in in time
that people weren't running out of memory right away
on long-lived jobs.
Wait, what happens when you don't have garbage collection
and you have objects?
Well, you just run out of memory.
And you know, at first, you write a short script
and the page doesn't last long or it doesn't do a lot,
and it's OK.
Oh, I see, yeah, yeah.
But if you're writing a game or something
and you're doing event-based allocation,
you run out of memory.
And this was noticed in the summer of 1985.
And people were like, what's going on?
Oh, yeah, I got to go back and do reference counting.
And then the problem with reference counting
is you're writing the language in the runtime in C,
an unsafe language.
And if you're reference counting and you overflow the counter,
you mismanage it so it goes high, it gets stuck high,
you leak memory again and you run out.
If you underflow it, you pre-memory that's still in use.
And even then, we knew what all the security hackers came
to know that you therefore have potentially a remote code
execution vulnerability.
Because this was before things like non-executable heap
memory and STAP defenses against taking over memory.
So if you can, from the remote side,
write some HTML and JavaScript that just happens
to exploit a bug in memory safety,
like it causes JavaScript to underflow reference counter.
And the script still has its hands on that object,
and it's trying to call a method on it,
and there's some kind of lookup function table in the object.
But you've managed to stuff the heap with strings
that forge their own lookalike for the function table.
You can call some other code.
And this was a problem right away.
So security, JavaScript up the ante.
Java had this problem too, but in its own VM.
And it just was a separate headache for Son to worry about.
We had this problem in Netscape right away.
So Netscape 2 came out after my 10 days
and after these follow on work to embed JavaScript better
in the browser and to add garbage collection
to reference counting, really, I call it reference counting.
And get it shipped, we had a bunch of dot releases
where we fixed security bugs like maniacs.
But what is the thing you're, you know,
when you sit back on a porch and just look out into the sunset,
what are you most proud of from those 10 days?
I think the first class functions shines.
I think especially since Java didn't have it,
and it was somewhat unusual.
Scheme made it in somehow at the end of the day.
In spirit, I mean, people complain because Scheme has,
you know, minimalism, it has, you know,
six or seven special forms, it has hygienic macros,
it has call CC, it has sort of a beautiful,
complete set of forms to make the Lambda Calculus
pleasant to use in practice.
And JavaScript is, you know, kind of a multi-paradigm
or shambolic.
Just in a small tangent, you mentioned Mark Andreessen.
It sounds like in Bill Joy,
but this thing on Mark, it sounds like he had an impact on you
in that he sort of believed in what you were doing there.
Can you talk about like what role Mark had in your life?
Yeah, we would meet at the Pinsla Creamery
in downtown Palo Alto.
And Mark was just fresh out of, you know, grad school
or whatever he was doing.
And he was a big dude and he got fitter later.
He had hair, he would order giant milkshakes and burgers.
And we would meet there in brainstorm about what to do.
And it was very direct because we didn't have much time.
The sort of, we didn't talk about it,
but the implication was Microsoft was coming after us.
Mark was saying things boldly pre-IPO like Netscape
plus Java kills Windows, right?
This is-
It's ambitious.
Make a browser programmable,
it becomes the new runtime for programs.
So the meta OS or it's the replacement OS.
But he still saw value in JavaScript.
Yes, even though he was saying that
and Java was the big name, hence the trademark license,
he saw a JavaScript as important.
And he even thought, what if we got,
I told this in other interviews, I can say.
He thought, what if we had my friend Kip Hickman
who'd been at Netscape from the beginning
and who was a kernel hacker at SGI when I joined.
He'd started writing his own JVM
before we consummated the Sun deal
and got our hands on their code.
And the Java compiler, Java C,
which Arthur Van Hoff had written, very nice code,
was all written in Java, it was self-hosted
or so-called bootstrap.
And so we could use that as soon as Kip's Java VM
could run the bytecode from the Sun JVM,
running the self-hosted compiler to emit the bytecode.
So once we could bootstrap into Kip's VM,
we wouldn't need Sun.
And Mark was like, well, maybe we can just ditch Sun
with Kip's Java VM or if you're at JavaScript VM,
now we need graphics.
So Mark was thinking far ahead
because he knew you could do things with HTML and images,
but at some point you really want this-
Like 10-nemographics or three-dimensional.
Like even SGI had already started its downfall
because the first four VLSI team there had gone off
to do 3DFX and all these other companies
that made the graphics card on your PC, right?
DOOM was big and quake.
And so we were all playing quake.
I was old, so I was terrible.
But why not put that graphics capability on the web?
And in fact, it finally happened at Mozilla
with Firefox era with Vlad Vukicovic taking OpenGLES
and reflecting it as WebGL.
But OpenGLES is the mobile version of OpenGL,
which is a standard based on SGIGL.
So there's this whole lineage of graphics libraries
or really graphics languages for what became the GPU.
And Mark was thinking ahead,
he's like, we need graphics too.
And I thought, okay, I can try to get somebody I knew at SGI,
but he's a grad student at MIT.
He was studying at the Barbara Liskoff.
He laughed when he heard about this later.
Andrew Myers, he's at Cornell,
a long time, I think he's a full professor.
And Mark said, great, well, get him,
I'm not sure he's gonna come.
We'll throw money, you know, stock options.
We never did it.
And they did the Sun deal.
So Kip Nobley put aside his own JVM
and we used the Sun JVM.
So that was an ambitious period.
And Mark was very generative because he was pushing hard.
He was ambitious and he wanted to have Netscape
possibly be in control of the ball.
Maybe you could speak to this dance
of Netscape versus Internet Explorer.
You've thrown some loving words towards Microsoft
throughout this conversation,
but that's a theme with, I mean, Steve Jobs
had a similar sort of commentary.
From a big sort of philosophical principle perspective,
can you comment on like the approach
that Microsoft has taken with Internet Explorer
from IE1 to Edge Today?
Is there something that you see as valuable
that they're doing in the occasional copying
and that kind of stuff or is the world worse off
because Internet Explorer exists?
So I'm going to segment this into historical errors
because I think Microsoft is today with Satya.
It's quite a different company
and what they're doing with Edge is different.
But back then Gates, you know, aggressive character,
not really original in my view, not an originator.
Steve Jobs famously said once,
he doesn't have any taste.
And I don't mean this in a small way, he has no taste.
You can see this, Apple at the time
had beautiful typography and ligatures and kerning
and the fonts looked great.
And Windows had this sort of ugly system font
that was carefully aligned with Pixel,
so it didn't get into anything.
What is it?
I'm sorry to keep interrupting,
but why was Internet Explorer winning
throughout the history of these competitions?
Distribution, distribution matters in anything.
And this is why, you know, even now
we're seeing in the browser worse Edge doing better
because it's being foisted on people of Windows.
We have Windows 10 boxes at home.
We have some Windows 7 boxes or laptops
we keep running to,
because we don't connect them to the internet generally,
but once you have that operating system to hold,
you can force, you know, Edge.
And Apple did it with Safari too.
It's not unique to Microsoft.
That's sad.
But distribution matters.
And that's why I think IE was going to win.
And that's why everybody at Netscape felt we're doomed.
This was something Michael Toy and Jamie Woodson were doomed.
But for a while there, we had a chance
and we innovated in Netscape too.
We did a big platform push,
Java and JavaScript and plugins,
more plugins and, you know, more HTML table features
and really started making a programmable stack
out of what were pretty static web languages.
And even in the beta release of Netscape,
two people were using JavaScript to build
what you would call single page applications like Gmail.
And they were using JavaScript locally to compute things
and to call the server on a hidden frame in the background.
So it was prefiguring a lot of what came later is AJAX
or Dynamic JavaScript, Dynamic HTML.
So people saw that, I mean.
Even then they saw it.
That's kind of, I don't know,
but from my perspective, that seems quite brilliant.
This seems like really innovative
that you would have code run in the browser.
It did impress me with something,
which I learned later about from Eric von Hippel of MIT,
which is user innovation networks, lead user effects,
that throwing out JavaScript,
even though we weren't doing open source,
we were doing beta releases early
and permissively with Netscape.
Getting early developer feedback, absolutely critical.
I loved it.
I did some of that with SGI
with some of the products I worked on,
but it really came to the fore in Netscape
and that, you know, culminated in Mozilla,
where you're dealing with developers all the time
and early adopters, lead users.
But the lead users helped improve JavaScript
even in those last few betas
where I could hardly change things.
I was under pretty rigid change control.
So we're talking about just a small collection of individuals
that are just like upfront.
A guy named Bill Dorch.
You can find his work in the web archives
still from 1996. It's a single page application.
It's an artist gallery of mountain art.
He's JavaScript.
It doesn't quite work.
He uses JavaScript locally.
He's a local database.
What you would think of now is JSON,
but it's all pure JavaScript code,
a bunch of objects being constructed.
That's so cool.
So how is, if you can do sort of a big,
sweeping progress of JavaScript,
how has JavaScript changed over the years?
Any of you from those early 10 days
with a quick addition of garbage collection
and fixes around security,
how has this evolution that now it's taken over the world?
In this, it's been a bumpy ride
because the standards body got shut down
after Microsoft, I think, took over the web
and then felt punished by the USV Microsoft antitrust case.
Can you speak to the standard body?
That was a fun ride too,
because Netscape had taken the lead with the web
and HTML innovations like frames and frame sets tables.
And the W3C was sort of off,
even then sort of an SGML land heading toward XML,
La La Land, I'm gonna be a little harsh on it.
What's SGML, I'm sorry.
SGML was the precursor of Markup language to HTML,
or it was sort of the more extensible standard,
generalized Markup language.
It was a pointy brackets,
but it had all sorts of elaborate syntax
for doing different semantics.
And this is why, I think,
TBL and others who wanted to do the semantic web
then took XML forward,
but they had this, or some of them anyway,
had this strange idea they could replace the web with XML
or that they would upgrade the web to be XML.
And it couldn't be done.
Worse is better had concrete meaning.
The web was very forgiving of HTML,
including sort of minor syntax errors
that could be error corrected.
Like error correction isn't generally done
in programming languages because-
Right, that's another amazing thing about HTML,
is like it's more like biology than programming.
Yeah, exactly.
And so, XML was, in its standard form,
super strict and could never have admitted
the kind of users who were committing these errors.
And the funniest part was Microsoft said,
hey, we're doing XML,
but the way they put it in Internet Explorer
under the default media type,
put it through the HTML error corrector.
Oh wow.
So they kind of bastardized it to make it popular,
usable and accessible.
And so, XML as a pure thing was never gonna take over.
And what W3C was kind of not fully functional
because Nescape wasn't cooperating with them.
We thought about where to take JavaScript.
And we realized our standards guru Carl Cargo
realized there was a European standards body
that had already given Microsoft fits
by standardizing parts of the Windows 3.1 API,
which European governments insisted on.
They said, Microsoft, we can't use your operating system
without some standards.
And Microsoft said, you know, here's our docs.
And the government said, no, we need a European standard.
So this body called the European
Computer Manufacturers Association, ECMA,
which eventually became global
and became a proper noun instead of an acronym.
Right, it's just one capital E now with a lowercase CMA.
Right.
And as one of the early Microsoft guys I met
when we first convened a working group
to talk about JavaScript said,
it sounds like a skin disease.
But it gave, I mean, maybe you'll speak to that,
but it gave the name to JavaScript of ECMA script.
That was the standard name because
Java was a trademark of Suns.
They were so aggressive,
they were sending cease and desist letters to people
who's middle European heritage meant their surname was
Javanko and they called their website Javanko.com.
And Sun would send them a letter saying,
you're using JAVA at the start of your domain name.
You must cease and desist.
I love marketing more than anything else in this world.
So ECMA script and now is popularly named as ES plus version.
I would say people use JS more than anything.
People still say JavaScript.
JavaScript is in all the books.
So I mean, when you're referring to,
it's usually JavaScript.
And when you want to refer to a version of JavaScript,
you'll say ES six, ES five.
Yes.
Or now they've gone to years, which is kind of confusing
because it's an offset of 2009, ES six, ES 2016.
Yeah, it doesn't match the years perfectly.
Yeah.
So what were the choices made
and how did JavaScript evolve here?
So we took this new standards body which had,
we thought sort of a proven record
of standing up to Microsoft,
but Microsoft sent a lot of people.
They sent some people who were pretty good.
And then when they realized that I was there in Netscape
was not gonna just bend over and do whatever they wanted.
They sent somebody really good.
And he was a smart guy.
He did a lot of the work on the first draft of the spec.
Sean Katzenberger, he's left Microsoft.
He even did what I sort of did.
He told his bosses,
stop bugging me to do other things.
I'm focused on this
because it took a lot of focused work
to create the first draft of the spec.
And I was still holding,
I was spending almost all the plates.
I had like part-time help in certain areas
and on the front end integrations
I had the front end guys.
But I couldn't take as much time as Sean was
to write the draft spec,
but I had to participate
because I was essentially helping write down
what the language did
and in areas where we didn't like what it did
and Microsoft didn't agree.
We sometimes got away with slight changes.
And that's the story of standards.
You have different implementations.
And depending on their market power,
they interoperate where you have agreement
and where they don't,
the dominant one usually sets the de facto standard.
And then you should probably reflect that
into the de jure standard.
And this happened with JavaScript.
Over time as Netscape went down and Microsoft went up,
we did the first edition of the standards
codified in 1997 in France.
We had a trip to Nice, which was very memorable.
For any interesting reason or just because it's Nice?
And ECMAS European and IBM and others were there.
Mike Cowleshawn, IBM fellow was a Britisher.
And the guy who ran ECMAS at the time,
Jan van den Bel was quite a raconteur and a very fun guy.
And he had us out for the great,
Fuitemeer, the Boyabes.
Was the standardization process beautiful or painful
that those early days you as a designer of the like?
It was painful because it was rushed.
Now, Guy Steele was contributed by Sun.
So even more than Sean, you had this giant brain guy
Steele helping, bringing some of that scheme magic.
He even brought Richard Gabriel for fun.
And Richard wrote the fourth clause of the ECMAS standard,
which was kind of an intro to what JavaScript's all about.
So we had some really good people.
And we didn't fight too much.
There was some tension where I was fixing bugs
and I was late to a meeting and Sean Katzenberger
or Microsoft was actually mad.
Like, where is he? We need him.
And when I got there, I saw that only he saw this sort of
off by one bug and somewhere in the spec.
And then I saw it too.
And I said, there's a fence post bug there.
And then we kind of locked eyes
and we realized we were on the same page
and we kind of, he wasn't mad anymore.
What were the features that are being like struggled over
and debated and thought about?
And it was mainly writing down what worked
and what we thought should work in the edge cases
that didn't interoperate or that seemed wrong.
But we were already laying the groundwork
for the future editions that I was already implementing.
I was still trying to lead the standard
by using the dominant market power
to write the code that actually shipped.
So the de facto standard would lead the deserter standard
and I was putting in the missing function forms
that I didn't have time for in the 10 days.
So this is the engineering mindset versus the theoretician.
So you didn't want to create the perfect language
but one that was the popular and shipped
and all that kind of stuff.
And you could say there was,
I was standing out of the shoulders of giants.
So there was a staged process where I had to hold back
things that were well designed by others
in other languages that I could imitate
but I couldn't do them all in the 10 days.
So they came in in 1996 and 97
and they came into the third edition of the standard
which was finalized in 1999.
But at that point Netscape had been sold to AOL
and was, which was a decent exit considering
and had previously been mercilessly crushed.
Netscape was selling the browser along with server software
that it had acquired after its IPO
and Microsoft was just underpricing it.
So there was no way to compete with that.
Microsoft was also making Internet Explorer
the default browser in Windows
which is called tying in antitrust law.
And they were doing even more brutal things.
There was a famous investor.
He did very well on Google.
So he's a billionaire, Ram Shri Ram.
And he was sales guy or head of sales at Netscape.
And he got off the phone looking ash and faced
after a compact called and said Microsoft just told us
they're gonna pull our Windows license
if we ship Netscape as the default browser.
Wow, so there is some bullying going on.
It was totally material in the antitrust case.
But JavaScript escaped into the standard setting
where there was fairly good cooperation.
Microsoft had a really good guy on it
and guy steel was there for a time
and there was some good work.
But after the antitrust case and Netscape kind of dissolving
into AOL and not really going anywhere quickly
Mozilla took years to really bring up the standard froze.
And by 2003, even though they've been sort of noodling
around with advanced versions, JavaScript 2,
I'd given the keys to the kingdom
to another MIT grad, Baltimore Horwatt.
Very big brain.
It's still at Google, I think.
He won the Putnam in 86.
So he's, yeah.
Very mathematical.
He designed this successor language, JavaScript 2,
but it only showed up in mutated form
in Microsoft's ASP.net server side.
And it didn't last there.
And it showed up in Flash.
And that's what became ActionScript 3.
ActionScript, interesting.
And then Flash was declined.
And so how did we arrive at ES6 where it's like,
there's so many, where everyone,
okay, there's this history of JavaScript
that people were just like cool
when you're like having beers to talk crap about JavaScript.
Everyone loves to hate.
Like people who are married say, ah, married sucks.
Is they just want to get, let off some steam
even though everyone uses the language.
But ES6, it's become less like reputed.
Like it fixed major pain points, I think.
It added things to the language
and added something that was already ES5 strict mode
but made it implicit in class bodies and module bodies.
It was a big jump, but it accumulated
some of the ES4 designs that we'd done with Adobe
for what we hoped would be the fourth edition of ActionScript
that were supposed to fold in some of these old JavaScript.
Two ideas that had come into ActionScript three.
So you look at the family tree and you see these forks
and the main ones are the ones that go into Adobe Flash,
acquired from Acromedia, and the one that went
into the server side of Microsoft's stack,
which kind of died.
And then trying to bring them back into the standard
and not quite succeeding ES4 was mothballed.
But all the good parts that everyone liked
made it into ES6.
And so that was a success.
And I said earlier, I had the wrong year,
I think it's 2015, so it's off by four ES6.
Yeah, it was done, finalized in 2015.
It took a little longer than we hoped,
but because ES5 was 2009,
and that was a smaller increment from ES3.
We skipped four again, we mothballed it.
And we had a split in the committee where some people said,
you know, ES4 is too big,
we're gonna work on incremental improvements,
no new syntax in particular, they promised.
Not quite true, but they added a bunch of interesting APIs.
Alan Weir Sprock, my co-author of that hobble paper.
And he was at Microsoft at the time,
I ended up hiring Mozilla, he wanted to get to Mozilla
and keep doing the sort of editor job
of the JavaScript standard ECMAScript.
And when we got ES6 done, it was a little late, 2015,
and we switched to year numbers.
So people still call it ES6, I call it ES6.
But if you remember, you know, off by nine plus 2000.
Yeah, I mean, ES6 is such a big job.
I mean, like you said, there's a thought that connects all of it,
but ES6 is when it's like, became this language
that it almost feels ready to take over the world completely.
More programming in the large features,
more features you need for larger teams.
And it-
Software engineering.
Microsoft did something smart too.
They, Anders and company, Luke Hoban,
who's left Microsoft also did TypeScript.
And they realized something,
I think that Galat Braka's also popularized
and he was involved in Dart at Google.
If you don't worry about soundness in the type system,
you don't try to enforce the type checks
at runtime in particular,
just use it as sort of a warning system,
a tool time type system.
You can still have a lot of value for developers,
especially in large projects.
So TypeScript has been a roaring success for Microsoft.
What do you think about TypeScript?
Is it adding confusion or is it ultimately beneficial?
I think it's beneficial.
Now, it's technically a super set of JavaScript.
So of course I love it, right?
The shortest JavaScript program is still a TypeScript program.
Any JavaScript program is a TypeScript program,
which is brilliant because then you can start
incrementally adding type annotations,
getting warnings, learning how to use them.
Microsoft had to kind of look around corners
at the standard's body and guess how
their version of modules or decorators should work.
And the standard's body then may change things a bit.
So I think they're obligated with TypeScript
either to carry their own version
or to bring it back with incompatible changes
towards the standard over time.
And I think they've played generally fair there.
There's some sentiment that why don't they
standardize TypeScript?
Well, they've been clear they don't want to.
They have a proprietary investment, it's valuable,
they've controlled the ball.
And in some ways, you can say the same thing
to any of the other big companies in the standard's body.
Why doesn't Google standardize its stuff?
So you think it'll continue being like a kind of
dance partner to JavaScript, to the base JavaScript?
There's a hope that at some point,
if they keep reconverging it and the standard
doesn't break them and goes in a good direction,
we will get at least the annotation syntax
and some semantics around them.
Because when you're talking about Type annotations,
they're generally on parameters and return values
and variable declarations, they're cast operators.
You want that syntax to be reserved
and you want it to work the same in all engines.
And this is where ideas like Gilad's
pluggable type systems might be good,
though then you could create the same problem
you have with Blisp and Scheme
where there's a bunch of macro libraries
and they don't agree and you have conflicts between them.
But the pluggable type systems
could be one way to standardize this.
What do you think about the giant ecosystem
of frameworks in JavaScript?
It feels like, because I mean,
this is a side effect of how many people use JavaScript.
A lot of entrepreneurial spirit,
like create their own JavaScript frameworks.
And they're actually awesome in our own different ways.
And that, this is an interesting question
about almost like philosophically
about biological system and evolution
and all that kind of stuff.
Do you see that as good or should it like,
should some of them die out quicker?
I think that maybe they should.
Now jQuery was a very clever thing,
John Resig made this library that was sort of query and do
and blended sort of CSS selector syntax
with JavaScript sort of object graph or DOM querying
and made it very easy for people to do things
almost like they were learning jQuery as its own language,
domain specific language.
And that I think reflected in part
the difficulty of using the document object model,
these APIs that were originally designed in the 90s
for Java as well as JavaScript.
They're very object oriented or even procedural.
They're very kind of verbose.
And it took like a constructor call
on three different, you know,
hokey pokey dances to do something
where it's in jQuery, it's just one line, right?
So that fed back finally into the standards.
It didn't mean we standardized jQuery.
It wasn't quite that concise,
but you find now with the modern standards
that we were working on in the HTML5 sort of effort,
that things became simpler.
The fetch API and the query selector API,
document query selector,
a lot of things can be done now in raw JavaScript
that you would make more concise and terse in jQuery,
but it's not bad, it's pretty good.
Whereas in the old DOM of 15 years ago,
it was just too verbose.
So maybe the frameworks were born kind of
because JavaScript lacked some of the features of jQuery.
And so like now that JavaScript is swallowing
what jQuery was, then the frameworks will,
only the ones that truly add value will stick around
and the other ones will die out.
And that highlights this also this division
between the core language JavaScript,
which can show up in other places
like Node.js on the server side
and the browser specific APIs
or the document object model APIs,
which are even managed by the W3C,
the standards body that was off in XML,
and we were doing real JavaScript standards in ECMA.
And you have this division of labor,
division of responsibility and division of style
and sort of aesthetics and also speed.
So the document object model really stagnated
after Microsoft kind of de-invested in the web.
And Microsoft did something in their haste
in the spirit of Netscape,
doing things quickly and getting on first called DHTML
on some of their innovations that were like
an alternative document object model
didn't really get standardized until HTML5
when we pragmatists set up for at the time,
Ian Hixon, he went to Google,
Apple and Mozilla said,
let's XML is not going to replace HTML.
HTML4 is too old.
Let's standardize HTML5 based on all this good stuff,
including that DHTML variant dynamic HTML5.
HTML5, it feels like to me, maybe you can correct me
like a beautiful piece of design work.
It's not often with web stuff,
you have this breath of just like,
oh, whoever did this, they just feels good.
Is that, what are your thoughts about HTML?
Is it, am I being too romantic?
A little bit.
Are there flaws, fundamental flaws to it
that I'm just not aware of?
My old friend Hix, he did a great job.
He was another renegade physics student.
And he was basically a QA guy at Opera,
but he obviously trained physics student
and someone who could write a British or he,
he developed test suites
and he started thinking about them more axiomatically.
Now, this can be good
because you can sort of systematize
in a way that makes a better HTML
or you can get caught in the pragmatism of saying,
well, we have to handle all these edge cases.
So we're just going to have sort of a test matrix.
And if the matrix is large,
it will not be beautiful by many people's lights.
Everyone likes to minimize along their preferred dimensions,
the seven special forms and scheme or whatever.
But reality is HTML needs to be big.
It's kind of shambolic, it's a creative multi-paradigm.
And Hix, he did a good job, I would say, with a bunch of it.
Other people came in, in the spirit of Enix
and to do HTML5 work.
And they've carried on that effort.
And it's a, so it's a mix of pragmatism,
de facto standards from the past being sort of,
combined or written down for the first time
and then rethought in a way that has a simpler syntax,
like the Fetch API instead of XMLHTPU request.
This video too as well.
It's ultimately, it feels like maybe you can correct me.
It feels like it was the nail in the coffin of Flash.
Steve Jobs saying no Flash on the iPhone,
in my opinion, was the actual stake to the heart.
But, well, I'm not sure what trope you want to use.
This Flash was a zombie until just this year, right?
Or last year.
Last year was the end of Flash and main browsers.
But Jobs really did the death blow.
And yet you're right, we had to make HTML5 competitive.
I still don't think we got that beautiful timeline animation.
The timeline thing.
So you like the time.
I mean, me from, you know,
I used to animate all kinds of stuff inside Flash.
Plus there's a programming element.
Yes.
It was a little bit,
I don't know if you commented on that,
but to me, it was a little bit like go-to statement,
like in a sense that there's a little bit too chaotic.
Like it didn't, that OCD part of me as a programmer
wasn't satisfied by Flash.
It feels like there was bugs
that were introduced through the animation process
that I couldn't debug easily.
Yes, I heard that too.
I didn't use it.
So I'm doing the grasses greener thing here.
The thing I liked about the animation model
was that it was this immutable function of time.
So you could time warp and you could,
if you dodged these bugs or worked carefully,
you could really make it sing in ways
that I think still a little challenging
with the web animation standards,
but or just using Rock Canvas and WebGL.
But there's so many tools now
that maybe it doesn't matter.
And yet we had to, you know, do video.
We had to do WebGL and then evolve it.
We had to do web audio.
But once we did all these things that helped Flash die,
thanks to Steve Gobs,
we had something that people didn't realize.
We had that vision that Mark and Jason had,
this graphics capable to the metal portable runtime.
And we at Mozilla realized this
and we saw JavaScript was something
that you could compile to use.
Adobe had somebody in the Adobe labs doing this too.
He had a project called Alchemy.
We had somebody who's now at Google,
Alon Zakai, who did his own LLVN based compiler
that would take C or C++ and it would emit JavaScript.
And you would think this is crazy.
Going from this sort of machine types,
low level, you know, controlled memory allocation language
to this garbage collected, dynamically typed,
high level, higher level language.
But Alon sort of just phenomenologically carved nature
of the joint and found the forms that were fast
in JavaScript.
And then with Dave Herman,
who I'd recruited from North Eastern University
who was a type theorist and Luke Wagner who's still at Mozilla,
who was the compiler guy and the jet guy,
they figured out how to codify what Alon had done
into a typed subset of JavaScript called asmjs.
And this is a strange thing to think about
because it doesn't have new syntax.
The types are casts that occur in dominator positions
in the control flow graph.
So it's like a hack on JavaScript and it's a subset.
And it uses those bitwise operators
that I talked about copying from Java
to basically cast num numeric types,
which are double precision flowing point into integers.
And so inside JavaScript in the kernel semantics
are integers.
And if you use these operators,
if a compiler emits them in the right places,
you can then treat them as typed values,
typed memory locations, and you can type check your program.
You can not only type check it, you can compile it.
This is all in sort of linear time.
Oh, and you can compile it to have deterministic performance.
It doesn't touch the garbage collector.
It calls a bunch of functions that come from the C functions
or C++ code that you're compiling.
And you can make the Epic Unreal Engine
go in 30 frames a second.
And when we did this in 2013 in the fall,
Tim Sweeney I met didn't think it could be done quickly.
Thought it would take years.
And the team went to Raleigh to Epic
and in four days they had Unreal Engine ported
by pressing a compile button.
But they had to have WebGL, which came from OpenGL,
ES came to OpenGL, which came from Silicon Graphics GL.
They had to have WebAudio so they could map OpenAL, which
was another audio library standard,
to WebAudio, which was kind of a Chrome idiosyncratic thing.
But they could make it work.
And they had to have Asmjs for fast C++ to JavaScript.
And if you didn't have that fast compiler step,
the JavaScript you'd write by hand trying to do an Unreal
game would be too big and too slow.
It would touch the garbage collector.
It would not keep up with 30 frames a second
on the hardware, 2013 hardware.
So we demoed that at, this must have been fall 2012
now that I think about it, because we demoed it at GDC Game
Developer Conference 2013.
And people were stunned.
It's like Unreal Engine, Unreal Tournament running
in my browser window.
No plug-in, no Flash, no Java, no.
So where does the early days of, because JavaScript now
is able to run basically on par with a lot
of the C++?
Yeah.
And even before then, you had the fast JavaScript VMs.
In 2008, when Chrome came out, just before it came out,
Mozilla, my friend Andreas Gal and I, and others hacked out.
Trace Monkey, our trace-based JIT.
The Squirrel Fish Extreme team at Apple did their JIT.
And we were all competing on these crazy performance
benchmarks.
It was a little bit too much tuning of the benchmark.
But JavaScript started getting fast,
and developers started noticing it.
But it was still kind of its own high-level language
with garbage collection.
The ASM.js step helped us go further.
Because until we really proved the concept,
people were still saying, well, JavaScript's OK.
It's getting faster thanks to V8.
Everybody gave Google credit, especially Google.
But we need something to kill Flash.
Let's use the portable native client code that Google
had acquired, native client, which is a separate lineage
for taking basically C code, compiling it
into a software fault-isolated container or some sort,
using some kind of virtualization technique.
And maybe it can even be in process and still be memory-safe.
That would be awesome.
But they ended up using process isolation, too.
And that kind of weakened it.
And in the end, it was like, portable native client, OK,
meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
This is the Google Flash, right?
But when we did ASM.js and we showed Unreal Engine working,
I think it was only a matter of time before Google
threw in the towel.
And in fact, everybody agreed in spring of 2015,
we're going to take what was proven by ASM.js
and make a new syntax, a binary syntax that's
efficient that loads into the same JavaScript VM
that JavaScript loads into.
So there'll be two source languages, one VM,
very important, one garbage collector, one memory manager,
one set of compiler stages.
And that's called WebAssembly.
And that's the successor to ASM.js.
And it's important that it have binary syntax
because at the end of the day, especially on mobile,
if you're downloading JavaScript,
even if you're using LZ compression on the wire,
that's cool. But you've got to blow it out into memory
and then parse the silly eight character function keyword
that I picked when I could have used something shorter.
I picked it because of AUK, the Unix tool.
So anyway, I'm not following.
I want to, but I'm not following the AUK thread.
Yeah, don't want to.
I said surprising to you that how damn fast JavaScript
is these days.
I mean, you've been through the whole journey.
I know every step of the way.
But is it like, I mean, it feels incredible.
It does, but I knew.
So the funny thing is computer science
is this big karmic wheel, right?
Wheel of Fortuna.
And in the, it's not the 97, I was loaned by Netscape
to do due diligence for Sun in their acquisition
of Anamorphic, which was David Unger and friends,
people, Craig, I'm forgetting his name.
He went to Microsoft.
These Stanford language buffs who had taken small talk
and then David created itself as a simpler sort of
small talk language and made really fast
just in time compiling VMs for them.
And they, you know, well ahead of Java hotspot
or JavaScript V8 or any of these modern VMs,
figured out how to make dynamic code fast
because small talk is dynamic language, right?
It has classes that has, I think more lockdown
declarative syntax than JavaScript,
but it's fundamentally dynamic.
You don't declare the types.
But you could infer the types as the program runs
and you start to form these ideas
about what types are actually flowing through key operations
and you form little so-called polymorphic inline caches
that are optimized machine code.
The cache is the machine code that assumes,
does a quick check to make sure the type is right.
And if it's not right, it bails to the interpreter.
And if it is right, you go pretty fast.
And that short test is a predicted branch.
So things are pretty quick.
All that amazing stuff I knew about in the 90s.
And I didn't have time to do it
and anamorphic got bought by son and they did hotspot.
And you needed that even in Java
because at scale Java has some dynamic aspects
due to invoke interface.
You can have basically collections of Java code
where you don't know at the time each module
or packages compiled exactly what's being called,
what subclass or what implementation
and interface is being called.
And so you want to optimize
using this sort of dynamic polymorphic caching there too.
And they did that and hotspot, it's amazing, amazing beast.
I've met like 13 people who all claim they created it.
I think one of them maybe deserve credit more than others.
But I didn't get to do that in JavaScript.
And when we knew that Google was going to do their own browser,
which we knew at Mozilla around 2006,
I also met the team that did V8.
And it turns out it was Lars Bach,
who was one of the young engineers from anamorphic
got acquired by son.
And so Lars is like one of the world's expert
on these kinds of virtual machines.
And he picked my brains about JavaScript.
I could tell he didn't like it at the time,
but he had to do it.
And...
Oh, really interesting.
Yeah, in 2006 lunch at Google's campus.
Then I had another friend who was DevRel at Chrome
and he said, yeah, we don't know what they're doing.
This was getting 2007 to fall, getting toward 2008.
We're trying to get Chrome out
and we don't know what's going with the V8 team.
They're often all whose Denmark,
rewriting their engine four times, which is good.
That's the right way to do this kind of development.
They were learning JavaScript, including all its quirks,
which they came to hate the fire of a thousand suns,
which is one of the reasons that Lars and company
did dart their own language.
But they also made the language fast.
And meanwhile we knew this was happening.
So we got our act together with TraceMonkey,
our tracing jet at Mozilla.
And Apple, I think was also aware.
And so they were doing their own jet.
So the era of jetted fast JavaScript in 2008
had this prehistory going back to small talk itself
and anamorphic.
And again, the lineage is interesting
because you had Lars and anamorphic
and then he ends up at Google.
Yeah.
And today we have an incredibly fast language
that like you said, still without hate, you can't have love.
So I think there's both love and hate
for this dance, this rich complex dance
of JavaScript throughout its history.
There's the dialectic for sure.
Today JavaScript is the most popular language in the world.
Why?
By many measures.
Why do you think that is?
Is there some fundamental ideas
that you've already spoke to a little bit
but sort of broader that you think
it's the most popular language in the world?
So I think I did, by doing first class functions
and taking the good parts of the C operator hierarchy
and just keeping things simple enough,
maybe it could have been simpler,
but I had to make it look like Java
and interpret it with Java,
that there was inherent goodness
and Aristotelian quality there.
And people perceive that even through all the quirks
and warts and then over time working on it
with the standards body, working on it,
not only as a core language,
but in the context of HTML5 and making the browser better,
listening to developers, thinking about,
this is something that Nick Thompson wrote nicely about
on the hacker news, I was very flattered.
He said, Java was this thing
where the experts were writing the code
and it was compiled and you had to declare all your types
and some didn't really give a damn about the average programmer
who wanted to build real web apps, dynamic things.
And I was in there meanwhile doing a bunch of people's jobs,
making JavaScript survive those early years
when it was kind of touch and go, right?
JavaScript was considered Mickey Mouse language.
It was for annoyances,
like the scrolling text at the bottom of the browser
in the status bar, but I kept listening to developers
working with them and trying to make it run
in that single threaded event loop in a useful way.
And I think that forged something
that people have come to love.
Now, you don't always love, you know, the best thing, right?
I talked about Shakespeare,
sonnet about I'm a mistersizer, nothing like the sun
or the scene from Josh Whedon's film Serenity at the end
where the actual piece in the score
by David Newman is called Love,
where Captain Mal is teaching River Tam
about how to pile the ship.
And she's a super genius, super soldier.
She knows how to do it already.
And he's basically talking about how you have to love the ship
because if you don't, it's gonna kill you.
And then the piece falls off the ship.
It's kind of like JavaScript.
You have to love it.
You have to love it because now people say,
we're stuck with it because it got this priority of place.
But there's love underpinning that
and actually the listening to developers,
that's kind of beautiful.
There's most successful products in this world
with all the messes, with all the flaws.
Perhaps the flaws themselves are actual features,
but that's a whole other, that's a discussion about love.
But underneath it, there's something
that just connects with people.
And it has to keep connecting.
If JavaScript kind of went off in this,
people sometimes complain about ES6,
oh, you put classes in JavaScript.
I hate classes, you know, you've ruined it.
But it's not true.
It's a dynamic language, small talk had classes.
Python has classes.
There are lots of lists variants
that have classy systems, common lists.
So, you know, people who don't reject it
based on some sort of fashion judgment do use it
and do interact with the standards body.
The standards body is competing browser vendors mainly,
but also now big companies that use JavaScript heavily,
the PayPal's and other such companies, Salesforce.
And they have to cater to web developers.
They have to hire developers who know JavaScript.
They have to keep their engines up to the latest standard.
And this creates all this sort of social structure
around JavaScript that is unusual.
I mean, you get C++ buffs to follow the inner workings
of, you know, C++, what is it now?
21 something, I don't know, I've lost track.
But it's a more rarefied group.
It's more like the old language, you know, gray hairs.
Whereas JavaScript is a younger
and more, you know, vibrant large crowd.
There's a community feel to it.
There's a echoes, perhaps I don't wanna
draw too many similarities, maybe you can comment on it.
There's a C++ is like Wall Street
and the JavaScript is like Wall Street bets
from the recent events.
It's like there's a chaotic community of all
and there's some power from that distributed crowd
of people that ultimately catch up.
It's more demonic, it's more of the people.
It lets people in without requiring these credentials.
I remember in the late 90s into the 90s,
people were all getting Java credentials.
And I knew people and friends knew people
who became Java programmers and you knew
they really should have been like nature guides
or pilots, they hated programming,
but they thought, I gotta make money,
I'm gonna become a Java programmer.
Do you have some, because it's such a monumental
moment in our current history as a quick aside,
do you have thoughts about this huge distributed
crowd sourced financial happenings with Wall Street bets?
That's like nobody could have, well,
you could have predicted, but the scale and the impact
of this kind of emergent behavior
from independent parties that could happen.
Like I said, my own experience with the dismal science
as with physics led me to reject a lot of bad models.
And economics was always compromised by politics,
but in political economy, you could also argue
that it used to be a branch of moral philosophy,
so it was concerned with the good and it became divorced
and became sort of in this quasi-Newtonian way
just about everything's just running by itself.
Don't worry about it.
This monopoly is crushing your Netscape company,
but that's just nature.
And economics couldn't or doesn't really have good models
for the Wall Street bets subreddit.
They know how to squeeze the short, right?
So the amazing thing is you have Robinhood app,
which was again, supposedly for the demos for the people
and eliminated the fee through various kinds of straddles
or some kind of spread operation
that helped them eliminate the fee or eat the fee.
And in fact, as a broker in these days
because it takes two days to settle,
there's counterparty risk as they found out.
And so the Wall Street bets people,
the memes are like the Terminator robot
with the $600 STEMI check
and the hedge funds, the anime little girl
hiding under the desk.
There is a problem which I talked about in the recent podcast
which I'm conscious of from the history of the web.
And that is, you could say it's monopoly,
which antitrust wasn't enforced after USV Microsoft
for a long time.
And a lot of this was due to the money interests
buying control of politicians.
And in Plato's five regimes, that's oligarchy.
That's where we are.
And now we're seeing a fight against the oligarchs.
I don't know if it'll work,
but you're definitely seeing it.
And it's also kind of hackerish, right?
It's got a hacker ethos.
Hey, Robinhood, no fees.
Oh, interesting.
Hey, you know, buy a fraction of a share in this thing
or I can keep buying with my stimulus check.
So I mentioned Hegel seeing Napoleon on the horse.
Hegel also talked about the cunning of reason
that you have the sort of, you know,
God's history in full and if you believe in God,
or, you know, we don't know the future,
but there's always this sort of fly in the ointment,
this unintended consequence
that confounds the best plans of the powers that be.
And we're living through it.
That's, I'm glad it's not, you know,
street warfare or mechanized warfare
because it has been in the past.
It's more like soft power and people are fighting back.
Do you think it's possible?
So the JavaScript used to be for the front end of the web.
It's now increasingly so being used for backend,
like running stuff that's like behind the scenes.
And it's also starting to be used quite a bit
for things like TensorFlow.js.
So it's starting to actually use
like these heavy duty applications
that are using your networks, machine learning
and so on on the browser.
Is it possible in 10, 20, 30 years
that basically most of the world runs on JavaScript?
This is a dystopian, a nightmare to some people.
When I, when we did ask them to ask the web assembly,
I would joke and meme people with scenes
like Neo waking up in his pod in the matrix
and he's all skinny and weak and hairless.
And, you know, you realize in the future
that you're living in some simulation
that it's all running on JavaScript
and you just scream forever.
It's possible.
Gary Bernhard does these funny talks.
He did what JS and then he did this
life and death of JavaScript, I think it's called
where he took some clever ideas
that actually have a threat of credibility to them.
But I mentioned software fault isolation.
In the old days when we were using computers,
we said we're gonna use the UNIX monolithic monitor
and it's the privilege program.
This is before you even had hardware rings of protection
those some of the early 60s operating systems
used hardware protection zones.
But UNIX is privileged
and the program that runs user code in a process
is hosted, it's the guest in the host
and you get to suspend it, you get to kill it.
If it crashes, it doesn't take down the whole
west, it's a wonderful idea.
But the call into the kernel is expensive,
the system call so-called.
And this has even been optimized now
for things like getting the time of day
so it doesn't actually enter the kernel.
And meanwhile, hardware architectures
and virtualization techniques have gone
in a different direction,
even to the point where you can do software fault isolation
very cheaply without entering the operating system kernel.
And so you get UNI kernels and exo kernels
and very lightweight VMs.
And so Gary took this idea and said,
JavaScript will take over computing
because the system call boundaries too expensive.
So everything ends up in JavaScript
with these lighter weight isolation enforcement mechanisms.
It's not totally beyond belief.
People have assembly too.
It's nice to ask you sort of for advice
to there's so many people that are interested
in starting to learning about programming,
getting into this world.
Is there some number of languages,
three to five programming languages
that you would recommend people learn
or maybe a broader advice
on how to get started in programming?
Well, so you asked about machine learning
and JavaScript is a general purpose language.
And it's a language that's not that great
for doing matrix operations
or doing parallel programming, I would say,
without using some extensions or some libraries
that have some magic in them.
So if someone wanted to learn,
there are amazing languages in sort of the APL family
that are very useful for, I would say linear algebra,
which gets to a lot of the kernels in machine learning.
And so APL had like J and then K
and they're K variants because the guy that did K
is still going and he's the proprietary
but he's still innovating there.
There are, you know, Python is used.
So people talk about TensorFlow.js.
Well, it's not that surprising
because Python was heavily used for machine learning.
And Python was always, you know,
they didn't have this fast just-in-time compiler tradition.
There were some projects that tried this
and some of them were interesting.
PyPy was interesting.
But the philosophy with Python was,
oh, you need to go fast to write a C plugin
and drop into C code.
So I think people should look at multiple languages
because there are different tools in the belt.
If you're trying to do supervision or rapid prototyping,
you want a dynamic language,
you want to throw things together and see what works.
If you're trying to go down to the metal very fast,
well, I'm an old C hacker,
but I was also the sponsor, executive sponsor of Rust
at Mozilla and Rust is now escaped, you know,
from that sort of nest where it was born
to be adopted by a bunch of companies
and have a foundation in the works.
Some of the key core team members
are working now at Amazon and other places.
So it looks like Rust has reached escape velocity
and Rust is an interesting language
because one of our goals there,
one of the reasons I sponsored it was,
we were all tired of seeing those remote code execution
vulnerabilities due to C and C++.
And we thought, can we have a sort of safety property
through a type and effect system or an ownership system
and Rust has that.
And that ownership system is interesting
because it doesn't just give you memory safety,
there's a sort of theorem for free,
a dual that falls out for protection against data races.
So Rust is better for low-level programming,
you delimit your unsafe code
where you do have to be unsafe
and you can prove certain facts
about memory safety and race condition avoidance.
And so I think people should learn these new languages.
I think Go is a great language I admire, you know,
the UNIX people who did that, Ken Stoll was involved,
Rob Pike, of course, David, what's his name,
and other people, Go is a huge success.
Really on the server side,
anywhere you have a lot of networking to do
and it's garbage collected,
but it's also very pragmatic
and has that sort of C flavor.
As an old C hacker, I can't get used to the fact
that they swapped the type and declarator
in the declaration order.
I haven't used Rust,
but this is one of the most respected
and loved languages currently.
So it's an interesting one.
Yeah, and it's still young.
You look at these things,
JavaScript is now considered old.
It's gone to so many versions
that you can fall in love with it all over again.
25 plus years, you know, it's an adult.
It should be out of the house,
but it could be around another 25 years.
Cannot rule it out.
So Rust will be around for a long time.
The longer you're around,
the more likely you're Lindy and you're around.
I mean, a lot of people ask me like,
I'm often torn between recommending either Python
or JavaScript as the first language to play with
because, I mean, it's difficult
because it's so easy to do JavaScript incorrectly.
It's much easier to do it correctly these days
or like, well, like learn about programming.
But the cool thing about JavaScript
is that you can create stuff
that will put a smile on your face.
Like as a developer, you can create stuff
and it'll visually look like something
and it'll do stuff and it makes you feel good.
It makes you fall in love with programming.
With Python, you could do the same.
It's a little slower and with C++,
it takes five to 10 years to write a program
that actually does something.
So like there's that tension
between is JavaScript the right first step
or is it Python?
And I've been going back and forth on those too.
I had my Python right.
It came from a lineage of ABC,
which was a pedagogical language in the Netherlands.
And it was a good teaching language too.
I think it is a good teaching language
and it's a little more restrictive
in that if you misspell something in a way
that JavaScript might let run, let reach runtime,
it'll get stopped at syntax check in Python.
That's good for beginners.
I think the sloppiness that some people object to,
like people were just tweeting at me,
having just learned JavaScript.
They said, I can take a number and I can index into it
and get undefined out of it as a property.
And why is that? A number is not an object.
And I explained why it is,
because like in Java, the primitive types,
which unfortunately are not objects,
can be automatically boxed or wrapped by an object.
And I made that implicit.
In Java, it's typed and you have to declare things
and you'll get type errors.
But there are cases in Java where you get auto boxing
or auto wrapping because you've declared that you want it.
In JavaScript, it just happens.
So once I explain it, I'm like, oh, wow, I get it.
But it also means that you can commit a blunder
that just you don't get punished for, you don't detect.
And there's an undefined value
and you don't know where it came from.
I've been reading a lot about military history recently.
And one way to paint the picture of browsers,
internet browsers is through the various wars
throughout its history.
I don't know if that's a useful way to look at it,
but we've already talked a little bit
about Netscape and Internet Explorer in the early days.
Can you tell the story of the different wars?
If that's at all an interesting way to look at it
of the 90s and to today?
Yeah, so I mentioned that Microsoft,
which was convicted for it, did abuse its monopoly,
but they had a pretty good team by the time they did IE4.
And Netscape, unfortunately, I was like the second floor
and I was friends with all the first floor people,
the front-end guys who did the JavaScript event hookup
and things like that, that that team was fairly burnt out.
And I think having gone public, the upper management
wanted to buy a bunch of companies
to try to go head to head with Microsoft.
Didn't work, but buying a bunch of companies
usually doesn't work.
I think the modern sort of approach,
it roughly is like Mark Zuckerberg took,
which is to keep them at arm's length
and let them do their thing.
And now that he's pulling what's up in
and people are fleeing it
because it's tied into the ad surveillance.
But for a while there,
keeping it separate really does work
because you bought it for its value,
it's complimentary and you're not messing with it.
With Netscape, when they bought a bunch of companies,
they had some of the first floor people
or the founders burned out.
They had newcomers who wanted their turn to do the browser
and they hadn't really done browsers or understood them.
And so Netscape 4 was originally supposed to be three
and it was so late, they renumbered it.
We did a three release, Jamie and a few others
put some extra effort into,
Secure Mime was supported in the mail, built-in mail program.
And Netscape 4 was late
and it was only on Windows at first
and Microsoft had really started doing better, like they do.
They copy and the first version's trash
and the second one, you're starting to feel a threat
and the third one, you can tell what's gonna happen
and the fourth one's good.
And plus there's the benefit, like you said,
that it comes as a default browser.
Yes, and yet Netscape's screwing it up
and Microsoft really putting some quality people on it.
IE 4 was good, on Windows it was good.
And they did the dynamic HTML innovations.
They, Scott Isaacs, my old buddy, a former accountant
who programmed in basic and became what Microsoft calls
a program manager, which is kind of an elevated position.
It's, you can be a programmer or an engineer track
but you switch to it and you sort of lead a lot of design
and standards efforts.
And so Scott Isaac put in a lot of those funky DHTML APIs
that didn't quite have the same flavor
as the stuff that I did and neither of them was like
the later sort of verbose Java like Dom W3C standardized.
But IE 4 was pretty darn good.
I remember a friend, Scott Furman and I got invited
by Scott Isaacs to Gordon Beers and San Jose.
They were doing a preview of IE 4.
This must've been 1997.
And Scott said, yeah, we've got,
here's the new graphics stuff we're doing.
We've got something like your Netscape layers.
We've got VML, a vector markup language.
We can do like virtual reality.
And Scott and I looked at each other and said,
we're doomed, right?
Microsoft was starting to fire in all cylinders.
So I have to give them credit for that
even though they've used their market power
and maybe I shouldn't give them credit
for having the resources to hire talented people
but they did a credible job on IE 4.
What really was bad was that phase of the browser wars
ended with monopoly and perhaps due to the antitrust case,
perhaps due to regulation in Europe,
perhaps just due to Microsoft not liking
dealing with standardization, they would let it rot.
They just abandoned it, IE 5, IE 5, IE 6 later.
But these were not well maintained.
They had a lot of security bugs.
It was really closed and outdated too,
even though it was getting updated.
It's just weird.
Browsers like Mozilla and then Firefox were adding tabs,
Opera had a version of tabs and they didn't add tabs.
And they pop up blocking,
something I should have done from the start.
People realized that you can tell
when the user clicks something
and it goes in JavaScript to open a little window
that you can sort of inspect the stack
and see that the click originated that.
And it's probably okay.
Whereas if you're just loading a script
and it opens a new window, that's a spam technique
and you should block it.
Tabs were brilliant innovation.
Like you said, Opera had it.
But I remember I fully switched to Firefox the moment.
I remember the moments of first using tabs in Firefox
and not liking it for the first few minutes.
And then like, wait a minute.
You get the groove.
You get the groove and you understand.
So that timing, what year was this?
Because also as a aspiring web designer,
I used Table, so we didn't mention layout or CSS much.
There's also a change in the way,
the frames were going away.
So there's a change in the way websites looked
and behaved and all that kind of stuff.
CSS finally, which Microsoft embraced with I4
and Netscape never really did, right?
CSS became a better standard over time
for doing table layout that relieved you of the need
to use what are called spacer gifts, spacer gifts, right?
Images you would throw into space up tables.
The typographic power of the web has gotten better,
but it's still not on the level of PDF.
And you can't do advanced typography,
but it's gotten really better.
And even then, tables were getting better.
If you were using Firefox, that would have been 2004
because it was called Firebird until earlier that year.
No, yeah, I think it wasn't.
2003. I don't remember.
It was a Firebird, which had tabs?
We had tabs the whole way.
So it started out as Zola slash browser in 2002,
became Phoenix.
There's a BIOS that has an embedded version of IE
and they said, we're called Phoenix Technologies.
You can't use Phoenix.
And so we said, okay, we'll call it Firebird.
And then this Australian-centered open source database project
started really like in the true Mad Max style,
just screaming at us saying, you can't use Firebird.
And I had to sort of be the ambassador and say,
okay, we're going to rename.
And I'm like, we don't believe you.
You shouldn't have used it. We hate you.
And then we renamed it to Firefox.
And they're like, ah, we love you.
And then I haven't heard of them ever since.
But Firefox was a clever name.
We had to think of something distinctive.
We wanted to keep the fire going.
And it turns out there's a red panda, right?
It's a nickname for them.
So that's the second set of browser wars.
Second browser wars.
So how did you, how was Firefox born?
How was Mozilla born?
Is there a...
There's a long story there too.
So Netscape got acquired by AOL,
which as I say was a reasonable happy ending
for a lot of people,
because Netscape otherwise was going to go out of business
because Microsoft was just killing its market.
There was no way to charge for a browser.
Windows came with IE, IE4 was pretty good
and Netscape 4 wasn't that good and took a while to get better.
But the Netscape executive said,
let's do an open source escape pod, you know.
And like in Star Wars and New Hope,
the gunner won't shoot it
because there's no life forms on board, right?
It's not a threat.
And so we did Mozilla in 1998
and it looked like it was going to, you know,
initially just give the world an open source browser.
But it's really hard to get people to work
on this sort of hairball that had been hacked up
over by that point four years.
It also couldn't have the crypto module
for secure sockets, so-called,
or now transport layer security.
That was an electronic munition.
We were not allowed to release that
in the full 1024 bit key strength.
And yet people, one of whom I happened to meet previously
at SGI when I went on a sales support engineering trip,
Tim Hudson in Brisbane, Australia
and Eric A. Young did what became open SSL.
It was called SSL EAY after Eric's initials.
And Tim and Eric took their open SSL
outside of the purview of the NSA
and the Department of Commerce
and they stuck it into Mozilla's code.
And that was perhaps the best hack that was done
in the first few months after we open sourced the browser.
We had other problems.
The politics inside Netscape were riven by these acquisitions.
So the one acquisition that kind of
messed up Netscape 4 also wanted to keep doing
a proprietary mail and groupware program,
not Jamie Zewinski's mail program
that was in Netscape 2 and 3
and they held it back from open source.
We didn't have a mail program, it was just a browser.
We didn't know what AILA would do to us.
Turns out they didn't interfere with us for a long time.
But Netscape wasn't the best steward of Mozilla.
We were operating Mozilla as a pirate ship
without a legal entity.
So most of us worked for Netscape
under a separate organization.
And initially the first engineering manager,
Tom Paiklin of Netscape was the Mozilla
Law Founding Manager, but he left pretty quickly
and he left me as the acting manager,
which is more like method acting in my case.
And I did, that was my first management stint.
But then someone who'd written the licenses,
Mitchell Baker, she was a lawyer at Netscape.
She was involved in the open source license decision making
and the actual writing and construction of those licenses.
That was Mitchell's job, Netscape public license
and the truly open Mozilla public license.
And there were two because Netscape needed,
because of some encumbered code,
needed some special rights,
but that went away over time.
Mitchell was always interested in Mozilla
and she came back from maternity leave
and she said, I'll be the manager if you want.
And Jamie and I said, sure.
And then Jamie quit.
He quit after a year and he said, this didn't work,
I'm sorry, he acted like it was a total failure
because Mozilla didn't restart the browser market.
But there's no way it could have, right?
Netscape was still shipping variants of Netscape 4,
which was based on the old code.
Mozilla was trying to rearchitect the code
to make green field for developers.
So it was one of my big goals.
It wasn't a technical goal so much as, again, a social goal.
People wanted a more standard spaced browser.
They wanted a less of a hairball
that had been hacked on by ex grad students
starting four years prior.
So we said, we're gonna make a modular code base.
We're gonna use a variant
or an open source version of Microsoft's
component object model has reference counting
and standardized vTables, virtual calls and C++.
And we're gonna use JavaScript.
We're gonna have a bridge between those two
so you can script those components
just like Java components.
We're going to make a portable front end
with a markup language for the user interface.
Not tables, not HTML, but custom menus and dropdowns
and toolbars and that was called Zool,
XML user interface language.
And some real talent on the Netscape side delivered
that Dave Hyatt who was instrumental in Zool,
Chris Watterson, Joe Hewitt, Blake Ross
and Blake was an intern.
He was like a high school aged intern in Netscape.
And at some point we were innovating rapidly
in the Mozilla world and Netscape was still caught up
in this management mess from these acquisitions
and it wasn't delivering.
And every year they were wondering if ALO was gonna come
and start beheading the executives
because it didn't do anything useful.
And there was a thought you should take the Netscape browser
engine and put it in the Windows ALO client
which was the dial-up client
that all the increasingly aging users of ALO were using.
Never happened.
It would have been too big a change.
So it wasn't clear why ALO bought Netscape
but as I said, they left it alone
but Netscape didn't leave Mozilla alone.
And so in 2001, Mitchell called me up
and said, I'm no longer employed.
And I was like, what, you quit?
And no, no, this wasn't my choice.
And there was a layoff which maybe accidentally
or on purpose got rid of Mitchell.
But the funny thing was we had an open source project.
We had a lot of the engineers on staff on our side
and we had people we'd hired through the Mozilla community
who were top notch.
They'd risen, they came in high quality,
they knew the code and they actually were better
than the average or median hire of Netscape.
And so the funny thing was the executive
who thought they'd gotten rid of Mitchell in the layoff
on the next week's community call around Mozilla
and what to do, there's Mitchell.
And so this show, you can kind of transcend your boundaries
of corporate open source if you get a project
that has enough loyalty, even among the paid staff.
Cause we had outside people contributing
with people at Red Hat and a few other places
but the majority of the hackers were employed by Netscape.
But a lot of them at that point had come from the community
and others got the community and wanted to work with it.
And it was really the weakest engineers at Netscape
who didn't like Mozilla and didn't like the crucible
of competing with the better programmers.
So if the project is good enough, it will rise,
the Phoenix will rise out of the-
That's exactly right.
And so we had this Mozilla code base that was getting better.
In fact, I think at some point in 2002
when we declared Mozilla 1.0,
I engineered a roadmap that successively
through similar sort of six week, five week releases,
like we all do with browser releases nowadays,
Chrome does and Firefox braves us three weeks.
We got to a point where we said, you know what?
It doesn't suck.
This is like the 1.0 that you want to release
because if you hold it back any longer to polish it,
you're denying others the ability to use it.
So like pro engineer, the mechanical CAD tool
embedded the code, they embedded the layout engine.
And Mozilla 1.0 was like a Netscape communication suite.
We had at that point gotten the mail people
to reintegrate mail and news
and we had an editor for HTML.
And it felt like a 90s suite, a suiteware.
And it felt kind of bloated.
And the people who were taking that Mozilla open source
and then adding Netscape flavor to it
were not calling the shots right.
And they were also under ALL's thumb a little bit
and that they said, well, we should probably put
the ALL instant messenger chiclet on the toolbar.
And we should put the ICQ,
the other messaging system that ALL had acquired.
We should put the ICQ button on the toolbar
and pretty soon Netscape looked like a bit of a NASCAR
badged version of Mozilla.
And that also made Mozilla more popular.
And yet they had contrived to fire or lay off the leader
and we'd carried on with an open source structure
where Mozilla was still, Mitchell was calling sort of
management or project level shots
and I was calling technical shots.
And we had a popular suite, but we thought
why not make it just a browser?
Because it'll be simpler, it'll do one job well.
And even then we can strip it down by having extensions.
So Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross, the high school aged intern
did the first version, which was called Mozilla slash browser.
It was very, the group, small group of us, Ian Hicks
and Asa Dotsler, me, Joe Hewitt and Hyatt and Blake.
And Hyatt was really the senior hacker.
He'd done all these things like amazing cross-platform menus
through the user interface market language.
And he knew how to do tab browsing.
He'd implemented it natively on macOS of the time
in Camino, originally called Camara.
He'd written multiple limitations, which was
a thing programmers should do.
It's like the VA team did for those missing years
when the rest of the Chrome teams like, where's VA?
In fact, Dave's wife, Rebecca told me a story
about when they were at UIUC,
they were also University of Illinois grad students.
There was an assignment, it was a programming assignment.
It was supposed to be due at the end of the semester.
And Dave's friend was this, I'm gonna go think
and I'm gonna design and I'm gonna make this, you know
platonic perfect form of the program.
And then I'm gonna write it at the end when it's due.
And Hyatt just went in and started hacking.
He wrote one version, he wrote a second version,
a third version.
End of the semester comes around.
The friend's not doing too well.
It wasn't perfect and it wasn't written.
I'm not sure how that story ended, but for him
but Dave's version was a fifth iteration, it was great.
And so he'd done that with everything you need
in a tabbed browser.
And this really showed well in Phoenix,
what we called Phoenix and I had to rename two more times.
And, you know, Blake went to Stanford,
he became a Stanford student and couldn't work on it.
Dave Hyatt went to Apple in 2001.
He was one of the founding Safari team members.
Interesting, wow.
But he was still vlogging about tabbed browsing.
I think Apple at some point said,
does Safari have tabbed browsing?
Yeah, but it was because of Hyatt.
Yeah.
Hyatt was quite a feather in their cap.
Don Melton, who had been the engineering manager
for Safari from the beginning, had been in Netscape also.
And so there's just a diaspora of talent.
And yet Hyatt was still kind of writing blog posts
about how to do tabs, right?
And at some point Apple said, don't blog about that.
That's our proprietary tab technology.
And I was like, no, it's not.
It was an opera and I refined it.
So we had to replace people and we had Ben Gooder,
the New Zealander, we hired at Netscape.
And he stepped in to be the Firefox lead.
And we also had this weird circumstance
where AOL finally did notice that Netscape
was kind of a albatross,
that they bought it for no particular benefit.
And even then the AOL politics were also heinous,
sort of East Coast politics.
I remember taking two trips there
because I was a principal engineer.
And so as principal engineers got trotted out
to do dog and pony shows in Dallas, Virginia.
And the AOL for management was very East Coast in flavor.
And they were at that time merging with Time Warner,
which did not go well.
So one of these years we went out there
and we were all doing dog and pony shows.
And there were these characters
that were sort of like marketing guys,
one of the most wearing a cravat.
And one of them was named Reggie.
And they were very you rather than non-you.
Or they were like, what's still man's metropolitan film,
U-H-B, urban, they were funny
and they were kind of useless and kind of preppy.
And then the next year we went back and I said,
where's Reggie?
And it's like, oh, Reggie's not here anymore.
Cause Time Warner realized that the merger wasn't
in their interest either.
And then the sort of knives came out.
And this was, these mergers rarely work, right?
This is very difficult.
You get these giant companies
and they think there's going to be synergy.
That was the late nineties who watch work.
And there wasn't synergy with AOL buying Netscape.
And there wasn't synergy with Time Warner and AOL.
But did AOL ever really work?
Was it ever really cool?
Like the same kind of fire and excitement
that Firefox eventually created,
was that ever there in AOL?
AOL was the right time to do a dial-up service
that got distribution by basically leaflet bombing
compact discs on the country.
And they beat out CompuServe and the other ones, Prodigy.
And then the web happened.
And so you had almost like this isolated continent,
like some of the evolutionary biologists I follow
make fun of the funny large marsupial mammals
of Australia, how silly they are.
So AOL is like Australia.
And you saw it over time because they kept aging
and they were using AOL to get online.
And they couldn't really use a web browser.
And it became sort of a valued cohort
cause they're still have relatively high socioeconomic
status and they have grandchildren,
but it's going away.
It's dying at some point.
Towards the end of the aughts that decade
and then to the decade 2010 plus,
that Firefox became, it's incredible.
I forget when Chrome came out,
but I was in 2008, but Firefox was the sexy, cool thing
that represented a lot of the cutting-edge technologies
and all that kind of stuff.
How did it-
It was amazing.
Tim O'Reilly and John Betel did the first Web2 conference,
which eventually became huge and they split it.
But that was in 2004, right?
When Firefox was out, Craig's list was huge.
It was killing classified revenue for newspapers,
but there was just this ferment.
People starting-
Wikipedia along there somewhere.
Gmail was already done and it was an impressive Webmail.
There were others before it like Hotmail,
but Gmail was really impressive from Google.
And Google Maps, people started seeing what could be done.
They thought, how can you drag the map around?
And how does that work?
And it was all JavaScript and images and-
So Gmail was 2003, 2004?
Yeah, I think it actually started quite early.
It might have been 2002 or 2003,
but by the time we started dealing with Google and Firefox
to get the search deal,
which was the main revenue source for Mozilla,
and still is 2004, early Sergey Brins,
one of his trusted engineer guys,
Fritz Schneider, made contact with me at Mozilla.
And we started talking and we realized
search and browser need each other.
And this is deeply true, right?
This is still true.
This is why a lot of the search engines
have their own browsers.
Yeah, so in case people don't know,
the main revenue source for the browser
is the default search engine,
which is kind of incredible to think about,
that that is a revenue source.
It's a little bit sad.
Yeah, it leads to this capture or kill effect
where you have the search engine own its own browser
and other browsers may struggle to get this distribution
we talked about earlier.
So where, and you said you've figured out
that Google is working on its own browser at some point.
2006, yeah.
2006.
So would you say Firefox versus,
was Internet Explorer part of the war here
or was the Firefox versus Chrome?
So Firefox didn't quite cause Microsoft to reconvene IE.
They did do IE seven.
And I remember being on a plane back
from the standards meeting,
JavaScript standards meeting from Seattle from Redmond.
And there was some Microsoft guy in front of me.
Turns out my wife knew him from her past life
before we married.
And he was just this bearded big guy.
And he was like,
we should have just killed Firefox and the cradle.
All we needed to do was add pop-up walking in and tabs
and we could have made Internet Explorer kill Firefox.
And it's like, shoulda coulda woulda, pal.
And I was right behind him hearing this.
But they didn't.
They were slow and IE seven wasn't that great.
And what really got them started I think was Chrome.
And I talked to Larry Page in 2005.
I think I said, we're talking about the Firefox relationship
but he was also saying, what a web kit.
This was Apple's version of the old Caged ML engine
from Linux, the KDE side of Linux
that was used in the Conqueror browser also with K's
that Apple had forked.
And in 2005 was when Apple's principles
including Dave Hyatt,
Maches de Covex, some of my friends were still there
and said, we must stop patch bombing
this poor Kaged ML project.
We should make a proper Mozilla like organization
webkit.org.
Now it wasn't a separate nonprofit or anything.
It was still Apple.
It was Apple controlled.
But they made their fork first class
and they made it be something that they all worked in.
And then lived in.
And that was before Chrome.
And then Chrome Larry Page said, what about webkin?
I said, yeah, it's nice.
I have friends who work on it.
You might use that if you do your own browser.
Why don't you do your own browser?
Don't worry about Firefox.
You should do your own browser.
You can have your own opinion of how it should work.
And sure enough, they did.
So by 2006, we knew they'd been working on it.
Some of my friends who'd been at Netscape
did the original demo.
And the demo wasn't what you thought.
It didn't have the fast JavaScript yet
that was still often Denmark and the farm.
It didn't have tabs.
It had tabs because all browsers had tabs at this point.
And it had this software fault isolation I mentioned.
It was through process isolation.
So in theory, each tab has its own operating system process.
And so what's going to take your tab down?
Well, Webkit has bugs that can crash it,
but Flash was still big then.
All the restaurant sites, remember, and Flash crashed a lot.
So the demo that I heard about my friends
at Netscape, as a lot of people did,
inside Google was the sad tab.
They showed an early version of Chrome,
which is this bare-bones tab browser.
They loaded a site with a known Flash bone,
and then suddenly Flash crashes.
And everyone expected the whole browser to go down.
But instead, you got this little sad face in the tab.
And you could reload it, and there it is again.
So this was an improvement.
It was a real move for security.
It was based on a company that acquired
called Green Border that had some really big brains
like Olfar Erelingson, I think, was involved.
And they had done some exotic security stuff,
but they ended up simplifying it to this process isolation.
And it was good.
And Firefox didn't have it at the time.
So we were still struggling with security bugs.
So we knew Chrome was coming, but it took two more years
to come out.
And we were still getting the Google search revenue.
We were still making Google the default engine.
And Firefox was still growing.
Firefox grew, I think, until 2011.
And that was when it peaked.
And as it started falling, it was because of Chrome.
Chrome came out in 2008, and it had a comic book that leaked
accidentally that showed some of the people who worked on it.
Lars Bock was in there, and so on.
It was kind of soft launch because they didn't market it
heavily, they didn't push distribution.
But Google had reason to worry about distribution
because Microsoft was doing a search engine, Bing,
since 2007.
In fact, when they came out with Bing,
Google was worried that Microsoft would just
brute force switch the default browser
and everyone's Internet Explorer or even Firefox
on Windows to Bing from Google.
And Microsoft wasn't, I think, ready to dare the antitrust cops
that way, even though they'd gone to sleep.
And I don't think Bing was ready either.
But just in case it happened, Sundar Pichai, who
rose very well based on this work,
was sort of in charge of getting distribution deals.
And he got Google Toolbar and Google Desktop Search
distribution.
And remember those pieces of software?
Those were like desktop extensions,
Toolbars, or operating system extensions
for doing desktop search, searching your local files,
kind of like macOS spotlight, right?
Sadly, died of doubt.
It all died.
And there were some features that we still missed
that didn't make it into Chrome.
But Sundar got OEMs to bundle those.
And then he got enough of those deals that by 2007 or 2008,
Google felt, well, if Bing, Microsoft does the worst
and tries to force Bing, we can reach in and reset it
with that point of presence.
So that was good for Sundar's career.
And it was good for Google.
But it never came to pass that they had to defend.
Microsoft was still slow.
And by the time they saw Chrome come out,
then they did what would have been IE9.
And then they said, we're going to have a fast JavaScript
engine to Chakra, Chakra Core.
And they did OK.
They were another process isolated fast JavaScript
browser, Tab browser.
So it sounds like there's a deep fundamental coupling
of search engine and browser that's
mixing this whole thing up.
And obviously Firefox doesn't have a search engine that's
like, I mean, you're partnering with somebody
with a search engine, with Yahoo or with Google or so on.
They tried Yahoo.
That was unfortunate, because I think even though Marissa
Mayer talked about it, she never pulled it off.
They never restored the search team that had been laid off.
I believe Carol Bartz was running Yahoo when Carol said,
I've got to get rid of one of the three expensive things.
I'm going to get rid of search.
And those researchers went to Google and Microsoft.
And there was no way to put Yahoo search back together.
So when Firefox tried switching all their users who'd
stuck with a default from Google to Yahoo,
like mid-December 2014, that she used to say,
what just happened to my Firefox?
And others didn't notice right away,
but over time they did.
And so over the next year, the traffic just
went away for Yahoo.
And yet they were obliged.
I understand it.
I don't have inside knowledge, but this
is leaked out and Danny Sullivan's written about it.
Search Engine Land.
I think the deal was like fixed payments to Mozilla.
So Mozilla was getting a bunch of money for traffic
that wasn't staying because users were resetting their default.
And this shows how defaults are important,
but they have to be good enough that the user doesn't override
them.
And a lot of the commercial value in popular apps
is one of the default settings.
What is the default search?
But oftentimes there's something just like you said.
I mean, if there's something compelling,
that also can beat out the default, like tab browsing
and so on.
And that's where, I mean, we'll talk about brave browser.
It feels like now we're in this third stage where
there's Chrome, Firefox, Edge, I guess it's called, and Brave.
And these all seem like really exciting, I don't know,
innovative browsers.
They're all kind of copying off of each other,
picking up the good stuff.
There's evolution again, especially on tracking protection.
So privacy is this sort of global wave that's rising.
I like to call it a wave because it's a large,
somewhat chaotic structure.
It's not a unitary good.
You can't say, I'm buying privacy for $3.
I'm paying $3 privacy.
Some people think a VPN does this and are disappointed when
it fails them.
But often people use VPNs for region unlocking video
or getting the US Netflix catalog.
Exactly.
But privacy is not a unitary good.
It's complex.
And people are understanding it only over time.
And it's to get burned.
But there's a genie that's not going back in the bottle there.
People are fed up.
Apple has responded to this.
Apple was always making Safari, I think,
more of a privacy-branded browser from the very beginning.
I think this was probably Steve Jobs.
Safari had private Windows, private TAS, before Firefox did.
And these are only private in the sense
that they don't leave local traces,
if you don't want them to.
Turns out Safari does keep them around between shutdown.
But the canonical model is no local traces
after you close the private window, no leftover traces
that you went to some site that you were embarrassed by
or bought a gift for somebody you wanted to keep secret.
But there's still some level of tracking.
There's network tracking.
Network privacy is not guaranteed at all
because you're using the same internet and ISP as a public
window, a non-private window.
But Safari had that early on.
They also had a cookie blocking policy
that might take a little explaining.
If you know what a cookie is, it's
a little bit of storage in the browser
indexed by the name of the site.
And it's really only the main name of the site, like bfa.com
or something like npr.org.
Every site can store some information in a cookie.
Every time it's contacted by the browser,
the previous version is sent back.
And in response from the server, the cookie's updated.
So it's this little bit of storage in the browser
that the site can keep updating.
And it can store an encrypted version
of your login credentials with a timestamp
so you can stay logged in without having
to retype your password every time you navigate, which
is how it would be if you didn't have cookies.
The web protocols, especially in the 90s,
are so-called stateless protocols.
So you go to your bank, you log in,
you go from your login confirmed page to your account view.
If you didn't have a cookie, you'd be logging in again.
Every time you type in the service.
So that was a great thing about cookies.
Lumontually did it in a hurry in 1994
before I joined that escape.
And he did it for really holding that kind of credential.
But even then, there was the image element embedded
in the page.
And the image gets fetched possibly
from a different server.
And that request carries the last cookie, which
could be empty at first.
And the response carries the updated cookie.
So just by having images and cookies, you had tracking.
Because that image server can be serving a little one by one
pixel.
And they still use the word pixel on ad tech.
And that pixel can be served from the same server,
embedded differently with different URL
spellings in the New York Times and ESPN.
And as you go from one to the other,
the image server can say, I haven't got a cookie for you.
It's empty initially.
I'm going to assign you user number 1234.
I'm going to put a database entry in.
And I see, by the way, I always fetched the name
of the path part of the URL that I was in the New York Times.
So you're a New York Times reader.
And then you hit ESPN, same thing.
And the database gets updated.
And the number user 1234 indexes in the database
to a profile of you, you've been tracked.
This was not intended.
And it was too late to undo by the time I got the Netscape.
I think Lou wanted to do Twinkies, he called them.
And he was trying to solve several problems.
He wanted them to be bigger because initially cookies
had a short size limit.
I think he wanted to solve the third-party problem.
But Tom Paiklin, the engineering manager said, no.
No Twinkies.
Just cookies.
We're done.
You're done, son.
And that's how a lot of that stuff was.
That's how JavaScript got frozen like a flying
amber in some ways with that sloppy equality operator
that I made because of the early adopters.
And the cookie got stuck with this tracking hazard.
And then because JavaScripts can be like images,
they're embedded in the page by the time of Netscape 3,
I made that work.
You can get a request with the last cookie value
and the response updates it.
That's a tracking mechanism.
And that's why you don't even need images to track.
Now you just use scripts.
So this whole tracking economy evolved.
And it depended on these accidents of the 90s,
these unintended consequences.
Well, it created some of the richest companies
in the world, right?
I mean, it's the social media.
All I got was t-shirts.
All I got is this crappy t-shirt.
Yeah, I mean, so that's the fundamental problem
the world is facing now.
They're looking at what social media has created.
And they're looking at a world they're
looking at itself in the mirror.
And seeing that privacy is actually something
that's supposed to be a nice thing to have, it's something
that actually should be fundamental to the way
we interact with the world as part of our tooling.
And that's where the Brave browser comes in.
And I suppose others as well will play with this idea,
but Brave is at the forefront of that.
So maybe can you describe what Brave is
and what are its key principles?
And what's broken or what is it Brave trying to fix?
So when I realized that these accidents,
like the third-party cookie, the image or script that's
tracking you, or the JavaScripts that can do it invisibly
now, that all this stuff wasn't intended
and that Firefox had supported extensions that
blocked some of these things, I thought probably we
should have browsers just block some of these things by default.
These were not intended and they're now unsafe.
They're tracking you.
There could be data breaches, malware distribution,
bullying and PsyOps and other attacks on people,
block that stuff, block that JavaScript.
I'm Dr. Frankenstein.
I've got to deal with the monster here.
But obviously, you go to Gmail, there's
so much of script there to make that amazing web client.
That's OK.
That's first-party JavaScript.
So how do you tell the first from the third party?
And it's not easy.
It's not a matter of just what's embedded
from a different server because a lot of publishers
use benign scripts from unrelated domains
or apparently unrelated domains.
So you end up having to develop a sort of human and machine
learning practice around blocking.
And at Brave, we did that from the start
and built a research team to help drive it and automate it.
We realized that protecting people needed machine learning.
And around 2017 spring, I talked to my friends at Apple
about this too, and they were also doing what they call
intelligent tracking prevention, which
uses local machine learning in the browser.
And the funny thing is, great minds think alike,
they were taking their third-party cookie blocker that
was in Safari from the old days and making it not
have a big loophole.
Because what they did was, in 2003 when Safari came out,
they said, we're going to block cookies that
are from those third-party embedded elements where you've
never visited that site before.
So I'm going to pick an app company that got sold to AT&T,
so I'm not picking on anybody on fairly.
AppNexus.com, have you ever been to AppNexus.com?
No.
I've never been there.
But I guarantee you 10 years ago, you probably
had, if you were using Firefox, you had a cookie.
Third-party cookie, because you were being tracked by them.
And they were using that cookie to build up a profile of you.
In Safari, as long as the user never went to AppNexus,
that cookie would not be set.
And that was a real move for privacy early on when
JavaScript was still around in Safari.
But it had this loophole that, if you do go to AppNexus,
then why it's OK to be a third-party cookie?
And so AppNexus did something very naughty.
They took their ad partners to put the actual ad you click on.
And they said, hey, add a little script so that when somebody
clicks on the ad, before it goes to your landing page,
redirect to AppNexus, and we'll redirect to the landing page.
And by doing that, they set a first-party cookie,
and they got whitelisted.
So as a loophole, they exploited.
Intelligent tracking prevention in Safari
was sophisticated enough to counteract this.
And it did other things, and it's evolved since they did it.
And we've evolved brave, too.
And so when I say machine and human learning,
there's a real set of techniques here.
They have to find things.
It's a fascinating problem, actually.
Fingerprinting, right?
Anytime you have a little bit of storage in the browser
associated with a website, if the bad guy can get 32 websites,
each one has a bit of storage.
That's 32 bits.
You can turn the bit on or off.
You can make 4 billion numbers.
You can make an identifier.
It's called a super cookie sometimes.
It's a, there are weaker ways that are statistical.
They're called fingerprinting.
You have to block all of them, and you have to not only automate,
you want to work in the web standards body
to put privacy in by default, by design, from the get-go,
not added as an afterthought, or go hog while with new web APIs
that add a bunch more local storage or fingerprint surface area.
And that's been a struggle, too, because guess who's
the new Microsoft in the standards body?
It's Google.
And they're not in favor of privacy first.
They want to do privacy their way, only under,
I would say, market pressure.
But with Apple and with Brave leading the way,
we block third-party cookies almost without exception.
So we just block them.
And that gives us a very strong privacy benefit.
But it also means some sites just don't work right.
Embedded YouTube videos might not work right.
So we're adapting in a similar way to Apple's done with ITP
to make third-party cookies blocked,
but to sort of simulate what looks like a working third-party
cookie for the site.
It essentially tries to partition each site
and its third parties into its own sort of cookie jar.
Got it.
And so, like you said, is this both a human fine-tuning issue
and a machine learning problem?
And as humans learn, then they train the machine learning.
But maybe Google aside or including Google,
there is millions of dollars, if not
B, billions of dollars to be made from fighting
the ways of Brave.
That's right.
And it's been an interesting change
from when we started in 2015.
And we started, ad-blocking extensions, Ablock Plus was
one of the big ones that started on Firefox in 2006,
I believe, had gotten to a certain level of use
around the world.
And browsers like UC Web, UC Browser in Asia,
had some amount of ablocking built in and on by default.
So a page fair was a startup.
And they measured ad-blocking adoption.
And they tried to say, hey, publishers, you're
30% of the visitors to pitchfork or wire
to kind of NAS properties are using ad-blockers.
If we can somehow convince them to lower their ad-blocking
for your site, that could be like a 43% lift, right?
And three sevenths.
Well, that's easier said than done.
And page fair and other source point
that many others tried to either smuggle ads through
or cajole the user into letting ads appear.
And it didn't really work.
And meanwhile, the ad-blocking adoption
has just continued intelligent tracking prevention
Safari in 2017, brave from 2016 on with very strong cookie
blocking and other protections.
And this is not going away.
The publishers used to rage against it.
Like we would try to say, we can help you.
You're dealing with users who are already
blocking all your ads.
We can try to put back some economics that
helped the user and you that led to the basic attention
token that we started with Bitcoin.
We can be your friend.
Don't just fingerprint us as an ad-blocker and treat
us as an enemy.
But in 2015 or 16, it was like, nah, you're an ad-blocker.
Get out of here.
I hate you.
And by 2017 or 18, it's like something's happening.
The ad-blocking is not stopping.
And we're all getting sort of pulled on the Google's
plantation through AMP, AMP.
Or we're getting killed by the Google ad system we use
because it's taking all the revenue.
Or some other vendors we use are permitting ad fraud.
And so a fake New York Times is getting paid by the marketer
running an ad that a bot clicks on.
And the real New York Times, it's supposed to get the ad,
doesn't get it.
And there's something really broken about that kind of system.
And that fraud is mediated through Google's ad exchange,
which is the biggest of them all.
And Google takes a fee.
There's a flip side of that, which
is malware distribution, malvertising,
where fake advertisers put malware payloads in or exploit
hit loaders in JavaScript.
And they smuggle them in ads onto real publisher pages.
The ad exchange takes the fee.
Now, I'm not a lawyer.
I'm not going to say this is a RICO predicate.
But why is the ad exchange facilitating fraud and malware
distribution and taking a fee?
It's not right.
As opposed to just fighting.
This is the really interesting thing about Brave
is as opposed to just fighting and then being treated
like an ad blocker, you're providing an alternate.
There's a philosophical idea here
that might change the nature of the internet
with the basic attention token.
But maybe what is basic attention token, BAT,
and how does it work?
OK, I'll tell the story first by saying how I came to it.
I realized for a long time at Firefox,
we were dependent on this Google search deal.
And I thought, now that Chrome's out,
maybe that's going to go away.
At some point, Google will say, Firefox, like old Yeller,
you saved me from the rabid beast.
Now I have to shoot you in the head.
Done your job.
Sad but true.
Goodbye.
And what can we do?
And I think this, Mozilla doesn't know what to do.
This is something that I couldn't solve there,
and I don't think they can solve.
But I thought, why is the browser
the sort of passive servant of these big tech companies?
Why is it a blind runtime for ad tech
JavaScripts, including from Google?
Why doesn't it block some?
And if it blocks some, why can't it
reconnect users, readers, fans with publishers,
creators, websites?
Why can't it help people make direct payments
or even possibly get an ad revenue share for private ads
that are placed in the browser?
The ads are all placed in the browser.
Some people have this sort of model
that the server is painting the ad into some flash combined
package or into some giant image, and then it all gets sent down.
That's not how it works.
All the ads you see on the web are placed in your browser
by calling out to various ad tech partners.
And Google's among them.
And so if you block those scripts,
you break the advertising flow of money
from the brands and their agencies to the publishers.
And if you want to reconnect it directly with the user,
you have limited choices.
The user generally isn't going to sign up
with a ACH bank connection or a credit card.
The publisher isn't going to sign up the user,
except as a subscriber.
And then they're going to overcharge you
because they want you to cross-upsize all the content
and buy more than you read and all that stuff.
And how many people are doing great who
are big names like New York Times and The Washington Post?
But how many subscriptions are you as a user going to pay for?
This is why startups like Tony Hale's Skrull
are trying to do a portable subscription system.
But by the way, just on a small tangent there,
even the New York Times, it's really annoying how difficult
it is to subscribe.
There's way too many clicks.
They don't make any sense.
I had friends a few years ago, I think they fixed this,
who would pay for the paper, and then they'd go online
and they'd get upcharged for the digital.
And there was no break.
There was no connection between them.
But publishers are not that technical.
And they can't all get you to subscribe.
You can't have 1,000 subscriptions.
So for a long time, people talked about micropayments.
There was Blendol and other ones which came to the US,
but didn't grow.
And I thought, if you have just a browser
and it's protecting you by blocking all this ad tech
tracking junk, it can provide you an option that
uses cryptocurrency to let you support your favorite sites
and even YouTube channels.
And that way, prototype with Bitcoin.
And that meant the user had to be of means to contribute
and willing to contribute.
But it could be done on the Bitcoin blockchain.
And it could be fairly efficient, even though Bitcoin
went through a period when we had this prototype running
in 2016 into 2017, where Bitcoin was very congested
and very slow to confirm and the fees got very high.
And a lot of users who were not Bitcoin maximalists
or even experienced, we helped them out
by embedding a Coinbase buy widget.
And they had the income to buy, but it was hard.
It was like, do I buy $5 a month?
But the fee is like $4.50.
I better buy in larger batches, right?
And they're like, I don't want to own that much Bitcoin.
So it became this painful thing.
And the real idea that I had of private ads
that pay the user a rev share couldn't be realized alone
in that kind of system.
In these cryptocurrency systems, especially with the blockchain
we switched to Ethereum, you can have smart contracts.
The Bitcoin system is not turn complete.
So what you can do with the script is more limited.
But you can still do sort of clever things,
even with Bitcoin script.
What we wanted to do was sort of a three-sided ecosystem.
We wanted users, creators, or publishers, and advertisers.
And we wanted the advertisers to put money in just like they
do today, but without going through the Googles
and the app nexuses and all these other ad tech companies.
Because those companies take out a huge cut.
The Guardian in the UK once did an experiment for a month.
They bought out their own ad space.
They put in a pound and they were paid 30 pence.
70% was coming out to the intermediary vendors they
were using.
And that's like the opposite of what the App Store does.
The App Store takes 30% and gives the publisher 70%.
So pretty broken.
In the old days of the Superstation TBS,
the media owner would get 85%.
So these splits have become really unbalanced.
And the middle players, the ad tech vendors,
are taking out way too much money.
And they're doing something worse, which has been noticed.
They're letting not just the malware vendors,
but also the ad fraud side, which fakes the publishers,
and clickbait merchants come in and steal traffic
from good sites.
Because once you have a certain audience identified
at one site, Jason Calconas told me this about his experience
with, I guess it was in Gadget.
I forget what site he was running.
But once he started using an ad partner that was sharing
his audience information across multiple sites,
he saw his competitors stealing all his traffic.
And then what's worse is the clickbait sites
that just have much cheaper rates steal all that traffic.
And that facilitates fraud, facilitates fake news,
all sorts of problems.
So Grave blocks it.
And then we give users the ability to give back.
And because we invented the basic attention token
in Ethereum, we can do this three-way split.
And we can give users a share of the revenue.
And if they want to take it out, they can.
Now, unfortunately, for us and for all blockchain,
the regulators are saying, we're going
to have to know who you are.
There's the Treasury Department's FinCEN agency.
There's the Office of Foreign Asset Controls OFAC.
There's the other regulators in the federal government
that take a very dark look at things like money laundering
and sending money to someone named Osama bin Laden.
So compliance starts to come in.
And even now, they're threatening,
for pure Bitcoin, sending to some address.
If you're a Coinbase, you're going
to have to know who's at that address.
You're going to make sure.
Make the actual identities of people involved.
Yeah.
Now, with Coinbase members, you sign up,
and they know you.
And they comply with the regulations.
They're a regulated money services business.
And but if somebody's using their own self-custodial wallet
where they have the hardware private key
and they're not named, and they want to send to that address,
our friends in the federal government
are talking about requiring at some threshold
knowing who that is.
So some threshold that's unreasonable.
It's not that big.
Yeah.
I don't know how this will play out.
I think crypto is here to stay.
I think the beauty of being able to send peer to peer
without any bank in the middle, without any huge wire
charge and two-day delay and all that nonsense is beautiful.
And I've used it and I love it.
But we're pragmatists that brave about crypto.
And we realize that anything like a revenue split,
we can't facilitate without being licensed in a certain way.
And it requires knowing who the user is.
So our default mode doesn't know who the user is.
It instead imputes to the user's browser some of the revenue
and allows that browser to steer it back to the creators.
And we do have to identify the creators.
But as things improve, and who knows how it'll play out,
there should become a day when this full vision can be done
more fully on a blockchain.
But regulations and the practicalities of today's
blockchains, which are not that fast and not anonymous over time,
you fingerprint yourself over time,
we do some of this with the browser.
So one of the ideas with the basic attention token
is to make a hybrid system that's
stronger than blockchain alone.
It's the browser and the blockchain.
And the browser is this trusted endpoints software.
It's this universal app.
Everyone uses browsers.
The bigger the screen, the more you're in the browser,
the less you install fat clients for things.
I use Slack on macOS, and it's like a browser.
It's based on an electron framework we used to use.
And it's not that great.
Some people at Brave use Slack in Brave as a browser.
I use that often, yeah.
And I noticed on the iPad, I use apps less.
The smaller the screen, the browser
got handicapped by Apple and Android both.
And it also can be slower or not have the right affordances
to interface with the security-limited APIs.
But in principle, with the right permissioning,
you can make the web browser just as good as any app.
You can make it be a super app.
And that's part of our mission at Brave.
So we want to have the economics that
got captured by these big tech companies through tracking
and through social networks.
We want to block that for your own safety
and then let you opt into a cleaner world where
you keep your data defended in your browser
and you can actually realize value from it.
So the way our ad system works, I mentioned it being private,
but how does that work?
We don't see your data at all.
All browsers are sort of the mother of all data feeds,
your history, all your searches at all engines.
Each engine sees the queries you send to it,
but it doesn't see the others.
But the browser sees them all.
Machine learning in the browser that you can opt into
can study all that in a very complete way
and do a better job than Google does.
Google has cookie and scripts across the web
from, according to DoubleClick, they have YouTube.
They have Android.
They have Search, which is still their big revenue link.
But they don't see everything.
The browser sees everything.
And if it can do a good job locally,
and this is not advanced machine learning,
this is not TensorFlow, this is like SVMs now and Naive Bayes,
then you can match intense signals,
intense signals from those data feeds, searches, the queries,
the history, how much you're scrolling down a page,
how much you redid a search.
It's all a blind browser algorithm.
We don't see that data.
And then pick the best ad from a fixed catalog per day.
And the catalog is fixed across a large population per day.
And it only updates once a day because new offers come in
and old ones inspire, sometimes every week or every month.
And that catalog, and there can be many such catalogs,
is sold by our direct sales team.
And so we're making an anonymous audience
available to advertisers without the advertisers tracking them.
Instead, each browser is a little machine learning system
that's picking the best catalog entry.
Now, the catalog is not the ads.
Those are big.
It's a video or a web page.
It's just the link to an edge cache.
And there are many such edge caches.
We're not trying to protect them from seeing your IP address.
It's not really feasible.
We could use Tor, but we don't yet.
And some keywords about the ad.
So it's basically like metadata and a link.
And that's what the catalog consists of.
And that's what the machine learning picks.
And the machine learning is learning about the use
specifically, locally, in order to choose
from the catalog of different ads.
Couldn't this possibly be like a multi-billion dollar?
Isn't this taking on the Google ad ad?
So one question to ask, there seems
to be some really profound ideas here
that are different than what the internet has grown up to be.
If Brave or something like Brave,
the fundamental philosophical ideas underlying Brave
win out and runs 95% of the internet.
How does that change the?
What are the major things it changes about the internet?
So social networks and then the creatives, like YouTube
creators and all that kind of stuff.
So let's talk about that.
First of all, if Brave gets 95%, I'm
going to demand a recount, because I won't believe it.
I don't know.
I think we're trying to put things
into web standards that can be standardized across browsers.
So the main value of Brave will be the trust users have in us
and our ability to give the best deal to users.
So 70% of the gross ad revenue we give to the user.
And if they go through that KYC process I mentioned,
they can take it out.
They can also give it back.
They can take some out, give the rest back.
They can add basic attention tokens to give back.
Some of them turn off the ads, because you just don't like ads,
but they put in $20 a month.
So I believe Zucco of ZCast fame does that.
And that's very generous, because the browser is just
anonymously based on his browsing sort of keeping score
on how much time he spent on this video, on that website.
And if those sites verify in sort of like getting
the domain certificate fashion, they can get paid.
They can get part of his $20 a month.
So that vision could go big.
And if it does, I hope it's across multiple browsers.
I don't know that they'll all compete well
on the quality of the ads, the quality of the ad blocking
and tracking protection.
Those are subject to competition.
It'll take a while to standardize them.
But I think that would be a better world.
It would have less counterparty risk.
Fewer fee takers in the middle, really just the browser.
We're taking 30%, sort of the app store split.
And if we get bigger, maybe we can take even less.
Social networks, creators, if you look at YouTubers,
a lot of them are the indies that are getting some size
are getting sponsorship deals.
They're using Patreon.
They're encouraging people to subscribe and give them
regular money through Patreon.
But that's centralized your Patreon.
So there's censorship hazards.
There's a 5% fee.
What if that were a web standard?
What if Brave pioneered it first and we took 3%?
And we did it in a way that was through your browser
so we couldn't censor it.
That's brilliant.
Do you think it could be standardized to cross browsers?
Can Internet Explorer come in again?
And protocols are easy to copy.
And they're meant to be interoperable.
So there's a risk there.
And the loyal users might be tricked into leaving you.
Or they might, because of that distribution power,
you might end up getting stomped.
I don't know.
I can't predict the future.
I think antitrust is back on the case finally in the US.
And certainly in Europe, DG Comp is doing its thing.
So I'm hopeful that we'll have a period of innovation.
People were talking, like Elizabeth Warren was talking
about breaking up the tech companies very clearly.
Now, she didn't win.
And I suspect that won't happen.
But I also suspect that Google might be smart enough to see
they should do something more than just put
privacy perfume on Chrome.
They should maybe get rid of Double Click or something,
divest something.
I don't know.
It might happen.
So Brave might inspire Google to completely change
the way they're doing things.
They're already doing something you may have read about
called the Privacy Sandbox or Flock, which they have this bird
metaphor going, Turtledove, Fledge.
But these systems have been very googly,
kind of overengineered.
And yet, depending on differential privacy,
which has weakness over time, if you know how that works,
it's kind of injecting noise to hide you in a crowd.
But over time, an adversary can pull you out of the crowd.
This doesn't look like it's going to become a standard.
Like Apple, Brave, Mozilla, we're not going to just say,
oh, Google, you saved us.
You've invented the Privacy Sandbox,
so we'll all just adopt it.
Not going to be that easy.
It's going to be more like pieces of what we do in Brave,
the synonymous ad matching or the blind signature cryptography
we used to confirm the ad impressions.
That's David Chowm's invention.
That could get standardized.
In fact, some of that is being standardized.
Even Google is in favor of so-called trust tokens,
which are Chowmian blind signature certs.
But they're not using them for ad confirmations
because they don't want to blow up their own business.
And they need to let some of the publishers they serve
have other ad tech scripts on the page.
And so they're kind of caught.
And this is something I realized doing Brave.
I thought, what's Google's innovators dilemma apart
from just being mature and having trouble innovating?
It's that they have come to depend on this ad tech system
that has all these vendors that publishers rely on
because publishers aren't technical enough.
And I feel for the publishers,
but I realized the users have to come first.
And if you give the users a better browser that's faster,
then you'll get enough users to give back
or support publishers.
The speed and the battery savings
and the data plan savings are significant.
There's so much bad JavaScript involved in ad tech
that if you block it and you sort of chop off the,
what's called the programmatic waterfall,
which chains a bunch of requests.
Yeah, that's one of the incredible things about Brave.
I guess you're saying you should attribute it
to the fact that the message JavaScript, no offense.
It's not my, it's like, is, I mean,
Brave just feels faster.
Even then, I mean, Chrome was fast.
And one of the things that it was like impressive is
it showed that browsers can be really fast
and Brave is even faster than that, which is incredible.
We've walked so much.
And it saves the network, which means data plan,
it saves battery because the radio consumes your battery
when it's running more to do those requests.
And it's just stunning how many there are.
Like some of my Google friends are like,
oh, that's just that bad site.
They'll fix it.
And you actually do a survey of web pages
that they're like mostly like that.
I know Google engineers could make everything super efficient,
but they can't, especially in antitrust court, do it.
They cannot take over all the publishers and do that.
They're trying with accelerated mobile profile, AMP.
They're trying to pull publishers.
They're like, oh, you poor publishers,
don't know how to make your pages fast.
Put them on our AMP system.
We'll give you extra placement in the search carousel.
That's an antitrust problem for one.
But it's also publishers we talk to hate it
because it degrades their brand.
Now they look like a gig writer wrote a piece
that's got Google's framing and AMP URL on top of it.
And they're trying to fix that too.
But it just looks like Google's
borgifying all these publishers
and they don't want to be plugged into the board cube.
They want to build up their own brand
and have loyal readers.
So I'm in favor of giving the users power
to help all the publishers
and the little platoons and the creators.
And so we talked about Patreon.
What about social networks?
Well, they're inherently like search a global algorithm.
You're trying to find friends of friends.
You're doing the transitive closure of a graph
induced by this friend of relation.
But you should own your friend relation.
You should own your posts.
They shouldn't be owned by somebody else
who can take them down or send to them.
And your friend relations,
you should be able to find those friends
on other networks.
And that's why I've tweeted about this.
I haven't built it yet.
What if the browser could keep track of those for you?
What if the browser could maybe combine Facebook and Twitter
and you could find your friends on both
and you could have a sort of more place?
So that relationship is not owned by Facebook or Twitter.
It's owned by you through the browser.
They don't have terms of use and they'll say they own it.
But if they zap you on one and you're still on the other,
your friends find you
and the browser could preserve a combined view.
You could resurrect almost across networks.
It's something I want to maybe quickly ask you about.
On that front, there's been quite a lot of centralized,
we talked about Wall Street Bets and then Robinhood.
There's been centralized banning of different accounts
and removing like Parler, for example, from AWS
and this kind of overreach of centralized control.
Is your hope that it's possible to,
like what are your thoughts about that in general?
Is it, and is it possible to create tools
that give individual people the power
to fight back against overreach of such control?
So we're talking about oligarchy, I do think.
And that if it controls a nation state, that's formidable.
It's the tax and the police power, the military power.
It means that you may have the great firewall of China.
You may have people in China
who are jailed because of their tweets, right?
This is a serious threat.
I can't minimize it or say that we'll win.
I don't know how it's gonna go.
But I do think, like I said earlier about the cunning
and reason people find ways around things.
The internet routes around censorship.
And this is not to endorse any particular bad faction.
One of the things that happens
when you try to wave the free speech flag too much,
you say, I'm not gonna censor anything
and you get colonized by terrible, terrible people.
I don't care if you call them neo-nazis,
some of them could be doing illegal things.
And you don't want them colonizing
because it'll ruin your reputation and destroy your business.
So what you really want is that kind of
user first subsidiarity, that subjectivity.
I want my social networks to be composited
in some multi-social user interface
where I don't lose track of people across networks.
And if they leave one or they get banned from one,
I can find them on another.
I can still sort of thread them together.
That's brilliant.
And this didn't happen
because browsers got captured by the central powers.
Why did they get captured?
Mostly because of search.
And search is a central algorithm.
So Larry Page said this too many years ago.
He said, with search, you're giving up a little privacy
by handing the query over to us.
And we'll error correct it.
Alan used to be a Google executive.
He said, oh yeah, we used to laugh.
They'd all be doing typos
and they'd be typing the wrong word.
And we're like, no, dummy, type that query.
And it's like, okay, Google,
you might want to dial back that ego a little bit.
But yes, you do see all the queries
and you can improve them
and you can find the best results.
And that was Google's forte.
When we did the Firefox deal in 2004,
Google was really good.
And over time, SEO, which is an adversarial game
and Google itself buying all these companies
and crowding its own results page
with its own tied in stuff.
The YouTube.
The slipper slope that happens
when you have control over these kinds
of really important mechanisms
at the 7th Hedge Fund.
Yeah, monopoly capitalism or cartel.
You get this with the Robin Hoods and the hedge funds.
You get sort of the money interest takeover
and kind of abuse their power and wear out their welcome.
So how do you get around that?
You have to have either new land to go to,
which some people's ancestors, not mine did,
to found the country, mostly Irish German.
You have new virtual space people go to.
And that requires an ISP or a Colo Center
or Amazon to host you.
It requires domain name registrar
who will not strike you.
And so when Parler was taken down,
I thought that was egregious.
Parler, it was not well designed.
And I tried it out because I tried all these things,
but I didn't use it.
And I also felt they were being unfairly scored
for not moderating because you can find tweets
to this day that are horrendous
and threaten all sorts of violence.
Whereas Twitter, why isn't Twitter being taken down?
But so it was very selective.
It was the insiders who have the power
are gonna take out the newcomer.
And it looked bad.
Sort of like the hedge funds shorting GameStop.
It looked bad.
You're seeing a piece in Time Magazine this week
that's like basically saying,
yeah, we interfere with the election,
but it was great, aren't we good?
I don't know if you've seen this piece yet.
No, I haven't.
If you tried to say that as a Trump supporter in November,
after the election, you'd get banned from Twitter.
But now time in its Twitter account is saying,
we saved the day.
It's AFL-CIO and big business,
the Better Business Bureau got together,
kept Trump from spreading fake news.
So the country's kind of broken.
I don't know how to fix that.
The oligarchs have run wild in my opinion.
And big tech is in the antitrust doc.
What's gonna happen?
I don't think they get out.
I think some of the DOJ and certainly the state cases,
because they're separate cases,
are not gonna go away
just because somebody got elected differently.
And these are career prosecutors
and they have a strong case.
And Google Smart, Microsoft almost got split up, right?
The judge, Thomas Penfield Jackson, he overreached.
He didn't hold a hearing about the remedy.
He just said, I'm gonna break you up.
And Microsoft appealed and the higher level court said,
go back and figure this out.
You're not breaking them up.
You didn't even hold a hearing.
And when they got back, Microsoft said, let's settle.
Let's settle.
We don't wanna get broken up.
Because Jackson was gonna make the Opsco,
the operating system company,
and the Opsco office, Word and Excel.
And that would have been a huge blow to Microsoft.
So...
But ultimately, I don't know if you're optimistic or cynical
about the possibility of breaking out big tech.
To me, I'm optimistic that tools like Brave,
I love the idea of owning your friendships.
And the users more and more owning the stuff
is the only real way.
Unfortunately, it's like the Wall Street bet subred
is the only real way to fight decentralized power.
You can't break them up with the regulation.
It's very difficult.
Certainly I don't wanna wait for the law.
Netscape was long dead or acquired by AOL and effectively dead.
It was only most of the return in Firefox to the market
by the time that the USV Microsoft case
was finally settled and the penalties were put in place.
And yet, antitrust has a role to play.
Those penalties caused Microsoft
to kind of turn away from the web.
They did Windows Vista and they thought,
the web's too painful, we got punished in court
and we had to standardize things
with those icky standards people.
So they ran back to proprietary lock-in
and Windows Vista flocked.
It was late, it was bloated, longhorn, remember?
Now, what I was gonna say,
but Google's smart enough, they won't get split up.
They'll split something out to get off the hook, I think.
This is a complicated subject,
but I myself was so, I decided to journey out
from the world of being a researcher at MIT
and potentially doing a startup myself.
And I've been thinking of,
I wanted to come to Silicon Valley to do so.
It's the land of the entrepreneur.
And there's a lot of my friends,
a lot of them are successfully
have been entrepreneurs themselves,
has said, do not come to Silicon Valley.
You've started, you ran amazing teams of engineers,
you started a lot of successful businesses.
I wondered if you could comment on
why a lot of people are leaving California?
Is there something that could be fixed about California?
If you were starting a business today,
would you consider somewhere else like Austin
or some other place or is Silicon Valley still?
Is it just a little lull?
Everybody's being overdramatic
during this particular year of the coronavirus and so on?
I think, even Austin's getting overheated here.
And I've had relatives and friends move to Texas
within the last few months.
So Texas as a whole is a big place.
And people are moving to Florida,
there's a big movement toward Miami,
Peter Thiel, Keith Warhol, all these people.
The mayor has been very business friendly about it,
which I think is just good politics.
America is fundamentally a commercial republic.
So you would think this would be what's happening.
For a long time, California was the golden state.
I came here in late 76 when I was a teenager.
It's in crushing debt to the lockdowns.
It's got the highest taxes.
That's got to matter.
People will do a fleet at high taxes.
It's got likely fires every year because of the dead fall.
It's not global warming.
It's because the forests weren't managed
like they had been in the first part of the 20th century.
I would say corruption at all levels,
especially up to the governor,
who famously was eating at the French Laundry
and claimed the outside, it was inside,
and they were out in masks off and it was great.
Do what I say, not what I do.
Rules for thee, but not for me.
When you see that in leadership,
people either run or they get rid of the leadership.
So there's a recall drive,
which is about to reach the threshold.
Or in the old days, they get their guns, right?
You don't put up with this junk.
Ultimately, the thing that made Silicon Valley
a special place, it gave freedom to young kids,
entrepreneurs, young minds, brave minds
to think bold, to try different stuff.
I mean, even if the taxes are high,
so outside of financial stuff, outside of all of that.
Housing's super expensive.
Housing's super, so it's hard, okay?
Everything about startups is hard.
It was narrow and they didn't plan the roads, right?
They got rid of public transportation in LA.
Like the Who Framed Roger Rabbit cartoon show
that used to have trolley cars in Portland too.
The oil companies and the DoD
conspired to build highways and make cars dominant.
And the rights of way are long gone.
Like Elon's gonna go underground.
And I wish him well.
That's probably the only way to do it now.
But is it still a place,
do you think it's possible that Silicon Valley
is still a place where magic happens?
Where the next Google's built, where the next,
I mean, Brave is built where...
I think all good things come to an end.
I think the problem is Silicon Valley
had strong network effects through Stanford,
through the angel investor networks and the wealth effect.
And originally you have to give the federal government credit.
Like the ARPANET was a government project.
Let's not kid ourselves.
This wasn't wild free market,
you know, libertarian capitalism.
This was all Cold War stuff.
You had out of the academia, you had Shockley
and then the Traders Aid and Fairchild and Intel.
And but now, you know,
when's the last fab that was built in the valley?
Micro-unity might have been the last fab.
I don't know, I haven't followed,
but we built a fab in Sunnyvale
and micro-unity in starting early 90s.
And now the fabs are overseas.
And the one thing that I would say
that the oligarchs have intentionally done
in both parties is sort of labor
and environmental protection law arbitrage
by going where the labor is cheaper
and the environmental laws aren't as strict.
And, you know, that's polluted the hell out of parts of China,
but it's made things, you can make cheaper junk.
And this is not a story that's over yet.
So what is Silicon Valley for now?
It's for the network effect, the brain trust,
the who you know, the parties,
the Stanford sort of network.
That's fragile too over time, I'm afraid, right?
Stanford, a lot of good professors are like,
they still filter, you know,
mainly based on socioeconomic status,
but it's kind of a skate school.
I had a friend who hired out of Harvard
20 years ago at Netscape.
And we talked about Harvard and he said,
yeah, there's still professors who are great on the curve.
And I said, oh yeah, I don't know
if they're any doing that at Stanford anymore.
And he said, yo, it was shocking.
Some of the students got C's and D's and they were crying.
It's like, yes, that's right.
The precious deers can't take that at Stanford.
So they get A's and B's.
Now, you look at China and say what you all about China,
they prove Russia to that a lot of math science training,
a lot of engineering, a lot of people who are doing their
coursework to get the A's and B's.
So I'm an American, I'm born on the 4th of July.
Really?
4th of July.
Yeah, and America, as I say,
fundamentally as a commercial republic,
you can try to make it something else.
You can see it's the new Atlantis and mystify it.
You could talk about it in a more,
I think correct way, which is 13 colonies that grew.
And then there's a lot of local
or in original design anyway,
the Federalist papers talk about this.
There was a lot of subsidiarity,
but that's been eroded over time.
And like I say, a lot of the offshoring is hurt.
So what happened with coronavirus?
People working from home.
And at first it was funny,
because I have friends at Google who used to grumble
that not only did they have to come into the office,
if they joined a different team that was sent
to a different office, they had to move.
Or if the VA team was reconstituted in Munich,
which it was after Lars Bock just got tired of JavaScript,
that they hired in Munich or they hired PhDs in Germany
and moved into Munich.
With coronavirus, everyone's working from home
and it's like, what a relief,
I can work for Google from home.
But then the next shoe dropped
and people started asking Mark Zuckerberg,
hey, can I move to my hometown in the Midwest?
And he said, okay.
And they said, I'll kind of keep getting myself
in Valley Pay.
No, we're gonna figure out
what your cost of living there is
and we're gonna adjust your pay accordingly.
And these colonies and these little mini experiments
that all combined to the big giant experiment,
I have a, I don't know,
I have this vision of America,
which the country I was born in Russia,
like I said here,
and this is truly a wonderful country.
I wasn't born on the 4th of July,
but I might as well be-
People still flee here, people still flee here.
And I'm a red-blooded American at this point.
And I have a sense that we've figured it out somehow.
If Silicon Valley burns,
another place will come up in this place
that even more innovation and people will move.
And the remote work might change fundamentally
how we work or it might not.
It might just give you the freedom
to then create many other small Silicon Valley's
throughout the place,
like Austin included, but other places as well.
And we somehow figured it out.
And-
I think that's true,
that there will be more mobility
and maybe new places that come up.
I don't know if Silicon Valley has, you know,
passed some sell-by date
because it did hurt, the coronavirus hurt.
The lockdown's hurt in the sense that
part of what keeps things going is social.
And so a lot of young people,
even before coronavirus, moved to San Francisco.
It was very strange to watch
because in the 80s, we all lived in the valley
and it was less populated.
And San Francisco was grungier.
It was more like dirty hairy in the 70s.
But by the 90s, and Jamie runs a nightclub there,
and he's talked about this.
You had sort of wealthy tech people moving in,
south of market, fancy townhouses being built.
And that's continued in such a point
that it's almost like,
what's the movie by the South African director?
Nils Jody Foster up in the space colony.
Matt Damon is the guy on the earth who has to go up.
And anyway, it's about the stratification.
It's about the great inequality.
The people in the space station have like amazing medical
auto docs that can extend their life
or save them cure cancer.
People on earth are all suffering,
ground down in poverty.
And, you know, that sort of happened while I was here.
You saw a lot of money drive prices up
along the narrow peninsula.
And the single people wanted nightlife
so they were in the city.
And the condos in the city got super expensive.
And I know even Google friends who are, you know,
socially responsible say we should have more housing built.
We should have yes in my backyard, not in my backyard.
But that's not happening, as far as I can tell.
And from the government to the incumbent, you know,
landowners and renters, it's just not happening.
And that has to drive people away.
I appreciate that people come here
and you should wait for the prices to monitor, they will.
But a lot of people are gonna go where the prices are lower.
You, and sorry for silly questions here,
but just looking back, you have created things,
have been part of creating things
that have transformed this world,
the world of technology,
perhaps more than almost anything else.
But you're still a human being.
And unfortunately, this ride ends.
Do you ever think about your own mortality?
Not too much.
I mean, I'm Roman Catholic, so I am not afraid of death.
I think a lot of people who have problems with death
are suffering from some lack of either faith
in their transcending death
or maybe they don't have children
or they feel like they get later in life
and they feel like they've missed opportunities
to do something that endures.
And I sympathize with a lot because I'm old,
I got married fairly old, so I understand all that.
Nothing human is alien to me, as Terence said.
But I don't fear it, no.
What do you hope your legacy is?
Yeah, it's gonna be JavaScript.
I think, no, I think my legacy has more to do
with my children and their children.
I think it also has to do with web standards,
it has to do with things like Brave.
The things we did with Firefox,
when we did, I'm not gonna over-solve Brave,
but I think Brave is important
and we will continue to prove this
in a way that counts for many decades to come.
But even Firefox, whatever its future fortune,
showed you can restart the browser market.
This thing you said about people opting out
and routing around, you don't need everybody to do that.
It's more like Talib's stubborn minorities that do that.
It's the lead users, Airfront Hippos lead users.
You can be a few percent, you can tilt the market
and that can be done in spite of the incumbents,
the money interest, not being in favor of what you're doing.
So I think what we do with Firefox won't be forgotten
and it needs to be done more and we're doing it with Brave
and you could argue that other projects are doing it.
In some ways, blockchain is doing it.
The Robinhood take down the use of Robinhood
by the Wall Street Bets kids, similar.
So yeah, that kind of spirit endures
and I think it, in some ways it's American, right?
It's not hard revolutionary.
It's not trying to burn the past and destroy everything.
It's more like we have these certain, let's say, rights.
We have duties too, so there's some debate
about which comes first in American jurisprudence
and the founding documents, but as long as things are working,
we'll be like pragmatic Americans,
like the Tocqueville described in his writings.
But if things get too out of whack for one reason or another,
too unequal, too oligarchic and abusive,
we're going to start our rights
and even a few of us can do it.
And even in the American Revolution,
it was a minority who fought and put their lives treasure
in sacred honor at stake.
It was a bunch of people went to Upper Canada,
I think it was called, Ontario.
Yeah, that's the beautiful thing.
I mean, that is at the core where your work stands for
is that a few people can have the power
to transform society with just a few radical ideas
with just a little bit of code, change the world.
Gotta do it.
And that's empowering, and that is the American way.
That's why this country is,
I believe the greatest country on earth.
That's not over, Ramameth says it too much,
but I think some special things have already happened
in this country and will continue to happen.
And that spirit can continue no matter who comes here,
they can adopt those folk ways and that spirit.
Brandon, I can't tell you how much I was freaking out,
how much of an honor it is to talk to you.
You're an incredible human being.
It's one of my favorite conversations ever.
Thank you so much for wasting all this time with me.
I really appreciate it.
Oh, it seems like a breeze.
My pleasure.
Thank you for listening to this conversation
with Brandon Ike, and thank you to our sponsors,
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And now let me leave you with some words from Jeff Atwood.
Any app that can be written in JavaScript
will eventually be written in JavaScript.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.