#160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave

Brendan Eich is the creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla and Brave. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – The Jordan Harbinger Show: https://jordanharbinger.com/lex/ – Sun Basket: https://sunbasket.com/lex and use code LEX to get $35 off – BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off – Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex and use code LEX to get special savings EPISODE LINKS: Brendan’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich Brendan’s Website: https://brendaneich.com Brave browser: https://brave.com PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LexFridmanPage – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (06:54) – History of early programming languages (11:47) – Physics needs more experiments and less theory (16:24) – JavaScript origin story (41:17) – JavaScript was created in 10 days (50:57) – Marc Andreessen (54:14) – Internet Explorer (57:58) – Evolution of JavaScript (1:03:44) – JavaScript standardization (1:09:33) – TypeScript (1:12:05) – JavaScript ecosystem (1:15:15) – HTML5 (1:18:47) – Making JavaScript fast (1:27:57) – JavaScript is the most popular language in the world (1:38:23) – Advice for programmers (1:44:20) – Browser wars (1:50:50) – Firefox (2:12:33) – Brave (2:25:33) – Basic Attention Token (2:50:36) – California (2:59:48) – Mortality (3:00:54) – Legacy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Brendan Icke, 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:

• 0:45Lex Fridman?

  The Jordan Harbinger Show, Sambasket Meal Delivery Service, BetterHelp Online Therapy, and Aidsleep Self-Cleaning 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 mix right is tough.

• 1:29Lex Fridman?

  And Brendan, 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 on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at LexFriedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but I give you timestamps, so if you skip, please still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast. This episode is sponsored by The Jordan Harbinger Show.

• 2:09Lex Fridman?

  Go to jordanharbinger.com/lex, subscribe to it, listen, you won't regret it. I've been binging on his podcast for many months now. Jordan is a great interviewer. He gets the best out of his guests, dives deep, calls them out when it's needed, and makes the whole thing fun to listen to. He's interviewed Kobe Bryant, Mark Cuban, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Garry Kasparov, and many more. Perhaps more importantly, he's unafraid of addressing challenging, even controversial topics with thought and grace. I especially like his Feedback Fridays episodes, where this combination of fearlessness and thoughtfulness is especially on display,

• 2:51Lex Fridman?

  touching topics of sex, corruption, mental disorders, hate, love, and everything between. Again, go to jordanharbinger.com/lex. It's how he knows I sent you. On that page, there's links to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and everywhere else. The show is also sponsored by Sun Basket. Sun Basket delivers fresh, healthy, delicious meals straight to your door. As you may know, my diet is pretty minimalist, so it's nice to get some healthy variety into the mix. They make it easy and convenient with everything proportioned and ready to prep and cook. You can enjoy a delicious, healthy dinner in as little as 15 minutes. I've enjoyed a lot of meals from their menus

• 3:36Lex Fridman?

  that fit my, what they call, carb-conscious ways. They have prepared meals, meal kits, and even raw ingredients, like just a nice New York strip steak, rainbow trout, like a filet, wild Chilean sea bass, king salmon, and much more. Right now, Sun Basket is offering 35 bucks off your order when you go to sunbasket.com/lex and enter promo code LEX at checkout. Again, visit sunbasket.com/lex and use code LEX to get 35 bucks off your order. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help.

• 4:18Lex Fridman?

  They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours. I chat with a person on there and enjoy it. Of course, I also have been talking to Mr. David Goggins over the past few months, who is definitely not a licensed professional therapist, but he does help me meet my and his demons and become comfortable to exist in their presence. In fact, in early March, I'm doing a 48-mile run with him, four miles every four hours for 48 hours. You should check out gogginschallenge.com for more information about that. I often talk about struggle. I think it's essential

• 5:00Lex Fridman?

  for creation, but I think you can struggle beautifully in a way that doesn't destroy you. Therapy can help there. BetterHelp is easy, private, affordable, available worldwide. You can communicate by text anytime and schedule weekly audio and video sessions. Anyway, check out betterhelp.com/lex. That's betterhelp.com/lex. This episode is also sponsored by Asleep and its Pod Pro mattress. It controls temperature with an app, is packed with sensors, and can cool down to as low as 55 degrees on each side of the bed separately. It's amazing. It's been a game changer for me. I just enjoy sleep and power naps way more now. I feel like I fall asleep faster and get more restful

• 5:45Lex Fridman?

  sleep. Combination of cool bed and warm blanket is amazing. Now, if you love your current mattress, but still are looking for temperature control, Asleep's new Pod Pro cover adds dynamic cooling and heating capabilities onto your current mattress. You can cool down to 55 degrees or heat up to 110 degrees. I don't know why you would want to do that. Maybe let's keep it under 100 degrees. And you can do so on each side of the bed separately. Also, it can track a bunch of metrics like heart rate variability, but cooling alone is honestly worth the money. Go to asleep.com/lex, and when you buy stuff there, you'll

• 6:23Lex Fridman?

  get special savings as listeners of this podcast. That's asleep.com/lex. And now, here's my conversation with Brendan Icke.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  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, you know, simple 2D graphics. And I didn't know what I was doing, so I just helped him 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 as Art Goldfinger, 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.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  I was a little late for the, I think, the, you know, the 20th century golden age. And I read a lot of science fiction. So I was like, yeah, it's on the cyberdrives 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, um, you know, 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 auto collator. But we were using Pascal and I got one of the first portable C compilers, ports to the deck mini computers we were using. And I fell in love with programming just based on,

• 8:23Speaker 01

  you know, procedural abstraction, Pascal, just what now would be considered old school, like structured programming from the 70s. Niklaus Wirth, 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. From scratch. Yeah, kind of. And I know some people who are grad students under him and said he was,

• 8:50Speaker 01

  he would torture the students with things like this custom email system that had 25-word limit.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  And things like that.

• 8:57Lex Fridman?

  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 it reminiscent of of today? Because it sounds like it may have had an impact on your own trajectory.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was in the Algol family and Algol was, you know, the big, successful language design and compiler project in the 60s. It had a successor called Algol 68, which was ambitious, but not as successful. But Pascal was kind of a wordy procedures and functions language. It distinguished between functions, which return a value, and procedures, which don't, which just compute. And you could say that whole Algol 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 Helsberg, who then went to Microsoft and did, you know, C sharp and done that with his team there and has done really well, doing TypeScript, type JavaScript.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  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 wrapped computers, 68, 20, 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, CISC, complex instruction set computer,

• 10:38Speaker 01

  and not the reduced instruction set computers that were just being contemplated into the mid 80s.

• 10:44Lex Fridman?

  And RISC ultimately won out.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  RISC won in some ways. It dissolved into that you have both. Now you have these superscaler architectures where like Intel has kept. Probably too much backward compatibility at the instruction level. But that's just a, there's a front end that parses that into these, you know, these wide internal instructions. So, you know, the very long instruction word research that was also interesting at the time, kind of became the microarchitecture inside the backward compatible Intel. But I picked a 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

• 11:31Speaker 01

  is go-go for computers. The Apple II, right? The PC, the Intel 8886, 8888 based PC, the IBM, you know, gave Microsoft the future for, in a somewhat fishy deal.

• 11:47Lex Fridman?

  So it was wide open in the computing space, but in physics, you were as optimistic about physics as.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  No, 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, you know, he went on, he actually studied under Kip Thorne at Caltech.

• 12:07Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  But he also didn't, he ended up in software.

• 12:13Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. In fact, I'd say the problem is theory over, over experiment. I would say, you know, we need more Aristotle and less Plato. You know, 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.

• 12:53Lex Fridman?

  I don't know if you are friends with or have a relationship with Elon Musk. Where's the, in terms of like 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?

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Well, those gentlemen are no longer with us and I think that's noticed. So like I said, the real glory days of 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, right? 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, that's good. I'm not dismissing that. We need good models. We need to experiment and prove them and test them.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  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 windowing out.

• 14:17Lex Fridman?

  That's such an interesting tension in society. You see this in even the softer sciences, which have a deep love for like psychology. You see this in epidemiology now with the virus.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 14:28Lex Fridman?

  It's this tension of, you know, how much of the world can we understand through just a beautifully fit model? And then at the same time, my main work is in machine learning where it's like there is no provable thing usually. It's just, it's kind of you, 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 like, I grew up on theoretical computer science, like I loved approximation algorithms, like all of that, like different complexity classes, just those little puzzles. I mean, I don't know. Do you, to you, as somebody who was in math and computer

• 15:08Lex Fridman?

  science and then ended up going into places where you engineer some of the most impactful things in this world, do you see the P versus NP, all that whole space as interesting at all?

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's not that useful in practice, right? People are using it with sort of cryptoanalysis or asymptotic arguments about, you know, can, can we have a quantum resistant crypto algorithm, things like that, which may not be practical, right? If you, if you follow Mikhail Diamov or Gil Kalay, there are, there are big questions about how, how quantum computing will scale up, how practical it will be.

• 15:47Lex Fridman?

  Is that something that you think about quantum computing?

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Not, 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, you know, design problems, which are really kind of an art. Like you've said, anything you can't automate is an art.

• 16:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Well, we can have, you know, machine learning, compose music, and it can imitate, you can train it, and it can sound kind of decent, but it'd be lacking that je ne sais quoi. But, you know, user interface still, I think, requires human art.

• 16:24Lex Fridman?

  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's 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?

• 16:48Speaker 01

  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, in the early 90s. There were several. I suppose General Magic was a little after that or around the same time. But MicroUnity 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 MicroUnity was doing everything. So this was, this was like the ultimate sort of Pretend grad school. It was doing a new fab, new semiconductor process. It was doing

• 17:30Speaker 01

  new analog and digital circuits on the same very large but not wafer scale chip. Originally it was five centimeters on a side. It was really hot too. So I needed a water cooler. It was a craze killer. 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 for multiple issue and and doing a lot of the stuff in software because the second iteration, the set top box was really for

• 18:12Speaker 01

  avoiding the cost to the cable company of rolling the trucks out to replace your garbage general Atlantic set top box with a slightly newer, less, less garbagey 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? It was like we were writing in, we were using GCC, we were writing C++ and C. Somebody I worked with there, really very smart guy hired from a sort of Wall Street hotshot programming consultancy, did his own hardware design as well as software. And we were working on how to make not only a short vector units, but general bit shufflers and promoters. So

• 18:54Speaker 01

  you could do things like, you know, crypto algorithms efficiently and you could do demodulation of the cable, you know, 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, right? If you, Jim Clark said to me when I hopped to Netscape after three years at Micro Unit, he said, oh yeah, you do 10 things each one in 10 odds, it's going to be one in 10 billion.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  The multiplication principle. So Netscape was already a rocket and I'd passed the chance to go there in 1994. I knew the founders because I worked at SGI Clark's company.

• 19:40Lex Fridman?

  Could you pause for a second and Netscape, when was the launch of this rocket?

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Ninety-four.

• 19:46Lex Fridman?

  Ninety-four was the launch of Netscape?

• 19:48Speaker 01

  And I went there in early 95 in April.

• 19:50Lex Fridman?

  Okay. So you said you missed the launch.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Well, I missed the first floor employment opportunity, but the IPO was August 1995. So I was there for that.

• 19:59Lex Fridman?

  How obvious was it that Netscape was world changing? What was the layout? Was Netscape one of the first big browsers?

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Yes. So when I was at MicroUnity still in 93, we saw a browser called Mosaic. And up till then, we'd used email and we'd used Usenet, the NNTV protocol. We'd use newsreaders. We used FTP. We used all these old internet protocols, all relying on the DNS and TCP/IP and UDP for that matter. When I was at Silicon Graphics, we brought up the whole stack, right? 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 head of a genius future.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  And instead it was Berkeley Unix and the TCP/IP 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 interoperating. But in the end, it won. And so that was the internet and it was email and texty. And it was Usenet, very texty. And then Tim Berners-Lee did his 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'd noticed Mosaic in 93 because one of the things that Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina did at NCSA was they innovated on the HTML, early HTML standard.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  They, in particular, Marc 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, we had another way of doing it. And it didn't work out because Marc 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, you know, Richard Gabriel of Scheme and Poetry fame has written about this.

• 22:03Lex Fridman?

  Poetry? What's poetry?

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Well, he's a poet.

• 22:06Lex Fridman?

  Oh, actual poetry. He's talking about some kind of something.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  No, no, I mean, he's the founder of Lucid, which is where Jamie Zawinski worked before in Netscape. And Lucid was doing, you know, 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, JDBC, 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, this is the crown jewel, right? Scheme, this Faberge egg or common list, this giant cathedral.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Of course, we're going to win. This is civilization. And those, you know, 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.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Well, guess what won?

• 23:07Lex Fridman?

  Wow, so you're saying this is a fundamental, like, principle of the internet is moving fast wins?

• 23:15Speaker 01

  You could say in almost any network system, like in biological evolution, you see successful allele sweep populations. And they don't always have, you know, they aren't free of flaws, like heterozygous advantage, right? You can get both parents, give you the gene variant and you get sickle cell anemia, right? But, 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, 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.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  But often, standards bodies go back and make incompatible changes. You can't do that with the web. It's more like, again, like biology, you, 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 worse is better being.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  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. It's like, 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. It would have been bad.

• 24:58Lex Fridman?

  So that's a good way to present the alternative. But so it was in 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?

• 25:10Speaker 01

  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 Marc and we 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.

• 25:31Lex Fridman?

  It's awesome.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  And they knew that, you know, 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 of the browser market which had images and, you know, other importances before you stopped working on it. And you're making Netscape the new thing that has images, plugins, 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.

• 25:57Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  HTML tables, that was new. Eric Bina did tables in S A four one one. 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, right? There was a recession in the U.S. in 91. 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, you know, 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, that was so fast moving a rocket that.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Mark and the engineering team there thought we need to make this programmable browser, not just a document viewer, not just a video.

• 26:51Lex Fridman?

  It was all HTML with images and tables and also, like you said, frames.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Early plugins.

• 26:57Lex Fridman?

  There's no dynamic element at all.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, the most dynamism we get was from a plugin, which there are a few of them then. Flash didn't exist at that point. It was, I think.

• 27:06Lex Fridman?

  Java applet yet or no?

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Well, that's the thing. We did the deal with Sun. In fact, I was recruited to go do Scheme in the browser. Remember Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman'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. Okay, I'll come do Scheme in the browser. I have a slide from my 2017 talk where I have Bruce Willis crawling through the duct in Die Hard. 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

• 27:49Speaker 01

  and Sun founder. And Bill got the idea of making the browser programmable, too. And so the idea, main idea was to put the Java VM, which at that point was not really easy to embed, into Netscape, including the Netscape version on 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 Spyglass, this other company that shot out from NCSA at University of Illinois. And in fact, Microsoft had tried to buy Netscape in late 94, before I got there. And I heard about this later. I heard.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  They offered way too little money. And so, you know, 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. 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 CompuServe path, a project called Blackbird, presumably after the S R 71. 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. You know, they could have content partners. They have a lot of money, but it still wasn't

• 29:16Speaker 01

  to scale 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 was a compiled, 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 I, Mark Andreessen and I observed that in a mature stack like Microsoft,

• 29:58Speaker 01

  you really benefit from having a scripting language like Visual Basic, which became Visual Basic Script in I three, but didn't take on, didn't take over, kill JavaScript, that you need two languages. One is for the component writers who are higher priced and more expert. And the other is for scripters, certified public accountants, designers, graphic designers with some programming inclination, anybody, amateurs, doesn't matter. There's a much more demonic 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 and Jason and I, we saw the need for companion language. And the gleam in our eye was to call it JavaScript. I didn't like it. That was marketing's plan.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Mark called it Mocha, which I liked. And Netscape Marketing, I think, didn't like that. So they said, oh, there's some trademark in 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 1995. 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 HP11. So I was actually, I had done protocol work at Silicon Graphics with Greg Chesson, former Bell Labs intern, grad student intern, who knew all the Unix founders.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  And Greg was very interested in taking protocols to the next level with VLSI. Because he thought that CPUs wouldn't, wouldn't scale up. He was mistaken in that, unfortunately. Moore's Law more than kept up. And you have, you know, 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, I came into Netscape to work on the server side for a month. But I was, I was thinking the whole time, what should this language be like? Should it be easy to use? Might its syntax even be more like natural language? Like hyper talk, which is Bill Atkinson's language in HyperCard? If you have ever used HyperCard on an early Mac.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 32:18Lex Fridman?

  What does that mean? Is it braces? We're talking about visually? Does it mean like, what management, do they understand what?

• 32:25Speaker 01

  They don't, marketing didn't know, but, but management did, like Rick Schell, 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 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 that looking like Java meant kind of the C curly brace syntax, but also some of the data types and objects.

• 33:10Lex Fridman?

  Like objects and so on, all that kind of stuff.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Dot called.

• 33:13Lex Fridman?

  Comparison operator.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Garbage collection, all that stuff.

• 33:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  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 times, 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 scheme, a little bit of scheme, even though it wasn't as clean as scheme.

• 33:45Lex Fridman?

  So you had a love, sorry to interrupt. You had a love for scheme and list, but that that functional language landscape.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Yes, I wanted first class functions because I saw the need for callbacks in the browser where it's a single threaded program. 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 the, without getting too fancy and 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 call back, be called back. And Java didn't have that at the time. It had, it took forever to get proper first class functions, lambdas now into Java, Java seven or eight, I think.

• 34:31Lex Fridman?

  It did have concurrency, right?

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:33Lex Fridman?

  From the very beginning, but you were thinking that JavaScript in the browser would not have the luxury of being concurrent.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  That's right. And the reason was Java was going to run in a plugin 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

• 35:21Speaker 01

  click run 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 you know, 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 plugin prison. It essentially was confined to a rectangle, the applet rectangle. And while we even built, next year, Nick Thompson,

• 36:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 36:18Lex Fridman?

  Did it work?

• 36:19Speaker 01

  It worked, but you were, Java was in charge, JavaScript was in charge, and Java was just these components, these helper objects.

• 36:25Lex Fridman?

  You might as well do everything in JavaScript.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  And what happened over time, it's like an evolutionary filter, just kind of, who needs the plugin? And in fact, Sun mismanaged Java as a plugin. They thought Netscape was 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 years, they tried getting into Microsoft. And you may remember, there was a Sun-Microsoft deal, which famously blew up. And 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 Helsberg'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. We don't want, I'm not sure what the fights were about.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  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 web mail, like Hotmail, like user interface. They had to call the mail server through HTTP and they they used a Java object to do this. And when they gave the boot to Sun, they suddenly other, you know, 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 we'll make it, it'll be what became XML HTTP request, which is now a web standard for calling asynchronously.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  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 plugin and you would find it required for like smart card banking in Nordic countries where that was mandated by law, but really didn't get used much. Or, you know, there were pilots who used it for flight information. But Flash, which Netscape could have bought, but fortunately didn't. Fortunately didn't. Yeah, we would have screwed it up. I mean, what year are we talking about with Flash? I think after the IPO, so it was probably late 95 and. Flash was around. Was it Adobe? No, it wasn't. No, it was it was called Future Splash and it was these brothers, Jonathan Gay, I think his name was.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  He 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, you know, stock gravy train. And he sent them packing and they they ended up selling to Macromedia and Macromedia was where Flash was created. And the good thing about Macromedia was it was a.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  Tool company. So invested in, you know, the best ideas, I think, which are still somewhat lost to us of Flash, the timeline, animation is sort of an immutable function over time.

• 39:14Lex Fridman?

  They had the tooling around that too, like that Dreamweaver, there's a Flash.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Flash Director, there were a bunch of them.

• 39:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I mean, yeah, that was a.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Flash Builder was one of the last ones. These tools were used by real artists and, you know, special effects people and designers. All the restaurant websites around 2005 were done in Flash, which was, you know, 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 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.

• 39:45Lex Fridman?

  You didn't like Flash from the beginning. You're like, this is, this doesn't feel right.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  Not really. I actually admire Flash's technology and I'm pretty pragmatic about these things. And I realized that, you know, it doesn't matter if you're dealt a 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, 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, you know, even after that, until I think Firefox and then Chrome, was people kept saying, oh, the web can't do X, can't do Y. We'll have to have a plugin. We'll have to have a new approach. We'll, we'll, we'll clean the slate and have a new web. And everyone who said that failed. And the reason they

• 40:30Speaker 01

  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 evolutionary advantage in priority of place, but you can also improve it over time.

• 40:49Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  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, right? So we did things at Mozilla with Adobe to improve, which bought Macromedia, to improve Flash and to improve the version of JavaScript that was in Flash. We tried to standardize that.

• 41:09Lex Fridman?

  That's right.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  I'm getting ahead of myself.

• 41:11Lex Fridman?

  You've programmed Flash.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:12Lex Fridman?

  That's, that's right. Can we just rewind to the magical, like, you know, it's a special moment in the history of all of computing. It's, we'll talk about it later, but it's arguable. It's possible that the entirety of the world will run on JavaScript at some point. So like, it's like, those are, those days, it would be, it would be interesting if you could just describe actually zooming in on the, how the cake was baked, uh, from the, you know, the, the several days that you were working on it. What was on your mind? Uh, how much coffee were you drinking? Were you nervous? Why are you freaking out?

• 41:48Speaker 01

  I'll try to remember it. I mean, you're right. There were these pregnant moments you see in hindsight, maybe they're overrated, but like Hegel sees Napoleon on horseback at Yenah and says, there's the world's spirit on, on horse.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  And, uh, I knew that there was a chance to do it. Mark knew and he was my, you know, executive sponsor and he was the one, you know, sort of brainstorming how the JavaScript should be right there in the page. That was important for him to say that because I, I thought so too, but a lot of people were like, oh, 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 like random gibberish. So I had to figure out how to hide that. That was a challenge.

• 42:28Lex Fridman?

  Is that, 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?

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Of the webpage. Yeah. It was considered kind of heretical. There was an S G M L 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, S G M L 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 S G M L thing. But it eventually came around and it was again, sort of of evolutionary necessity. It was almost like intergression, like, like, you know, the, the idea,

• 43:05Speaker 01

  which Lin Margulis, I think, helped get across that, uh, we have to consider mutualism biology that maybe, you know, mitochondria were ancient, uh, prokaryotes that got into the cell and became beneficial. Somehow, uh, the, the same sort of thinking applies. Uh, you have to embed JavaScript in HTML. It's going to be a good virus.

• 43:25Lex Fridman?

  So the code, uh, the code becomes data in the sense that just gets carried, uh, carried along. But is there, is there the side of the, you were focusing on Netscape at that time? Doesn't the browser have to support, interpret correctly this mix of HTML and whatever code?

• 43:42Speaker 01

  I had to hide it from old browsers, including Netscape 1.1, which was predominant then. So I used a, an HTML comment. But the inside the container that comment lived in the script tag, which is a new element, I could make different semantics in Netscape 2, where those HTML comment delimiters, instead of being multiline brackets, became oneline or essentially oneline.

• 44:01Lex Fridman?

  So you wrote, so JavaScript was written, the programming language was written as a comment.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  A comment for all 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.

• 44:23Lex Fridman?

  What were the challenges here? What, like, what, you know, typing? What were the choices you were thinking about?

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Garbage collection.

• 44:31Lex Fridman?

  Garbage collection.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  I didn't have time to write a garbage collector, so I just, I didn't at first. So the thing was using essentially arenas or what GNU calls object pools and 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, you know, 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 like alone in that in seeing 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.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  That 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.

• 45:29Lex Fridman?

  So what was the big moment of I'm done?

• 45:34Speaker 01

  So I had to do a demo. I forget the dates. I think I, for a history of programming languages paper that Alan Wersbrock did with my help, he did a lot of the writing. I think it was the 10 days from like Thursday evening through to the following weeks, you know, the whole of that week and then into the Monday.

• 45:53Lex Fridman?

  Did you get sleep?

• 45:54Speaker 01

  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 recursive descent parser, you can hand code it. And I did that for JavaScript in a blazing hurry, mostly got

• 46:37Speaker 01

  it right, didn't have precedence inversion problems or other bugs, but I copied a lot from Java and C. And I tried to keep things simple, like the equality 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 like match a number against a database field that had been stringized. And they said, oh, can't 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.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  You know, there are some edge cases with not a number that break that too, but it really broke it. Having implicit conversions in the operator is something that people still roast me over.

• 47:30Lex Fridman?

  So let's, let's talk about two things. One, it sounds like the comparison operator, the equality operator is the thing that you regret. So maybe

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Making it sloppy.

• 47:41Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 47:48Speaker 01

  So that, 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 Niklaus 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 We're running out of memory right away on on long live JavaScript.

• 48:17Lex Fridman?

  What happens when you don't have garbage collection and you have objects?

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Well, you just run out of memory.

• 48:21Lex Fridman?

  And you know, Love it.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  At first, you write a short script and the page doesn't last long or it doesn't do a lot. It's okay.

• 48:27Lex Fridman?

  Oh, I see. Yeah.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  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 1995 and people were like, what's going on? Oh, yeah, I gotta 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 the security hackers came to know, that you therefore have a potentially a remote code execution vulnerability. Because this was before things like non-executable heap memory

• 49:11Speaker 01

  and stack defenses against taking over memory. So if you can, from the the remote side, write some HTML and JavaScript that just happens to exploit a bug in memory safety, like it causes JavaScript to underflow a 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 look alike for the function table. You can call some other code. And this was a problem right away. So security, you know, JavaScript upped the ante. Java had this problem too, but in its own VM. And it just was, you know, a separate headache for Sun to worry about. We had this problem in Netscape right away.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  So Netscape 2 came out after my 10 days and after these, you know, follow on work to embed JavaScript better in the browser and to add garbage collection through 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 me and the X.

• 50:14Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 50:22Speaker 01

  I think the first-class functions shines. I think especially since Java didn't have it and it was somewhat unusual.

• 50:28Lex Fridman?

  Scheme made it in somehow at the end of the day.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  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 land calculus pleasant to use in practice. And JavaScript is, you know, kind of a multi-paradigm or shambolic.

• 50:57Lex Fridman?

  Just a small tangent. You mentioned Marc Andreessen. It sounds like, and Bill Joy, but staying on Marc, it sounds like he had an impact on you in that he sort of believed in what you were doing there. Can you, can you talk about like what role Marc had in your life?

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, we would meet at the Pensilla Creamery in downtown Palo Alto. And Marc 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, he would order giant milkshakes and burgers. And we would meet there and brainstorm about what to do. And it was very direct because we didn't have much time. The, the, sort of, we didn't talk about it, but the implication was Microsoft's coming after us. Marc was saying things boldly, pre-IPO, like Netscape plus Java kills Windows, right?

• 51:45Lex Fridman?

  So ambitious.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Make a browser programmable, it becomes the new runtime for programs. It's the meta OS or it's the replacement OS.

• 51:52Lex Fridman?

  But he still saw value in JavaScript.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Yes. Even though he was saying that and Java was the big name, hence the trademark license, he saw JavaScript as important. And he even thought, what if we got, I told this in other interviews, I can say it. 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 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 bootstrapped. And so we could use that as soon as Kips Java VM could run the bytecode from the Sun JVM running the self-hosted compiler to emit the bytecode.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  So, once we could bootstrap into Kips VM, we wouldn't need Sun. And Mark was like, well, maybe we can just ditch Sun, or have Kips Java VM, or have your 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... Like dynamographics or three-dimensional? Yeah, like even SGI had already started its downfall because the first four VLSI team there had gone off to do 3DEX and all these other companies that made the graphics card on your PC, right? Doom was big and Quake. And so you were, we were all playing Quake. I was old, 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 Bukicic, taking

• 53:22Speaker 01

  OpenGL ES and reflecting it as WebGL. But OpenGL ES is the mobile version of OpenGL, which is a standard based on SGI GL. 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, long time, and he's a full professor. And Mark said, great, we'll get him. I'm not sure he's going to come. We'll throw money, we'll 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.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  He was ambitious and he wanted to have Netscape possibly be in control of the ball.

• 54:14Lex Fridman?

  Maybe you can speak to the this dance of Netscape versus Internet Explorer. You've 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 in the occasional copying and this kind of stuff? Or is it is the world worse off because Internet Explorer exists?

• 54:56Speaker 01

  So I'm going to segment this into historical errors because I think Microsoft is today with Satya is 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 pixels. So it didn't get.

• 55:28Lex Fridman?

  Why, what is it? I'm sorry to keep interrupting, but why did why was Internet Explorer winning throughout the history of these competitions?

• 55:35Speaker 01

  Distribution. Distribution matters more than anything. And this is why, you know, even now, we're seeing in the browser wars, Edge doing better because it's being foisted on people at Windows. We have Windows 10 boxes at home. We have some Windows 7 boxes or laptops we keep running too because we we don't connect them to the Internet generally. But but but once you have that operating system to hold, you can you can force, you know, Edge and Apple did it with Safari, too. It's not unique to Microsoft.

• 56:02Lex Fridman?

  That's sad.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  But this matters. And that's why I think IE was going to win. That's why everybody at Netscape felt we're doomed. This was something Michael Toy and Jamie would say, we're doomed. But for a while there, we had a chance and we innovated in Netscape, too. We made the big platform push, Java and JavaScript and plugins, more plugins and.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  You know, more HTML table features and really started making a preferable stack out of what were pretty static web languages. And even in the beta releases 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 as Ajax or Dynamic JavaScript, Dynamic HTML.

• 56:49Lex Fridman?

  So people saw that.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  I mean, Even then, they saw it.

• 56:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. That's kind of, I don't know. From my perspective, that seems quite brilliant. It seems like really innovative that you would have code run in the browser.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  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 culminated in Mozilla, where you're dealing with developers all the time and early adopters, lead users. But lead users helped improve JavaScript, even in those last few betas where I could hardly change things. I was under pretty rigid change control.

• 57:35Lex Fridman?

  So we're talking about just a small collection of individuals that are just like upfront.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  A guy named Bill Dorch. You can find his work in the Web Archive still from 1996. It's a single-page application. It's an artist gallery of mountain art.

• 57:46Lex Fridman?

  He's JavaScript.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Doesn't quite work. He uses JavaScript locally. He uses a local database, what you would think of now as JSON, but it's all pure JavaScript code, a bunch of objects being constructed.

• 57:56Lex Fridman?

  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, given you from those early 10 days with a quick addition of garbage collection and fixes of our own security? How has this evolution that now it's taken over the world?

• 58:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 58:26Lex Fridman?

  Can you speak to the standard body?

• 58:28Speaker 01

  That was a fun ride too, because Netscape had taken the lead with the web and HTML innovations like frames and frames, that's tables. And the W3C was sort of off, even then, sort of in SGM land, heading toward XML la-la land. I'm going to be a little harsh on it.

• 58:45Lex Fridman?

  What's SGM? I'm sorry.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  SGM was the precursor markup language to HTML, or it was sort of the more extensible.

• 58:53Speaker 01

  Standard generalized markup language. It was, it was a

• 58:55Lex Fridman?

  XML like.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Pointy brackets, but it had all sorts of elaborate syntax for doing different semantics. And this is why I think, you know, 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.

• 59:30Lex Fridman?

  That's another amazing thing about HTML is like, it's more like biology than programming.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And so XML was in its standard form, super strict and could never have admitted, you know, 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.

• 59:54Lex Fridman?

  Oh, wow.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  So they kind of bastardized it to make it popular and usable and accessible. And so XML as a pure, you know, thing was never going to take over. And what W3C was kind of not fully functional because Netscape wasn't cooperating with them. We thought about where to take JavaScript and we realized our standards guru Carl Cargill 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, and the government said, no, we need a European standard. So this body called the European Computer Manufacturers Association, ECMA,

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  which eventually became global and became a proper noun instead of an acronym.

• 1:00:41Lex Fridman?

  Right. It's, it's just one capital E now with a lowercase CMA.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:00:54Lex Fridman?

  But it gave, I mean, maybe you'll speak to that, but it gave the name to JavaScript of ECMAScript.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  That was the standard name because Java was a trademark of Sun's. They were so aggressive. They were sending cease and desist letters to people whose middle European heritage meant their, their surname was Javanco. And they called their website javanco.com and Sun would send them a letter saying, you're using J A V A at the start of your domain name. You must cease and desist.

• 1:01:19Lex Fridman?

  I love marketing more than anything else in this world. So ECMAScript and now is popularly named as ES plus version.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  I would say people use JS more than anything. People still say JavaScript. JavaScript is in all the books.

• 1:01:33Lex Fridman?

  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 ES6, ES5.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Yes, or now they've gone to years, which is kind of confusing because it's an offset of 2009. ES6 is ES 2016.

• 1:01:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it doesn't match the years perfectly. Yeah. So what were the choices made and how did JavaScript evolve here?

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  So we took this, this new standards body, which had, we thought, a sort of a proven record of standing up to Microsoft. But Microsoft sent a lot of people. They sent some, some people who were pretty good. And then when they realized that I was there and Netscape was not going to, you know, 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, I've stopped 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 spinning 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.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  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 standard codified in 1997 in France. We had a trip to Nice, which was very memorable.

• 1:03:23Lex Fridman?

  For any interesting reason or just because it's Nice?

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  And ECMAS, European and IBM and others were, you know. There, Mike Kowalszczon, IBM Fellow, was a Britisher. And we, the, the guy who ran ECM at the time, Jan van den Beld, was quite a raconteur and a very fun guy. And he had us out for, you know, the great, you know, Fuite de Mer, the Bouillabaisse.

• 1:03:44Lex Fridman?

  Was the standardization process beautiful or painful that those early days, you as a designer of the language?

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  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. And he even brought Richard Gabriel for funding. Richard wrote the fourth clause of the ECM standard, but 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 were some tension where I was fixing bugs and I was late to a meeting and Sean Katzenberger of 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.

• 1:04:30Lex Fridman?

  What were the features that are being like struggled over and debated and thought about?

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  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 additions 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 desire standard. And I was putting in the, the missing, you know, function forms that I didn't have time for in the 10 days.

• 1:05:01Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  And you could say there was, I was standing on 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, you know, had previously been mercilessly crushed. Netscape was 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, you know,

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  making Internet Explorer the default browser in Windows, which is called tying and antitrust law. And they were doing even more brutal things. There is 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 ashen faced after Compaq called and said, Microsoft just told us they're going to pull our Windows license if we ship Netscape as the default browser.

• 1:06:15Lex Fridman?

  Wow. So there is some bullying going on.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  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, you know, Guy Steele was there for a time and there was some good work. But after the antitrust case and, you know, 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 Horwath, very big brain and still at Google, I think. He won the Putnam in 86. So he's, yeah, very mathematical. He designed this successor

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:07:15Lex Fridman?

  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, it was 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, marriage sucks, is they just want to get, let off some steam, even though everyone uses the language. But ES6, it's become this like, Uh, reputable, like it fixed major pain points, I think.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  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 ECMAScript that were supposed to fold in some of these old JavaScript 2 ideas that had come into ActionScript 3. 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 Macromedia 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

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:08:41Lex Fridman?

  For ES6.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  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 going to work on incremental improvements. No new syntax in particular, they promised. Not quite true, but they added a bunch of interesting APIs. Alan Weersbrock, my co-author of the Hubble 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.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  So people still call it ES6. I call it ES6. But if you remember, you know, off by nine plus 2000.

• 1:09:33Lex Fridman?

  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 is almost feels ready to take over the world completely.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  More programming in the large features, more features you need for larger teams.

• 1:09:50Lex Fridman?

  Software engineering.

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  Microsoft did something smart too. They, Anders and company.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  Luke Hoban, who's left Microsoft, also did TypeScript. And they realized something, I think, that Gilad Brak has 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 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.

• 1:10:22Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about TypeScript? Is it adding confusion or is it ultimately beneficial?

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  I think it's beneficial. Now, it's technically a superset of JavaScript, so of course I love it. 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 standards body and guess how their version of modules or decorators should work. And the standards 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.

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  They have a proprietary investment, it's valuable, they have control of the ball. And in some ways, you can say the same thing to any of the other big companies in the standards body, why doesn't Google standardize its stuff?

• 1:11:21Lex Fridman?

  So you think it'll continue being like a kind of dance partner to JavaScript, to the base JavaScript?

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  There's a hope that at some point, if they keep re-converging 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, there are 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 Lisp and Scheme where there's a bunch of macro libraries and they don't agree and you have conflicts between them. But pluggable type systems could be one way to standardize this.

• 1:12:05Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:12:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:16Lex Fridman?

  A lot of entrepreneurial spirit, like create their own JavaScript frameworks.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:12:23Lex Fridman?

  And they're actually awesome in all different ways. And that, this is an interesting question about, almost like philosophically about biological system and evolution, all that kind of stuff. Do you see that as good or should it, like, should some of them die out quicker?

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  I think that maybe they should. Now, jQuery was a very clever thing. John Resick 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 and three different, you know, hokey pokey dances to do something, whereas in jQuery, it's just one line.

• 1:13:20Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  Right? So that fed back finally into the standards. It didn't, 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, it's not bad. It's, it's pretty good. Whereas in the old DOM of 15 years ago, it was just too verbose.

• 1:13:52Lex Fridman?

  So maybe the frameworks were born kind of because JavaScript lacks 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.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  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 La La Land when we were doing real JavaScript standards in ECMA. And you, you, you have this division of labor, division of responsibility and division of style and sort of aesthetics and.

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  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. And some of their innovations that were like an alternative document object model, didn't really get standardized until HTML5, when we pragmatists at Opera at the time, Ian Hickson, who went to Google, Apple, and Mozilla said, let's, 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 HTML.

• 1:15:15Lex Fridman?

  HTML5, it feels like to me, maybe you can correct me, like a beautiful piece of design work. It was, it's not often with web stuff, you have this breath of just like, oh, whoever did this, they fit, this just feels good. Is that, what are your thoughts about HTML? Is the, am I being too romantic?

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  A little bit.

• 1:15:37Lex Fridman?

  Are there flaws, fundamental flaws to it that I'm just not aware of?

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  My, you know, my old friend Hicksey did a great job. He was another renegade physics student. And he was a, basically a QA guy at Opera, but he, obviously, a trained physics, you know, student and someone who could write, Britisher, he, he developed test suites and he started thinking about them more axiomatically. Now, this is, 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,

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  the seven special forms in Scheme or whatever. But, but reality is, HTML needs to be big. It's kind of shambolic, it's accretive, multi-paradigm. And Hicksey did a good job, I would say, with a bunch of it. Other people came in, in the spirit of Ian Hickson, 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 XML HTTP request.

• 1:16:55Lex Fridman?

  This video too as well, it ultimately, it feels like maybe you can correct me, it feels like it was the nail in the coffin of flash.

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  Steve Jobs saying no flash on the iPhone, in my opinion, was the actual stake to the heart, but, but, well, I'm not sure what trope you want to use. This flash was a zombie for, until just this year, right, or last year. I think last year was the end of flash in main browsers. But Jobs really did the death blow and, uh, yeah, you're right. We had to make HTML5 competitive. I still don't think we got that beautiful timeline animation.

• 1:17:27Lex Fridman?

  The timeline thing. You like the time. I mean, me from, uh, you know, I used to animate all kinds of stuff inside flash. Plus there's a programming element.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:17:35Lex Fridman?

  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, uh, 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.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  Yes. I heard that too. I didn't use it. So I'm doing the grass is greener thing here.

• 1:18:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  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, uh, or just using raw canvas and WebGL. But there's so many tools now that maybe it doesn't matter. And, and yet we had to, you know, do video, we had to do, uh, WebGL and then evolve it. We had to do web audio. Um, but once we did all these things that helped flash die, thanks to Steve Jobs, we had something that, um, people didn't realize, we had that vision that Mark and Jason have, this, this graphics capable

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  to the metal, uh, portable runtime and.

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  We at Mozilla realized this and we saw JavaScript was something that you could compile to. 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 LVMOS compiler that would take C or C++ and it would emit JavaScript. And you would think this is crazy. You're going from this sort of machine types, low level, you know, controlled memory allocation language to this garbage collected dynamically typed, uh, 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 Northeastern University, who was a type theorist,

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  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 dominated 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 numeric types, what you're double precision flowing point, into integers. And so inside JavaScript, in the kernel semantics, are integers. And if you use these operators,

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  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. And 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 we did this in 2013 in the fall. You know, Tim Sweeney I met, um, didn't think it could be done quickly. He thought it would take years. And the team went to Raleigh, to Epic, and in four days, they had Unreal Engine ported by

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  By pressing a compile button, right? They had to, but they had to have WebGL, which came from OpenGL. Yes, came OpenGL, which came from Silicon Graphics GL. They had to have Web Audio, so they could map OpenAL, which was another audio library standard, to Web Audio, 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,

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  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 plugin, no Flash, no Java, no...

• 1:21:53Lex Fridman?

  So were those the early days of, because JavaScript now is able to run basically on par with a lot of the like C++?

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  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 Gall 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 this, its own high-level language with garbage collection. The ASMJS step helped us go further because until we really proved the concept, people were still saying, "Well, JavaScript's okay. It's getting faster thanks to V8." Everybody gave Google credit, especially Google, but we need something to kill Flash.

• 1:22:45Speaker 01

  Let's use the portable native client code that Google had acquired, Native Client,

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  which is a separate lineage for taking basically C code, compiling it into a software fault-isolated container of 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, okay, you know, meet the new boss, same as the old boss. This is the Google Flash, right? But when we did ASMJS 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 ASMJS 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,

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  one garbage collector, one memory manager, one set of compiler stages. And that's called WebAssembly, and that's the successor to ASMJS. 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. Why I should have used something shorter, I picked it because of OC, the Unix tool. So anyways.

• 1:24:05Lex Fridman?

  I'm not following, I want to, but I'm not following the OC thread.

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:09Lex Fridman?

  But is it surprising to you that how damn fast JavaScript is these days? I mean, like, you've been through the whole journey.

• 1:24:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:17Lex Fridman?

  I know every step of the way, but is it like, I mean, it's how, it feels incredible.

• 1:24:23Speaker 01

  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 must have been 97, I was loaned by Netscape to do due diligence for Sun in their acquisition of Animorphic, which was David Unger and friends, people, Craig, I'm forgetting his name, he went to Microsoft, these Stanford language buffs who had taken Smalltalk and then David created itself as a simpler sort of Smalltalk 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,

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  figured out how to make dynamic. Code fast because small talk is dynamic language, right? It has classes, it 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, what's 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, things are pretty quick.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  All that amazing stuff I knew about in the 90s and I, I didn't have time to do it and Anamorphic got bought by Sun 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, each module or package is compiled exactly what's being called, what, what subclass or what implementation of an 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, I think one of them may deserve credit more than others.

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  But I didn't get to do that in JavaScript. And when we knew that, that Google was going to do their own browser, which we knew it was around 2006, I also met the team that did V8. And it turns out it was Lars Bock, who was one of the young engineers from Anamorphic that got acquired by Sun. And so Lars is like the, you know, one of the world's expert on these kinds of virtual machines. And he picked my brains up, JavaScript, and I could tell he didn't like it, it's time, but he had to do it. Oh, really? Interesting. Yeah. 2006 lunch at Google's campus. And then I had another friend who was DevRel at Chrome and he said, yeah, we don't know what they're doing. This is 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.

• 1:27:15Speaker 01

  They're often all who's Denmark, you know, rewriting their engine four times, which is good. That's the right way to do this kind of development. You know, they were learning JavaScript, including all its quirks, which they came to hate with 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 Trace Monkey, our tracing Jit at Mozilla. And Apple, I think, was also aware. And so they were doing their own Jit. So the era of Jitted fast JavaScript in 2008 had this prehistory going back to Smalltalk and Self and Anamorphic. And the, again, the lineage is interesting because you had Lars at Anamorphic and then he ends up at Google.

• 1:27:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And today we have an incredibly fast language that, like you said, still, you know, 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.

• 1:28:13Speaker 01

  There's a dialectic for sure.

• 1:28:16Lex Fridman?

  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 is the most popular language in the world?

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  So I think I did, you know, 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 had to make it look like Java and interoperate with Java, that there was, you know, inherent goodness, 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 Hacker News. I was very flattered. He said, Java was this thing where the experts were writing the code and it was compiled and

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  you had to declare all your types. And Sun didn't really give a damn about, you know, the average programmer who wanted to build real web apps, dynamic things. And I was in there meanwhile, doing, you know, 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 That 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 my mistressizer, nothing like the sun.

• 1:30:01Speaker 01

  Or, you know, 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, I have to love the ship. Because if you don't, it's going to 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 will say, we're stuck with it because it got this priority of place.

• 1:30:32Lex Fridman?

  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 nother, that's a discussion about love. But underneath it, there's something that just connects with people.

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  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. Smalltalk had classes. Python has classes. There are lots of list variants that had classy systems. Comment list. 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 the other such companies, Salesforce. And they have to cater to web developers.

• 1:31:37Speaker 01

  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 vibrant and large crowd.

• 1:32:08Lex Fridman?

  There's a community feel to it. There's echoes, perhaps I don't want to draw too many similarities. Maybe you can comment on it. There's a C++ is like Wall Street and 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-

• 1:32:31Speaker 01

  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 gotta become a Java programmer.

• 1:32:52Lex Fridman?

  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 crowdsourced 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?

• 1:33:16Speaker 01

  Like I said, my own experience with the dismal science, as with physics, led me to reject a lot of bad models. And, you know, economics was always compromised by politics, political economy. You could also argue that it was, 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. You know, this monopoly is crushing your Netscape company, but that's just nature.

• 1:33:44Lex Fridman?

  And economics couldn't, or doesn't really have good models for the Wall Street Bets subreddit.

• 1:33:50Speaker 01

  You know, they, they know how to squeeze a 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, you know, straddles or some kind of spread operation that helped them eliminate the fee or eat the fee. And in fact, you know, 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, you know, the memes are like the Terminator robot with $600 stimmy check and the hedge funds, the little girl hiding under the desk.

• 1:34:34Speaker 01

  There is a problem, which I talked about in a 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 US from Microsoft for a long time. And a lot of this was due to the money interests buying control of politicians. And, you know, in Plato's five regimes, that's oligarchy. That's, that's, 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. You know, hey, Robin Hood, no fees. Oh, interesting. Hey, you know, I could buy a fraction of a share in this thing, or I can keep buying with my stimulus check. So I mentioned Hegel seeing Napoleon

• 1:35:16Speaker 01

  on the horse. Hegel also talked about the cunning of reason, that you have the sort of, you know, God sees 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, it's more like soft power.

• 1:35:47Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:35:48Speaker 01

  And people are fighting back.

• 1:35:51Lex Fridman?

  Do you think it's possible? So JavaScript used to be for the front end of the web. It's now increasingly so being used for back end, 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 starting to actually use like these heavy duty applications that are using your networks, machine learning and so on in the browser. Is it possible in 10, 20, 30 years that basically most of the world runs on JavaScript?

• 1:36:29Speaker 01

  This is a dystopia and a nightmare to some people. When I, when we did AsmJS 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, it's all running on JavaScript and you just scream forever. It's possible. Gary Bernhardt 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, he took some clever ideas that actually have a threat of credibility to them. But I mentioned software fault isolation.

• 1:37:09Speaker 01

  In the old days, when we were using computers, we, we said, we're going to use the Unix monolithic monitor and it's the privileged 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, 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. That'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.

• 1:37:50Speaker 01

  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 kernels. You get Unicolumns and Exocolumns and very lightweight VMs. And so Gary took this idea and said, JavaScript will take over computing because the system call boundary is too expensive. So everything ends up in JavaScript with these lighter weight isolation enforcement mechanisms. It's not totally beyond belief. It'd be Web Assembly too.

• 1:38:23Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 1:38:44Speaker 01

  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 there are K variants because the guy that did K is still going and they're proprietary, but he's still innovating there.

• 1:39:29Speaker 01

  There are, you know, Python is used. So people talk about TensorFlow, yes, 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 faster. Write a C plugin, 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

• 1:40:11Speaker 01

  I was also the sponsor, executive sponsor of Rust at Mozilla and Rust has now escaped, you know, from that sort of nest where it was born to be adopted by a bunch of companies that 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

• 1:40:51Speaker 01

  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, you know, a lot of networking to do, and it's garbage collected,

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  but it's also very pragmatic. It 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.

• 1:41:41Lex Fridman?

  I haven't used Rust, but this is one of the most respected and loved languages currently. So it's

• 1:41:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's still young. You look at these things, JavaScript is now considered old.

• 1:41:51Lex Fridman?

  It's gone to so many versions that you can fall in love with it all over again.

• 1:41:55Speaker 01

  25 plus years, you know, it's, it's, it's an adult. 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.

• 1:42:10Lex Fridman?

  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, 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.

• 1:42:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:55Lex Fridman?

  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 two.

• 1:43:02Speaker 01

  I admire Python, right? It came from a lineage of ABC, which was a pedagogical language in the Netherlands. And it, you know, 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.

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  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. And so once I explained it like, oh, wow, I get it. But it also means that you can commit a blunder that just.

• 1:44:14Lex Fridman?

  You don't get punished for you don't detect and this.

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  You get an undefined value and you don't know where it came from.

• 1:44:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:20Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 1:44:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mentioned that Microsoft, you know, which was convicted for it, did have used its monopoly, but they had a pretty good team by the time they did IE4. And Netscape, unfortunately, I was like 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 roughly is like Mark Zuckerberg took, which is to keep them at arms length and let them do their thing.

• 1:45:29Speaker 01

  And now that he's pulling WhatsApp in and people are fleeing it because it's tied into the ad surveillance. But, um, you know, for a while they're keeping its effort. It 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 3 and it was so late, they renumbered it. We did a 3 release. Jamie and a few others put some extra effort into secure mine was supported in the mail, built in mail program. And that's gave 4 was late and it was only on Windows at first.

• 1:46:12Speaker 01

  And Microsoft had really started doing better like they do. They copy and the first version is trash and the second one, you're starting to feel a little threatened. The third one, you can tell what's going to happen and the fourth one's good.

• 1:46:23Lex Fridman?

  And plus there's the benefit, like you said, that it comes as a default browser.

• 1:46:26Speaker 01

  Yes, and yet Netscape screwing it up and Microsoft really putting some quality people on it. IE4 was good on Windows, it was good. And they did the dynamic HTML innovations. The 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 elevator. ...position. It's you can be a programmer or an engineer, you're trapped, 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.

• 1:47:09Speaker 01

  But IE4 was pretty darn good. We, I remember a friend, Scott Furman and I got invited by Scott Isaac to Gordon Beirish in San Jose. They were doing a preview of IE4. This must have 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. You know, we can do like virtual reality and Scott and I looked at each other and said, we're doomed. Microsoft was starting to fire in all cylinders. So I have to give them credit for that, even though they abused their market power. And maybe, you know, I shouldn't give them credit for having the resource to hire talented people, but they did a credible job on IE4.

• 1:47:49Speaker 01

  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, they let it rot. They just abandoned it. IE5, 55, IE6 later, but these were not well maintained. They had a lot of security bugs.

• 1:48:15Lex Fridman?

  Browser's really closed and outdated too, even though it's getting updated. It's just weird.

• 1:48:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:48:46Lex Fridman?

  Tabs were brilliant innovation. Like you said, Opera had it, but like I remember I fully switched to Firefox the moment. It was, I remember like the moments of first using tabs in Firefox and like not liking it like for the first few minutes. And then like, wait a minute.

• 1:49:03Speaker 01

  You get the groove, yeah.

• 1:49:04Lex Fridman?

  You get the groove and you understand. So that timing, what year was this? Because also as a aspiring web designer, I use table. So we didn't mention layout or CSS much. There's also a change in the way like the frames were going away.

• 1:49:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:21Lex Fridman?

  So there's a change in the way websites looked and behaved and all that kind of stuff.

• 1:49:26Speaker 01

  CSS finally, which Microsoft embraced with IE4 and Netscape never really did, right? CSS became a better standard over time for doing table layout that relieved you have the need to use what are called spacer gifs. Spacer gifs, right? Images you would throw into space out tables. You know, the type of graphic 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 early that year.

• 1:50:01Lex Fridman?

  No, yeah, I think it wasn't.

• 1:50:02Speaker 01

  Well, in three.

• 1:50:03Lex Fridman?

  I don't remember. It was a Firebird which had tabs.

• 1:50:06Speaker 01

  We had tabs the whole way. So it started out as Mozilla 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 it. We don't believe you shouldn't use it. We hate you. And then we renamed it to Firefox and they're like, ah, we love you. And then I don't, 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.

• 1:50:50Lex Fridman?

  So that's the second set of browser wars. So what, how did you, how was Firefox born? How's Mozilla born? Is there a?

• 1:51:00Speaker 01

  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. I four was pretty good and Netscape four wasn't that good. It took a while to get better.

• 1:51:21Speaker 01

  But the Netscape executives 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 to 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.

• 1:51:48Speaker 01

  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

• 1:52:31Speaker 01

  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 four also wanted to keep doing a proprietary mail and groupware program, not Jamie Zawinski's mail program that was in Netscape two and three. 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 AOL 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

• 1:53:13Speaker 01

  Initially, the first engineering manager, Tom Paquin of Netscape, was the Mozilla 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.

• 1:53:58Speaker 01

  And then Jamie quit. He quit after a year. He said, this didn't work. I'm sorry. You know, 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 code to make greenfield 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 less of a hairball that had been hacked on by ex-grad students starting four years prior. So we said, we're going to make a modular code base. We're going to use a variant or an open source version of Microsoft's component object

• 1:54:39Speaker 01

  model, has reference counting and standardized Vtables, virtual calls in C++. And we're going to use JavaScript. We're going to 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 Zul, XML User Interface Language. And some real talent on the Netscape side delivered that. Dave Hyatt, who was instrumental in Zul, Chris Waterson, Joe Hewitt, Blake Ross. And Blake was an intern. He was like a high school aged intern in Netscape. And at some point,

• 1:55:23Speaker 01

  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 AOL was going to come and start beheading the executives because it didn't do anything useful. And there was this thought you should take the Netscape browser engine and put it in the Windows AOL client, which was the dial-up client that all the increasingly aging users of AOL were using. Never happened. It would have been too big a change. So it wasn't clear why AOL 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? 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

• 1:56:08Speaker 01

  open source project. We had a lot of the engineers on staff on our side and we had

• 1:56:14Speaker 01

  people we'd hired through the Mozilla community who were top-notch. They'd risen, you know, 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 showed you can kind of transcend your, you know, boundaries of corporate open source if you get a project that has enough loyalty, even among the paid staff, because we had outside people contributing. We had 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 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

• 1:56:58Speaker 01

  who didn't like Mozilla and didn't like the crucible of competing with the better programmers.

• 1:57:05Lex Fridman?

  So if the project is good enough, it will rise, the phoenix will rise out of the...

• 1:57:09Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. And so we had this Mozilla codebase 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, braved a three weeks.

• 1:57:28Speaker 01

  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. It's 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'd at that point gotten mail people to reintegrate mail and news and we had an editor for HTML. And it felt like a 90s suite, 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 AOL's thumb a little bit in that they said, well, we should probably put the AOL Instant Messenger chicklet on the toolbar.

• 1:58:14Speaker 01

  We should put the ICQ, the other messaging system that AOL 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.

• 1:58:59Speaker 01

  So Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross, the high school aged intern, did the first version, which was called Mozilla slash browser. It was very, a small group of us, Ian Hicks and Asa Dotzler, 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 and implemented it natively on macOS of the time in Camino, originally called Camara. He'd written multiple implementations, which was a thing programmers should do. It's like the V8 team did for those missing years when the rest of the Chrome teams like, where's V8?

• 1:59:42Speaker 01

  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 going to go think and I'm going to design and I'm going to make this, you know, platonic, perfect form of the program and then I'm going to write it at the end when it's due. And Hyatt just went in there and started hacking and 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.

• 2:00:22Speaker 01

  And this really showed well in Phoenix, what we called Phoenix and 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.

• 2:00:40Lex Fridman?

  Interesting, wow.

• 2:00:41Speaker 01

  But he was still blogging about tabbed browsing. I think Apple at some point said you shouldn't.

• 2:00:45Lex Fridman?

  Safari have tab browsing?

• 2:00:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it was because of Hyatt. Hyatt was quite a feather in their cap. Don Melton, who'd been the engineering manager for Safari from the beginning, had been in Netscape also. And so this is 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 it's like, no, it's not, it was an opera and I've refined it. So we had to replace people and we had Ben Goodger, New Zealander, we'd 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 an albatross, that they bought it for no particular benefit.

• 2:01:31Speaker 01

  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 us principal engineers got trotted out to do dog and pony shows in Dulles, Virginia. And the AOL upper 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 they were, one was named Reggie and they were, they were, they were very.

• 2:02:04Speaker 01

  You rather than non you, or they were like, what's what's still in this metropolitan film UHB? Urban haute bourgeoisie. They were haute bourgeoisie. 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 because 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 nineties, late nineties watchword. And there wasn't synergy with AOL buying Netscape. And there wasn't synergy with Time Warner and AOL.

• 2:02:42Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 2:02:51Speaker 01

  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 mammal, you know, marsupial mammals of Australia, how silly they are.

• 2:03:22Lex Fridman?

  So AOL is like Australia.

• 2:03:24Speaker 01

  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 because they're still have relatively high socioeconomic status and they have grandchildren. But it's going away. It's dying at some point.

• 2:03:40Lex Fridman?

  Towards the end of the aughts, that decade, and then to the decade 2010 plus, that Firefox became this incredible, I forget when Chrome came out, but

• 2:03:51Speaker 01

  2008, September.

• 2:03:51Lex Fridman?

  2008, but Firefox was the sexy, cool thing that represented a lot of the cutting edge technologies and all that kind of stuff.

• 2:03:59Speaker 01

  Web two. It was amazing. Tim O'Reilly and John Battell did the first web two conference, which eventually became huge and they split it. But that was in 2004, right? When Firefox was out, Craigslist was huge. It was killing classified revenue for newspapers, but There was just this ferment, people starting.

• 2:04:16Lex Fridman?

  Wikipedia along there somewhere.

• 2:04:17Speaker 01

  Gmail was already done and it was an impressive web mail. 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's that work? And it was all JavaScript and images and.

• 2:04:33Lex Fridman?

  Gmail was 2003, four.

• 2:04:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it actually started quite early. It might've been 2002 or three, but by the time we started dealing with Google and Firefox to get the search deal, which was the main revenue source from Mozilla and still is.

• 2:04:46Speaker 01

  2004, early Sergey Brin's, 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.

• 2:05:03Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:05:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:05:23Lex Fridman?

  So where, and you said you've figured out that Google is working on its own browser at some point.

• 2:05:30Speaker 01

  2006, yeah.

• 2:05:31Lex Fridman?

  2006, so would you say Firefox versus, was Internet Explorer a part of the war here? Or was the Firefox versus Chrome?

• 2:05:38Speaker 01

  So Firefox didn't quite cause Microsoft to reconvene IE. They did do IE7 and I remember being on a plane back from Standards Meeting, JavaScript Standards Meeting from Seattle, from Redmond. And there was some Microsoft guy in front of me. It 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 in the cradle. All we needed to do was add pop up locking in tabs and we could have made Internet Explorer kill Firefox. And it's like, should've, could've, would've pal. And I was right behind him, hearing this. But they didn't, they were slow and they, IE7 wasn't that great and. What really got them started, I think, was Chrome. And, you know, I talked to Larry Page in 2005.

• 2:06:22Speaker 01

  I think I said, you know, we're talking about the Firefox relationship. But he was also saying, what about WebKit? This was Apple's version of the old KHTML 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 principals, including Dave Hyatt, Maciej Stokowiak, some of my friends who are still there, said, we must stop patch bombing this poor KHTML 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 lived in. And that was before Chrome. And then Chrome, Larry Page, said, what about WebKit? I said, yeah, it's nice.

• 2:07:07Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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 off in Denmark on a farm. Did it 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?

• 2:07:52Speaker 01

  And Flash crashed a lot. So the demo that I heard about, my friends, Netscape, a lot of people did, inside Google was the sad tab. They showed an early version of Chrome, which is just this bare bones tab browser. They loaded a site with a known Flash bomb. 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 then you could reload it and there it is again. So this was, this was an improvement. It was a real move for security. It was based on, you know, a company they acquired called Green Border. They had some really big brains, like Olfar Erlingsen, 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.

• 2:08:37Speaker 01

  So we were still struggling with, you know, security bugs.

• 2:08:42Speaker 01

  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. That was when it peaked. And as it started falling, it was because of Chrome. Chrome came out in 2008 and it was a comic book that leaked accidentally that showed some of the people who worked on it. Lars Bach was in there and so on. It was kind of soft launched 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,

• 2:09:26Speaker 01

  switch the default browser in 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 if you 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

• 2:10:05Lex Fridman?

  That's right.

• 2:10:05Speaker 01

  Mac OS Spotlight, right?

• 2:10:06Lex Fridman?

  Sadly died out.

• 2:10:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:10:49Lex Fridman?

  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, a search engine that's like, I mean, you're, you're partnering with what, with somebody with a search engine.

• 2:11:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:05Lex Fridman?

  With, with Yahoo or with, uh,

• 2:11:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:08Lex Fridman?

  Uh, with Google or so on.

• 2:11:09Speaker 01

  They tried Yahoo. That was unfortunate because I think, um, even though Marissa Mayer talked about it, she never pulled it off. They never restored the search, uh, team that had been laid off. I believe Carol Bartz was running Yahoo and Carol said, I've got to get rid of one of the three expensive things. I'm going to get rid of search. And, um, 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 the default from Google to Yahoo, it was like mid-December 2014. A bunch of users said, 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, the traffic just went away for Yahoo.

• 2:11:52Speaker 01

  And, and yet they were obliged. I understand it. I, 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, you know, a lot of the commercial value in popular apps is what are the default settings? What is the default search?

• 2:12:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. But oftentimes there's some, just like you said, I mean, if there's something compelling, that's also can beat out the default, like tab browsing and so on.

• 2:12:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:12:29Lex Fridman?

  And that's where, I mean, we'll, we'll talk about Brave browser. It feels like now we're in this third stage where there's, uh, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, I guess it's called, and Brave. And these are 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.

• 2:12:54Speaker 01

  There's evolution again, especially on tracking protection. So privacy is this sort of global.

• 2:13:02Speaker 01

  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, you know, $3. I'm paying $3 for 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. Exactly. But privacy is not a unitary good. It's complex and people are understanding it only over time and as they 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 is probably

• 2:13:41Speaker 01

  Steve Jobs. Safari had private windows, private tabs 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, you know, some site that you were embarrassed by or bought a gift for somebody you wanted to keep secret.

• 2:14:11Speaker 01

  But there's still some level of tracking. There's network tracking. There's 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. When you, 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 brave.com or, you know, 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 the response from the server, the cookie's updated. So it's this little

• 2:14:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:15:25Lex Fridman?

  Every time you type in.

• 2:15:27Speaker 01

  So that was a great thing about cookies. Lou Montzold did it in a hurry in 1994 before I joined Netscape, 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 in 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

• 2:16:09Speaker 01

  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 fetch 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 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 Paquin, the engineering manager, said, nope, no Twinkies, just cookies. We're done. You're done, son.

• 2:16:51Speaker 01

  That's how a lot of that stuff was. That's how JavaScript, you know, 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 in 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.

• 2:17:26Lex Fridman?

  Well, it created some of the richest companies in the world, right? I mean, it's the social media.

• 2:17:29Speaker 01

  All I got was T-shirts.

• 2:17:32Lex Fridman?

  All I got is this crappy T-shirt. Yeah. I mean, so that's, that's the fundamental problem the world is facing now. They're looking at what social media has created and they're looking at, and like a world is looking at itself in the mirror. And seeing that privacy is actually something, I suppose, like a nice thing to have. It's something that is, 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 are playing with this idea, but Brave is at the forefront of that. So maybe can you like describe what Brave is?

• 2:18:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:18:12Lex Fridman?

  And what are its key principles? And what's broken? What is Brave trying to fix?

• 2:18:17Speaker 01

  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, you know, bullying and psy ops and other attacks on people.

• 2:18:50Speaker 01

  Block that stuff. Block that JavaScript. I'm Dr. Frankenstein. A monster here. But obviously, you go to Gmail, there's a bunch of script there to make that amazing web client. That's okay. 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.

• 2:19:33Speaker 01

  And they were also doing what they call intelligent tracking prevention, which uses local machine learning in the browser. And the funny thing is, you know, 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 ad company that got sold to AT&T. So I'm not picking on anybody unfairly, appnexus.com. Have you ever been to appnexus.com?

• 2:20:07Lex Fridman?

  Nope.

• 2:20:07Speaker 01

  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're 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 Jobs was still around, in Safari. But it had this loophole that if you do go to AppNexus, then why it's okay to be a third party cookie. And so AppNexus did something very naughty. They took their ad partners that 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 it was a loophole they exploited.

• 2:20:52Speaker 01

  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. If to fight.

• 2:21:06Lex Fridman?

  This is a fascinating problem.

• 2:21:08Speaker 01

  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 four billion numbers. You can make an identifier. It's called a super cookie sometimes. 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 add it as an afterthought, or go hog wild with new web APIs to add a bunch more local storage or fingerprint surface area. And that's been a struggle too, because

• 2:21:50Speaker 01

  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've just blocked 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.

• 2:22:35Lex Fridman?

  Got it. And so, like you said, is this both like a human fine-tuning issue and a machine learning problem?

• 2:22:43Speaker 01

  Yes. And as the humans learn, then they train the machine learning.

• 2:22:47Lex Fridman?

  But, you know, maybe Google aside, or including Google, there is millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars, to be made from fighting the ways of Brave.

• 2:22:58Speaker 01

  That's right. And it's been an interesting change from when we started in 2015. When we started, ad-blocking extensions, AdBlock 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 ad-blocking built-in and on by default. So PageFair was a startup, and they measured ad-blocking adoption. And they tried to say, hey, publishers, 30% of the visitors to Pitchfork or Wired, 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?

• 2:23:41Speaker 01

  And three sevens. Well, that's easier said than done. And Page Fair and others, Sourcepoint, 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 adoptions just continued. Intelligent Tracking Prevention in 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 help 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.

• 2:24:27Speaker 01

  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 it's permitting, 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 that's supposed to get that doesn't get it.

• 2:25:01Lex Fridman?

  And there's something really broken about that kind of system.

• 2:25:03Speaker 01

  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, maladvertising, where fake advertisers put malware payloads in, or exploit kit 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.

• 2:25:33Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:25:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:25:50Lex Fridman?

  BT, well, maybe, what is basic attention token BAT? And how does it work?

• 2:25:56Speaker 01

  Okay, 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, You know, now the crumbs out, maybe that's going to go away. And they just, at some point, Google will say, you know, Firefox, you know, like Old Yeller, you saved me from the rabid beast, now I have to shoot you in the head.

• 2:26:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:17Speaker 01

  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's painting the ad into some, you

• 2:27:02Speaker 01

  know, 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-subsidize all the content and buy more than you read and all that stuff.

• 2:27:44Speaker 01

  And how many, you know, people are doing great who are big names like New York Times and Washington Post, but how many subscriptions are you as a user going to pay for? This is why startups like Tony Hale's Scroll are trying to do a portable subscription system.

• 2:27:57Lex Fridman?

  But by the way, just on a small tangent there, even the New York Times is really annoying how difficult it is to subscribe. There's way too many clicks.

• 2:28:05Speaker 01

  They don't make it easy. And 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.

• 2:28:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:16Speaker 01

  But publishers are not that technical, and they're, they can't all get you to subscribe. You can't have a thousand subscriptions. So for a long time, people talked about micropayments. There was Blendle in the Netherlands, 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 we prototyped 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

• 2:28:57Speaker 01

  very congested and very slow to confirm and the fees got very high. And a lot of users who were not Bitcoin maximalist 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 a script is more limited.

• 2:29:42Speaker 01

  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 nexus's 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.

• 2:30:24Speaker 01

  In the old days of 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 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 Kalconis told me this about his experience with, I guess it was in Gadget, I forget which site he was running. But once he started using an ad partner that was sharing his audience information across multiple sites,

• 2:31:08Speaker 01

  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, it facilitates fake news, all sorts of problems. So great blocks it, and then we give users the ability to give back. And because we invented the basic attention token on 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 Control's OFAC.

• 2:31:51Speaker 01

  There's the, you know, 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.

• 2:32:12Lex Fridman?

  Like the actual identities of people involved.

• 2:32:14Speaker 01

  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 custody, so-called 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

• 2:32:39Lex Fridman?

  Some threshold that's unreasonable?

• 2:32:41Speaker 01

  It's not that big.

• 2:32:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:43Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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 pragmatist to 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 you know, who knows how it'll play out, there should become a day when this, this full vision can be done more fully on a blockchain. But regulations and

• 2:33:27Speaker 01

  the practicalities of today's blockchain, 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 of 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 endpoint software. It's this universal app. Everyone uses browsers. The bigger the screen, the more you're in the browser and the less you install, you know, fat clients for things. I use Slack on, on macOS and it's, it's like a browser. It's based on an Electron framework we used to use. And it's just, it's not that great. Some people at Brave use Slack in Brave as a

• 2:34:08Lex Fridman?

  In the browser, yeah. I use that often, yeah.

• 2:34:11Speaker 01

  And I noticed on the iPad, I use apps list. The smaller the screen, you know, the browser got handicapped by Apple and Android both. And it also, you know, can be slower or not have the right, you know, affordances, the user 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 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.

• 2:34:55Speaker 01

  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, you know, cookie and scripts across the web from acquiring double click. They have YouTube, they have Android, they have search, which is still their big revenue lane. 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, intent signals from those data feeds, the searches, the queries, the history,

• 2:35:40Speaker 01

  how much you're scrolling down a page, how much you redid a search. It's all 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 the day once a day because new offers come in and old ones expire. 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, right? It's a video or a webpage. It's just the link to an edge cache and there are many such edge caches.

• 2:36:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:36:38Lex Fridman?

  And the machine learning is learning about you specifically locally.

• 2:36:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:36:42Lex Fridman?

  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? So like what, I mean, 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 ideas, 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?

• 2:37:24Speaker 01

  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 they just don't like ads, but they put in $20 a month. So, I believe Zuko of Zcash Frame does that. And that's very generous because the browser is just anonymously based on his browsing,

• 2:38:06Speaker 01

  sort of keeping score on how much time he spent on this video, on that website. And if those sites verify in sort of a, like getting a 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.

• 2:38:48Speaker 01

  Social networks, creators, if you look at YouTubers, a lot of them, 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.

• 2:39:05Speaker 01

  But that centralized your Patreon. So there's censorship hazards, there's a 5% fee. What if that were 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.

• 2:39:20Lex Fridman?

  That's brilliant.

• 2:39:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39:21Lex Fridman?

  Do you think it could be standardized across browsers? Can like Internet Explorer come in again and?

• 2:39:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, protocols are easy to copy and that they're meant to be interoperable. So it's, 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. You know, people were talking, like Elizabeth Warren was talking about breaking up the tech, 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 DoubleClick or something, divest something. I don't know. It might happen.

• 2:40:08Lex Fridman?

  So, so Brave might inspire Google to completely change the way they're doing things in the.

• 2:40:12Speaker 01

  They're already doing something you may have read about called the Privacy Sandbox or Flock, which they have this bird metaphor going, turtle dove, fledge. But these, these, these systems have been very googly, kind of over engineered, 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, in a crowd, but over time an adversary can pull you out of the crowd. This, 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, this anonymous ad matching or the

• 2:40:54Speaker 01

  blind signature cryptography we use to confirm the ad impressions. That's David Chalm's invention. That could get standardized. In fact, some of that is being standardized. Even Google's in favor of so-called trust tokens, which are Chalmi and blind, 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, you know, Google's innovator's dilemma apart from just, you know, getting, being mature and having trouble innovating? It's that they have come to depend on this ad tech system that has all these, these vendors that are. Publishers rely on because publishers aren't technical enough.

• 2:41:37Speaker 01

  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 data plan savings are significant. There's so much bad JavaScript involved in ad tech. If you block it and you sort of chop off the, what's called the programmatic waterfall, which chains a bunch of requests.

• 2:42:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's one of the incredible things about Brave. I guess you're saying you should attribute it to the fact that the messy JavaScript, no offense.

• 2:42:08Speaker 01

  Not my.

• 2:42:11Lex Fridman?

  Is, I mean, Brave just feels faster even than, I mean, Chrome was fast. And one of the things that it was like impressive is it showed that browsers could be really fast. And Brave is even faster than that, which is.

• 2:42:24Speaker 01

  We've blocked so much and it saves the network, which means data plan. It saves battery because of 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 were like, oh, that's just that bad site. They'll fix it. And you actually do a survey of webpages that's 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 poll publishers. They're like, oh, you poor publishers don't know how to make your pages fast. Put them on our AMP system and 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.

• 2:43:06Speaker 01

  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 a, Google's Borgifying all these publishers and they don't want to be plugged into the Borg cube. They want to build up their own brand and have loyal readers. So, you know, 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.

• 2:43:44Speaker 01

  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 censor 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

• 2:44:07Lex Fridman?

  So that relationship is not owned by Facebook or Twitter. It's owned by you.

• 2:44:12Speaker 01

  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 observe a combined view. You could resurrect almost across networks.

• 2:44:24Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 2:45:00Speaker 01

  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 going to go. But I do think, like I said earlier about the cunning of 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 going to 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

• 2:45:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:46:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's brilliant.

• 2:46:05Speaker 01

  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 you know, 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 at Google and 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, you know, SEO, which is an adversarial game.

• 2:46:47Speaker 01

  And Google itself buying all these companies and crowding its own results page with its own tied in stuff.

• 2:46:54Lex Fridman?

  The YouTube. It's a slippery slope that happens when you, when, when you have control over these kinds of really important mechanisms.

• 2:47:01Speaker 01

  Monopoly capitalism or cartel. You get this with the Robin Hoods and the hedge funds. You get sort of the money interests take over and kind of abuse their power and wear out their welcome. So what, 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, you know, an ISP to, 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, you know, I thought that was egregious. Parler, I, it was not well designed and I tried it out because I tried all these things.

• 2:47:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:46Speaker 01

  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 going to take out the newcomer. And it looked bad. It's sort of like the, the hedge funds sorting GameStop. Looked bad. You know, you're seeing a piece in Time Magazine this week that's like basically saying, yeah, we interfered with the election, but it was great. Aren't we good? I don't know if you've seen this piece yet.

• 2:48:16Lex Fridman?

  No, I haven't.

• 2:48:17Speaker 01

  If you tried to say that as a Trump supporter in in November, after the election, you'd get banned from Twitter. But now Time in its Twitter account is saying, you know, we saved the day. We we it's AFLCIO and big business. The Better Business Bureau got together, kept Trump from, you know, spreading fake news. So the country is 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 dock. What's going to 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 going to go away just because somebody got elected differently. And these are career prosecutors, and they have a strong case. And Google's smart. And Microsoft almost got split up,

• 2:48:59Speaker 01

  right? The judge, Thomas Penfield Jackson, he overreached. He didn't hold a hearing about the remedy. He just said, I'm going to 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 want to get broken up. Because Jackson was going to make the Opsco, the operating system company, and the Appsco office, you know, Word and Excel. And that would have been a huge blow to Microsoft. So.

• 2:49:29Lex Fridman?

  But ultimately, I don't know. I don't know if you're optimistic or cynical about the possibility of breaking up big tech. To me, I'm optimistic that tools like Brave, I love the idea of owning your friendships and like users more and more owning the stuff is the only real way. Unfortunately, it's like the Wall Street Bets subreddit is the only real way to fight decentralized power. You can't break them up. The regulation is very difficult.

• 2:49:54Speaker 01

  Certainly don't want to wait for the law. Netscape was long dead or acquired by AOL and effectively dead. It was only Mozilla that returned Firefox to the market. By the time that the USP 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 got, we had to standardize things with those icky standards people. So they ran back to proprietary lock-in, and Windows Vista flopped. It was late, it was bloated. Longhorn, remember? Now, what Google's, what I was going to say, but Google's smart enough, they won't get split up. They'll split something out to get off the hook, I think.

• 2:50:36Lex Fridman?

  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, you know, 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, have said, do not come to Silicon Valley. It'd be, 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?

• 2:51:20Lex Fridman?

  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 over dramatic during this particular year of the coronavirus and so on?

• 2:51:37Speaker 01

  I think, you know, even Austin's getting overheated, I hear. 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, you know, people are moving to Florida, there's a big movement toward Miami, Peter Thiel, Keith Farber, 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 due to the lockdowns. It's got the highest taxes. That's got to matter. People will do flee to high taxes. It's got likely fires every year because of the dead fall.

• 2:52:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:52:29Speaker 01

  Just, I would say corruption at all levels, especially up to the governor, who famously was eating at the French Laundry and claimed that the outside was inside and they were all masks off and it was great. Do what I say, not what I do. Rules for the, 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.

• 2:52:58Lex Fridman?

  But ultimately, the thing that made Silicon Valley a special place, it gave freedom to like 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.

• 2:53:16Speaker 01

  Housing's super expensive.

• 2:53:17Lex Fridman?

  Housing's so it's hard. Okay, everything about startups is hard.

• 2:53:21Speaker 01

  It was narrow and they didn't plan the roads, right?

• 2:53:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:24Speaker 01

  They got rid of public transportation in LA, like the Who Framed Roger Rabbit cartoon show. They used to have trolley cars, Portland too. The oil companies and the DOD conspired to build highways and make cars dominant. And the rights of way are long gone. Elon's going to go underground. And I wish him well. That's probably the only way to do it now.

• 2:53:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. 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?

• 2:53:54Speaker 01

  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, 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. But now, you know, when's the last fab that was built in the valley? Microunity might have been the last. I don't know. I haven't followed. We built a fab in Sunnyvale and in Microunity in starting early 90s. And now the fabs are overseas. And the one thing that I would say that the

• 2:54:39Speaker 01

  oligarchs have intentionally done in both parties is

• 2:54:44Speaker 01

  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, this is not, this is not a story that's over yet. So what is Silicon Valley for now? It's for the network effect, the, the brain trust of 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 I like, they still filter, you know, mainly based on socioeconomic status, but it's kind of a skate school. I had a friend hired out of Harvard 20 years ago at Netscape.

• 2:55:27Speaker 01

  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 think they're any doing that at Stanford anymore. And he said, yo, it was shocking. Some of the students got Cs and Ds and they were crying. It's like, yes, that's right. The precious deers can't take that at Stanford, so they get As and Bs. Now, you look at China and people say what they want about China, they prove Russia too. A lot of math, science training, a lot of engineering, a lot of people who are doing their coursework to get the As and Bs. So I'm an American, I'm born on the 4th of July. Really? Fourth of July? Yeah. And, and America, as I say, fundamentally is a commercial republic. You can try to make it something else. You can say it's the new Atlantis and mystify it.

• 2:56:09Speaker 01

  You could, 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 original design, anyway. The federal, Federalist Papers talk about this, there's a lot of subsidiarity. But that's, that's been eroded over time. And like I say, a lot of the offshoring has 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 centered in a different office, they had to move. Or, you know, if, if, 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 from Germany and moved them to Munich. With coronavirus, everyone's working from home and it's like, what a relief, I can

• 2:56:54Speaker 01

  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, oh, can I keep getting my Silicon Valley pay? No, we're going to figure out what your cost of living there is and we're going to adjust your pay accordingly.

• 2:57:11Lex Fridman?

  And these colonies and these little mini experiments that all combine 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.

• 2:57:27Speaker 01

  People still flee here. People still flee.

• 2:57:28Lex Fridman?

  I still, and I'm a red-blooded American at this point, and I have a sense that we figured it out somehow. If Silicon Valley burns, another place will come up in its place, that even more innovation and people will move. And the remote work might change fundamentally how we work, or might not. It might just give you the freedom to then create many other small Silicon Valleys throughout the place, like Austin included, but other places as well. And we somehow figured it, figured it out. And

• 2:57:59Speaker 01

  I think that's, 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 lockdowns hurt, in the fact, 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.

• 2:58:28Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:58:29Speaker 01

  But, 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, Nels, Jodie 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.

• 2:59:03Speaker 01

  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 that were in the city and the condos in the city got super expensive. And you, 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, 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 moderate. They will. But, but a lot of people are going to go where the prices are lower.

• 2:59:48Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 3:00:14Speaker 01

  Not too much. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm a 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, you know, they get later in life and they feel like they, they've missed opportunities to do something that endures. And I sympathize a lot because I, I'm old. I got married fairly old. So I understand all that. I, nothing human is alien to me, as Terrence said. But I don't fear it. No.

• 3:00:54Lex Fridman?

  What do you hope your legacy is?

• 3:00:57Speaker 01

  It's gonna be JavaScript. I think, no, I think, you know, 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, you know, I'm not gonna oversell 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, routing around, you don't need everybody to do that. It's more like Taleb's stubborn minorities than do that. It's the lead users, Eric Ron Hippel's lead users. You can be a few percent, you can tilt the market. And that can be done in spite of the incumbents, the moneyed interests not being in favor of what you're doing.

• 3:01:42Speaker 01

  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 Robin Hood, take down the use of Robin Hood by the Wall Street Bets kids, similar. So yeah, that, that kind of spirit endures. And I think it, in some ways, it's American, right? It's, 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.

• 3:02:21Speaker 01

  But as long as things are working, we'll be like pragmatic Americans, like the Tokibor described in his writings. But if, if things get too out of whack, for one reason or another, too unequal, too oligarchic and abusive, we're gonna assert our rights. And even a few of us can do it. And even in the American Revolution, it was the minority who fought and put their, you know, lives, treasure and sacred honor at stake. It was a bunch of people went to, you know, Upper Canada, I think it was called, Ontario.

• 3:02:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's the beautiful thing. I mean, that is at the core what 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.

• 3:03:05Speaker 01

  Got to do it.

• 3:03:05Lex Fridman?

  And that's empowering. And that is the American way. That's why this country is, I believe, the greatest country. And that's not over-romantic, says it too much, but I think some special things have already happened in this country and will continue to happen.

• 3:03:19Speaker 01

  And that's And that spirit can continue, no matter, you know, who comes here, they can adopt those folkways and that spirit.

• 3:03:26Lex Fridman?

  Brendan, 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.

• 3:03:37Speaker 01

  It seems like a breeze. My pleasure.

• 3:03:40Lex Fridman?

  Thank you for listening to this conversation with Brendan Nyk. And thank you to our sponsors, Jordan Harbinger Show, Sun Basket Meal Delivery Service, BetterHelp Online Therapy, and Aidsleep Self-C cooling Mattress. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. 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.