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Brendan Eich

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2021-02-12

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2021-02-12

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1. “Robin Hood takedown the use of Robin Hood by the Wall Street bets kids similar. So yeah, that kind of spirit endures. And I think... In some ways, it's American, right? It's not hard revolutionary. It's not trying to burn the past and destroy everything. It's more like we have these certain, let's say, rights, we have duties too, so there's some debate about which comes first in American jurisprudence in the founding documents, but as long as things are working, we'll be like pragmatic Americans like De Tocque described in his writings. But if things get too out of whack for one reason or another, too unequal, too oligarchic and abusive, we're going to assert our rights. And even a few of us can do it. And even in the American Revolution, it was a minority who fought and put their lives, treasure, and sacred honor at stake. A bunch of people went to upper Canada, I think it was called, Ontario.”

   2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “It's going to be JavaScript. I think my legacy has more to do with my children and their children. I think it also has to do with web standards. It has to do with things like Brave. The things we did with Firefox, when we did, I'm not going to oversell Brave, but I think Brave is important and we'll continue to prove this in a way that counts for many decades to come. But even Firefox, whatever its future fortune, showed you can restart the browser market. This thing you said about people opting out and routing around you don't need everybody to do that. It's more like Taleb's stubborn minorities that do that. It's the lead users, Eric Von Hippo's lead users. You can be a few percent. You can tilt the market. And that can be done in spite of the incumbents that money interests not being in favor of what you're doing. So I think what we do with Firefox won't be forgotten. And it needs to be done more. And we're doing it with Brave. And you could argue that other projects are doing it in some ways blockchain is doing it.”

   2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Not too much. I mean, 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 they get later in life and they feel like they've missed opportunities to do something that endures. And I sympathize with all that because I'm old. I got married fairly old. So I understand all that. Nothing human is alien to me, as Terence said. But I don't fear it. No.”

   2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Yes, in my backyard, not in my backyard. But that's not happening as far as I can tell. And from the government to the incumbent 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 a lot of people are going to go where the prices are lower.”

   2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “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 to such a point that it's almost like, what's the movie by the South African director, Nell's Jody Foster up in the space colony? Matt Damon is the guy on the earth who has to go up. And anyway, it's about the stratification. It's about the great inequality that people in the space station have amazing medical auto docs that can extend their life or save them, cure cancer. People on the Earth are all suffering ground down and poverty. And 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 nightlives that were in the city and the condos in the city got super expensive. And I know even Google friends who are, you know, socially responsible say we should have more housing built. We should have.”

   2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “I think that's true that there will be more mobility and maybe new places that come up. I don't know if Silicon Valley has passed some sell-by date because. It did hurt. The coronavirus hurt. The lockdowns hurt in the sense that part of what keeps things going is social. And so a lot of young people, even before coronavirus, moved to San Francisco, it was very strange to watch because in the 80s we all lived in the valley and it was less populated and San Francisco was grungier. It was more like dirty hairy in the 70s.”

   2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Mark Zuckerberg. Hey, can I move to my hometown in the Midwest? And he said, okay. And they said, Oh, kind of 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.”

   2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “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. You could talk about it in the more, I think correct way, which is 13 colonies that grew. And then there's a lot of local original design anyway, the Federalist papers talk about this. There's a lot of subsidiarity. But 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 the VA team was reconstituted in Munich, which it was after Larsbach just got tired of JavaScript, that they hired in Munich or they hired PhDs in Germany and movement to Munich. With coronavirus, everyone's working for home and it's like, what a relief I can work for Google from home. But then the next shoe dropped and people started asking.”

   2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Now, you look at China, and people say what you all 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 A's and B's. So I'm an American. I'm born on the 4th of July. Really? Really? Fourth of July. Yeah. Wow.”

   2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “And this is not a story that's over yet. So, what is Silicon Valley for now? It's for the network effect, the brain trust, 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 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, 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 there are any doing that at Stanford anymore. And he said, yo, it was shocking. Some of the students got C's and D's and they were crying. It's like, yes, that's right. The precious deers can't take that at Stanford. So they get A's and B's.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “You had out of the academia, you had Shockley and then the Trader Sate and Fairchild and Intel. But now, when's the last fab that was built in the valley? Micro Unity might have been the last fab. I don't know. I haven't followed, but we build a fab in Sunnyvale and Micro Unity in starting early 90s. And now the fabs are overseas. One thing that I will say that the oligarchs have intentionally done and both parties is sort of labor and environmental protection law arbitrage by going where the labor is cheaper and the environmental laws aren't as strict. And, you know, that's polluted the hell out of parts of China, but it's made things, you can make cheaper junk.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “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.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “It's narrow, and they didn't plan the roads, right? They got rid of public transportation in LA, like who framed Roger Rabbit cartoon show. They used to have trolley cars in Portland too. The oil companies and the DOD conspired to build highways and make cars dominant. And the rights of way are long gone. Like Elon's going to go underground. And I wish him well. That's probably the only way to do it now.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “It's in crushing debt due to the lockdowns. It's got the highest taxes. That's got to matter. People will do flee taxes. It's got likely fires every year because of the deadfall. 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. Just, I would say corruption at all levels, especially up to the governor, who famously was eating at the French laundry in a... Claim to be outside, it was inside, and they were 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 leaderships or does it 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.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “I think even Austin's getting overheated, I hear, and I've had relatives and friends move to Texas within the last few months. Texas as a whole is a big place, and people are moving to Florida. There's a big movement toward Miami, Peter Teal, Keith, 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.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “I 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 USV Microsoft case was finally settled and the penalties were put in place. And yet antitrust has a role to play. Those penalties caused Microsoft to kind of turn away from the web. They did Windows Vista and they thought the web's too painful. We got punished in court and we had to standardize things with those icky standards people. So they ran back to proprietary lock-in and Windows Vista flopped. It was late. It was bloated Longhorn, remember? Now what Google 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.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “The country's kind of broken. I don't know how to fix that. The oligarchs have run wild, in my opinion. And big tech is in the antitrust doc. What's 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. Microsoft almost got split up, right? The judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, he overreached. He didn't hold a hearing about the remedy. He just said, I'm 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 OpsCo office, Word and Excel. And that would have been a huge blow to Microsoft.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “If you tried to say that as a Trump supporter in November after the election, you'd get banned from Twitter. But now time in its Twitter account is saying, you know, we saved the day. It's AFL-CIO and big business, the Veter Business Bureau got together. Kept Trump from spreading fake news.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “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. Sort of like the hedge funds sorting Game Stop. Looked bad, you know, you're seeing a piece in Time magazine this week that's like basically saying, yeah, we interfere with the election, but it was great, aren't we good? I don't know if you've seen this piece yet.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Yeah, monopoly capitalism or cartel. You get this with the Robin Hoods and the hedge funds. You get sort of the money interest takeover and kind of abuse their power and wear out their welcome. So how do you get around that? You have to have either new land to go to, which some people's ancestors, not mine, did, to found the country. mostly Irish German. You have new virtual space people go to. And that requires an ISP or a COLO center or Amazon to host you. It requires domain name, registrar who will not strike you. And so when Parlor was taken down, I thought that was egregious. Parlor, it was not well designed and I tried it out because I tried all these things. Yeah. 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.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “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 Eustace 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. We're like, no, Dummy type that query. And it's like. Okay, Google, you might want to dial back that ego a little bit, but yes, you do see all the queries and you can improve them and you can find the best results. And that was Google's forte. When we did the Firefox deal in 2004, Google was really good. And over time, SEO, which is an adversarial game”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “So, what you really want is that kind of user first subsidiarity, that subjectivity. I want my social networks to be composited in some multisocial 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.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “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. I don't care if you call them neo-Nazis, some of them could be doing illegal things. And you don't want them colonizing because it'll ruin your reputation in this for your business.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “They'll have terms of use and they'll say they own it, but if they zap you on one and you're still on the other, your friends find you and the browser could preserve a combined view. You could resurrect almost across networks”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “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 sort of relationship?”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “All the publishers and do that. They're trying with accelerated mobile profile MP. They're trying to pull the publishers. They're like, oh, you poor publishers don't know how to make your pages fast. Put them on our AMP system. We'll give you extra placement in the search carousel. That's an antitrust problem for one. But it's also publishers we talk to hate it because it degrades their brand. Now they look like a gig writer wrote a piece that's got Google's framing and AMP URL on top of it. And they're trying to fix that too. But it just looks like Google's borgifying all these publishers and they don't want to be plugged into the Borg cube. They want to build up their own brand and have loyal readers. So I'm in favor of giving the users power to help all the publishers in this 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.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “People walk so much, and it saves the network, which means data plan, it saves battery because the radio consumes your battery when it's running more to do those requests. And it's just stunning how many there are. Like some of my Google friends were like, oh, that's just that bad site. They'll fix it. And you actually do a survey of web pages. And they're like, mostly like that. I know Google engineers could make everything super efficient, but they can't, especially in antitrust court, do it. They cannot take over.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Certs, but they're not using them for ad confirmations because they don't want to blow up their own business, and they need to let some of the publishers they serve have other ad tech scripts on the page. And so they're kind of caught. And this is something I realized doing Brave. I thought, what's Google's innovator's dilemma apart from just being mature and having trouble innovating? It's that they have come to depend on this ad tech system that has all these vendors that are publishers rely on because publishers aren't technical enough. And I feel for the publishers, but I realize the users have to come first. And if you give the users a better browser that's faster, then you'll get enough users to give back or support publishers. The speed and the battery savings and the data plant savings are significant. There's so much bad JavaScript involved in ad tech that if you block it and you sort of chop off what's called the programmatic waterfall which chains a bunch of requests.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “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 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 crowd, but over time, an adversary can pull you out of the crowd. This doesn't look like it's going to become a standard. Like Apple brave, Mozilla, we're not going to just say, oh, Google, you saved us. You've invented the privacy sandbox, so we'll all just adopt it. Not going to be that easy. It's going to be more like pieces of what we do in Brave, the synonymous ad matching or the blind signature cryptography we use to confirm the ad impressions. That's David Chum'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 Chao Mian blind signatures.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Yet protocols are easy to copy and that are meant to be interoperable. So there's a risk there. And the loyal users might be tricked into leaving you or they might, because of that distribution power, you might end up getting stomped. I don't know. I can't predict the future. I think antitrust is back on the case finally in the US and certainly in Europe DG Comp is doing its thing. So I'm hopeful that we'll have a period of innovation. People were talking like Elizabeth Warren was talking about breaking up the tech companies very clearly. Now she didn't win and I suspect that won't happen. But I also suspect that Google might be smart enough to see they should do something more than just put privacy perfume on Chrome. They should maybe get rid of Double Click or something, divest something. I don't know. It might happen.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “But that centralized your Patreon. So there's censorship hazards, there's a 5% fee. What if that were a web standard? What if Brave pioneered at first and we took 3% and we did it in a way that was through your browser so we couldn't censor it?”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “And if those sites verify in sort of 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 a cross-modal browser. I don't know that they'll all compete well on the quality of the ads, the quality of the ad blocking and tracking protection. Those are subject to competition. It'll take a while to standardize them. But I think that would be a better world. It would have less counterparty risk, fewer fee takers in the middle, really just the browser. We're taking 30% sort of the App Store split. And if we get bigger, maybe we can take even less. Social networks, creators. If you look at YouTubers, a lot of them, 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.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “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. 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 could take some out, give the rest back. They can add basic attention tokens to give back. Some of them turn off the ads because you just don't like ads, but they put in $20 a month.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “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 web page, it's just the link to an EdgeCache, and there are many such EdgeCaches. 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.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Machine learning in the browser that you can opt into, can study all that in a very complete way. A better job than Google does. Google has 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 line. 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 Bays, then you can match intense signals, intense signals from those data feeds, searches, the queries, the history, how much you're scrolling down a page, how much you redid a search. It's all blind browser algorithm. We don't see that data. And then pick the best ad from a fixed catalog per day. And the catalog is fixed across a large population per day, and it only updates once a day because new offers come in and old ones expire. Sometimes every week or every month. And that catalog, and there can be many such catalogs, is sold by our direct sales team.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “And I noticed on the iPad I use Apps List. The smaller the screen, the browser got handicapped by Apple and Android both. And it also can be slower or not have the right affordances, the user interface or 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. 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.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “With the basic attention token is to make a hybrid system that's stronger than blockchain alone. It's the browser and the blockchain. And the browser is this trusted 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 fat clients for things. I use Slack on macOS and it's like a browser. It's based on an Electron framework we used to use. And it's just not that great. Some of the people at Brave use Slack in Brave as a”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “It's not that big I don't know how this will play out. I think crypto is here to stay. I think the beauty of being able to send peer to peer without any bank in the middle, without any huge wire charge and two-day delay and all that nonsense, it's beautiful. And I've used it and I love it. But we're pragmatist and 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. Instead imputes to the user's browser some of the revenue and allows that browser to steer it back to the creators. Now we do have to identify the creators. But as things improve and who knows how it'll play out, there should come a day when this full vision can be done more fully on a blockchain. But regulations and the practicalities today's blockchains, which are not that fast and not anonymous over time, you fingerprint yourself over time. We do some of this with the browser. So one of the ideas”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Yeah. Now, with Coinbase members, you sign up and they know you and they comply with the regulations. They're regulated money services business. 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.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “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.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “Just have much cheaper rates steal all that traffic. And that facilitates fraud, facilitates fake news, all sorts of problems. So Grape blocks it, and then we give users the ability to give back. And because we invented the basic attention token in Ethereum, we can do this three-way split. And we can give users a share of the revenue. And if they want to take it out, they can. Now, unfortunately for us and for all blockchain, the regulators are saying we're going to have to know who you are. There's the Treasury Department's FinCEN agency. There's the Office of Foreign Asset Controls OFAC. There's the other regulators in the federal government that take a very dark look at things like money laundering and sending money to someone named Osama bin Laden.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “And that's like the opposite of what the App Store does. The App Store takes 30% and gives the publisher 70%. So pretty broken. In the old days of Super Station TBS, the media owner would get 85%. So these splits had become really unbalanced and the middle players, the ad tech vendors are taking out way too much money. And they're doing something worse, which has been noticed. They're letting not just the malware vendors, but also the ad fraud side, which fakes the publishers. And Clickbait merchants come in and steal traffic from good sites. Because once you have a certain audience identified at one site, Jason Calcanus told me this about his experience with, I guess it was in Gadget. Which site he was running, but once he started using an ad partner that was sharing his audience information across multiple sites, he saw his competitors stealing all his traffic. And then what's worse is the clickbait sites.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “Hard. It was like, do I buy $5 a month? But the fee is like $450. I better buy in larger batches. Then 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 switch to Ethereum, you can have smart contracts. The Bitcoin system is not turned complete, so what you can do with the script is more limited. But you can still do sort of clever things even with Bitcoin script. What we wanted to do was sort of a three-sided ecosystem. We wanted users, creators or publishers, and advertisers. And we wanted the advertisers to put money in just like they do today, but without going through the Googles and the app nexuses and all these other ad tech companies, because those companies take out a huge cut. The Guardian in the UK once did an experiment for a month. They bought out their own ad space. They put in a pound and they were paid 30 pence. 70% was coming out to the intermediary vendors they were using.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “But publishers are not that technical and 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 Blendel 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 way 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 very congested and very slow to confirm and the fees got very high. And a lot of users who were not Bitcoin maximalists or even experienced, we helped them out by embedding a Coinbase buy widget and they had the income to buy, but it was.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “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 get upcharged for the digital. And there was no break. There was no connection between them.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Flash combined package or into some giant image, and then it all gets sent out. That's not how it works. All the ads you see on the web are placed in your browser by it 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. And how many 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.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Your job sad but true goodbye and what could 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 this sort of passive servant of these big tech companies? Why is it a blind runtime for ad tech JavaScripts, including from Google? Why doesn't it block some? And if it blocks some, why can't it reconnect users, readers, fans with publishers, creators, websites? Why can't it help people make direct payments or even possibly get an ad revenue share for private ads that are placed in the browser? The ads are all placed in the browser. Some people have this sort of model that the server is painting the ad into some”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “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, malvertizing, where Fake advertisers put malware payloads 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.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “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, you know, it's permitting or some other vendors we use or permitting ad fraud. And so a fake New York Times is getting paid by the marketer running an ad that a bot clicks on. And the real New York Times, it's supposed to get the ad doesn't get it.”

    2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source