This Week in Startups - E1111: Brewster Kahle on archiving the entire Internet, creating the Wayback Machine, protocols over platforms, microschools & more

Episode Date: September 18, 2020

Check out the Internet Archive: https://archive.org FOLLOW Brewster: https://twitter.com/brewster_kahle FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

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If you're interested in investing, you can join Our Crowd for free at OUR-C-O-W-D.com slash twist. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this week in Startups. It's September 2020. And we're very lucky to have our guest on the program today. He's an internet legend. And he has been building, I think, his life's work for the last couple of decades, the internet archive, which many of you know as the way back machine, the ability to look back and see what was on the web in the past because it's all lost. And you may or may not know that Bruce or Cal,

also worked on one of the predecessors to the World Wide Web, something called Waze, which eventually I think was, Ways Inc was bought by AOL. And then he did Alexa, which tracked the amount of traffic and ranked the internet. That was bought by Amazon before they had Alexa, the virtual assistant. And he basically has been around the internet since before it was commonly referred to the internet. And prior to that, worked with Danny Hillis at Thinking Machines, which I think was back in the 80s. They were creating the first parallel computers. And he studied at MIT with Legends, Marvin Minsky, and Danny Hillis.

Welcome to the program, Brewster Cal. How are you? Thank you. It's great to be here. Yeah. I mean, if you look back on your career now, it seems like there's a theme here. how would you describe your life's work at this point, you know,

now having this, I guess, 20, 30 year, you know, run in the internet. The idea was to build a library of everything. Can we build the global brain? Could we build the memex that Vannevar Bush dreamed of,

of having all information at your fingertips? Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee. it's been a recurring theme in the technology era, but of course, the Library of Alexandria was the original of the, what would happen if you actually had all information at your fingertips? So that was the dream that I signed onto,

and it's been kind of a strange trip out there. You know, it's gone through periods of, you know, mass commercialization of sort of the 90s, and then we sort of hit the Facebook, MySpace era of social media. So nothing quite comes out the way you think it would. And if you look at that strange journey, you were in the entrepreneurial space.

You sold a couple of companies and you did okay, which is great as a founder. But the Internet Archive, I think, becomes the lasting legacy. Explain to the audience what the mission of the Internet Archive is and why it's so important to you. The idea of the Internet Archive is to build universal access to all knowledge. Can we make it so that anybody curious enough that wants to have access to anything ever published, say a book or a lecture that was made available, or old web pages,

or can we make it so that people could go and learn from it and build on it and then make new things that are worthy of sharing? So that's the mission statement of the Internet Archive at Archive.org. And mostly we've been doing the Wayback Machine. That's how most people think of it is, and that's basically a web collection of hundreds of billions of web pages. And it's used by hundreds of thousands of people a day. And it's been interesting that it's become such a staple of journalism because so many people, well, they try to remove things from the web or change things.

average life of a web page is only 100 days before it's changed or deleted. So the idea of having the new generation publishing instead of clay tablets or papyrus or paper, it's digital and it's shifts and changes. And there's only one copy. It's usually just with the publisher's website. And that's not good enough. One's almost always the wrong answer. We're going to need multiple copies. And then you also have this tragedy where sometimes, you know, we saw this in the 90s happen very often. Company would go out of business. They had all of this incredible content, all this incredible knowledge, whether it was a blog company or a social network, and then poof, all of that knowledge, all of that learning, all of that art, science, whatever it was,

commentary is gone. So you have like multiple potential leaks in the system we have, whereas with books, we would print thousands or tens of thousands of them. They'd be distributed across libraries. So if somebody's copy was burnt of, you know, a tell of two cities, we know there were other copies somewhere, right? And this actually, paradoxically, the internet was made for redundancy, but because of the silos, it doesn't actually have redundancy as an internet as a platform, but not for the content on it, correct? Yes, you're absolutely right, me, the, we had in the paper era, there are lots of libraries. If one burns down, there are others.

And so the web, bless it, it was very easy to go and use, but it shifted an enormous amount of control into publishers' hands. So there's only one website, and there was one URL. And so it doesn't get copied. So we have this problem with journal literature. or a books, that if a publisher wants a book gone, they can just take it away. And it's, it's like it reached into every library and everybody's private collections, he yanked it out. And so the idea of a library working this way is kind of frightening to think about, but it's

exactly what we're getting used to with Netflix or Spotify. And it's even worse in the case of a lot of websites that go and encourage other people to put their photos on them or their dreams and whatever, whether it's GeoCities back in the day, gone. Yahoo video, there was a Yahoo video. Did you know there was a Google video? I remember, yeah. And there were about 7 million

videos on it until they turned it off. And there was Apple that had Mobile Me, which was make your own websites until they didn't want it anymore and they just turned off everybody else's websites that had been counting on these

billion dollar companies to last and keep their services going. So asking publishers and now these platform companies to do the job of a library is kind of a fool's errand. So the idea of the Internet Archive is to try to build that up. And the Brave Browse, they did something kind of awesome. They made it so that if you hit a 404 document not found in your Brave browser, it goes in queries the Internet Archive way back machine automatically. What a killer feature. Hey, it may be gone on the web. But do you want the old version? We'd love to see Chrome and Firefox go and sort of make the web more reliable than what it's become.

And many of these social networks are black boxes where you have to be logged in to see the content. Now, Twitter is open. So if I were to pull up Twitter.com slash POTUS, I could see the president's tweets there. but the president could delete tweets or any public official could delete tweets and they often do that and then those changes will not be recorded in the history books but other social networks like Facebook they make it very difficult because you have to be logged in in order to record what's going on there so how does the internet archive deal with specifically Twitter and Facebook because of these two different it's really challenging and especially things like a Facebook

which morphs for everybody that sees it. So that every time anybody that sees it, you're seeing a completely different Facebook. It's customized to just you in your bubble. And so it's particularly challenging. So we archive the publicly accessible Facebook and Twitter that we can. A lot of those platforms don't make it particularly easy, but we do what we can to try to make an,

to make an enduring access to the cultural record. Right now, you know, especially during this pandemic thing, we're all staring at screens all the time. It's sort of, that's now become our world. Now, everybody's a homeschooler now, and how does this all work? And we're trying to make things that are available through screens to be as good and reliable, and you can, as we can.

And I'd say overall we're failing. I just, you see sort of the bubbles, the fake news, the obvious corruption going on from foreign actors, domestic actors, people thinking they're doing the right thing by spamming the world. We've got some real problems to our digital infrastructure that I think we're seeing some of the, what happens when that goes on over the last several years, not just during this pandemic. So we've got to fix it. And the Internet Archives piece of this is to try to make enduring access.

Another is to try to provide context around what you're seeing. If things have been fact-checked, wouldn't it be nice to be able to see those fact-checks on there? You may not believe the fact-checks if you're in a, you know, if you're in that kind of mode, but at least it's made available to you. All right. When we get back from this quick break, I want to know how corporations with their over-referencing, bearing sort of interpretation of copyright, look at the internet archive and then how you navigate that with these big rights holders and social networks, which have terms of service,

which are onerous, and they also have unlimited legal budgets when we get back on this week in startups. Hey, everybody, you know Dell has been sponsoring this week in startups and they've been a tremendous supporter of me for many years. And I have been a tremendous supporter of Dell's. And we're very lucky today to have Mobile Aji. So, Cumbi on the program, and he runs Dell for entrepreneurs. You have Dell for finance.

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That's important to us. But more importantly, we also look at the fact that, you know, have they been able to maybe raise like a million dollars plus in VC funding throughout the last 12 months? So there's a part of the key requirements to look at to make sure that, you know, we can get behind them and empower them to do more. saved up to 43% when you take an extra 5% off at launch.co slash Dell. And while you're there, you can also register for a free IT consultation and be entered in to win a $200 Amazon gift card. All right, Brewster Cal is with us. Legend of the Internet when I was coming up in the 90s. We were watching the folks from MIT and Mark Andreessen and basically build the

infrastructure of the internet, which then we got to build on top of. And so it's a privilege to get to talk to Brewster about how he sees the future of archiving this incredible asset and the importance it has to democracy. I noticed a couple of my old zines, like cyber surfer magazines I worked on the 90s, some of them had been scanned and put up there. How does the internet archive acquire something like magazines that were out there in the 90s that are no longer around and then scan them or movies. I noticed there are some Kurosawa films that were up on the Internet Archive.

How do you acquire information? And then how do you deal with rights holders who might say, hey, we don't want you to archive this stuff. It's a two-part question there. So the Internet Archive goes and crawls a lot of materials from the World Wide Web and puts them up in the wayback machine for free access at web.archive.org. But also on Archive.com, there's an upload button.

so you can go and put things up and sometimes people put just fabulous things and sometimes they put things that shouldn't be up there and there are different signals for figuring out what really belongs in our library on the internet archive and one of them is they can become

fantastically popular. If they become fantastically popular and start to melt down our servers then we'd look at it and sometimes it's not, you know, it's some current movie or something, so we'll take it down. And so we do try to find things that, at least that get overly popular. We will examine those. And then others, people will write to us and say, no, you've got to take things down.

And we deal with it in terms of going, is like, all right, is that something that they own? And if it is, then generally take it down. it's, you know, if it's a public figure in the wayback machine, then that may actually make some balancing calls in all of this. But we've been dealing with the, the takedown issues now for 25 years, as we've, so it's, it's just trying to make a system that works. And in general, libraries and publishing have always worked in parallel. There are certainly some publishers that, that think libraries are not necessary because their publishers are doing everything that libraries should or everything that in a library should be able to be retracted from a library under some kind of license.

That's kind of awesome. But I think a lot of us remember what libraries are for in society as a culture and why they play a different role. And they're just the – so we're not trying to replace the publishing infrastructure. In fact, libraries are completely dependent on the public and publishing infrastructure. Like 20% of book publishing revenues comes from libraries and the big trade publishers. So libraries really keep the whole system going and preserve the materials. So if things become too hot out of a library, then that's usually some reason to sort of worry about it.

And there are things that we do take down. If an artist regrets a piece of work they did or wants the refreshed version to exist in the world, let's say an artist like Mark Knopfler, he had in his, I Want My MTV Song, you know, some derogatory words that he was using that he quoted somebody as saying, but they may not want that to exist in the world right now because of cancel culture. And how does the Internet Archive look at something like that? you know, a word, you have this word policing culture and words change over time and they hurt people's feelings and they trigger people. And now you might be caught in the middle of that where

somebody put a piece of art into the world that had certain words or certain ideas. And now that person, the artist themselves says, I want to change that. I don't want that to exist. But history should have that version exist. I would think in your mind. Do you have to deal with that to the artist themselves saying, hey, can you please not let this exist in the world? I changed my mind. it changed my heart. Mostly this, all of that back and forth tends to happen among the major platforms because they're, you know, they're dealing with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of downloads of these things and all that. The library tends to stay kind of in the background, and that's sort of where it's supposed to be. The Internet Archive is, well, it's an archive. It's,

you know, not the most exciting thing. But there are issues that do come up in our sphere, and we try to react in empathetic way and try to understand. understand what's going on out there. And so we try to keep things up, but we're also not sort of ideologically so rigid that it goes against sort of where we're all trying to get. I mean, as the whole digital wave has sort of come across, there's been these different phases of it all.

And we're all just trying to figure it out. And I'd say the Internet Archive, by being a nonprofit, there's no money involved, we're trying to do the right thing, and though many people may think we're doing the wrong thing, but at least hopefully people are giving us the benefit of the doubt. It's not an advertising-driven model. We're not trying to glue people to our screens. And I think that gets us a long way. If people are trying to figure out whether they're being taken advantage of, And if they feel like they are, they'll throw things at you, whether it's copyright or lawyers or storm you or do whatever, or send a billionaire after you. There's something that is, we're, we try to step back from that. So we're trying to make sure that the Internet Archive does not look like it's an organization that's trying to take advantage of anybody. It's an interesting thing. Intent and being fair really do matter in when it comes to the law. I've always explained this to people like, hey, when you're doing fair use, the first word is fair, right? And fair use of copyrighted materials, it's pretty well established what that four-part test is.

But I was always amazed that it's up to interpretation. And if people want to go to the mat and actually do a fair use lawsuit, and most people do not, they just want to be treated fairly. So your intent is archival. Your intent is not to disrupt their ability to do commerce or do business in the world. So if you have a fish concert or a dead show from the 70s, like, that's just there so it doesn't get lost into the ether, right? I mean, the intent is not to monetize it or sell it to anybody, just to preserve it for future generations to hear that one track that, you know, Garcia just perfected, right? Well, actually, you brought up a good contrast. There's the live music archive on the Internet Archive is fantastically popular.

There's thousands of bands, but probably the most prominent is the Grateful Dead, which started this whole area of non-commercial distribution of concert recordings. And they've basically given the OK for things to be on the Internet Archive. All the other bands have given like explicit emails OK. And Fish, I think it was Fish, originally said, yes, let's do this. And then they wrote back to us, this was early days. So this is now probably close to 20 years ago. Said, hey, we're going to start selling all of our concert recordings.

You know, would you take them down from the archive? We said, sure, right? I mean, what we want is universal access to all knowledge. And while they're trying to hawk it, then, you know, they pulled back the permission. And we're fine with that. But we find that often having things. things available on the Internet Archive as well as being sold doesn't tend to interrupt the selling. It's a yes and. And yeah, there are a lot of people that sort of think, oh, my God,

if there's one copy, one place, it's going to be in billions of people's hands immediately. It turns out to not be true. So, you know, you look at the Internet Archive has a little download counts of just how many times have been, you know, accessed. And we have a lot of lot of things that have been accessed hundreds of times. We think that's awesome. And then somebody picks it up and moves it to YouTube and it gets downloaded tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of times. And that's okay, you know, as long as it's, you know, say it's some of the public domain films that we've paid to digitize. And so there's very different paths to try to make, make this whole thing work. And I just hope that we don't get so.

infuriated and tweet-a-matic to go and just always yell at people all the time, which starts to feel a little bit of the world that we're in now and try to figure out how to make a system work. By being a library, for those of us old enough to remember sort of how libraries work, what they're for, I think that's an analogy that works for people and we're true to it. Hey, when we get back from this quick break, I want to know how you think about software. Obviously, software gets written and then copies are on floppy disks back from the 80s and 90s. And then today we have apps, but then apps get kicked out of the app store or the company gets shut down like Path or another company. And then where does that app go?

Where does that software go? Or video games that existed and the ROMs are gone. I'm curious when we get back from this commercial break, how you think about archiving software itself. We get back on this week at startups. From websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. With Squarespace, you already know that you can blog and publish content as you like. You can promote your business and now it's upcoming events, do special projects like I do all the time.

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And if you're out there and you're looking to build a project to do e-commerce, special project event, blog, whatever it is, you know what to do. Go to Squarespace.com slash twist. Okay, we're back with Brewster Cal, founder of the Internet Archive, Internet Legend. And we're talking about backing up our legacy and backing up the world's knowledge, not just searching and indexing the world's knowledge like Google does a great job of, but actually making sure that that knowledge is stored and saved for all time. Just out of technical perspective, is all of this on EC2 on servers, or are they at servers in that Internet Archive Building in the Sunset District of San Francisco that I drive by sometimes? Where are the servers in the hard drives? Well, we don't just have one copy because one is the wrong number. But yes, actually, a lot of the data, it's about 60 petabytes of data.

So PETA is what comes after, Terra, Terra, PETA, 60 petabytes. And if you go into the building, which is this gorgeous building with pillars, and it was an old Christian science church. And you go into the great room with the, you know, the hall, the beautiful. And in the back, there are actually servers that have lights blinking on them. And so it's kind of like open stacks of a library. You can actually see, you never get to see somebody's servers, right there in the clouds and wherever the heck that is. And it's, it's this, they're beautiful. And one thing I love about it, I've been building supercomputers my whole career.

And the thing about this one is the lights actually mean something. Every time a light blinks, is somebody either uploading something or downloading something from the archive. Right. So I think it's just glowing books. So it's books that are glowing. If anybody is reading that book anywhere in the world, then it glows. Anyway, it's beautiful. Is that building enough to store all the footprint you need?

And then how do you think about 10 years from now, 100 years from now? It's actually not already we've gotten too big for it. But it does hold a lot. And because hard drives are continuing to get more and more dense, and it has an added benefit that it heats the building. So we actually use the energy from the servers to heat the building. So it's saving money and being green all at the same time. That's where we can actually see the servers being used over the multi-gigabit fiber that connects

the building to the net. And do you have an endowment of sorts that throws off capital to do this? Or are you every year just trying to keep the lights on for the archive? Yeah, the Internet Archive is funded based on a lot of library, about 600 libraries and museums and organizations that give us money to archive web pages for them through the archive and service, but also grants. But a big and growing part is the donations we're getting from users. So it's kind of the Wikipedia model, the NPR sort of, please. And it is, I love that particularly because it puts us in the right direction in the sense that we want to be as

useful as we can to everybody we can. But some of the grants come from the big foundation, a lot of come from some of the new ones. A lot of the crypto guys have basically been extremely, and it's almost all the guys, but there's probably other, a lot of it's anonymous, have been contributing to the Internet Archive to basically build infrastructure. And we see the Internet as part of that infrastructure. What is the yearly budget to maintain it? Is it cost just to keep a million a year. So the internet archive is over 100 people.

A lot of them are scanning books and other things. But it's actually kind of challenging to do. But on the other hand, I'd say we're a bargain. So if you take the San Francisco Public Library is about $170 million a year. Really? I didn't realize it was that big of budget. So for a fraction of that, you do all these. the Alameda Public Library. That's about the cost of the Internet Archive. And we're about the

300th most popular website. So there are 300 websites that are more popular than the Internet archive, but there are hundreds of millions that are less. Yeah, I mean, and I could sign up right now and do a reoccurring donation, correct, if I just go to the Archives. Yes, well, thank you for asking. Why, sure enough. So go to Archive.org, hit donate. We take anything and everything. But also a lot of people contribute their time. They upload things that are important. They might donate some money, some stock, some crypto. And that this is the way that something like the Internet Archive survives in the long term is that it's wanted and needed by all of us. That's the way that we're going to survive and thrive. Yeah. And I'm just going in here right now to

archive.org slash donate, where you can all go and just putting in my own $25. dollar reoccurring monthly donation is a no-brainer given the value I get from it. And, you know, I'm a spot of user. Once in a while, I just need to look at a web page that doesn't exist anymore. And I go there. Let's talk about software, which I tease before the break. I noticed that there were some software. There's a software section and you have ROMs, things like video games that don't exist

anymore. Oh, yeah. Talk to us a little bit about what you've accomplished so far in basically backing up software. And then what you have. haven't figured out yet because I think the app stores are a particularly hard. Oh, yes. The internet is solved. So we started with the old stuff by working with these communities.

There's a community of people that had been building emulators that were kind of maim and these awesome emulators. But they were difficult to use, frankly. And it took, you know, some real dedicated effort. And there are other communities that were dedicated to the Amiga, the Commodore 64, the Apple 2 and they or some of the old game consoles that they went and you know basically took the the bits off of the proms to try to get them into the emulators and working with these different communities there's this guy named jason scott that works for the archive and he said i think

i figured it out week ago and emulate those games those old platforms the apple two or ibm pc in your browser by using javascript and he said no way that's never going to work. He said, yeah, yeah, give me a little time and no budget. And let me see if I can just work with these different communities to get it to go. And they took MAME, which is this emulator software written in C, and they used in scripten to cross-compile it into JavaScript. Oh, my God.

And then got it. So when you go to thearchive.org and go to the Historic Games Collection or go to the IBM, you click on it, it downloads the emulator in JavaScript, and it boots an IBM PC in your browser. It's just surreal that this works. And then it goes to the Internet Archive as a virtual floppy drive to go and get the software. And then download that into your browser and you're playing Oregon Trail. Interestingly, that's my experience.

My wife and I knew about Oregon Trail from the 80s and 90s when we had that game on a floppy disk. we told our daughter about it. She was obsessed with it. And the way we found it was, if you go to the Internet Archive, you can find the MS-DOS version of it and hit power and hit play and just play it in the emulator right there. Your childhood popping right up for you to see whether it's Atari or Kamur, 64, all that software, not disappearing. Okay, Jason, I got to ask. Did you ever win at Oregon Trail or did you always die somewhere by Indians or dysentery? Yeah, always died.

And then you also have Prince of Persia on there, which is a really good book out right now about the story of the creator of Prince of Persia that like the strike. Oh, I've been trying. I can't get that to. I die every time. When we put up these, it was so fun. So Jason Scott got all this together and we sort of came up with, you know, a few thousand games and, and some of the old productivity software. I'd actually never. Oh, right.

I'd use Excel and I'd used Lotus 1, 2, 3. But VisiCalc. VisiCalc. It was the original spreadsheet. I'd never actually been. So I thought it was going to be, people were going to, wow, you can actually use VisicCalc. It's like, nope, it was Oregon Trail. And so people just went for Oregon Trail and it melted our servers, and we had to go and

reinforce it and put copies up. And it was so fun as people were trying to discover and kind of relive the 80s and 90s, so a little bit of nostalgia, but also be able to show it to their kids. It's like, hey, and some of it actually is worth reusing. The cool thing about Oregon Trail is you always lose. It is just such a non-2020 where everybody's a winner. Here's a trophy for showing up. It's like, no, you die.

Okay, let's figure out another way for you to die. And so anyway, I have met a few people that have actually won an Oregon Trail, but I think it's just evidence of misspent youth. All right. And when we get back from this final break, I want to talk about the app revolution and all of these stories and ephemeral by design content that we're now losing unless people happen to screen record and how you think about that next challenge at the Internet Archive.

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Hey, everybody, Bruce Tichel is with us and as we round third base here with the internet legend, just want to remind everybody that you will use the internet archive

at some point. You've probably used it many times. Maybe I didn't realize you're using the way-back machine. And that it is worthy of your consideration for a donation, especially if you've got equity in companies or crypto, go ahead and ship it. Ship it over at archive.org and make a donation and really be part of

the solution here of preserving our legacy. All this stuff is important. Hey, two more things I want to talk to you about. One is apps and two is microschools. Let's go quickly through apps. You know, you have these things like Snapchat and stories, TikTok, people record stuff. These corporations own it. It's in an archive somewhere. They have access to it for all time, but it kind of goes away at any point in time, they can just take away your YouTube channel, take away your Snapchat, turn off your Instagram account.

How are you, do you have the ability to, uh, go deep into apps to kind of extract that data or is that too hard? You have to wait for somebody to post it on a website. Apps are the enemy. You know, the,

if there's protocols and standards are our friends and silos, proprietary, uh, locked down. I mean, you think of the, you know, what's the anti-web? And I would say it's the iPhone.

Yeah. So the iPhone is locked down on every level. So it's all segmented into different apps. So there's no links that go between apps, really. I mean, it's really, it's not designed for that. And they approve what's on it and what's not on it. That's kind of awesome. There's no law involved there.

And then you can't change the operating system or it's called jailbreaking. That's loops. And then it goes, over the cell phone network, which we know some of the problems there. So it's sort of, that's kind of the anti-worldwide web. So we have to really keep an open internet going if we're going to have lots of winners. Otherwise, we're going to end up with very few winners. And I don't, I like games with lots of winners. So we don't want to just one monopoly and oh, well, we'll all win by owning stock in it. That's sort of the Milo Minderbinder from catch 22. Is that's not the way to make,

a rich ecosystem work. So we're really into the whole open and commons and providing services and structures around the commons. I mean, this is why podcasting has been so great, right? I mean, podcasting used open standards.

Dave Weiner worked on RSS and OPML and attachments there. And you just think about that one stroke of genius where we put attachments into RSS feeds and all of a sudden an entire industry exploded. Podcasting. Just from that one little open source standard. We had RSS feeds for blogs and for content and title, subject,

metadata, whatever. And then, boop, we just added an attachment. And now an entire industry. And now what's happening? Spotify wants to unravel that and not have the RSS feeds and not have, you know, then buy off, you know, specific podcasters and then put them in a black box. Yeah, Mike Maznick had a great essay on, let's have protocols, not platforms. Absolutely. And then, unfortunately, it's harder to make protocols that don't suck and make it so that they continue to get better. I mean, large part, people are giving up on email because we've just had such troubles with it and it hasn't evolved. So now we're using Slack.

So I think what we really want, it's decentralized systems. I think of it as sort of, I want blank but decentralized. And the Internet Archive has been working on decentralized web technology. How do you go and take this idea of the JavaScript running in your browser to do a peer-to-peer network for the whole world? web so that things live everywhere and nowhere. So there's multiple copies of things everywhere. That's the system that actually we should have built originally, but frankly, they weren't really available at the time of Tim Berners-leads doing the web. And we have to make it so people can publish and make some money out there. Because right now this ad-based model is

causing real problems. Why is the ad-based model so problematic? Because it tends to go towards winner-takes-all. You see things hoovered up. magazines you go to a you know if you actually see old old time you know paper magazines and a grocery store they're often owned by very few players because they control the ad networks that that sell ads across all of them or newspapers there used to be lots of little newspaper companies and they got hoovered up and then they all sort of crumbled so it's you end up with these monopoly structures um if the money goes through uh too few hands you don't have a market. You don't have an open system that works.

The crypto thing is kind of a good API for money out there on the net. So let's build on it. Yeah, I mean, the brave browser came up as like a really interesting foray into that, the ability to just donate or to give a little bit of cryptocurrency just when you're giving your attention to a webpage, it seems like a no-brainer of an idea. Actually, that's how we both know AOL started, where they were charging three, four, five bucks an hour,

and they would just give 15% of that, 20% of that, to whoever the content owner was. Absolutely. They had a royalty. I love the royalty system. That's how books worked for a long, long time until, well,

fairly recently now we have monopolies again. But was there, it was easy to purchase, but a little bit of money made it all the way back up to the author, usually too little. That's nothing new. But we had a distributed, decentralized system.

And AOL replicated that by, by going and paying people for being on the platform until they turned a corner and said, no, let's charge for people to get to our eyeballs. Remember that awful period of the 90s when they talked about eyeballs? Yeah, they would just sell their auto channel to one person, sell their music channel to one person, just whoever the highest bidder was could just buy out the entire inventory. And they flip the model and it's the classic ad-based model and it's just not their way to go. You must be encouraged by watching the emergence of email newsletters, and journalists going and just, you know, because they, I mean, it seems to be because of cancel

culture to a certain extent, you have Matt Taibi and, you know, other journalists who maybe are too controversial, maybe they're Overton windows a little too wide for their current publications. And they've gone and then started their own newsletters and get a thousand, two thousand true fans to pay 10 bucks a month. All of a sudden, you're making a better living than you did when you were writing for a publication. then those emails could make their way into the archive. Do you have somebody signing up for emails? Yeah, pushing people into being on the fringes to try to do something as normal as paying your rent.

It just isn't the way to go. So we need mechanisms to go and have people be able to sell things. We have this problem with book publishers. Most of them won't sell us e-books. They just won't sell it. They'll do these sort of funny licensing things with these long scrolling things where, okay, it's only for a short time, a year, or you can only read it 20 times, and then it goes away. And it's just like, what? What happened to actual selling things?

And so I think we need to get back to some basics. So let's sell ebooks. Let's sell MP3s. Let's go and make things available in such a way that you can. And yes, can you rip, rip it off? Yes. Is it dorky? Yes. So why don't we go and actually have a system that that works? Ad-based system is going kind of sideways out there. That's sort of that recent movie on the social dilemma. It points to some of the problems that we haven't overcome. The web is too simple.

We need to give some alternative possible solutions. Let's pivot over to micro-school, something you've been involved in for some time. And people are now having to embrace pods and microschooling, homeschooling. I guess these are all kind of in that zone. And I got tremendous resistance when I announced I was doing a little pod and trying to figure out, hey, how do we educate our kids if the schools are going to be closed this year, which I think they're going to continue to be closed, sadly, because of the pandemic. What are your thoughts on micro-schools?

Oh, I'm completely for it. So I actually tried it. So I, the idea of having a one-on-one schooling or, or I called it custom schooling. So it's not quite homeschooling. But a couple of my friends had been doing this, Stephen Wolfram with Danny Hillis, have done this where they hired teachers to teach their kids. And frankly, I thought it was too extravagant. for words, right? I mean, this is like, I'm supposed to believe in public schools, right? What's, you know, what's going on? How, why are we doing this other thing? But I, so, but I had my kids in, in private school here in San Francisco, and it wasn't working out for one of them. And so I thought, okay, why don't I do out the math? And it turned out that if I paid teachers more than they were being paid in these private schools, or even in a public school, that I could make a classroom of between one and four kids,

and the teachers are making more, and the kids turn out to thrive in this sort of small environment. And more people can also... Oh, yeah. Can you imagine? Okay, so we have set teachers up to lose. So they basically have to walk into a classroom of 30 kids. And not only that, the next hour,

they have a different 30 kids and then another 30 kids. And they have to go and do report cards on these kids twice a year. I mean, think of a boss, right? We say if you're managing more than seven people, that's too many, and you know, getting around to doing your job reviews is pulling teeth out of managers. So this is a, teachers often have 100 or 120 little direct reports, and they have to go and give report cards and talk to parents about them. And I think we've made it too hard. And I think we have a lot more people that can teach if they taught in very small-scale environments. And it costs less. So my financial thing on this was it costs $10,000 per kid per year in the United States to have

them schooled in public school. That's how much it costs. More in a big city. Like New York, I think is 22 and some other years of 15 to 20. But 10 across the whole country, if you were to take that $10,000 and pay all the teachers. teachers more than they're paid on average across the United States. And you had one administrator for every five teachers. If you calculate out, if you take the money and you don't put the money in anything else, like no tea, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, if you just put it in those, you'd end up with a classroom size of four. And a classroom size of four, everything's different. Like what a class is, where a classroom is, how do you deal with it? So we did.

this with our kid. And we did it actually with a classroom size of one because we could. And it worked great. And he just was engaged all the time. And if he wasn't engaged, the teachers just said, I'm done here. You're not paying attention. Right. Go home. Right. And you know he didn't do that again the next time. And he loved it. And he graduated from high school, our high school, a year early, went to Cornell, did great. So we've seen it all the way through. Um, And so the idea of going and rethinking. So you have teachers. And we can all teach something, right?

We all have something we're good at. And that enthusiasm is infectious. So I did Euclid's Elements. This book written in 300 BC at the Library of Alexandria is geometry. Geometry. So we worked through Euclid Elements, Book 1 together. And we bonded. It was fabulous.

Amazing. But otherwise, it was other people doing, doing the work. Why so much, why is there so much resistance when somebody like you or when I tweeted it to this basic concept where the math is undeniable, right? If you just look at teacher's salary is 50, 60K in the United States and then you look at what private schools charge 30, 40, 50k a year. And the math just kind of works out that like two or three students in private school or four or five kids in public school. We could get rid of all of this overhead and infrastructure and provide a massively radically better

micro-schooling experience, but people seem to defend and want to attack anybody who chips away at the established dysfunctional education system we have today. You must have gotten massive blowback, I would think, on your ideas around this. Well, I think it's the blowback that I felt originally when I saw my friends doing it.

It just felt too elite for words. I mean, it just feel like it's only going to be available to the very, very rich. and it turns out that's not actually true. It's not true. The math is not true. And I think we can find teachers in every place. So you don't necessarily want to turn everyone into an eight hour a day teacher.

But let's take people that they work down at the auto place or they're in a store. They've got something to teach maybe an hour a week. And let's go and put them on and have them teach. and put that and blended into their world. I think we've ended up with sort of segmenting school so far from our day-to-day life. It's someplace we send our kids in a way. Yeah. And this pandemic, if it's one thing that's happening, is we're rethinking everything.

Everybody's trying to understand what their work-life balance is. How are they going to raise their kids? How they're interacting, how it's working, how it's not working. So let's take advantage of this, you know, terrible situation. situation that we're in to learn some new tricks. Because I think if anybody really looks at how the school system has evolved, it isn't the panacea that we're all hoped it would be. It's kind of, kind of creaky.

It does really well for people, well, like me. I did really well going through school. I could ace any test even if I'd not even read it. I mean, it's just like I got good at the mechanisms of school. that's not true for everyone. And a lot of people sort of fall off the edges. They get shunted aside and maybe something else would make sense for them. And one kid really didn't want to step out of the school system he was in.

He liked hanging out with his friends. The other one was a birder. And he liked birds. He learned from people in every decade of their lives. He was good friends with somebody in every decade of their life. He had more positive role models than the 30 kids that were surrounding him when he was in normal school. So it's one thing I learned out of this whole experience is one kid at a time, one year at a time. So you just basically have to figure it out and try some things out.

And what I did is once I started to find that it worked, I tried to share it. So I shared the teachers with other people, some other people started pulling their kids out of school. and putting them in. Some of them liked it. Some of them actually wanted to go back to school, so they did. But a lot of people kept it going. We did a conference on brewster.kale.org. That's a private blog, brewster.bruster.kale.org. There's a tab on education. And there's the write-up of how the finances work, how the issues worked with all the parents trying to deal with it, what the social problems were or not among the parents with their colleagues when they were doing this. I tried to be a blunt as possible to go and say, this is what you're up against. And this is what worked for us,

what didn't work. So hopefully people will try some new and different experiments. Yeah, I think competition and innovation in the education space would be welcome by everybody except maybe some unions that really don't want to have the competition. But if parents were able to take their 10K and get a credit and five parents, six parents got together and hired teacher, like let them do that and let them experiment and see if it works better for their kids. No, that's happening. So that's what the charter school thing for better and for worse, which I think is largely an abuse.

So I think a lot of the things that are sort of done in this area as experiments are actually not all that great for the kids, but there are some flexibilities now with the charter schools. So the charter schools, if they will go and you can set up your own school. So we were officially a school. We didn't get the $10,000. We didn't need it. Thanks on doing well in the dot.com boom. But there are mechanisms to try these things out.

In San Francisco, you're seeing a lot of different experiments, but some of them are just so hideously expensive. And there's this idea that if we pull a lot of the rich kids out of the public schools, then it will drain some of the rationale, the help, the diversity of income diversity, but also the funding system would go away. So I think we have to be careful as we do these things. Yeah, you got to be considered.

But I think let's do some experiments. Let's learn from it. But it's, and I'd say that the system that we did with our child was not for everybody, not for everybody, but boy, did it work for him. He wasn't, he was really bright doing, you know, he was getting A's and all. But the social environment, the schools that he was in was just not healthy for him. Yeah. And so this, and he was kind of hyperactive.

And that doesn't work very well. No, if your kid is high verbal, high energy, they'll just tell you like, hey, listen, can you put your kid on a pill to make them just, you know, put them on riddle and put them on adderall, you know, and make them sit down and shut up and make their penmanship better and let their executive function keep them in their seat and not talking. It's like to talk. What if that's their superpower in life? What if their superpower in life is to, you know, go bouncing? between multiple functions at a startup or in life and have a diverse skill set.

Like, we want to kill that at the age of 12, really? That's what we're doing here. Like, makes no sense. And if you're faced with 30 kids all, all, and you're trying to keep order, that's going to be one of the tools you're going to go to. So there's, the school system works for some. Let's find as many alternatives. I'm a big fan of lots of possibilities.

when we sort of, I think we get boxed in, and we're boxing ourselves in, and then we're sort of screaming and pounding and clubbing people, when actually there are a lot more possibilities out there. If we just try a few more things, be honest, straightforward, transparent about what we're trying to do, we can learn from each other and grow. And I think that should be applied to our tech. It should be applied to schools. It should be applied to almost, everything. I don't, I don't quite use the term competition, because that usually tends to mean marketplace competition. And that's often not the right thing to go and inject into some of these environments. There are other success metrics. Like, do you have a happy thriving child that's really learning a lot and growing and engaged and curious? And frankly, we, thankfully, we succeeded in this by leveraging something that I thought was too elite. But it, and,

ended up costing us less than private school to be able to do and it worked for us. I mean, experimentation is a good word, right? And trying different things and being open-minded. I think it's one of the problems right now, whether it's the governance of San Francisco or the country as a whole. If you were to say, you know, I have an idea about how to improve policing. I'd like to try this. People would say, no, no, you have to pick. You're either anti-policing and defund the police or your, you know, Blue Lives Matter. And there's no in-between and no experimentation. And that's what Merrick was built on. This is great experiment. America is the great experiment, the great melting pot, right?

We tried something new year. Let's try some things. When things aren't working, let's try a few different things. I mean, I'm in San Francisco as well, and why do we have a homeless problem? We have more billionaires here than any place. Come on. We can fix this. But let's try some things.

And we're dropped down trying some things. And I do love that about San Francisco, but probably not enough. And let's. let's build some new experiments. The thing I learned out of the free and open source software idea of Richard Stallman was if you're in an oppressive regime, make a little bubble with different rules, whether it's sharing software, share and share alike of software, the Ganoon license. And if it's good, it'll catch on and grow and grow and maybe it'll take over. And the free and open source software worked that way, the internet worked that way. I'd say the nonprofit, the 501c3s,

is another one of those some rights reserved. Right there, you can't take full property rights. You can't buy and sell of nonprofit. And maybe it just works better than our for-profits. So let's go and build some alternative structures and then learn from them. Yeah. Well, on that note, thank you, Bruce Tercall,

for spending the hour with us. And everybody, if you hear my voice right now, very simple, go to archive.org and make that donation and make it reoccurring so that you know, you set it and forget it and you're doing something to help society. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a small budget overall compared to the value provides to humanity. So let's get behind it and support it. And Brewster, it's good to know you and it's good to have you in the world. Thank you for doing the work you do. You could be off doing

entrepreneurial stuff or venture capital. And you've chosen for the last couple of decades to do this for all of us. And on behalf of humanity, who I do not speak for. But, you know, just I really do appreciate that you've taken the time to make this your life work. It really is meaningful to the world that this content, this art, this software, the science is backed up somewhere and that somebody is thinking about it. And I think when we look back a thousand years from now, this moment in humanity, you're going to come across as one of the most important people at this time for having preserved this moment in history. And so for that, we're in awe and we thank you for your service to humanity. Gosh, Jason, thank you very much. Really appreciate the time.

Okay. And with that, go ahead and make your donation, everybody. We'll see you next time in the sweet source. Bye-bye.