The Breakfast ClubINTERVIEW: Frank H. McCourt Jr. Wants To Buy TikTok & Change The Internet + More
The Breakfast Club Sits Down With Frank H. McCourt Jr. To Discuss Him Wanting To Buy TikTok & Change The Internet. Listen For More!
Wake that ass up in the morning. Breakfast Club, Good morning.
Everybody is the DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, Charlamagne the guy we are to Breakfast Club law La Roses filling in for Jess was on maternity leave, and we got a special guest in the building.
We have Frank mccaud welcome, thanks for having me. How you feeling this morning?
Feeling good? And you pretty good?
Pretty much black and favored man. For those who don't know Frank, te just tell them who you are.
To Mike Frankon.
Yeah, let's start with the fact that I'm a father of seven kids. Oh okay, fifth generation builder, born and raised in a little place called Watertown, Massachusetts, right outside of Boston. So you know, my my great grandfather came here a long time ago as an immigrant and started building roads when Henry Ford started building cars, and so we've been building stuff ever since. And so yeah, I'm I guess my work kind of identifies me in many ways because I've worked hard for a long time. I've had the privilege of owning some sports teams, which are is fun, hard work, but fun. And yeah, that's a little bit about me. Who else I own a football team? Called Olympic there must say French football club. We just had a massive win last night against Leon congrats. One man down after the four and a half minute mark, so we had to play the entire match with ten guys and beat them in their house three to two. So that was massive for our club.
How was owning the Dodges? I'm sure you were a Red Sox fan, I.
Would assume, yeah, growing up, that's right.
So how was that purchasing the Dodgers being a Red Sox fan?
It was, yeah, it was amazing actually to own the Dodgers, you know, in credible franchise. So look, I I my my grandfather was owned a small part of the Boston Braves when they were in Boston, and but they left Boston when I, you know, here I was born. Actually, so anything I I knew about that was in a scrap book. But I so, I grew up a Red Sox fan, had eight times there with my family growing up and then with my kids, you know, and so forth. And they went on the market, and after being in a family for a long long time, and I had the privilege of of bidding on the on the club. We were one of the three finals but didn't get it. It was like an inside job. It went to an existing owner, which was fine. I mean, it's that that's the game, right, I mean, it wasn't like when you're buying a team, you're not just it's not like buying another company. You have to get owners approvals and all that stuff, so they they decide who's going to buy it. So anyway, it was disappointing, But on the other hand, like massive privilege to to be bidding on my hometown team, you know what I mean. Never did I think I would be in a position to do that. And after losing the bid, I went to New York here and and met with the the the higher you know, the leadership at MLB just wanted to make sure I hadn't steped on anybody's toes in the process, because Boston is pretty can get pretty rough when it comes to politics and sports and all that. And they said no to the contrary, would you like to buy another team? And I said, yeah, I haven't even thought about it, but I'll get back to you. And so I looked around and Dodgers were on the market, Murdoch was selling them, and the rest is history. We ended up buying it. So it's sometimes you know, one door closes, the other.
Opens when you sold it? Are you did you sell it to the group that Maddie Johnson was with?
Yeah, exactly, So it's magic And yeah, I was going through the massive divorce, ugly, humiliating, embarrassing and all that and very public. There's a lot of things are in LA, uh and sold the club to move on with life.
Now you want to buy TikTok.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, tell us about that. Why would you love to jump into the social media world?
It's interesting. So when I was in LA through that tough period, I got a little taste of what social media is. Was like, yeah, and that was think about this for a second. Now. That was I got separated in July of nine, So, uh, my divorce was a matter of, you know, a public thing for three years and tough. Yeah. I had four at the time. Uh and but for those four it was very tough. And uh it was tough all around and for everyone and not just me and and but I I I watched what was happening here and first of all, let me is it don't feel don't feel bad for me. Okay, I'm doing great. So that's that's not the point of what I'm about to say here. But I I saw this complete change in how we were communicating or or sharing information. I'm not sure we were communicating. And you know, Facebook had introduced a like button, smartphones were in everybody's hands. So all this, like this wild wild West was it was appearing right before our eyes. And so I was, as I said, I felt a sting of all that because and you know what, I felt like a guy with a watching my house burn down with a little garden hose with low water pressure, Like I'm supposed to put that fire out. It's impossible. So and I said, you know to myself at the time, while this is it in the direction it's going, this is going to take us all down. This is going to just destroy everything we love.
This is an nine when you felt it like that?
Yeah, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. So it was a three year period where I got a glimpse at something, and little did I know that I'd be here ten plus years later talking to you about this. But I saw that. My first move after selling the Dodgers was to help start a public policy school in Washington, d c our Nation's Capital with Georgetown, my alma mater. We started that school, and you know, I hope that, you know, maybe we could get the policy making apparatus up to speed here and out in front of the problem, so that this runaway you know, runaway machine wasn't going to, like I said, destroy everything we love. And so I started that public policy school in d c And in twenty thirteen, and it's a great place. It will be the best public policy school in this country. I'm certain of that. However, I learned after two three years that policy making and the whole policy making apparatus is no match for big tech. You know, technology is big, it's powerful. These companies are rich. They have people all over Capitol Hill, you know, donating money and so on and so forth, and it moves fast. And tech could care less about democracy. Tech could care less about truth or trust. Tech could care less about our kids. It just optimizes for whatever. You know, some technologist says, optimized for this. We have these algorithms optimizing for crazy shit, and we're all suffering the consequences of that right now. So it was five years ago, that December of nineteen, that I had shifted my focus to the actual infrastructure because we have an infrastructure problem we have and I'm an infrastructure guy, and if we could fix the infrastructure, fix the engineering problem, we could change how this all works. So I launched something called Project Liberty.
I was gonna ask are they selling TikTok because I thought at one time the government was trying to force the guy to sell it, but he didn't want to sell it. So are are they actively selling TikTok for you to purchase?
Yeah? Great question. They the government is it has passed the law that the President's signed that TikTok must either sell the US piece of TikTok and byte Dance as the company, or shut it down. And byte Dance is resisting that, and so there's litigation right now. There was just a hearing last week. I think the government's case is very very strong. I think they'll prevail and Bytance will have to either shut down US TikTok or sell it. And our bed is they're going to sell it, not shut it down. And we don't want to see it shut down. There's one hundred and seventy million people using it that enjoy it. It just shouldn't be wreaking havoc on the world, you know, and you know creating the harms it creates, and it doesn't have to. So I don't want to be the CEO of a social media platform. Don't misunderstand me. What I'd like to do is see the one hundred and seventy million TikTok users come over to a new protocol where each of us own our owning, control our identity, We own and control our data, we permission its use. It's not just scraped up by these platforms. Aggregated algorithms apply to it, and then we have a lot of crazy stuff going on. We need people, and this is my strong opinion, we need technology where we own us again and we're in control of us again, because right now we are not in control of us.
These these platforms are what's a comparable time of you said, well, we own us again on the internet. When did we owners our own info on the internet.
Before what I'll call the app age. So when the Internet started forty one years ago, it was decentralized and nobody was scraping our data, surveying us twenty four to seven and taking advantage of us. And in eighty nine, the World Wide Web started, and that's when our data was up for grabs. That's when it all started, right, Suddenly the data was out in the in the ether, so to speak. Right, and a few companies, you know, they understood that if you own everybody's data, you own them, and whoever was going to own the most data would be the winner, quote un quote, right. And so you had a winner in social that was Facebook, now meta, you had a winner in search that was Google. You had a winner in shopping that was Amazon, and so on and so forth. And what happened was this data is don't don't think of it as this like amorphous thing that doesn't mean anything. Your data is you. These platforms know everything about you, more than you know about yourself because they have hundreds of thousands of data points about you, and so they make judgments about you. So it's not just like where you shop or what you know, you know what what what your interests are and what restaurants of this that. It's it's how you think, it's how you feel. So they're predicting. They have a they've made an assessment of your personality and mind, so that means they can trigger us, right, Yeah, and that's not that's not a good thing.
So who do these companies sell it to? And like, how did they know that they should be farming people with data?
Well, I think what they what they real essar is that they had the data was going to be very valuable and so let's collect the data and figure out how to make money next. So they went into this. They built machinery to basically extract and collect data, and then they needed a business model to keep the company going, right, and that was that was the ad so called ad tech model or the attention economy. Right. Oh, if we know a lot about you, we can sell you shit, right, we can sell you stuff. We can go ahead and push ads on you to get you to buy things in retrospect. That was that's like the benign aspect of this. And what I mean by that is what they realized is that it's not just what you want to buy or where you eat, or what you like to you know this or that. It's like I said earlier, how you think and how you feel. So you're profiled. We'd call that micro profiling. Right, You're targeted. So if I can, if I know everything about you, then I can feed you news content that is going to reinforce how you're already thinking. Right, If I can, if I know everything about you, I can get you to do things. I can manipulate you. You know, Jack Dorsey was the guy who started Twitter. Earlier this summer, he was at a conference in Ostlo. He said, we are talking way too much about free speech and way too little about the loss of free will. We're losing what makes us human. You know. I don't know about you guys, but when I was at school, what I was taught was that the you know, what separates us from all the other species, animal species is free will. It's our ability to make judgments, to make choices, to live our lives, to have freedom, to have liberty, etc. That's what makes us human. You take for our free will away from us, what's all going to look like then? And so that's why I started Project Liberty. That's why I've launched the People's bid to go ahead and move not to shutdown TikTok. We don't want to see it shutdown. Move the user base to this new protocol where we where we each essentially own ourselves again, own our personhood, and we get to decide how to share information about us two trusted counterparties, and.
You know, so scary about people giving up day free will in this era. They think that they're doing it by choice, but they're not. Like they're really just giving it up because they're being influenced to give it up.
There's not a choice to it. It's a vicious circle. Yep, exactly right, and it's self fulfilling it in that way. And I hear over and over again, you know this thing, Oh, people don't care about their data. People don't care about their privacy. And it's like, what what if you knew how much about you was in the public domain. Of course you would care about it if you knew how valuable this data was. Of course you'd want a piece of that action if you But right now there's only one choice, right, we have these big plays forms that dominate the By the way, when I talk about big tech and all this, I'm talking about Internet technology. That's what I'm talking about. I mean, technology is not a bad thing inherently. Internet technology has has become a weapon, and so we these these this evolution of how the Internet worked from something that was decentralized, designed by really smart people to make us all smarter share information, you get smarter, advanced civilization, you know, and so forth has become something just just the opposite. It's really making this dumber and it's making us and it's it's amplifying bad behavior and in amplifying meanness not goodness.
What is Project liberty? You put you put up five hundred million.
Right, yes, so yeah, that's the seed capital. Get this show on the road, and it's to put to let people know that it does not have to be this way. The Internet could operate differently and we could each own ourselves, our identity, our data, can control who gets to see what, just like we used to do in the world pre internet. Right, there was a world before the Internet where people got to decide what information they shared about themselves with other human beings. And so you know, you you didn't share a lot with a stranger. You shared a whole lot with your most intimate relationships. Right, So we have an Internet that doesn't operate like that at all. As a matter of fact, you don't even know if it's another person on the Internet because it could be a machine, a fake person. You know this, and that, so we need to get it, get the Internet to operate like the world. The world operates when it's coherent, which is, you know, restore truth it, let people, let people be in control of their lives, have real people using the Internet, not a bunch of fake in phoniness. And then we, by the way, this still be bad behavior. They'll still be bad actors. Tech, better tech is not going to take care of all the problems in the world. But better tech that puts us in charge of our own all of our own data and our being and our personhood, then puts us in charge of us again, and we're accountable for our own bad behavior.
Or realistically? Is that real though?
You know, because let's say, you know, let's say you purchase TikTok and you do that with TikTok, with all these other platforms, whether it's Facebook, whether it's Instagram, whether it's elon chs, elon musks X, is it realistically can get back to a place where we have our privacy back.
I mean it's to the point now where everything is open.
I mean you can pull up court cases, you can pull up somebody's house address, you can pull up so many different things.
Way before you absolutely positively couldn't. But is that real?
Yeah, totally real. I'll tell you why. You know, five years ago when we started this project, if I was having this conversation with you, I guarantee you when I left this room, you'd say, out of his mind, not gonna happen. Right, impossible? Uh three years ago, two and a half years ago. And by the way, you say it was impossible because it's too complicated the tech and nobody's ever going to change. Who gives a shit anyway, right because five years ago people weren't focused the way they are now. Two and a half years ago we were able to actually push the tech out and say, see it works. So we have over a million, almost moving towards a million and a half people on this new Internet. I'm talking about this upgraded Internet using it. So what does that say to me? The tech works? We can have better technology. The Internet only works the way it works now because of some engineering decisions. It can work differently, and if we decide to go to that alternative, to that upgraded version, then it works. It's just all a matter scale, right, So now we know the tech can work. So what we're left with is this issue of how do you get people to migrate? Okay, and I think people don't migrate until they realize there's a problem. And the other thing that's happened in the last couple of years is the problem is now surfaced, hasn't it. People are seeing how bad this technology is. They're seeing the harm to you know, you pick your problem. You know, how are we doing with democracy right? How we doing with our our ability to govern ourselves? How are we doing with the information ecosystem? How we doing with real information versus fake shit? How we doing with a trust and truth? How are we doing with protecting kids. It's just people are seeing it because they're hearing ten stories a day about the the the harms. So are we going to just sit here and say, well, yeah, I got my phone, I'm addicted to it. It's free, so whatever. Or do we kind of show up and say, you know what, this is madness, it doesn't have to be this way. Let's fix it and get people to migrate to a new place. And so the TikTok thing, for me, look, I've been working on this for a long time. I didn't know TikTok was going to have to be sold or you know. And I wrote a book on this called Our biggest came out a few months ago. I didn't know TikTok was going to be you know, legislation was going to be passed. It's to me, it's an opportunity, a fantastic one, to take a problem to turn it into a solution.
How's my ask? So all that is great, and in the perfect world it would be amazing. But you know, the data is being moved around the way it is because they make money, right, So as a business person, how do you speak to the money that isn't going to be made? Or is there a way to still make money even though we would own our own data and I get to pick and choose when you can put it where, Like, how does the how's money made?
Well, I'm going to tell you that more money will be made because more people will be making money. And so it's not like the data isn't valuable, and it's not like we're not going to use data to solve big problems. And to you know, they'll still be shopping and searching and social on this internet. The difference will be you'll decide who to share your information with and on what terms. So imagine an internet we're rather than clicking you know, stupidly on the terms and conditions of use of these big platforms. You know, the cookies that we all just click on because they're annoying. Okay, imagine an Internet where the new apps and there'll be millions of them, click on your terms of conditions of use you say, sure, you could use my data, but pay me, right, So we're what we're saying is that there will be advertising, there will be commerce, there will be business. There has to be for this to be realistic. Otherwise it's just like sounds good but will never happen type of projund Right, So, but don't once you prefer an Internet where, rather than being targeted all day long and have stuff pushed on, you have an Internet where you signal that you want to buy something. You say, I'm this person, I'm a real person. You could be anonymous until you contract, right, and I want to buy something. That's more valuable to advertisers. That's more valuable to companies selling things than just surveilling all of us and guessing that you want something and hoping that you want something. Do you know a third of all the money that spent on the Internet in the advertiser economy is complete wasted. It's either scam scam artists or just misdirected or not. Why are we doing this? Why are we in what world do we think that being surveiled twenty four hours a day is a is a reasonable thing. It's it's not so there's going to be business. Last thing, I'll just say, you know, I tell this story all the time. I said, Pretend I'm the Postmaster General, I'm in charge of the post office, and I say to you, I'm going to deliver your mail from now on for free, no stamps. Say okay, what's the deal. All right, I'm going to put a camera and a listening device in every room of your house, in your car, in your place of business, and I'm going to surveil you twenty four seven. You say, well, that is super creepy. You say one other thing. I'm going to open your mail. I'm going to read it, and everything I learn is now mine. Your relationships, your thoughts, your ideas, your feelings, even your most intimate ones, they're now mine. You say, that's it's creepy and unfair. Oh and while I'm at it, I'm gonna read your fourteen year old daughter's diary. And when I see she's a little bit concerned about her weight, I'm gonna send her stuff to make her feel worse. I'm gonna send her stuff that she can buy so I can profit from making her feel worse. And I'm gonna send her stuff to show her how to hurt herself, wow and cut herself. Right, that's the Internet we have today. I think you'd say, you know, keep your idea. I'll pay for my stamps. And so the point is, we have something that's incredibly predatory, incredibly exploitive, and we need to get it back under control so that we can go and lead our lives and protect our kids and like have some sense of what's what's fact, what's fiction, what's truth? Without truth, there's no trust without trust, there's no society as we know it. And it's so it's all pretty basic stuff.
I got three final questions if you've got time, I'm one, Uh, what's the first thing you would do if you acquire TikTok to make it safe for people?
Move the users to a new protocol, which is simple protocol. We own and control your identity and your and your data. So it's a permission based Internet. Now, all of the good stuff of TikTok still happens. The user experience is very similar.
So you won't take away to dance, and you won't take away to the thing.
People can dance all day long. It's all good. It's just it's just not. I don't want people think they're just dancing and having fun. But at the same time, somebody's scraping all that information about them and using it in harmful ways. Right, So that's the the that's the thing here that we want to eliminate. So that that's that's the first thing.
And what can everyday people do right now to support or help make the change you're trying to make.
Go to the go to the people's bid dot com, the people's bid dot com and join the fight, Get involved and just in in that involvement. May be that you want to invest that involvement. May be you can socialize it at your church. It may be socialized it at your kid you know, at your kids school on the on the sideline of the football field. It may be that you want to volunteer and get involved because we eventually we're gonna have to have a million people show up and washing it right and say, you know, you've got to stop this nonsense. And because the CEOs of these tech companies, we now know and they know that there's a problem here, right, how many more, how many more conversations that we're going to have where they go in front of Congress and they testify and lie about this, and so if they were going to fix it, they would have fixed it, right. So that's that we can't. We can't rely on them at the moment. The next place you go is to elected officials and say, hey, please fix this. It's hurting my kid, it's hurting you know, my business, it's hurting whatever, it's hurting my life. And you go to But sadly, these companies are all over all over our elected officials. They're giving them donations, they're they have lobbyists and all that stuff, and so nothing's getting done. And and by the way, worse, our elected officials are using the same social media platforms that are killing us, right, they're using them to get elected and all that. So what are we left with? Well, left with us, we're left with people. And that's what we call it. The people's bid. Let's green Bay packer, this thing let you know how the fans own the Green Bay Packers.
That's my last question. What do that people's bid look like?
Yeah, let's let's have people. Let's have people fix the problem that others have creative rather than sitting near bitching and morning about it. You know, we can sit here all day long and talk about the problems. I am not I didn't say a single word today that on the problem side that you don't already know. Okay, And this is this is progress because everybody's now known there's a problem. You can't change something until people look at it and say we have a problem, then they're open to change. So now the idea of the people's bid is let's get people involved and create the future we want. And again I want to emphasize better tech doesn't solve all of our problems overnight. You know what I mean, You still have people, and people do Some people do bad stuff, some people do crazy stuff, But you know what, there's a lot of people that do good stuff, a lot of people that really want things better. A lot of parents particularly, I think, are going to be the change agents here because they've had enough. They're there. This is like you know, mother's against drunk driving type of deal you know where sadly, you know, some parents lose a child and they step forward because they can't stand you know, that's they do it in honor of that child, and that other parents who are scared of losing a child to step forward. And then you have a movement, right, and then other people step in and say, you know what, I'm I'm for this too, because you know, I'm concerned about the lack of you know, the lack of trust in truth in our in our world and in the miss and disinformation. So you just you start building different cohorts and people jumping on the bandwagon, and that's what's going to cause change. And you know, you know again they'll still be bad behavior and this and that. But why why have an internet that amplifies all the bad shit and doesn't make it at least make it a level playing field for good people to do good things. And the Internet is not the problem. It's designed so poorly that it amplifies this bad stuff because it was never designed for billions of people to be using it.
I know you got one other question, but one last question. You know they're making TikTok sell because of the Chinese government having our information, right, But they don't care about all the other people here in the US with bad intentions with the bad information without information as well.
But sounds kind of crazy, you know.
I mean, it just seems like they should be stopping everybody having access to our information, not just the Chinese government.
I'm with your thousand percent. That's project liberty right there. You just described it's it's look the Chinese government, the Chinese Commist Party, which is built on a different ideology than free societies like America, where individual rights matter. In China and they don't matter all right. So if you have a government that is surveillance based, that is centralized, that that is autocratic like China, centralized surveillance based autocratic technology is pretty awesome because it's in harmony with what you want to achieve. In China, the Chinese Communist Party wants to know everything about every person, right because if you get off their reservation, you're going to get punished. Right, So everybody tows the line. We supposedly have a country built on individual rights, human rights, right, and we need yet we have this, as you point out, the centralized autocratic surveillance based technology. Something's going to give here. You can't have a set of principles that respects individuals and freedom and liberty and choice and autonomy and permission and all that and have technology which is, as it turns out, more powerful than our democracy, and think our democracies going to bend to be more autocratic centralized surveillance space. What I want to do is see the tech bend to respect the human rights. Think of your your data as a human right, because it is. It is everything about you, everything about you, and I can't emphasize that enough. It's not just who gives a shit where I am right now, or what I buy or what I eat. It's everything about you, hundreds of thousands of data points. So you and I have been micro profiled. Are you kidding me? Would we ever let this government profile us to this degree? We say, out of your mind, no way. Why are we letting these companies? So you're one hundred percent right. We should be talking about this more broadly, not just about TikTok, but let's but it's good at least that TikTok is in play because and that people understand we don't want one hundred and seventy million Americans data going to the Chinese Communist Party. Everybody gets that, but I'm with you one percent. We don't want that information going to Silica Valley either.
This is going to start somewhere.
That's exactly right now.
Now what political season around the corner.
Is there any I guess politician that's that's supporting what you're doing, whether it's the Democrat or Republican side.
Is there anybody saying this is wrong or not at all?
No? Well, this, this this move to get TikTok to sell or shut down was started by Trump and then it was continued by Biden. The legislation was by partisan signed on by which is pretty amazing when you look at how dysfunctional are our Congress has been right and then signed by Biden. So this has been a bipartisan effort to get because you know why, they know the harms that this this technology has. And and I had the privilege of seeing a portion of what was sent to the US Congress as part of the briefing. I I didn't think I could be more concerned about this issue. It's pretty obvious I'm concerned about it. I've been working on it for a long time. I saw that briefing. The hair in the back of my neck stood up. I I it was frightening.
Were you at that Texteo hearing back in January?
No? O, But but I saw this, this briefing that was given to Congress, and it is it is amazing how powerful this technology is to affect people's thinking. And that's that's that's the part of it that I want to get across here. It's not just that China has our data. It has it it we're all profiled. So China can get you to think a certain way about things that are in their best interest, to get you think think that way, and think you and get you to think differently about things. For instance, a pro America. Maybe they want to get you to think things, think positively about the things that are on their agenda. Right, maybe making us completely you know, a chaotic society where people can't tell fact from fiction and truth is gone. That's probably a good thing for China if you're out to elevate your own ideology, right, which is centralized communist type of If we want freedom and liberty and individual rights, we need to start looking at our data as a human right. This is who you are, and we should we should own us. Right, Even our DNA, by the way, our biological DNA is now digitized, So what could get more more you than your DNA? Right? So this this is really, really, I think a key issue. And like I said earlier, I didn't realize ten years ago I'd be sitting here talking to you all about this. It was just I had had an experience, open my eyes, try to do something about it. And here we are. And I'm actually becoming more and more optimistic every day because you know, people like you are on this and you're doing your own things aright to get people to understand that how social media is just killing us and so let's fix it. It doesn't have to be this way.
Absolutely, Thank you for joining us this morning, ladies and gentlemen.
Frank McCourt check out his book to Our Biggest Fight, Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the In and thet Age. And if they want to know more about Project Liberty, where did they.
Go Projectliberty dot io or go directly to the peoplespid dot com.
All right, it's the Breakfast Club.
Good morning, Thanks for your time, guys.
Wake that ass up in the morning. The Breakfast Club,
