The Breakfast Club - INTERVIEW: Frank H. McCourt Jr. Wants To Buy TikTok & Change The Internet + More

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

The Breakfast Club Sits Down With Frank H. McCourt Jr. To Discuss Him Wanting To Buy TikTok & Change The Internet. Listen For More! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Wake that ass up in the morning. The Breakfast Club. Morning, everybody. It's DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, Charlamagne Tha God. We are The Breakfast Club, Lawn LaRosa's filling in for Jess who's on maternity leave. And we got a special guest in the building. We have Frank McCord. Welcome. Thanks for having me. How you feeling this morning? I'm feeling good. And you? Pretty good, pretty good.

Bless black and highly favored, man. For those who don't know Frank, just tell them who you are. To the mic, Frank, too. Yeah, let's start with the fact that I'm a father of seven kids. Ooh, okay. Fifth generation builder. Born and raised in a little place called Watertown, Massachusetts, right outside of Boston.

So, you know, 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 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 is fun. Hard work, but fun. And, yeah, that's a little bit about me.

You own the Dodgers, right? Who else? I own a football team called Olympique de Marseille, a French football club. We just had a massive win last night against Lyon. 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 Dodgers? 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 amazing, actually, to own the Dodgers. It was an incredible franchise. So look, my grandfather owned a small part of the Boston Braves when they were in Boston. But they left Boston the year I was born, actually. So anything I knew about that was in a scrapbook. Gotcha. great 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 bidding on the club. We were one of the three finalists, but didn't get it. It was like an inside job. It went to an existing owner, which was fine. I mean, that's the game, right? I mean, it wasn't like when you're buying a team, it's not like buying another company. You have to get owner's

approvals and all that stuff. So they decide who's going to buy it. So anyway, it was disappointing, but on the other hand, massive privilege 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 met with the leadership at MLB. Just wanted to make sure I hadn't stepped on anybody's toes in the process because Boston 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. 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, did you sell it to the group that Magic Johnson was with?

Yeah, exactly. I sold it to Magic. And yeah, I was going through a massive divorce, ugly, humiliating, embarrassing, and all that, and very public, as a lot of things are in LA, and sold the club to move on with life. Now you want to buy TikTok. That's right. Yeah. Tell us about that. Why would you love to jump into the social media world? Oh, it's interesting. So when I was in LA through that tough period, I got a little taste of what social media was like. The negative side.

Yeah. And that was, think about this for a second now. I got separated in July of 09. So my divorce was a matter of, you know, a public thing for three years. With seven kids, that was tough. Yeah, I had four at the time. But for those four, it was very tough. And it was tough all around for everyone and not just me.

But I watched what was happening here. And first of all, don't feel bad just me. But I watched what was happening here. And first of all, don't feel bad for me. Okay, I'm doing great. So that's not the point of what I'm about to say here. But I saw this complete change in how we were communicating or sharing information. I'm not sure we were communicating. And Facebook had introduced the like button. Smartphones were in everybody's hands.

So all this, like, this wild, wild west was appearing right before our eyes. And so I was, as I said, I felt the sting of all that because, and you know what? I felt like a guy watching my house burn down with a little garden hose with low water pressure. Like I'm supposed to put that fire out somehow. It's impossible.

And I said to myself at the time, well, this is, in the direction it's going, this is going to take us all down. This is going to just destroy everything we love. This was in 09 when you felt like that. Yeah, 09, 10, 11, 12. So it was a three-year period where I got a glimpse at something. And little did I know that I'd be here 10 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 I had hoped that maybe we could get the policymaking apparatus up to speed

here and out in front of the problems so that this runaway machine wasn't going to, like I said, destroy everything we love. And so I started that public policy school in DC in 2013. 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 policymaking and the whole policymaking apparatus is no match for big tech. Technology is big. It's powerful. These companies are rich. They have people all over Capitol Hill 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 some technologist says optimize for this. And so 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 19, that I had shifted my focus to the actual infrastructure. Because we have an infrastructure problem. That's what 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 going to 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 they actively selling TikTok for you to purchase? Yeah. Great question. The government has passed a law that the president signed that TikTok must either sell the U.S. piece of TikTok, and ByteDance is the company, or shut it down. And ByteDance 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 ByteDance will have to either shut down US TikTok or sell it. And our bet is they're going to sell it, not shut it down. And we don't want to see it shut down. There's 170 million people using it that enjoy it. It just shouldn't be wreaking havoc on the world and 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 170 million TikTok users come over to a new protocol where each of us own and control our identity. We own and control our data. We

permission its use. It's not just scraped up by these platforms, aggregated algorithms applied 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 platforms are in control of us. What's a comparable time of when you said, well, we own us again on the internet? When did we own our own info on the internet? Before what I'll call the app age. So when the internet started 41 years ago, it was decentralized and nobody was scraping our data, surveilling us 24-7 and taking advantage of us.

And in 89, 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 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 unquote, 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 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. 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 your interests are and what restaurants are this, it's how you think, it's how you feel. So they're predicting. They've made an assessment of your personality and mine. So that means they can trigger us, right? Yeah.

And that's not a good thing. So who do these companies sell it to? And how do they know that they should be farming people's data? Well, I think what they realized, Char, is that 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 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'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, uh, if I know everything about you, I can get, get you to do things. I can manipulate you. You know, Jack Dorsey was the guy who started Twitter. He earlier this summer, he was at a conference in Oslo. 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 in school, what I was taught was that the, you know, what separates us from all the other species,

you know, animal species is free will. That's right. It's our ability to make judgments, to make choices, to live our lives, to have freedom, to have liberty, et cetera. That's what makes us human. You take our free will away from us. What's it 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 shut down TikTok. We don't want to see it shut down. Move the user

base to this new protocol where we each essentially own ourselves again, own our personhood, and we get to decide how to share information about us to trusted counterparties. And you know what's so scary about people giving up their 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. Like there's not a choice to it. It's a vicious circle. Yep. Exactly right. And it's self-fulfilling 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 the data was, of course you'd want a piece of that action. But right now, there's only one choice, right? We have these big platforms that dominate the... And 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 become a weapon. And so this evolution of how the internet worked from something that was decentralized, designed by really smart people to make us all smarter, share information, get smarter, advance civilization, and so forth, has become something just the opposite.

It's really making us dumber. I agree. And it's amplifying bad behavior and amplifying meanness, not goodness. What is Project Liberty? You put up $ 500 million, right? Yeah, that's the seed capital, get this show on the road. And 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, 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 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 the internet to operate like the world operates when it's coherent, which is, you know, restore truth,

let people be in control of their lives, have real people using the internet, not a bunch of fake phoniness. And then, by the way, there'll still be bad behavior. There'll still be bad actors. Better tech is not going to take care of all the problems in the world. But better tech that puts us in charge of 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. But realistically, is that real though? Because 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 Musk's ex, 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 where before you absolutely positively couldn't, but is that real? Yeah, totally real. I'll tell you why. 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 going to happen, right? Impossible. Three years ago, two and a half years ago, and by the way, you'd say it was impossible because it's too complicated, the tech, and nobody's ever going to change. And 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 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 of 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 has now surfaced, hasn't it? People are seeing how bad this technology is. They're seeing the harm to, you know, pick your problem. You know, how are we doing with democracy, right? How are we doing with our ability to govern ourselves?

How are we doing with the information ecosystem? How are we doing with real information versus fake shit? How are we doing with a trust in truth? How are we doing with protecting kids? It's just people are seeing it because they're hearing 10 stories a day about 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. And I wrote a book on

this called Our Biggest Fight. It came out a few months ago. I didn't know TikTok was going to be, legislation was going to be passed. It's, to me, it's an opportunity, a fantastic one, to take a problem and turn it into a solution. I was going to ask, so all that is great, and in a 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 is money made? 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. 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 where rather than clicking 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. Yeah. Okay. Imagine an internet where the new apps and there'll be millions of them click on your terms and conditions of use. You say, sure, you can use my data, but pay me. Right. So what 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 project. Right? So, but don't, wouldn't 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's spent on the internet and the advertising economy is completely wasted? It's either scam artists or just misdirected or not. Why are we

doing this? Why are we, in what world do we think that being surveilled 24 hours a day is a reasonable thing? It's not. So there's going to be business. Last thing I'll just say, 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. 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 24-7. You say, well, that is super creepy. You say, oh, one other thing. I'm going to open your mail. I'm going to surveil you 24-7. You say, well, that is super creepy. You say, oh, 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, it's creepy and unfair. Oh, and while I'm at it, I'm going to read your 14-year-old daughter's diary. And when I see she's a little bit concerned about her weight, I'm going to send her stuff to make her feel worse.

I'm going to send her stuff that she can buy so I can profit from making her feel worse. And I'm going to send her stuff to show her how to hurt herself 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 on and lead our lives and protect our kids and have some sense of 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 so it's all pretty basic stuff. I got three final questions if you got time. Number one, 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 where you own and control your identity 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 the dance and you won't take away the thing, okay. People can dance all day long. It's all good.

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 thing here that we want to eliminate. So that's the first thing I would do. And what can everyday people do right now to support or help make the change you're trying to make? Go to thepeoplesbid.com,

thepeoplesbid.com, and join the fight. Get involved. And just, in that involvement may be that you want to invest. That involvement may be you can socialize it at your church. It may be socialize it at your kid's school on the sideline of the football field. It may be that you want to volunteer and get involved. Because we, eventually, we're going to have a million people show up in Washington, right? And say, you know, you 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 conversations are we 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 we can't rely on them at the moment. The next place you go is to your elected officials and say, hey, please fix this. It's hurting my kid. It's hurting my kid. It's hurting, you know, my, my business is 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 there. They have lobbyists and all that stuff. And so nothing's getting done. And, and by the way, worse yet, 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? We're left with us. We're left with people. And that's why we call it the people's bid. Let's Green Bay Packer this thing. You know how the fans own the Green Bay Packer? That's my last question.

What does that people's bid look like? Yeah, let's have people fix the problem that others have created rather than sitting here bitching and moaning about it. You know. We can sit here all day long and talk about the problems. I didn't say a single word today on the problem side that you don't already know. And this is progress because everybody's now knowing 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, this is like, you know, mothers 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 then other parents who are scared of losing a child step forward and then you have a movement, right? And then other people step in and say,

you know what, I'm for this too because, you know, I'm concerned about the lack of, you know, the lack of trust and truth in our world and the mis- and disinformation. So you just start building different cohorts of people jumping on the bandwagon, and that's what's going to cause change. And, you know, again, there'll still be bad behavior and this and that, but why have an internet that amplifies all the bad shit

and doesn't 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. 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 U.S. with bad intentions, with the bad information, without information as well. Which sounds kind of crazy. You know what I mean?

It just seems like they should be stopping everybody having access to our information, not just the Chinese government. I'm with you a thousand percent. That's Project Liberty right there. You just described it. It's, it's, look, the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party, which is built on a different ideology

than free societies like America, where individual rights matter. In China, they don't matter. All right. So if you have a government that is surveillance-based, that is centralized, 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 the reservation, you're going to get punished, right? So everybody toes to the line. We supposedly have a country built on individual rights, human rights, right? And yet we have this, as you point out, this 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 democracy is not going to bend to be more

autocratic, centralized, surveillance-based. What I want to do is see the tech bend to respect the human rights. Think of your data as a human right because 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'd say, out of your mind, no way. Why are we letting these companies? So you're 100% right. We should be talking about this more broadly, not just about TikTok. But it's good, at least, that TikTok is in play because the people understand we don't want 170 million Americans

that are going to the Chinese Communist Party. Everybody gets that. But I'm with you 100%. We don't want that information going to Silicon Valley either. It's just got to start somewhere. That's exactly right. Now, with political season around the corner. Is there any, I guess, politician 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 move to get TikTok to sell or shut down was started by Trump. And then it was continued by Biden. The legislation was bipartisan, signed on by, which is pretty amazing when you look at how dysfunctional 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 technology has. And I had the privilege of seeing a portion of what was sent to the U.S. Congress as part

of the briefing. 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 on the back of my neck stood up. It was frightening. Were you at that tech CEO hearing back in January? No. Okay. But I saw this briefing that was given to Congress and it is amazing how powerful this technology is to affect people's thinking. And that's the part of it that I want to get across here. It's not just that China has our

data. 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 to think that way and get you to think differently about things, for instance, that are pro-America. Maybe they want to get you to think positively about the things that are on their agenda, right? Maybe making us 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, which is centralized communist type of control. 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 own us, right? Even our DNA,

by the way, our biological DNA is now digitized. So what could get more you than your DNA, right? So this is really, really, I think, a key issue. And like I said earlier, I didn't realize 10 years ago I'd be sitting here talking to you all about this. It was just I had an experience, opened my eyes, tried to do something about it, and here we are. And I'm actually becoming more and more optimistic every day because people like you are on this. And you're doing your own thing, Shara, to get people to understand 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 Internet Age. And if they want to know more about Project Liberty, where do they go? Projectliberty.io or go directly to thepeoplesbid.com. All right. It's The Breakfast Club. Good morning. to thepeoplesbid.com. All right. It's The Breakfast Club.

Good morning. Thanks for your time, guys.