The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 396: Frank H. McCourt, Jr,—Selected Garbage from Families of Distinction

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

The American businessman and philanthropist talks about growing up in Boston as a fifth-generation builder, starting his first business collecting garbage at the age of 13, and the mission he's on to create a new internet by arguing in his new book,  Our Biggest Fight, that we the people's data should belong to we the people.

Hey guys, it's the way I heard it, episode number 396. Love this one. It's called Selected Garbage from Families of Distinction. While it's not necessarily the most bang-on literal title we've ever had, it was such a great turn of phrase from my guest, who is, I was going to say the one and only Frank McCourt, but he ain't the one and only. He's not the one and only Frank McCourt. The one you might remember wrote Angela's Ashes a few decades ago.

and totally changed the literary world. This guy has written a book called Our Biggest Fight, and it might very well change the world as we know it, reclaiming liberty, humanity, and dignity in the digital age. There are a lot of people out there, Chuck, who are deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply concerned about the impact of social media and the internet and the slow commoditization of the users,

into the products themselves. This guy, Frank McCourt, takes it a step further. He's suggesting that we are fast losing our citizenship, headed back toward a time when we were subjects. If that's all that was going on, that would be worth having a conversation about. It's a big idea. What makes Frank sort of interesting

is that he's a billionaire. Frank McCourt has built a chunk of Boston. He owned the Los Angeles. Dodgers for a time. Yep. And way, way back, as you'll see. Which, by the way, was just the consolation prize because his bid didn't win for the Sox, the Red Sox.

He's a Boston boy. He dearly wanted the Red Sox. But he settled for the Dodgers. And under his tutelage, watched them become a winning team. Then he sold him for a whole bunch more money. And now he's of a certain age and possessed of a certain idea. And I do believe he's what you call determined. He's determined and very passionate. He believes that our data, our personal data, is our personhood. That's what he refers to it as, that this is something that's unique to us that we should own. And he makes a great comparison with the Ma Bells, where it was just AT&T, and then they broke them up. And people wanted to keep their phone numbers when they went to someplace else, but they weren't allowed to in the beginning. He's saying that our personal data should be like our phone number. It should be ours and go where we want it to go.

It sounds quixotic. It sounds doomed. It sounds grim. It sounds Sisyphian. But everything this guy does works out. He has a shocking pedigree. Bit of a track record. Yeah, a bit of a track record that begins, as you'll soon hear, with a garbage route. But not just any garbage, selected garbage from families of distinction, which makes me laugh because there's so much garbage on the World Wide Web. And there is so much crap that has been sold to us in this bargain. We've traded our convenience for our privacy and according to Frank for our identities. And while all of that is undeniably grim, he is very hopeful and he's very optimistic. And he believes he has a relatively simple solution to this. And it's in the book you'll hear us talk about. It's called Our Biggest Fight by not the one and only Frank McCourt, Jr.

but one you're definitely going to get to meet, and I dare say like, right after this. Is it weird to love people but despise human resources? If so, well, color me weird. It's not to say I don't respect the millions of people who work in HR departments and companies all over the country. I do. It's just that I don't envy him. That's why MicroWorks doesn't have an HR department for better or worse. worse, and it's also why I use ZipRecruiter whenever we need to expand.

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And watch what happens. Odds are you'll find a human resource that just happens to be a great fit for your company in 24 hours or less. ZipRecruiter.com slash row. ZipRecruiter.com slash row. The smartest way to hire. Frank McCourt, man, once again, Chuck, we've proven that it's a mistake to meet these people prior to the actual beginning of the podcast because it never fails. They're so damned interesting before we begin. And now, Frank, you've set the bar so high.

What are we going to do for the next hour? We're going to talk. We're going to talk about life and we're going to talk about work and we're going to talk about all the good stuff. Excellent. Not to retread, but I mean, Frank McCourt. wrote a book that changed my life. Angela's Ashes inspired my mom to start writing again and renewed her dream of being published,

which she finally achieved at 80. And it just reminded me what a powerful thing it is to say what you mean and put it on the written, put it into the world in that way. And you've done this with your book, but before we dive in, tell me again how Frank McCourt met Frank McCourt, because that's awesome.

Yeah, I was in, he was coming to Boston too. Well, first of all, he had published his book called Angela's Ashes. This was before he won the Pulitzer Prize and so forth. And he was making the rounds, you know, talking about his book. And I had received a dozen copies from people who sent me a copy of the book with a note saying, hey, I didn't know you were an author too, ha, ha, ha. And then I would go to a meeting with someone like you. I'd grab a book off my desk.

I'd hand it to you and I'd say, read my book. How many did you inscribe? Yeah. Well, I didn't go that far. I didn't go that far. Anyway, we got a kick out of it, right? Because of the name similarity. And then he was making the rounds.

He was coming to Boston to do a reading of his book. So I said, geez, I'm going to go meet him. You know? And so I walk into the Boston Public Library. He was reading in the RAB auditorium. And I went and I walked up to the fellow who was kind of outside of the green room. And I said, hey, I'd like to. I'm here to meet Frank McCord.

He said, oh, good. Why are you here? And he said, oh, I'm related. And he looked at me, patting me on the back. And he said, yeah, he has a lot of relatives. Yeah, I bet he does more and more every day. And he says, you know, we're full. You can go into this other room where we're, you know,

you're piping the closed circuit, you know, into it. And then I've said to myself, geez, he's popular, right? It's full house. And then I played with the guy and I said, look, really, my name is Frank McCord as well. I'd really like to meet him. And he kind of bleed me and let me in the green room. you know, knock on the door, Mr. McCourt, Mr. McCourt here to see you.

And I walk in, his wife was there. We sat for 20 minutes shooting the breeze. Really got along and became fast friends and stayed in touch. And then, you know, another knock on the door. Mr. McCourt, it's time. And I'm like panicking. Time for what? And then I realized.

Not you, sir. It wasn't me. And then so, and I was going to, I was ready to leave. And he said, you're not leaving. Are you going to, and I said, of course I'm not leaving. And so went in, listened to him speak. He was just very charismatic, beautiful man. And I'll tell you one last funny story. I did learn that evening that the reason why the

title of the book was Angela's ashes was because he had intended the book to begin with the birth of his mom. And that happened when the Angela's bells were ringing in the church where she was born. So that's why his grandparents named his mom Angela. And his intention was it to be the story of her life and his life. And so the ashes part of it was her death. And so that was the trajectory of the story. His editor said, no, no, no. The story is from the birth of your mom

and your trip to America and your trip back home to Ireland and that story and your memories of that. And so he said, that's fine, but I'm keeping the title. And then he wrote a subsequent book called TIS, which is the second half of the story. Right. That's apostrophe, T-I-S.

That's correct, yeah. Because it's the very Irish. That's how we speak, Mike. So Irish. He was from Limerick. He's from Northern Ireland. Right. Came to New York.

They didn't make it as a family. Went back to Ireland and went back to Limerick. And that's where he grew up in quite trying circumstances. You know, they were dirt poor. What about you? I grew up in Boston, Mass. So I'm a Bostonian. grew up in a suburb called the name of Watertown.

Sure. Great working class town. Really a beautiful place to grow up. And yeah, I grew up on Russell Avenue. Read much Robert Parker? Yeah, yeah. I read a little bit of... Spencer for hire?

Yeah, exactly. So good, Chuck. Yeah. You got to dig into those, man. That and Travis McGee just amused me forever. And I really felt, you know, Parker, his knowledge of Boston was encyclopedic. The streets, the buildings. I mean, he had such a great sense of place.

I can still see him sipping his beer there in the bar at the Ritz, you know, in the back. It was just, it's such a great. Very graphic, yeah. Yeah, I mean, but the common, the town itself, we grew in Baltimore. Those towns rhyme in so many ways, even architecturally to a degree, which I imagine you can speak to being a builder of some renown. Yeah, so, you know, Boston is, look at many ways, it's where this whole Great America project began, right? Sure. And it's a great story.

And, you know, that a waterfront town that grew up around that harbor and prospered and then struggled a bit, and then prospered and then struggled a bit. Boston has an interesting history because it was the financial capital of the country until it wasn't. New York became that. It was the computer capital of the world, you know, many computers until it wasn't that went to Silicon Valley. And then now, I think which is why the city has it, you know, carries a little bit of a chip. A little bit. And which is a good thing because they have that underdog mentality, and that's, I think, ingrained in me, quite frankly. And now Boston is actually really, really in a good spot because of biotechnology, kind of the merger of technology and science and medicine and so forth.

So they have great hospitals, great universities. and because of the way the world is going, where technology is such an important part of our lives now, having the universities and the hospitals and kind of that foundational level and then connecting that now to the technology has created a biotech boom in Boston. I'd like you to talk about your book

in terms, not just to the tech, which is obvious, but in terms of the Internet as a tool, that's really what it is, right? and the tools that built Silicon Valley, the tools that you use as a builder to help shape the landscape in Boston and other places, I've never met anybody in your line of work, and I assume you still think yourself fundamentally as a builder.

Absolutely. If I was to pick one word, that's what I am. That's it, right, which is really the other reason why you're here. You're the living Frank McCourt, which is awesome. Congratulations. But I do think in so many ways, and in so many instances, it's been builders who have wandered outside of their lane to fix a thing,

or at least to talk about a thing, in ways that surprise people. Now, you're surprising because you've been there and done that. You know, you own the Dodgers for crying out loud, as you might recall, and you've done a lot of things. Why are you doing this? You're picking a fight, by the way, with a book called Our Biggest Fight, and you are now officially in it up to your neck. Yeah, so let me give you a couple reasons.

A couple of ways to answer that question. As we just talked about it, I grew up in Watertown. I'm one of seven kids. Unbelievably awesome parents. Dad, really a working guy that ran the family business, construction business. We are one of, if not the oldest, construction company in America. Third, fourth, fifth generation? Five.

1893. So my great-great-grandfather began the company. Let's start at the beginning, right? He came to America as a 13-year-old with his parents. and worked his way up the ranks. He worked for the Boston Gas Company, started as a laborer, became a foreman. He had a nice union job.

And when he was 50 years old, he made his leap of faith. His leap of faith in himself and in America. He started a construction company by the name of the John McCourt Company. That's what's his name. At 50. At 50 years old.

And he started building roads when Henry Ford started building cars. and he believed in himself, he believed in other people, and he believed in possibilities. It was interesting. It wasn't like we started building this company and kept records from the beginning. We were building a company to put food on the table and take care of ourselves and other people and build a life here in America. But I have looked back a little bit at that era. He took that leap of faith during a very, very difficult time in America. It was a virtual depression. It was a very, very difficult economic time.

But that belief in what's possible, regardless of what's going on around, that is the lifeblood of this country. That is the power. And it's like connecting a dream to an economic incentive. It creates unbelievable results. So off he went. And yeah, five generations later, here we are. And we're builders. And now I have the unbelievable privilege, right, of running a company that works around the globe.

in many businesses, but at the core, we are builders, we are contractors. And a lot of what we build is infrastructure. We understand how things work and have a deep respect for proper design, proper construction, and building things that will last a long, long time. And, but before we get too far into what I'm doing today, I took a little bit of my great-grandfather's, you know, kind of spirit. And when I was 13, I started my own first, company. And that was the beginning of my own personal journey. Well, he waited until he was 50. So you're bored at 12. You're like, okay, all right, enough with the paper boy route or whatever you were doing. What was the company you started?

Well, remember, he came here at 13. So that was a beginning of his journey. So mine was also at 13. And I started a garbage company. We had a small summer camp, you know, a cottage up in a little lake in New Hampshire. I don't know, maybe there was a hundred homes. Homes is is kind of an exaggeration. These are camps. These are cottages, you know, around the lake. And in Deerfield, New Hampshire, a great place, beautiful, beautiful little lake. But no municipal services.

You know, you lived on a dirt road, and you took your own trash to the dump. And so a buddy and I thought it would be a great idea to start a trash collection business and provide a service to these 100 families who had to take their, Wait a second. Why? I mean, I'm asking because were you looking, like were you affirmatively looking for a thing that needed to get done that wasn't happening? Or did you always have this garbage-related wishfulfillment festering in your heart? I didn't necessarily have a garbage-related wishful thinking in my heart. I love work. I mean, you can ask anybody about me and they probably say I identify with my work, quite frankly. It's who I am. And I love it. To me, it's not even work. if you know what I mean. It's, I enjoy it immensely. And honestly, I wanted to go to work for the family construction business when I was 13.

But as a 13-year-old, I couldn't. I had to wait until I was 16. And so I just wanted to start to do something, you know, that I could make a buck. Not to belabor the point. I've talked to a lot of builders, and I met a bunch of people who tend to our infrastructure. And the common thing that I often hear is that the feedback that you get in that kind of vocation is Undeniable. You see the fruits of your labor. You're not laboring, in other words, in the ether or wrestling with some kind of intangible. You're building a thing or you're fixing a thing. So one minute there's garbage. Now it's hauled away. Very satisfying. One minute, there's nothing. And then there's a high rise. Wow. Look what we did. I'm just circling back to it because I find that that dynamic in the human condition, is as addictive as any controlled substance I've ever seen.

It is. There's nothing more satisfying than being productive in seeing the fruits of labor. It's a great thing. Mike, I wish everybody could feel that, what I feel, when I work, when I have an idea, and suddenly it's a real thing.

It just gives you such a great feeling, not just about yourself, about what's possible. Sure. And so, you know, trash wasn't the most, Fun thing in the world, but 50 cents a barrel, you know? Yeah, yeah. 75 customers, you know. Post people had three or four barrels, so they give you,

if they had three barrels, they're generous, they give you two bucks. It's math. But the key thing that you're kind of glazing over here, Mike, is that he's 13 years old and starts to do this. It's like, how are you going to haul a barrel on the back of your bike or whatever, right? No, no. I know the answer to it because he grew up with the old man he just described, and he watched that guy pull rabbits out of hats his whole life.

He watched that guy build that guy build. things where there was nothing. He watched that guy come up with answers to problems that nobody else was thinking about. I'm guessing, but you had a front row seat to an example that you could follow. There was nothing that made me happier as a little kid than going off with my dad on a Saturday morning to the construction site. Off we'd go. You know, I was still half asleep because they start early, real early. And he'd throw me up on a, you know, a bulldozer or backhoe or big, big truck. And say to the guy he knew all those guys. Not only did he know his guy, he knew their wives and their kids and what was up in their lives,

you know, and that's why my dad was a beloved figure in the industry. And I would just be up on this gigantic machinery, you know, as a 10, 11, 12 year old kid and just was, it was exhilarating, you know, to see what, and I learned how to operate it. And, you know, for me, that was also fine. Yeah, so at 13, the only thing I was missing was a driver's license. So I had to convince my neighbor and have him convince his dad who had an old pickup truck the dump you had to put the garbage in and break it out because it didn't have a lift so it was that wasn't the most fun part of the job but you know collecting those two dollars five dollars from

different people and then you know that's hey you know we did it twice a week by the way so do the math on that and it was pretty good for way back then and and then we started our jobs and people said hey do you you paint and we said sure we paint you know do you do landscape of course we do landscape do you take down buildings well that of course we have special at that, you know, and then we figure out how to take the building down, and it was funny. We had so many last. And we had a great model. Our truck had low sidewalls, so we had 4x8 plywood.

We stuck in the sidewalls so that we could carry a lot of trash and painted it, and then had a guy in a tuxedo with, you know, horses pulling a wagon with trash in the back, and we had, our model was selected garbage from families of distinction. Only the best. I love it. Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments. They're hysterical.

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Do what my mom did. Get yourself unlimited high-speed data for just 3499 a month. At puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at Pure Talk. dot com slash row. Pure talk. Well look, I mean, when I was at age, I was playing with Tonka toys and Lincoln logs, maybe some Lego, you know, you were playing with actual timbers, actual building materials, actual machines. So that's good to know because I know we're getting to the point where you're about to enter

of the fight of your life and back to the tools, back to the hands-on stuff. Anyway, go on with your story, but I love the background because, right, that you want to understand the future. You better understand the past. Yeah, we're all part of our upbringing, our experiences, our choices, and what we do in our lives, you know, so it kind of makes us who we are. You know, going back to your original question in terms of like, I think, yeah, the builder thing is deeply ingrained. But there's also a, you know, a memory I have at the, you know, dining room table as one of seven with my two parents there. And my dad would leave really early. Yeah, he'd be out of the house at five. And he'd try to get home for dinner. You know, he was most nights. And we'd sit down and have family dinner.

And normally did be a friend or a guest or this. So we had 10 or 12 people at the table. I mean, that's a big dinner table every night. And we had incredible conversations that were all all over the place. And as kids, me and my siblings, we were pretty good at identifying problems, right? I mean, you can do that and say, what's wrong with this or that? And not a dinner would end without my mom saying, hey, kids, you've done a great job identifying the problem. Now what are you going to do about it? And that is very ingrained in me.

And my siblings, by the way. And I think that is ingrained in a lot of people who have had the benefit of a dinner table and a mom and or dad that try to do the best they can, you know, delivering the messages. No topic off limits. the table, talk about whatever you want? One ground rule. Listen, respect the other people at the table. And you'll get your turn, but we can disagree.

Listen, respect the other person, make your point. And I learned that good ideas, compelling ideas, and vision, actually carry the day, you know, once everybody's had their say. And it was very interesting because I have siblings that are quite conservative. I have siblings that are quite liberal. And so you just have this incredible, just in terms of their perspective, but it wasn't necessarily in political terms. It was just in terms of how they viewed things. And it was a great education to sit and be part of and listen to those conversations.

I was fifth in line. So I did a lot of listening until I figured out how to get my point of view in there. People don't need to be right. They like to be right, but they don't need to be right. They need to be heard. That's exactly right. they need to at least think they've been heard. I'm not sure there's a difference, really,

between being heard and thinking you've been heard, but at least you get to say your piece, right? So you've been saying your piece for a while now, and whatever words you grouped together along the way got you from picking up garbage to building buildings to owning the Dodgers for crying out loud. We'll talk about whatever you want. The problem with your life is that it's so jam-packed with stuff,

We can spin our wheels before you ever get to the fight of your life. But, I mean, how does baseball impact the guy sitting across from me now? I grew up playing baseball, playing all sports. It was a great management tool for my parents, you know, with seven kids to have them out there active, playing sports. We nearly have a team already. And, you know, but it was a way to keep us hanging around with a, generally speaking, a good crowd. And, you know, being physical. and active and quite frankly being tired at the end of the day which is a as I say a parental management

tool and I have seven kids now myself and I use some of those same tools and baseball was it was interesting in Boston you know with the Red Sox and so forth and Fenway Park a great place for families to go and what and I have a great memories of being there as a kid and then of course with my children and when the chance to buy the Red Sox came forward that was like a you know for a kid grown up in Watertown, Massachusetts, to have a chance to buy his hometown baseball team. So magical. Yeah, it was just a beautiful, a beautiful thing. And so, you know, we put our hat in the ring and went through the process and we're one of

the three finalists and then, you know, went a different way at the very, at the tail end. And because the fellow that owned the Florida team, the Marlins, wanted to upgrade by the Red Sox. And the fellow that owned the Montreal Expos was going to buy the Marlins. Marlins and baseball was going to buy the expos from the guy in Montreal and they were going to move it to Washington. And so it became a decision that was above my pay grade. You know what I mean? It was a decision of MLB to achieve some objectives. And so at the 11th hour, there was a shift. Yeah. And so the end result was very different than it looked like it was going to be. And it was, yeah, sure, it was disappointing. But, I mean, are you kidding? I had the chance to buy the Red Sox and

I was one of the three finalists. So I thought that was pretty good. And I remember my mom calling me and saying, hey, Frankie, are you, you okay? And I said, yeah, I'm great. And, you know, chances. After you didn't get it. Yeah. I said, I'm great. I mean, what are the chances that growing up I'd have a chance to even bid on this,

never mind, own it. And she said, well, just remember when one door closes, another opens. And I'll never forget that. And then I went to New York to MLB's headquarters just to close the book on it. Because, you know, in Boston, Mike, there are only three things that matter in Boston, right? sports and politics and revenge. And so when sports and politics mix, it can be dustups, you know, in the fur can fly. So I just went there.

I said, hey, look, to the president, I just want to make sure I didn't step on anybody's toes here inadvertently because it was a thrill of a lifetime to be in the process. And he said, no, as a matter of fact, we were wondering if you'd be interested in buying another team. And I was like, wow, can I think about that? He said, sure. Wait a minute. Would it have mattered what team to you at that point? I just had to think about it because it wasn't focused on buying any baseball team at that time.

I was living in Boston, focused on buying the Red Sox, which were the team that I grew up supporting. My grandfather, by the way, was one of the owners of the Boston Braes, which was the National League team in Boston at the time that then moved the year I was born. They moved to Milwaukee, and now they're, of course, in Atlanta, another great franchise. And yeah, so it was kind of in the blood a little bit, but I had no, any memory I had of my grandfather owning the Braves was in a scrapbook. As I said, they moved the year I was born. So I thought about what baseball said

and then, you know, just reflected on it. And I happened to have a neighbor who was selling the Dodgers for Rupert Murdoch. And he was in New York, but he was from Boston also, Stan Schumann. He said, you know, Frank, you should buy this team, the Dodgers. And I said, but Stan, and everybody tells me it's losing a ton of money, 50, 60 million a year. And Rupert Murrick is a pretty smart guy.

And he has a lot more money than me. So I'm a little nervous about that, you know, and you lose that kind of money for a few years. You're at the grown-up table, man. Pretty soon it adds up to real money, right? Yeah, exactly. It's a long way from, you know, barrels of garbage. My trash business, yeah.

So it was like the third time he asked or suggested, I take a look at it, that I said, okay, you send me the book because he had to go through a process and the bankers had pulled together all the information. Send me the book, I'll take a look at it. I have my guys take a look at it. And so we did. And we talked about it, thought about it.

I said, you know what, there is a path here if we can do a couple of things. So we said, okay, we'll take a hard look. We're going to have to fix two or three things here in order to remove that deficit. It's worth stressing. This was a losing team. This team was losing games.

They were losing money. and they were for sale. It was a team in distress. Yep, and there was the opportunity. You know, there was the opportunity right there. In fact, that it was a team that was in distress and so forth. So we developed a game plan, a strategy for how we could renegotiate the media contract with Fox, if we could get some of the expenses under control,

and quite frankly, if we could invest, actually invest more money in the stadium and the club to increase the revenues because the stadium had been invested in for a long, long time. What year are we in now? We were in 2003 at that time. 2003. Well, it's funny.

I mean, apropos of nothing. You know, Larry King was a big fan of yours. And I was on his show, I guess it was in 2006, and he mentioned your name. And I mentioned Earl Weaver's name. And we literally screwed up the whole commercial break because Larry King's a freak for baseball. Just a freak.

We're talking about Mike Quay, and Jim Palmer and Boog Pal and Alphumbray and Andy Etche Baron and Merv Redmond and Paul Blair and he got he and then he's crazy for the Dodgers like we were for the Orioles and just funny now that you're sitting here. I got to know him really well because of that and yeah I met a lot of great people in L.A. and just enjoyed that period. Well, you gave him a gift man. I mean you gave them a great gift because eight, nine, 10 years later, that's a different team. Dodgers now have a chance to win the World Series every year because we fixed what was broken, you know,

and started from the ground up with everything from renovating Dodgers Stadium to a new spring training facility in Phoenix, Camelback Ranch, fixed, you know, the scouting and player development, you know, brought in great young talent, Clayton Kirshaw, you know, drafted him out of high school and in return the winning attitude to the club and got, you know, real leadership in place. We had a really good thing going. It was a privilege, believe me, that period of my life.

But it shows you you can take something broken and fix it and make it great. Well, permission to make an obvious metaphor and juxtaposition. What you did there, Frank, was you fixed the infrastructure of a baseball team after working in infrastructure in every other way. That's how your brain works, right? What's the problem? Where is the solution? I'm five or seven. I'll wait my turn.

I'll speak my piece. I'll fix the busted pipe. I'll fix the crooked building. I'll fix the ailing baseball team. It is a metaphor. I hadn't ever thought about it exactly that way, but that's exactly right. And, you know, I've had also the great, you know, joy, really.

It's going to say privilege, but it's a joy to not only fix things that are broken, but actually envision things that were never there, you know, like the seaport in Boston. You know, it was one of the projects that I'm most proud of that, you know, we took an old abandoned railroad yards and turned it into a third of the city now, you know, in terms of... Well, it's like the inner harbor in Baltimore. Again, you know, what Rouse did for the inner harbor and for Canton and for all that area. I mean, you're so right.

Towns that are surviving today are there, in my view, because individuals bet on the city. I'm thinking of my Greek buddies, you know, the Smith brothers. Right. They got like, I don't know, 30 restaurants. Baltimore now often in places where you just didn't go and now you go out of your way to go there so taking a bet on a thing that isn't there you're right that's adjacent to fixing a problem that nobody else wants to talk about but it's still all part and parcel of a builder's blueprint totally and uh i think it was einstein who said you know imagination is more important than knowledge right so

if you can and that's also a great part of the american project is and i think builders you bring this perspective forward is just it's about reimagining things and then going ahead and making it happen right and it's uh and there's all different levels of reimagination you know it's let's reimagine you know how the the kids playroom is going to you know going to work or the little addition on a house or let's reimagine a country that's what our forefathers did they reimagined a country here that was you know where people were even before we were the united states of america you know we were we were subjects to monarchs right and Thomas Payne stepped forward and said you know we could continue to be subjects of of monarchs or we could be citizens and you know people said like what's a citizen well as a citizen you actually

are born with the same rights as that came you're a human being born with what became known as unalienable rights and so you're an equal and you have the same shot as everyone else no guarantee of the same result, but you have the same shot, and you're in charge of you. You have choice, you have autonomy, you have freedom, you have liberty. You are worthy. And by the way, for those rights to mean anything, you need to respect them in other people. And that's the so-called social contract. That was reimagining how a country could work and how a people could work. And, you know, and he wrote a... Common sense.

1775 and here we are almost 250 years later having the benefits of all that for the last 250 years and now we're struggling a little bit again because something's happened and we're becoming sadly subjects again and losing that citizenship and those rights in this digital era we live in and it's why I wrote the book and why I started Project Liberty because this is a very very key moment in my opinion where we need to once again reimagine the future and really have this technology, and I'm talking about internet technology, respect us, give us ownership of ourselves, return choice to each of us, autonomy. Look, if I were to ask you, Mike, to give me three or four words or phrases that would describe democracy, you probably wouldn't come up with autocratic, centralized, surveillance-based, exploitive predatory. Wouldn't be at the top of the list, no. And sadly, that's what our internet technology has become, right?

It's technology that scrapes our data and accumulates it, aggregates it, and applies algorithms to it, and to manipulate us, essentially, to do things. And it really is a subject or citizen question again. And do we want, I mean, obviously, we're not talking about kings with crowns and roves. We're talking about, you know, CEOs of big tech that have, a ton of power and influence over us in our lives. And something's got to give here. Look, I don't disagree with any of it.

But I think there's a difference in having all of those virtues that come with being a citizen, that Thomas Payne espoused. I think there's a difference in having them taken from us versus us giving them away. And I feel like that's what we've done. I don't feel like anybody has taken these things from me. I feel like I gave them away. Now, caveat umptur, right? You can say buyer beware in a lot of different ways and in light of a lot of different types of transactions.

But there is something, I used the word addiction earlier, and I'll circle back to it because an addiction can be a, you can be addicted to a very positive thing, or you can be addicted to what's clearly a negative thing. And the problem is this is not clearly negative. It's insidiously negative. The consequences are unintended. I think they're unintended, but maybe they're not. Maybe they're not. It's starting to feel like somebody wrote a pamphlet called Uncommon Sense. Well, are you sick of it yet?

Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines and sucking up all the bandwidth? You find yourself wishing we lived in a simpler time? Do you miss the rotary phone? Well, get over it. The genie is out of the bottle. The poop is out of the goose, I'm afraid. AI is here to stay, and every business in the country is asking themselves the same question. How do we make it work for us? Well, the answer to that question varies, but you'll find it in a free guide that you can get right now at netseweet.com slash Mike. It's called demystifying AI.

It's totally free. It's essential reading for anybody trying to make sense of a future that appears to have arrived yesterday. NetSuite, of course, is the number one AI enterprise resource planning software out there, trusted by over 43,000 businesses. With NetSuite, you can use the AI of your choice, GROC or Claude or Chat, GPT, whatever else is out there to connect to your actual business data, all of it, and automate all of those tiresome, time-sucking, soul-deadening manual processes. This is AI built into the system.

that's currently running your business. Learn more at netsuite.com slash mic. And while you're there, pick up their free business guy, demystifying AI. It's filled with super useful information. And again, it's free at netsuite.com slash mike. That's netsuite.com. Well, this is interesting. So roll the clock backward.

When our forebears, you know, those that came here early to create this great country, they didn't know anything other than being a subject. They and their families were subjects for 800 years. So when you don't know anything else, it's not like someone took it away from them. It's that that's all they knew, right, until they reimagined something else or they imagined something different.

Then you have to create that alternative and build it. You know, you envision it, and then you build it. And that's what we did, you know, Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Bill of Rights, very, very thin documents. These are not long, you know, a document thin that are embedded with values and principles and the stuff that never changes. Those are our founding documents. And then you go build on those all kinds of a whole institutional framework and a whole country that gets built on top of that, embracing those values.

You know, how many times have you heard people say, you know, we need now a digital Bill of Rights? And I say, no, we don't need a digital Bill of Rights. We need technology that respects the Bill of Rights we have. And that's what I'm getting at here. This technology is not only are we losing trust in our institutions and in one another, and is it really, really amplifying disrespectful behavior. This technology is dehumanizing us. because it's sucking all of our information out of us.

Who are we other than our choices? Who are we other than our behaviors? Who are we other than our lived experience? Our lived life? All of that now is being taken away by these big platforms. Look, one of the examples I use in the book, if I was the postmaster general and I said to you, hey, I have a deal for you, I'm going to deliver your mail from now on for free.

No more stamps. You say, okay, tell me, what's the deal? well I'm going to put a camera and a listening device in every room of your house in your car your workplace basically follow you around and I'm going to read your letters yeah yeah well the first thing is I'm going to creep you out okay you say well that's kind of creepy and I said well but now you're getting it for free and say I'm not well one other thing everything I read you know because I'm going to open those letters and everything I read now about you is mine so It's not just your relationships or where you shop or this or this or this everything about you.

So I'm going to read about your thoughts, your ideas, your emotions, your behaviors, how are you going to react to something? In other words, I'm assessing you. I'm grabbing hundreds of thousands of data points about you and I'm making an assessment about who you are, your persona, let's call it. And now I have all that information. So you'd say, wait a second, this is creepy and unfurricular. fair and then you say oh one other thing i'm going to read your 13 year old daughter's diary and when i find out she's a bit insecure about her weight i'm going to send her stuff to make her feel worse and maybe send her stuff that she can buy so i'm going to profit on that insecurity

oh and by the way show her how to hurt herself harm herself cut herself kill herself we're seeing an epidemic now in this country right of harms to young children because this is very, very manipulative technology. So creepy, unfair, and harmful. That's not American. It's also not how it was sold, right? I mean, there's a frog in the boiling water element to everything you've said. But I wonder, as a builder, was there a time when this technology first reared its head where it didn't look so ugly to you? Was there a time when you heard the information superhighway and thought, that sounds like a pretty grand thoroughfare, right? And then all of a sudden we start thinking of it in terms of, wait a second, cars are going too fast on this super highway.

And no one's using their signals. And there's a lot of wrecks, it seems. And some of these turnoffs just leads straight off a cliff. Maybe this highway is not so super, but we already paid our toll. Now we're on it. Were you ever optimistic about the tool that these guys built 10, 15, 20 years ago? Well, first of all, I am hugely optimistic about what can be done to fix this and the benefits once fixed that we'll all have. So I don't want to sit here and have my mom say, yeah, okay, you have to find the problem.

Now, what are you going to do about it? Okay, so I don't want to get stuck. I just want to set the groundwork here, you know, just like, here's the problem, right? And I really wanted to address your point about whose choice was it? Do we give it away or did they take it? Exactly. And my point is when it's all you know and all you have, have, it's really a difference without a distinction. We need to build an alternative,

and then people can decide whether they give it away or not. And that gets back to agency. But if we bring it back to addiction as well, one more complexity, right? So now we're just not, oh, you know what? I read the research. Turns out maybe I shouldn't drink half a bottle of bourbon a day. I'll just stop, except that's hard. That's hard. And I really wonder, It's ironic. I'm sitting here with this thing next to me right now. I imagine, you know, your team is here. Look at your guy Max over there checking his Facebook status right now or whatever he's doing. This is what we do. We're grownups. I was joking with you the other day, man. God help me. I sat down on the toilet, you know, in the private moment it's like, and I'm on reels.

I don't even know what I'm watching, Frank, but I'm laughing and they get funnier as I go. You're right? I'm just sitting there. I'm a grown man. I'm 62 years old. By the time I stood up, there was no blood in my legs. Damn near fell flat on my face. I need to get beyond this image first before I can get to the, but glad you were happy.

That's all I can tell you. I sat there so long and I had to go again. Look, oh boy, let's go back to your question. So, yes, when the internet was started, it was, I think, designed with the best of intentions and to actually empower people, actually, connect us, make us smarter, and really be that proverbial tie that lifts all boats.

So it is and was an exercise in optimism, right? It was imagined. It was created back in most people think it was 1983 when the internet really started. And that was a great thing where devices were connected. And, you know, because we all agreed again, just like our founding documents of this country, you know, very thin layer protocols were adopted. and one in 1983 connected devices. I think it's important to note

that 41 years later was still a device on the internet. You and I are not on the internet. Our devices on the internet. So I'm sure we'll talk in a moment about is this for humans or machines? What's relevant is it was built for machines and we need to fix it and now prioritize human beings.

But back to the point, I've talked to the people that created the internet. They didn't expect it. or wanted to be used the way it's being used now. This was a tool to make us smarter, not to make us dumber, right? And then 89, you know, Berners Lee comes around, and now he says we can connect the data, not just the device. Okay.

So now all of our, all this data we're creating is out there. And again, I've talked to Tim, Tim Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide Web. What's his last name? Berners-Lee. I feel like more people should know that. That's the guy who's most singularly, credited for creating the worldwide web. Yeah, with the protocol that we all adopted that,

you know, connected our data. Again, wanted to do it for all the best reasons to make people, empower people, connect people. The internet is awesome technology that can make us smarter, can help us solve problems, can make people richer. But then what happened around the turn of the century was something that got us off track. A few people realized that if they could be the first movers in collecting all of our data, particularly our our personal information, then they would figure out how to monetize it. And boy, have they monetized them. Sure. So you have now four or five giant trillion dollar companies. Okay, I think the top five are worth something like I last time I checked 12 trillion. And I'm not talking about billion.

I'm talking 12 trillion dollars. Okay. This is nobody can say now that our data, our personal information doesn't have value. It's created the most valuable enterprises in the history of humankind we are the product exactly right it is a you know what i say in the book and i i really want would love your listeners to just reflect on is you know when we talk about data data is you know like what's data who cares right it's like you said when you put a building up you look at it and say i put that building up when you talk about data it's it's in the ether it's abstract think of data as you think of your data as your personhood this is who we we are in this digital age, right? So this is, all of this information that is gathered up by these

platforms is basically a very intimate profile of each of us. And this is now the, do we really want these big companies having all this information on every human being that's on a platform? There's three billion people on Meta Products. There's four and a half. half billion people on Google products. This is a trove of information on each of us, and then that information gets used in a way. Sell us ads? Yeah. Push news and information that these algorithms have assessed that we will be interested in? You are more likely to consume the information that you are shoveled based on all of the data that has been, what's the words you used? Scraped. Yeah, stolen, scraped from us, you know.

And so the fundamental point in the book is that our information that we create should be our own to decide who gets to use it for what purpose. I see this as fundamental as what Thomas Payne was saying in common sense. We need to own us again. We need to own ourselves. And our data is our personhood. It is us in a digital world. I've heard people say, well, whoa, whoa, Frank, I'm not on social media.

I'm okay. and I said, do you search? Oh yeah, of course. Yeah, I'm doing it all the time. Oh, do you shop? Oh, yeah, it's fantastic. Yeah, I have all the time.

Do you have a smart TV? Yeah, I love it. How about a smart refrigerator? Dishwasher. How about your car? When did you buy your car? It's a smartphone on wheels. Do you walk outside?

There's cameras on the streets. Do you have a nest camera? Do you watch your, you know, when your young children? Do you have a ring doorbell? We're all connected to the Internet. All information about us is being gathered up by these big platforms or sold to them. Because there's a whole series of intermediaries that broker the data. And this is our information.

And I simply think we should flip this on its head. People, individuals should own themselves again. They should decide how their information gets shared, not a CEO of a big company or a government, or a Chinese Communist Party. I want to make decisions about myself. How do you get Americans less complacent? There are plenty of people listening right now who are going damn straight.

This guy who didn't write Angela's Ashes has written an even more important book and he's on to something. And then other people who are thinking, you know what I love? Hey, Siri, what's 2048 divided by six and getting an immediate answer? or directions to nearest Starbucks.

We're addicted to that, that level of convenience and that level of connectivity with my mom sent me a funny little meme as I was walking over here. I sent her a funnier. It went back. We had a good laugh. We're addicted to those connections, right? So talk to people who are like, look, I'm okay with the trade. Do they really understand to your post office analogy what the, those stakes were. And is this an oversimplification? Are you saying that the whole thing is just a big bait and

switch? That they made us this offer. We'll connect you. You'll get this. But they just out and out lied regarding the thing they wanted most of all. Yeah. You know, I'm pretty much more interested in talking about how to fix it in the future than putting fingers and blame and all that stuff. But I got to know it's busted first. Who cares about the trash right? Like somebody, had to look out and see a bunch of uncollected trash. Look, Mike, I'm pretty sure when your mom sent that funny meme to you and that when you sent one back, that part was awesome. But you didn't really, your mom, or you didn't really think that that was also a way for

information to be gathered up on you. Sure. That somebody, a big, you know, big brother, the big tech was watching, right? And collecting information. This country has been built on people having. freedom, deciding for themselves what their definition of privacy is, deciding for themselves what their definition of free speech is, deciding for themselves what they're comfortable with. It's called agency, individual choice, liberty. That's what liberty is. And my point about

Thomas Payne and the inspiration for the book is we rejected centralized control, where somebody is in charge of us and is born better than us, right? And just because of that birthright, they own us. We've rejected that. We rejected a feudal system where we, my ancestors, got to work a little plot of land, give most of it away, keep enough to sustenance, have no rights, own nothing, right? We've rejected that and built the greatest country on earth. Why would we be giving all of that up for the mere right to use the internet? It's a crappy deal. So answer to your question, like, what do we do is we build a better version?

We build an alternative. Because until there's an alternative to being a subject to a monarchy, you're going to be a subject to a monarchy. Until there's an alternative to the current internet technology we have, we're going to be subjects in this digital world. We're going to be owned by these big platforms. I would suggest, because it doesn't have to be this way, it's just technology. Okay, it's just a piece of infrastructure. Let's redesign it. Let's put people in charge of all of their personal information.

Let's put them in charge of their personhood. Let's think of it as personhood, not data, and let them decide what to do with it. And so they're in charge. They own themselves again. they benefit from the value of that data. They get a piece of that $12 trillion and growing. I'm sold. Look, I'm sold. I love it. I'm going to ask how we're going to do that, obviously.

But I mean, you sold the Dodgers for a couple billion dollars. These guys have $12 trillion. You're not going to do this alone. Of course not. Yeah. So I've committed a big chunk of my wealth to Project Liberty to get the ball rolling. And I'm not like a do-gooder. I want our business to continue for another five generations, right?

And I am worried that our business will not continue to thrive if our democracy fails. Tell me one, other than maybe Singapore, one thriving market capitalism in the world without democracy. Shameless plug. Long before she was Peggy Roe, my mom was Peggy Noble, daughter of Carl and Thelma Noble. It was her father, Carl, who inspired me to pitch a show called Dirty Jobs to the Discovery Channel, and later start a foundation that honored the kind of work Carl Noble did for a living, trade work, skilled labor. That foundation is called MicroWorks, and today I'm proud to tell you that we've helped thousands of people get the training they need to begin a

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whiskey to sip responsibly after a long day of interviewing people on this podcast. Pick up a bottle at noblespirates.com. K-N-O-B-E-L-Spirates.com. Soon may the noble man come to bring a bottle for everyone. One day when the waitin is done, we'll take a drink and go. Hard to pick one, isn't it? So I'm a businessman. And, you know, that's my skill and that's what I, if I have one. And without democracy, we're not going to have capitalism, at least as I've known it.

And I worry about that. So I want to fix this. And I realize it's, there's a lot of people that love this country. Like I'm not, you know, I'm one of millions who are very, very, unhappy with the direction of things. And I'm not talking about left right here. I'm just the direction, right? Because this technology, it amplifies, we were talking to Mary earlier, right? This technology amplifies extreme behavior on both sides. It's not how common sense, you know, normal, working people of America, you know, feel. It's like we want the best that can

be offered here. We want to be kind of left alone where we can be. We all have a dream. Let me pursue it. Connect it to an economic incentive, right? Because then I'll work really hard and build it. And so this technology can be redesigned in a way to empower everyone. I think the wealth that's going to be created for people who are on the outside looking in right now is going to be astronomical. How are you going to recreate this thing?

Okay. So the first issue is to really dig into how the thing. thing works and fix it from the ground up. That's how you fix, you know, thing. You don't build more on a bad foundation, right? You fix the foundation and then you build something great. So, uh, four and a half years ago, December of 19, I, I green lit a project with a brilliant tech team that we have. And the guy by the name of Baxter Woodham and another by the name of Harry Evans came forward with an idea once I charged them with the problem to create another thin layer protocol for the

internet much like the one that berners lee created you know tim berners lee and the one created before him the first one remember connected devices the second one connected data let's have a third one that connects us now we're in charge we own our information and imagine an internet where we're not clicking mindlessly on the terms and conditions of use of five big platforms none of us read them we don't care we just want the answer to our question right or we just want to order the good or do whatever. Imagine an internet where the new apps are clicking on our terms of use for our data, where we're respected, where we own us again.

And we can happily give away a piece of information if we're going to help cure a disease. Or if someone's going to make a trillion dollars, what are you giving me? There's value in our information. We've learned that. And by the way, nobody's saying, let's go to an internet that's taking people from eating candy to eat their vegetables. and it's something they don't want or it has to be an alternative that gets you that quick answer to your question, gets that thing you order to your doorstep the next day.

Sure, I'll press that button. I just don't know you've got 12 trillion reasons or 12 trillion opposers who are affirmatively. It's kind of like with guns in a way. I think about it like you can teach a responsible, decent American how to handle a firearm responsibly. But we're not talking about doing that. We're talking about redesigning the firearm in a way that will completely transform that tool. I love it. I think it's a great idea.

I just, it's so far beyond my pay grade. Okay, so let me give you a reason to be optimistic about this. I greenlit this project in December of 19 with this awesome tech team. Off they went to create the protocol and then everything up the line to the Apple. to make sure it works. And then last year, we made a deal with the first current web social media platform to migrate to this new platform. They have 20 million users.

They started their migration in earnest in the fourth quarter of last year. Now nearly a million people are on this new improved internet. What's it called? The protocol is DSMP. It's enabled by something called frequency. And the app that's migrated over is called Miwi. Mewee is a social media app, 20 million users. They're the proof of concept.

They're the first use case to prove that this works. I can go there right now. You can get on Miwi right now. Mewee. Mewee. Just go to the app store and download the Miwi app. M-I-W-E. M-E-W-E.

M-E-W-E. Okay, now you're on another protocol, right, that nearly a million people are on. Now you're in charge of you. Okay. So we know the tech works. Three, four, five years ago, people said to me, oh, this is too big, never work. You can't do it. It's not solvable. The genies out of the bottle. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Bs. The tech works. We've got that box checked. Now, what's needed? Scale. Adoption, right? Because you got hundreds of millions of people on the current internet, billions of people. A million people. It's not the money, Mike. It's not the, you know, little money versus 12 trillion. That's, Not the issue here. The issue is small community versus large community because we need adoption of this new internet, which is why we're bidding for TikTok.

Okay? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What? Yeah. So I've put forward a bid on behalf of Project Liberty, right, which is this project that we're saying we need to reclaim ownership of ourselves. A people's bid for TikTok,

which you've, you know, I'm sure read or heard recently that the legislation, President Biden signed the legislation that both houses of Congress passed very quickly to force bite dance, which is a Chinese company, to either sell the U.S. TikTok or shut it down. And so, now, right at the moment, you know, bite dance is trying to litigate and say, you can't do that. And then our bet is that the U.S. government will prevail. This is a national security risk.

Nobody wants 100 information on 170 million people going to China. You're talking about selling access onto the TikTok platform in the U.S. You're not talking about buying TikTok with a capital T? Yeah, buying the U.S. platform. Okay. Sorry if that was unclear. So buying the U.S. platform, which is what the government has legislated and dictated, either sold by Bight Dance or they can shut it all down.

They shut it down. So, I mean, but still, talk a couple hundred billion dollars? No, no, no, no, no. So, first of all, we don't want them to shut it down. There's 170 million people that love being on TikTok that enjoy it. So I see this as a fantastic opportunity to buy the platform, the U.S. platform. We don't want or need the algorithm, right, which is what makes TikTok, in many people's minds, very valuable. There are some people that might want to buy it with the algorithm. China has said they're not going to allow that to happen under any circumstances. So Most people who I've heard about who said they want to buy it,

they want to just re-engineer the algorithm. And again, collect everybody's data, scrape it, steal it, call it what you will, aggregate it, and then manipulate it, right? We're saying the opposite. We don't want the algorithm. We don't need the algorithm. What we want to do is bring the 170 million people over to this new alternative internet, because with 170 million people plus the 20 million from Miwi,

we have an alternative internet. It's no longer any question. It is catalyzed. It's happening. It's a real thing. And then let people choose. Do they want to be on an internet where their information is stolen? They get nothing for it.

Going back to my post office, they give up everything about themselves for, you know, because it's, quote, free? Or do they want to be on a free internet where they're in charge of themselves? Sounds like a no-brainer. But isn't it curious? I mean, I would think the majority of people online, understand that Google is Google. And when you search, they know and they anticipate and so forth and so forth.

Duck, Doc Go is another way to go. Free Spoke is another way to go. How many people have gone that way? What kind of success or what kind of roadblocks of those initiatives run into that might be a corollary with what you're trying to do? Those initiatives are learning that it's kind of a dead end because they don't have the scale. of these other platforms, and they're built on the same internet we have now.

So what we're saying is something entirely different. We're saying move people to a new version, the new protocol, empower people, and build from there. This is deja vu for me. When people say this is, wow, this is so big, it sounds great, but, you know, in 1993, my family started a, telecommunications company. My younger brother David ran the show. It's called RCN. And because we build infrastructure, because we saw where all this was going, said, hmm, the country had at the time

seven big oligarchs, the baby bells. You remember that? Sure. Okay, when AT&T was broken up. So it was like seven mafia families, right? They had they controlled the different geographies of the country. You had to use their service. They owned you. They owned your phone. number and you wanted to talk to somebody they had to be in the same server right they're the same carrier so that's how it worked most young people you tell them the story they think this is only by the way 1990s yesterday then they think it's like you're kidding right so you know if you lived in boston you used the carrier that covered Boston you moved to l.a get a new phone with a new number right sounds stupid but that's the way it was so we saw the internet the worldwide web right 89 so 93 so this is all

change. These baby bells are all on copper wire. High-speed internet is, you need fiber optic cable, not just copper wire. So why don't we raise money, take a risk, roll up our sleeves, and envision a new telecom company with fiber optics and build in the big cities in America where all the customers are, the bulk of them. We can deal with the other, you know, the suburbs and then the rural areas after we get going. And while the... Baby Bells are all trying to figure out how to do high-speed internet on copper wire, right, which is like they'll fumble and bumble. So off we went. We were the first ever to bundle to give someone high-speed internet access and cable TV and their phone from one provider, right?

People liked it. It was nice, a great idea, and off we went. So people would come in and say, I like this, I'll sign up, give me the contract, you know, they come, they sign the contract and say, and here's my phone number. And we have to say, well, sorry, we can't give you. your phone number because the oligarch in your area says they own your phone number and many people said well when I can have my number let me know and I'll sign up that was 93 four or five in 1996 the telecom act was passed and guess what the U.S. Congress said to people into the oligarchs you know the baby bells hey look people should own their phone number it's it's their number they know their number, their friends know it, their mom and dad know that, you know, the kids. People own their number.

And, oh, and by the way, carries, you've got to start to be interoperable. So if somebody owns their number in Boston and they make a phone call, you know, to somebody in L.A., come on. Yeah, or if they moved to L.A., their number still works. And they have the same phone number. It's part of who they were, right? So basically, the moral of that story is Congress passed an act that gave the consumers personal information back to them, you reckon it can happen again. Yeah, they gave people agency. Then the consumers could go to all the different carriers

and say, what are you going to offer me? Somebody may say, I'm going to give you high-speed Internet and say, okay, I'm going to use you. I'm going to give you a less expensive bill every month. I'm going to give you a better signal. I'm going to give you a free phone. I'm going to competition. And guess what?

since 1996 there's been I've heard heard different numbers but somewhere between two and two and a half trillion dollars

of private capital invested in telecom is our telecom system pretty good today you know it is by the way what people don't see that powers this entire internet

is our telecom 5G you know it's amazing all that private capital was invested because people like us, step forward and says, you know, it doesn't have to be this way. Fiber optics, high-speed internet, you can have your cable and your phone as long as people can own them. They can own their

number and do what they want with it. The carriers are interoperable. The reason I tell the story, it was the same talk track from the seven baby bells. Oh, we can't change this. They were rich too, by the way. Sure. Okay. Can't change this. It will stifle innovation. It will do this now. It's nonsense. Give people power. They'll decide what to do. with what's theirs, right? And now let's roll the clock forward. Think of your personal data as your modern-day phone number, okay? Should you be able to move it wherever you want to move it?

Of course. Think of these apps as modern-day carriers, right? That's what they are. They carry information. Shouldn't they be interoperable? So imagine an internet where you're not actually signing on to Facebook and then they own everything about you. you're signing on to the internet.

Our internet, our internet, not been colonized by five companies. Let's decolonize it. Let's decentralize it. Let's democratize, small D. Give the power to people. Get the toll booths off the information superhighway. Absolutely.

And by the way, this is a super highway to use that analogy that, think of it as our real highways, the interstate highway system, one of the great engineering feats. Amazing. Modern Marvel. Built by. tax money, with gasoline tax primarily, right? Built by people, by us, by citizens who built it and

we own it. What would happen if five companies just came in and said, no, we own it now? That's a great point. The freedom to go from state to state would not exist as a practical matter without the arteries, without our circulatory system, which are rivers and highways. The other thing I like about your story, metaphorically, is that we gave the baby bells our telephone number. We loved that deal back in the 40s and 50s. We loved that deal because to your earlier point, all we'd ever known was that which we knew. This is a bold way. You're telling me I have my own number and anybody with their own number can call me. Yeah, I'll eat a little crap along the way. All of the inconveniences that became inconveniences were infinitesimal at the time.

Because what was put before us was a new level of connectivity that nobody had ever experienced. That's the corollary that I think the internet was writ large on on steroids. And that's why we made the deal. We didn't fully understand this whole data scraping thing. Yeah, that's right. And look, here's what I think your big challenge is going to be. We still don't. Not enough people saw the social network.

They should. Not enough people have read your book. I hope they do. But there's going to be a curve, right? Do you think that the speed with which we get to the place where we have to get is going to be the result of people enlightening themselves? Or do you think something truly has to craft the bed first? Something has to go splat for people to sit. it up and say, wait.

And before you answer that question, I just need to tell you that you're like 15 minutes past when you were supposed to go. Oh, man. Now you've got to choose. You have to choose. Will you shove it up our listeners' butt and simply leave to keep your appointment? Or will you call an audible as your entire communication department over here just shakes their head? Now they're both on the internet right now.

You realize they're both on the internet sending out apology notes to wherever you're going. You know what? They're worried I'm not. Yeah, because you don't have to deal with whatever's going to happen next. You're Frank McCourt. Your question is kind of interesting because... Well, I hope so, man. It's the only kind I ask. I think we're crapping it up pretty good right now. And so here's the thing.

I'm an optimist. I'm a huge believer in people. And I think that the light bulbs are going off. if we were having this conversation a year ago, maybe even six or eight months ago, it's a bit of a different conversation. I think we see the wheels falling off the wagon, right? It's getting wobbly. It's getting wobbly.

And Americans are concerned, right? They're concerned about this great country and making sure we keep the wheels on the wagon and actually we deliver something great to the next generation. You could talk about any, talk about GDP, CPI, inflation, wages. You know what? Let's talk about one metric. Ask kids whether their life is going to be better or worse than their parents. Ask parents the same question.

When the poll comes back and the answer comes back, where parents and kids agree right now they're concerned. They don't think their lives, you know, kids' lives are going to be as good as their parents' in other words, the next generation is going to be worse off, that's the only metric we need to look at. Our job here is to make things better. Yeah, for ourselves and our for, you know, and so forth, but also for the next generation, right?

And when you look and you ask kids, is your life going to be better than your parents? That's what my parents wanted for me. Sure. Okay? That's what they lived for, right? That's why my dad worked so hard and my mom worked so hard, is they created a life that was better for us, me and my siblings,

just as their parents did for them and their parents did for them and their parents did for them. We need, when every kid is asked, is your life going to be better than your parents? We want them to say, are you kidding? My life is going to be so much better. I'm going to live until I'm 150 years old and I'm going to live a healthy life because of what the good technology can do, right? But right now, people aren't seeing it that way. They're seeing it as the wheels are wobbly, a lot of bickering, a lot of fighting, a lot of disagreement, a lot of argument.

And we're seeing kids literally taking their own lives, horror story after horror story of what's going on with social media and so on and so forth. This is not right. And the point I try to make in our biggest fight is let's peel the onion back. Let's peel the layers back. What is it that has changed in the last 20 years? years. What is it that feels different? That when we use common sense, because we all see it. We all feel it. Why? What is it that suddenly has happened? Well, let's look at technology. Let's look at how it's being used. And let's look at how we're being taken advantage of and how the algorithms are designed to polarize this.

The technology is, has no, do you know there's no identity? You've got billions of people connected and you don't even have to be a person. You can be a machine bot spewing crap into the internet. You can be a fake person. You can, look, miss disinformation. The technology, Mike, is advancing really fast. That's great. Society is regressing really fast. That's bad. And something's going to give here. And we need to fix this technology to optimize for American values, right? those values that were built and when we decided to go from subjects to citizens, it was to respect human beings,

give people agency and choice and power over their own lives, right? The technology is stripping that away from us and that's why we see now a society being ripped apart, miss disinformation, who knows what's true and what isn't, right? All this stuff can be fixed but we have to move quickly

because, you know, as we see what's going on now, when the wheels get wobbly, at some point they fall off, right? So let's fix the wheels and get going and then start accelerating really fast. He sees the garbage. He wants to clean it up. He's only been doing that his whole life. The book is called Our Biggest Fight. The author is that other Frank McCourt. MeWee is an app you might want to check out and projectliberty.io. Very good. There's a place you might want to sniff around. Last question.

The 12 trillion and the modern-day oligarchs, is there a plan somewhere in your book or in your big brain to enlist their help? Do you see them as the enemies, or do you think you can get a Zuckerberg? Do you think you can get some of these people to come around and say, you know something? Yeah, it'll cost us a fortune, but you're right. TBD. I certainly welcome them. I think they're the ones in the best position to fix this problem that they've created

and write the ship. They'll still benefit. They'll still be big, rich companies, and so forth. We'll have to see. Since you asked me about those three things, who are the three people you'd most like to have, assuming you even have a cell phone anymore, maybe Max over here, your communication guys. Who do you want? He's got one in each hand, man.

Poor Max, he's been demoted to communication guy. What is his actual title? Max, what's your title? What's your title, Max? Whatever Frank yells at me. Whatever Frank yells at me. It's a fluid situation. No, seriously, this is what I want to leave our listeners with.

What three people currently, you know, bipeds walking around, fog in a mirror, could have the most impact and do the most good if they partnered with you right now? That's a great question. I think it's the only kind I ask, Frank. I think it's three people representing three massive numbers of people. So I think it's a someone like Tim Berners-Lee or Dave Clark who have stepped forward and endorsed the work we're doing and said they support the bid for TikTok. They support this new vision for the Internet.

So they've done that. I think it's a person like Jonathan Haidt, who just wrote Anxious Generation, who's stepped forward support, he's part of Project Liberty, and he's stepped forward supporting our bid for TikTok, and he sees this as a huge, a huge way. Greg Lukianov, and he have done a lot of good work together.

Absolutely. And I would add with Jonathan, mums, stepping up and connecting to this work, I think their voice is extremely important. We see how parents can change things and moms in particular, when you start messing with their kids, mom's changed the world, right? And so, and then I think our political,

I think someone needs to have the courage in the political apparatus to step up and say, you know what? I know these are American companies and I know they're very wealthy, but we have bigger things at stake here and urge these companies to fix what they broke. Someone like the president, for us?

I would love to hear more discussion. We are in a presidential season, election season. I would love to hear more discussion about how to fix a problem than what I'm hearing now, which is one side blaming the other for the problems. I love it. The solution in part anyway, or maybe in total, our biggest fight, check it out wherever you buy books.

Thanks for your time. I'm sorry to make you late. Max, apologies for whatever vitriol is coming in your direction, brother. All right, good luck. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Chuck. Thank you. Bye-bye.

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