Frank McCourt: Our Biggest Fight

How do we get more access to information and get stupider? Because it's simple, because they took your critical thinking away earlier in these different demoralization steps. They took your ability to critically think away. They taught you how to believe. And then after you believe so much, they flooded you with information that you do not know how to dissect and digest. You cannot in it so much. You're overstimulated is information coming from everywhere.

Information span is too short for you to even be able to think about this stuff. They're hitting you with really short videos, and then they're changing things rapidly. Today, it's an app. Two weeks later, it's a new app.

The one that you was using two weeks before is old. They're doing this intentionally, because now you don't stick long enough to process and understand information. So that is part of the challenge ever since we came up with the Internet. We thought it was gonna revolutionize things, and it did. Did it make your life easier? In some respects, yes. Has it changed everything in a lot for the worse?

Clearly, and I think most people agree on that. I did not know it, but this is the 35-year anniversary of the birth of the World Wide Web. Our next guest just told me that. His name is Frank Bacorte. He has written the book out today, Our Biggest Fight, Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age. Frank, welcome. Yeah, nice to be with you, Brian. So was that a great move, the World Wide Web?

Absolutely, absolutely. I think the Internet as envisioned and launched was an awesome idea, a powerful, powerful technology, decentralized, and intended to be the proverbial tide that lifts all boats, right? That just provided us with the ability to share information and knowledge and just all get better and smarter and wealthier and so on and so forth. And about 20 years ago, things changed because we entered a different phase of the Internet, which I call the App Era. And these big, big platforms really started to scrape all of our information, all of our data, aggregate it, and then decide what to do with it.

How to monetize it, how to deal with our personal information and make it theirs and then do stuff with it. And the stuff they were doing with it was not designed to optimize for a healthy democracy or protect young children or find more accurate facts and truth. It was designed to sell more ads, keep people online more, clickbait stuff, right, and all that.

And so it got off the rails, so to speak. So the World Wide Web, awesome idea, connect people and really empower them, turned into a very, very different direction when these big apps showed up and started to really steal what I would call our personhood from us. But would you also say collected intelligence? So I could Google and get information where normally I'd go to the library. You have to grab an encyclopedia. So while it was collecting intelligence to help make life easier, it was also collecting personal data in order to be a sales tool to give us what we needed to sell more products and not necessarily have our best welfare in mind.

Of course. And because of the way it was, as I said, the way it was redirected to be highly centralized, highly autocratic, highly surveillance-based, what started out as this awesome thing that was going to just help us connect and communicate, help us get answers more quickly, shop and go online and get something delivered to our home tomorrow morning. All that great stuff. But what we've realized is what these big platforms have done is really scrape our data. But let's not call it data, because data is like, what's data?

Who cares, right? It's our personhood. It's everything about us in the digital era.

So it's really who we are. And these big platforms now own us. And we were talking a few moments ago about TikTok, which everybody's kind of concerned about right now because it's owned by the Chinese Communist Party. Now they're getting all this information. And I do want to highlight that the technology, the way it's designed to scrape our data and really aggregate all this information about us and then optimize for something is the same technology that our big platforms are using. Now the difference, of course, is they're owned by American corporations, not the Chinese government.

But I don't think any of us really want to be invaded by these and really surveil 24-7 and have our personhood scraped. So let's say you're looking for shoes. And you're talking about shoes. I've got to go shoe shopping. Next thing you know, shoes are popping up on your Facebook page. They're popping up on your Twitter feed. They're popping up on things. In theory, that's helping you.

Okay, I got a discount on shoes that I want. It was listening to me. But it's really creepy. It's flipping people out. I feel like more people than not are alarmed by this instead of saying, wow, what an opportunity this is. Yeah, well, thanks to people like you and what you're doing here and now a growing number of people. I think the harms are being more clearly understood.

We did look at it as sort of this benign thing. Look, I want shoes. I go online. I pick my shoes. They get delivered.

Isn't that great? But this is not about shoes. We should have an Internet where you can, Brian, you can go on. You don't have to be targeted and surveilled, right?

You can go online and just say, hey, I'd like some shoes. Tell me what you've got without your information all being grabbed and used for other purposes, which you're not aware of. Frank McCourt's here. He's got his book out today, Our Biggest Fight, Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity and Dignity in the Digital Age. So has it helped you in your business? The Internet in general?

Yeah. In ways, in certain ways it has. Look, my business, I'm a fifth generation builder, right? So our business started, my great great grandfather started building roads when Henry Ford started building cars. And so we've been building for one hundred and thirty one years. And that's what brought me to this project, because it's we have an infrastructure problem. We have an engineering issue that can be fixed. And if we fix that engineering issue, we can have the goodness of the Internet with all the creepiness that you just described. And so it's look, we've built Internet systems, big, big Internet systems around the world.

So has it helped my business? Yeah, it's been business for us, right, to build these telecom companies and so on and so forth. But the fact of the matter is, we're now at a point where how the Internet has been is being used, how it's been co-opted right by these big platforms is is creepy.

It is doing a lot of harms. It is, let alone AI. This is right. That is here. That's that's the point, right? We know it's broken. So why would we make the same tech?

Why would we introduce a more powerful version of the same tech before we fix the problem? So how do you so you paint out you go back to January 1776. You talk about Thomas Paine before there was a declaration of independence. It was common sense was about 40 pages. Yes.

And short pamphlet under 50 pages. You think you're at this moment now with the Internet? Yeah. Bring some common sense into it.

But can you do it without dialing back advancement? Because, you know, people were upset in the candle business that Thomas Edison electricity. They would have been laughed at. Are we in that? Are we in danger of that now of trying to rein in something that's already there?

Well, for sure, we're watching the policy debates and nothing's getting accomplished. Right. I would argue we need to innovate our way forward here. And the great thing about America is, is it's it's full of innovators. It's full of creators.

It's full of builders. Right. And rather than be having this never ending conversation about what regulation, what policy, what you know that we're going to put in place to constrain these platforms. Why not just unleash the next layer of creativity, which would be protection?

No, which would be a fixed attack at the protocol level, which right right now connects machines and data to for the first time connect people, put you and I in charge of our data online. So rather than having our data stolen by these big platforms aggregated and then used for purposes that we have no idea what they're doing with it. And we're learning that some of the things they're doing with it are harming kids.

They're certainly letting foreign actors into our into our democratic process. I mean, we're talking about putting an age limit now in certain cities and states. And so let's do this. Let's put another adopt another protocol, a simple thin layer protocol, which actually puts us in charge of our data for the first time.

Could you ever guarantee someone? Have you talked to engineers to actually the people convinced you that we could ever be in charge of our own data? Yes.

Yeah. And that's what we're building it right now. We're building it right now. There's a Project Liberty has created some brilliant tech people working for the project have put forward a new protocol. It's called DSNP, a decentralized social networking protocol. And think think about the D for decentralized. It's re decentralizing the Internet, the Web. It started as something that was very decentralized. It's now become something very centralized.

So DSNP would put individuals in charge. They don't in control their data. And imagine, Brian, an Internet where you really have to be a person to be on the Internet.

Right. You have to be a verified person. You can't be a machine just spewing out all kinds of misinformation. Do you do that with fingerprints?

No, you mean how do you how could you possibly do that? OK, well, first of all, DSNP allows identity and discoverability, attestation, verification, provenance. So so imagine an Internet where you're connected to your data. You decide what to do with your data. And the next version of this, of the Internet, of the World Wide Web is one where the apps that are built are clicking on our terms of use for our data. OK, we're not clicking on the terms of use of a few big platforms. So now we have variety, we have optionality, we have choice. And imagine lots of different apps being built so you're not stuck in one walled garden or the other. Interesting.

So this is in the tradition. This is the biggest threat that our intelligence operators believe, since China is our number one enemy in the world, clearly and competitor. And they created TikTok, which has over 170 million users, bigger than any network can imagine, including the one you're on. This is what Marco Rubio says we're up against.

Cut nine. They happen to control a company that owns the world's one of the world's best artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence algorithms. It's the one that's used in this country by TikTok. And it uses the data of Americans to basically read your mind and predict what videos you want to see. The reason why TikTok is so successful, the reason why it's so attractive is because it knows you better than you know yourself.

And the more you use it, the more it learns. See, I imagine statements like that prompted you to write the book you did. Absolutely. And what Senator Rubio is saying is that TikTok and these other platforms, they know us better than we know ourselves.

Right. And so we talked earlier about buying a book and people say, well, what's the big deal? They have these platforms have a little bit of my data.

I get my book delivered tomorrow. It's this is not what's going on. They know everything about us. So hundreds of thousands of data points in that we that's who we are in the digital age. We need to, I think, move from a place where we think of ourselves as biological beings. Right. With biological, we're born with DNA and so forth. In this digital era, our personal information, our social graphs. Right. That's that's our think of it as our digital DNA. It's our lived experience. All of that is collected. And now it's not about just, oh, you bought one pair of shoes.

Would you like to buy another one? It is feeding people information based on their personality and makeup. It's actually getting people to react in a certain way.

Right. It knows our personalities. It's making judgments about our reactions and so forth.

It's very, very creepy. And I would say at odds with the principles of democracy, at least as I know. Right. This idea of liberty, choice, freedom, agency, autonomy.

It's the opposite. We're being manipulated now by these big plaques. A few minutes on the other end to see what we could do about it in layman's terms, because it's easy to talk off my head when you talk about tech, because I wasn't born in Silicon Valley. But as usual, you take action. This is a problem and you want to fix it. And that's why you wrote the book.

You should go out and pick it up. It's called Our Biggest Fight. Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity and Dignity in the Digital Age. More with Frank McCourt in a moment. You listen to Brian Kilmeade Show. Frank McCourt is one of America's most successful businessmen.

You might know him because he just reminded me. You bought the Dodgers from us, Fox, from Rupert Murdoch. We didn't buy it from you. I had that reversed. The name of his book is out today. That's his new focus. Our Biggest Fight. Frank McCourt wrote this book. The subtitle is Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, Dignity and the Digital Age.

You point out 35 years ago, hard to believe. We come up with the World Wide Web. That can you bring us through the three levels of where we're at today? Yes. So in 1983, the Internet comes into being. A simple protocol is put in place that connects devices. IP. TCP IP.

That's right. IP stands for Internet Protocol. Ironically, we're still an IP address on the Internet today. So if people think they're on the Internet, they're not on the Internet.

Their device is on the Internet. It was something built to connect machines. Right. 1989, second generation so-called World Wide Web.

35 years ago. And that connected data. Our data.

Which is? H? HTTP. Gotcha. And that's probably some letters that we're all familiar with because we all just adopted it.

We know that we see them, but we don't understand. Hypertext transfer protocol. But it doesn't much matter. It's just a thin protocol. We adopt and suddenly now our data is linked up. Next. Next, we're proposing we need a another simple protocol. We call it DSNP. Doesn't the name doesn't matter as much as what it does, which is for the first time would put us in charge on the Internet.

We would be connected to the Internet, not our devices. What we I argue in the book, Brian, is that and the reason I use Thomas Paine. He he put a choice to people in 1775. Do you want to be subjects continue to be subjects and owned by a king? Or do you want to be a citizen and have liberty and freedom and independence and agency and autonomy and get to own things?

Right. So we're being we're we're being returned to subjecthood and stripped of our citizenship by these big platforms because they own us. I want to own me.

And that's what this book is about. And what did you create? We we let's be careful because I have some brilliant technologists and a guy by the name of Braxton Woodham and Harry Evans have led the charge to create a protocol called DSNP. Open source protocol has been gifted to the world. Anybody can build on it. People are building on it right now.

There are seven hundred thousand people that have migrated to the third generation. And how do we get it? Just go to the app store. No, yeah. Go to that. Go to that.

OK. At the moment you go to me. We and the EWE. It's a it's a Web two app that has 20 million users that's migrating their users over to DSNP and seven hundred seven hundred thousand have made the way. That's a that's a that's a if I do this, I will own my own and control your data. And that's just one app. Eventually there'll be millions of it. How many apps do you think there are in the world right now? No idea. Nine million.

OK. Seven million controlled by basically two app stores, Google's and Apple's. There's going to be nine million new new apps in this new world. But in the new world, the apps are interoperable and we get to tell these apps what we're willing to share with them about our data and on what terms.

And if they're making money, we want to share some of that. And again, one more time, if I want to get my data back and download, where would I go? Start by going to me. OK. OK. M.E.W.E. And then that that app will lead you through, will lead you through. Wow. Fantastic. So is this your is this your your your latest project? Is this the most something you have the most most motivated for right now? Yeah, totally. I mean, I, I, I brought someone in to be the CEO of our of our company so that I could buy time back to be able to do this.

I think this is vitally important, Brian, not only for our five generational business to continue for another five generations, but for this great country to thrive and survive, because we're all seeing right and feeling that everybody not nothing political that you brought up. It's all fact. We all can relate to the fight you're having. Our biggest fight. The name of the book.

Pick it up. Frank McCork. Congratulations. Thank you, Brian. Thanks for having me. Listen to the show and free on Fox News podcast, plus on Apple podcast, Amazon music with your prime membership or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.