Frank H. McCourt Jr. - Civic Entrepreneur & 5th Generation Builder | Our Biggest Fight

In the 60s and 70s, when the United States was in the midst of a Cold War, if you had an adversary like the Soviet Union that disabled that central hub, you had no communication. Why the infrastructure of the Internet is what? We need to revamp. They took it off the track. It was going a decentralized track and put it on to a very centralized track. And the app era did something that the inventors, you know, the creators of TCP IP didn't intend. The creator of HTTP didn't intend and that was where a few companies completely dominate the landscape. People don't understand that that's what's happening. It's the way that the Internet is now being used and the way it's been co-opted by these big platforms. It's actually causing problems in the world. But I think the reason is for the longest time, people weren't aware that they were giving their data or maybe they were just apathetic towards it. I don't know. So we have this beautiful, beautiful technology that was created by really smart people to help us all. And it's been co-opted in a way that is now harming us, including young innocent people. So, and it's not just where you buy a pair of shoes or something, it is everything about us. Welcome to success story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. HubSpot is a huge supporter of the show. I'm a huge fan of HubSpot, not just because they support the show, because they support entrepreneurs. And if you are an entrepreneur, you have some problems that a lot of entrepreneurs have. Productivity and it's not a secret. It's not going to be ashamed of. You're not the only one that has this problem and why do we have this problem? Well, all the tools and the tech that we're using, they're massively overcomplicated. We have tons of time-consuming tasks. Our teams are not getting the information they need to close the deals, connect with customers, whatever it is, as entrepreneurs and our teams, we all have productivity problems. But HubSpot's customer platform truly helps. It was built to save time and make your job easier. So you can get back to building your business. No more hours wasted on time-consuming tasks. No more chasing down prospect info if you're trying to close someone. No more one system for this, another system for that. HubSpot can help you find leads, reach prospects, deliver the insights you need to convert them to customers all in one place. Plus HubSpot AI can literally do more work for you. So you can focus more on scaling your business. Because HubSpot knows you have massive growth goals and they're here to make your productivity problem go away. Visit HubSpot.com to learn how they can help you grow better. Frank, thank you for coming on. It's a pleasure to be with you. How are you today? I'm doing good. I'm doing good. I'm excited. I'm excited to dive into the mind of somebody that is trying to disrupt. Because I love entrepreneurs. I love when entrepreneurs disrupt. You are a fifth generation builder. But you are an entrepreneur at heart. And I think that to solve any problem, you have to throw an entrepreneur at it. That's the best way to solve problems. So when you look at, we're going to talk about the internet. We're going to talk about all the problems with the internet. When you look at the problems with the internet, you look at it and not just internet. Privacy, big tech, through the eyes of an entrepreneur, you've chosen the focus on infrastructure as a core thesis as to what we have to solve for. So maybe explain to me why the infrastructure of the internet is what we need to revamp. How deep do you want to go? Let's go deep. The smart audience. Let's go deep. Okay, so let's go deep. So let's start in the 60s and 70s when the United States was in the midst of a cold war and was very concerned with centralized telecommunications. You know, we had communications that was hardwired, going through central hubs to redirect communication. So theoretically, if you had an adversary like the Soviet Union that disabled that central hub, you had no communication. Big problem. So the government set out to say, how do we build a decentralized communication system more of a spider web? If you poke a hole in it, you can still get around it and still have a and still connect to the other end. So that was the beginning. In 1983, there were two protocols that a bunch of researchers agreed to adopt to connect their devices. One was called the Transfer Control Protocol. Slash Internet Protocol, TCP, IP, and I call it one protocol now, TCP, IP, but it was trained. The one, yeah, it's actually two protocols that I could join. And when these devices were connected, suddenly boom, we had the internet, right? And the internet was intended to connect computing devices that adopted these protocols and we were up and running. Now, now let's stop for a second and just as a footnote, IP, internet protocol. We are still an IP address on the internet, right? We are not a person on the internet. We're a device. Okay, now we're all the clock forward. 1989 Tim Berners-Lee comes around, says I have another idea. Also another protocol. And by the way, when I say protocols, I'm talking core internet protocols, super thin layer. Very powerful because they're at the bottom of the stack, but very thin at the same time. So he comes forward with something called the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP in that connects data. So now you have devices connected and you have data links. And then so we have the World Wide Web. And that's both were intended to be how they decentralized. So the World Wide Web, just like the earlier solution for a decentralized communication system, the World Wide Web was a decentralized internet so that we could really empower individuals, share knowledge, do great stuff. And it would be the proverbial tie that lifted all human boats, right? And that was all wonderful and it's awesome and so on and so forth. What happened about 15 years later was that companies, platforms discovered that if they could aggregate all this data that was now up for grabs, centralize it, collect it, you know, and just apply algorithms to this massive data that they had collected, they could, they'd be, they'd kind of be the big dogs, right? On the internet and we all as users weren't necessarily educated about, okay, what does this all mean? And we kind of went along with it and I think with a societal enthusiasm that this internet is a very cool thing. It connects us all, must be good. And so we all went along for the next phase of the internet, which was the app era. And the app era did something that the inventors, you know, the creators of TCP IP didn't intend. The creator of HTTP didn't intend. And that was, they took it off the track. It was going a decentralized track and put it onto a very centralized track. And now we, now we had a very centralized internet where a few companies as we've learned over the last 20 years have completely dominate the landscape. These companies own us, right? Because they also discovered that the really valuable part of the data is something called our social graph. And that is everything about us. So, and it's not just where you, you know, you buy a pair of shoes or something, it is everything about us. Yes, it includes where we buy things and where we physically are and what we search for and who we communicate with. But it's also now how we think what we're going to react to, how we behave. It's very predictive now, right? If it's only data points. Yeah, we are the sum of our data points. And it's a massive collection of data. And so now these machines, remember, it was built to connect machines, right? It know more about us than we know about ourselves. So that's why it feels so weird now and strange because we've been disconnected from our real us. And so somehow this all evolved where we were kind of led to believe or maybe naively move forward with technology. Thinking like our digital selves is different than our biological selves. But in the world we live in today, our digital self is one and the same with our biological self in the sense that it's part of our identity, right? You can't separate yourself from your biological DNA or you can't separate yourself from your digital DNA, your lived experience. So that's what's really causing so many problems now is that we're kind of losing our identity, our citizenship, our relationships, kind of what all the stuff that makes us human is kind of been scraped from us, insect out of us. So we have an internet now that's highly dehumanizing, kind of soulless and controlled, run by algorithms, machines, etc. Fueled by all this data and more specifically, our social graphs, all of the stuff that makes us us. And we're being dragged now into a future that feels uncomfortable. And that's why you feel kind of unease where we're seeing the harms, we're not governable anymore. Why? Because the algorithms are designing us to be at odds all the time, 50% here, 50% there. And you know, we see the information ecosystem or landscape totally corrupted and of course, most importantly, we're harming children. So I think that if you ask anybody, if they're happy about the internet and the way that it's evolved, I don't think many people are, I think that there's the casual, oh, I feel like my phone's listening to me all the way through to the reasons why like GDPR and CCPA and Cambridge Analytica came to be. I am curious because I want to go just briefly back into your story a little bit. Why did you choose to make this your fight? Well, you mentioned earlier that I'm a fifth generation builder. So I've been, I'm hardwired that way, right? And I grew up in a household with, got one of seven kids and parents that, you know, I think raised us to be active citizens and really engaged. And when me and my brothers and sisters would sit at their dinner table and start complaining about things, you know, which we were pretty good at, you know, the dinner wouldn't end without my mom saying, okay, you guys have identified the problem now. What are you going to do about it? And so that all that part is kind of hardwired in me. And then, you know, I, I am, if you just really move the clock back to the last decade or so, I started a public policy school at Georgetown University with Georgetown University and, you know, in 2000, October of 2013. And we of course knew that massive data was important and so we put a massive data institute inside of the school. And, you know, figuring in retrospect, it was rather naive that, okay, we're going to have this massive data institute, policymakers need big data to make good decisions and so off we went. And it wasn't, it didn't take two or three years to learn that it's not, it's not going to work. I mean, the school is awesome, don't get me wrong, but this idea that, you know, we have what's publicly available data is going to help policymakers isn't going to work because what's really valuable is the data that sits in this, in the server farms of these big platforms. And here, and I'll share one story with you at one of the faculty members told me she had a theory that you could, you could predict large scale human physical migration by seeing what words are amplified on social media. It's pretty cool, right? I mean, it's a, and so she got a grant from the government of $200,000 to actually sharpen that model. And she knew Twitter had the data she needed to sharpen the model. So she went to them and said, do you have the data? And they said, yes, and she said, can I have it? And they said, for a hundred grand. And she said, I can't give you half my grant because I don't have the data, but we'll be able to do the work, right? And they said, well, you can't have the data then. So let's think about this for a second. The most vulnerable human beings in the world, they're leaving where they live because they can't, it's not sustainable for them anymore. And they have to uproot and go. They've created this data. An academic who's not going to commercialize it wants to help us all by developing a model that will help humanitarian organizations and governments to know when something, you know, very, very big crisis. A crisis is going to happen. And they, she can't have the data unless she pays money for it. So whose data is this? I would say it's the people who created the data. And for sure, we would want that data to help them. And all of us have better models to be able to help people, right? But no, these big platforms say it's their data. So what we really, those people, they would give you the data too. Yeah, that's every single individual. Totally, if people knew if we had trust and confidence in the internet again, people will share all kinds of things if they know it's for what purpose it's being used and this transparency. And by the way, if this economic benefit, they get some of that. And right now it's upside down because the data is there for us to solve lots of big problems in the world. However, it's the way that the internet is now being used and the way it's been co-opted by these big platforms. It's actually causing problems in the world. So, you know, I mentioned, you know, the difficulty, we're having and sustaining democracies around the world, including here in the US, the inability to tell fact from fiction. You can't, you know, the deep fakes are so good. And anybody can say, it's not me. I didn't say that. You know, how do you actually get to the bottom of these things? Our ability to know what is a fact and versus what is fiction, it's been degraded. And again, and I know we'll talk about this later, the harms to children is unconscionable. You know, if I said to you, I'm the head of the postal service. And I have an idea, a deal for you. I'll deliver your mail for free, no more stamps. You'd probably say, well, I guess that's better than paying stamps. You might be a bit suspicious, but you say, tell me, what's the deal? Well, I'm going to put cameras in every room of your house and in your car and in your office and survive you 24 hours a day. You would do exactly what you just did, you'd laugh, right? And I'd say, well, but it's for free, it's for free. And then, oh, one other thing, I'm going to open the mail. I'm going to read it and whatever I read and learn is now mine. Okay, your relationships are now my relationships, your ideas and now my ideas, et cetera, et cetera. Now you'd be like, this is really happening. Okay, but I'd say that, oh, I need to tell you, you know, you're 13 year old daughter, who keeps a diary? Well, I read that diary too. And when I see that she's maybe worried about her weight or worried about something as all 13 year olds are, I get to actually pray on her on that vulnerability and that insecurity to make money. It's sick. It's just not correct. And so we have this beautiful, beautiful technology that was created by really smart people to help us all and it's been co-opted in a way that is now harming us, really harming us, including young innocent people. And that's why you see, you know, the whole generation, more anxious, more depressed, think thoughts of suicide and sadly, actual, actual suicides. So enough is enough. This is an engineering problem. And I say that from an engineering perspective, right? We can fix this by adding yet another thin layer protocol that for the first time puts us in charge of us on the internet. So I own me again in my social graph, you own you again in your social graph. And now apps will be built rather than us clicking on them and giving everything away, they'll actually click on our terms of use for our data. And we'll have to be a person to be on the internet and our data will be portable and the apps will be interoperable and so on and so forth. It will be a better version of the internet and all of the TCPI people still work, HTTP will still work, but we'll have another protocol we call it the S&P, which will put us in charge of us. And we will own us again. Agency will be returned to us, choice, permission, autonomy, liberty, right? And this is what this is what we crave for as human beings and why in the earth we would give that up just to use the internet is be on my comprehension. So that's a really good question. And I think that I want to maybe ask you why that is because the example you just gave of the person, the postman coming to your house and saying, I'm going to deliver your mail for free and install cameras and not charge you anymore. And then I'm going to look at your daughter's diary and exploit her. It's because people don't understand that that's what's happening. People aren't aware or maybe they are becoming aware. I don't know. You're so involved in this world right now that maybe you see people waking up. But I think the reason is for the longest time, people weren't aware that they were giving your data or maybe they were just apathetic towards it. I don't know. But how do you project liberty? How do you plan to galvanize people, move them away from this entrenched big tech entity, all these different companies? Because I know you can do it. I know you can disrupt and that's doable. It's not easy. But what's the playbook? Yeah. So the reason I wrote our biggest fight, it was, is to really shine light on project liberty. And this idea of reimagining really how the how the internet works. And I've committed half a billion dollars to the effort. But it's not my biggest fight. It's our biggest fight. So it's going to take a lot more than that and a lot more than me and so on and so forth. And we have great people now in project liberty and many, many of the working really hard on this. And the playbook looks like this. You start by fixing the tech because if we don't fix the tech, we're not going to fix any of these problems for the reasons I just outlined. So we need to get ourselves back in charge of our social graphs, of our personal data. And we, and by the way, I really maybe let's not even call it data anymore in this conversation. Let's call it our personhood, right? Humanize it. And it's who we are. Yeah. It's who we are. So how do we get our retake control of our personhood away from the machines and algorithms of big tech? So that's that's that's the goal of project liberty on the tech side. So we have a bunch of brilliant people who have came up with the idea of a protocol to create a universally accessible global social graph. So rather than billions of atomized social graphs, that these platforms vacuum up and then do what they do with it with that data. One out one giant full of growing data, it grows every day massively because we're all connected to the internet, all this information, all this stuff. What if it's kind of just all of ours? Right? And or nobody's worth depending on how you want to look at it, but it's certainly not five companies. And then we we have ownership and control of our social graph. So we decide who gets to who we share what with on what terms. So that's that's the tech piece of this. However, our our theory of change is that you can't solve the issues just by having technologists once again, try to predict what's good for society. You need society to decide what's good for society. You we need this time around to bring in social scientists, you know, the the policy and governance experts, the economists, the psychologists, the you know, the people that understand human behavior. When you bring an artist and people that really understand what culture is and how to modify culture, we need to bring in teachers, parents, people, we need people to be here. So that that's what distinguish I think differentiates this project is that we're coming forward not just throwing more logs on the fire of what's wrong. We're we're we're saying and we're grateful to those that are talking about what's wrong because it's important that people be awakened here. We're bringing forward a solution. And by the way, if there's a better solution, we're going to support it is we're not putting forward a product. This isn't a solution to a big problem that I would argue is the biggest problem of our our day. This is the movement. It's an ideology and then bringing people who can help make sure that the the the the the next the next generation of the internet is designed with people in mind and that takes some expertise but also let's let's engage as you say people and make this a movement that with this is like our our man on the moon moment, right? This is this is what I believe we need right now because we're we're we're kind of recycling around this you know kind of uneasy kind of hollow, you know, we're going to be manipulated and it just doesn't feel like a lot of people seem like what's what's my purpose? You know what I want to do? Well, here's a purpose. Let's fix this. Let's fix this. Can you what wouldn't it be great that if rather than impolling young people and asking them, will your life be better than your parents and have a majority of them say no? I'm pretty I'm pretty down on things. What if we we pull them and 90% of them said my life is going to be way better than my parents because I'm going to live till I'm 150 and I'm going to live a healthy life because we've used all of this technology to achieve that rather than technology that prays on young kids and prays on all of us, right? And is is very exploitive and very surveillance oriented. It's just we have the wrong the wrong design. It's the internet is not bad. The the internet is awesome. Technology is awesome. How it's designed and being used however is very very bad for individuals and society and so let's fix the design and let's also bring in let's add the social scientists to the computer scientists and let's let's bring it let's get this conversation to the kitchen table. Let's get it to the sidelines of the soccer pitch. Let's get it to into schools including grammar schools right in high schools and where this is really really doing a lot of damage. Let's get this on you know outside churches and whatever other places people hang around and and you know and and do fun stuff or or serious stuff or but let's get a conversation going. I just want to take a second and thank the HubSpot podcast never for supporting success story for part of the network. If you love podcasts the HubSpot podcast network has other incredible podcasts like entrepreneurs on fire hosted by John Lee Dumas entrepreneurs on fire is one of the OG entrepreneur podcasts it really stokes inspiration share strategies to fire up your entrepreneurial journey to create the life you've always dreamed of it has unlimited energy value and consistency the podcast is truly for anyone who wants to learn more about entrepreneurship if you like fast paced packed with value stories as shows for you John brings on great guests he speaks about failures aha moments what's working for them currently if you love podcasts go listen to entrepreneurs on fire wherever you get your podcasts when you when you look at when you look at this problem it starts to look like a human rights problem because you're giving up all these liberties like you mentioned before talk to me about the government's role about Congress about regulatory because you see you know CCP GDPR I don't think that even after those mandates maybe the iOS update where people have a a harder time targeting customers when they're running ads there's like little you know little things that are trying to protect people but you're talking about a whole revamp so does the government have a role to play in this or is it not moving fast enough you got it you get you got to galvanize a people or is it like a two-part solution to the problem well let's again if the if the politicians were doing the job to fix this you and I probably wouldn't be having this conversation so I wrote the book as a call to action because if the CEOs at first stop is the CEOs of these companies who we now know know that their algorithms are doing harm so you kind of think what people know you they're doing harm they would change something and you've all seen the the testimony in Congress with these CEOs and it's like theater right it's like oh I'm a camp believe this stuff isn't really going on this is horrible and then nothing happens right so so the CEOs are going to do anything and then the next stop would in in the the normal world the one I grew up in right pre-internet would be you go to the you go to the politicians and you say like we do with tobacco it's killing people like let's get some regulation in place and but like I said nothing's happening and why is it because they're they're not educated on the tech and don't understand how it works maybe is it because they're taking a lot of money from these richest companies ever created by the way and I say that as a capitalist I'm all for people making money but not if it's going to destroy society right and maybe they're taking money or but I think for sure they're using this technology to get elected and to raise money and get votes and get clicks and get likes and get the same thing the incentives are wrong it's they're in the same loop yeah they're in the same loop where the irony is we're talking about fixing a problem that's that the very problem that's causing them to continue to to recycle and they're using the technology and it's further and further polarizing them and making our political system more less and less functional and more and more paralyzed so the same political apparatus that we want to fix the problem normally is also being manipulated by this because the algorithms are designed to polarize us to actually have you ever wondered why everything seems like this 50 percent of people on one side at 50 percent and also why everybody online seems to echo the exact same view that you have yeah it's so this is all the design and and this is algorithms doing a perfect job it's perfectly tweaked algorithms to keep us in a constantly 50-50 state constantly triggered constantly you don't have it because that keeps us you know engaged and having to defend ourselves and this so it's in and believing we're we're totally right right and whereas other person has exactly the opposite view and they're totally right and we and we you know just continue to do that it's it's just it's it's it's really very predatory and very manipulative and if I said to you describe democracy I don't think you'd say centralized autocratic surveillance based you know I mean the tech we have right now is awesome if you're an autocrat it's awesome for China that makes no bones about you know surveillance people and so forth but America it's like it we we the tech it's the tech is not a trivial thing that we use once in a while we are connected to this technology 24 seven right whether we like it or not and I'm not I talk to people and they say well it's not me I'm not on social media it's not just social media same the same model is used for shopping and for search and for everything and we we're now connected to the so-called uh internet of things so even our you know our refrigerator refrigerator or Alexa or whatever the thing that you know your ring camera your nest or the thing that's watching your baby the you know uh Siri Alexa and all that and by the way we've all learned all that stuff has been scraped so now our voice can be replicated perfectly and so now that can be weaponized too our image can be replicated perfectly so that can be weaponized too and so we're entering this next phase of generative artificial intelligence which is in by the way algorithms our machine learning that's artificial intelligence you know it's this is just for me anyway it's a fancy marketing term right of the same model aggregate the data right in this case they're called large language models train it so that it you know it spits out stuff well how does it work you train it and you ask a question and it predicts the next word and then the next phrase and then the next sentence and then the next paragraph that's how it works sometimes it looks like while that's pretty smart sometimes it completely elucinates and it's like ridiculous it's completely wrong it's just predicting just the same way the current model is predicting how you're going to react to something I feed you right a news feed or information so it's it's the same it's the same architecture or design just a much more powerful version and why on earth would we take something broken and make it more powerful when we fix it which I mean as a logic say fix it first and that makes a lot of sense but we're driven by the wrong things and we're we're we're continuing to be fed yeah we're we're all kind of you know a professor at MIT had a great quote he said we're all living in a minimum security prison we just don't know it uh when you think about the the future without any sort of revamp or disruption if we continue down the road that we're going on I mean you talk about divided country threats democracy echo chambers of hate and anger talk about children suicide rates going up I mean obviously like these people are super impressionable like after you know before a certain age and even after a certain age a lot of negative but if we don't fix it in your opinion what happens we we just the the country will look nothing like it looks now and all the all what I you know what I love about America and democracy generally and I love I loved about growing up and I love about learning and getting you know in getting educated it's all going to look very very different I mean I you know I as I said earlier I don't know how you have a democracy with surveillance based just you know this invasive exploitive technology that is autocratic because it's it is the reason I chose Thomas Payne as my inspiration in the book was you know he in 1775 asked his fellow colonists at the time you know the before the United States of America existed he he he borrowed it all down to a simple choice he said you want to continue to be a subject of a of a king come on arc or you want to be a citizen and you know you can be a citizen if you want meaning you can have rights you can you you you what we what we later started calling unalienable rights you're born in other words with the same rights as the king did you know that you know you can have those rights you can we can be self governed we can create a government we don't need a king we can govern ourselves you can own things you know property etc the it's just a pretty revolutionary idea and thankfully these are four bears chose citizenship in the country the greatest country in the war in history was created and um it to me it is it's very saddening that 250 years later we're sitting or having this conversation and because we are actually giving up those rights those hard fought and won rights to use the internet it's it's wrong we should be digital citizens not the digital subjects and and so why would we ever you know as I say give up these rights just to use a piece of technology that we can design to actually embrace those rights and make them even stronger what does digital 2.0 look like with a great yeah I'm democracy 2.0 look like with a great trusted internet I think it would be pretty awesome what does what does the pursuit of knowledge look like what if we have collective genius meaning everybody really to do that yeah participating and it's and you're not you know it's not just a assess pool of information you know totally contaminated as well sorry it's not gay did I exactly it's open yeah and and and look one and when I when I grew up I got to make mistakes I was I made a lot of them and they were forgiven and forgotten and now you make a mistake as a young person that mistake is there forever if it's online and in much much of those many of those mistakes are being used to harass kids and bully them and so forth you know we've all met bullies growing up right maybe one off or this or that but being attacked by a thousand or hundreds of you know bullies when you're a little kid you know when you're teenager when you're when you're when you're vulnerable when you don't realize that mistakes are forgivable and forgettable and you think it's like too big I mean too big a mistake I'm gonna take my life now because I'll never I'll never be able to make it up it's I have a I have a a young daughter who who um was in school and she one of her friends was sitting next to her and wrote a little note being a little critical of the teacher of what she was saying or something it might and handed it to my daughter and she she scribbled something like I agree or something you know just being trying to be a friend you know and the teacher saw them passing notes so she said what's what's on that paper and then she saw it was something about her and she said well you're gonna have to go to the principal's office and of course my daughter came home say I have to go to the principal's office am I gonna be expelled from the school and this and that I don't even know why I wrote it and the teacher that you know that was was trying to get them a lesson right about respecting also just you know what's proper and what's not so they went to the principal's office and the principal said okay you know you're you're forgiven and go you know apologize to your teacher and of course they did and my little daughter apologized and the teacher gave her a big giant hug and she came home relieved okay she had made her mistake she had learned her lesson and the piece of paper was thrown in the trash right it was she learned it's over life goes on if you do that same thing on you know you do something that you regret because my daughter said to me I don't know why I did it I said honey you did it because you wanted to be friends with that little girl next to you and you thought that was at the moment that was the way to be friends but if you now do the make mistakes online and your young person that you you you can't make mistakes right you you're not and it's just it was we're stealing childhood away from people right how how is it possible to steal a a childhood away from a child it's so this is is really just taking everything we love or at least I love and and we're kind of giving it up to to to to use it to kind of an awesome tool you know we went through the history it's a pretty epic what was created and now everybody could be connected to it but it it should be designed with us in charge of us we need to own ourselves again I don't want the Chinese Communist Party owning me and I don't want five big platforms in the US owning me I want to own me and I would expect that you probably want to own you too definitely when you look at what you're doing with project liberty the solution in its most simplest form is DSNP can you just describe the solution with DSNP is how it works some of the things that you're building in that ecosystem so people can understand sort of like the light at the end of the tunnel so DSNP it's yes for a decentralized social networking protocol and in the social is not social as in social media the social is as in social graph and the D is for decentralized that's probably the key thing to focus on so we want to re decentralized the internet and it's it's again a relatively when I say simple I want to be careful from it it's very sophisticated concept but relative to people changing their habits and and in migrating to you know kind of a new protocol I think that will be the more challenging part I think that the the tech is relatively easy in that sense but I have so much admiration for the technologist who who created it and and by the way it was very interesting when we when we when I first time I heard about it for me it was a a light bulb one off it was a real aha moment and I said that this is a really really novel idea to create a global social graph that would be universally accessible we'd all own and control our our data and it would it would be something that if adopted at scale would completely change how the internet works because it would put us in charge so you'd be returning agency to individuals and we'd still have the in the network effect by the way would be part of the internet so anybody building a new app in this new world would get the network effect theoretically but with permission not because they scraped your data and they're in the privileged spot of having all the data right so it would be it would feel much more I don't know much less invasive and we'd feel much more in control so I was immediately knew it was the right way and I said to Braxton Woodham who who was the gentleman I was who runs our labs group and I was talking to I said go out and find out who's doing something like this because I want to work with them and accelerate this and he came back to me a few weeks later and said nobody and I said well then we need to do it and can you pull together a team to to create a protocol create the whole stack you know a wireframe version of the stack so that we know it's work it's work because before I open my mouth I want to know it works and it's not just a concept and and he said you're given the resources I can and I said okay I'll get back to you in in December of 2019 Greenlit the project and we were at a company outing at the Statue of Liberty Island in New York Harbor and and when I cut up the Braxton to tell him the project was a go that the Statue of Liberty was right outside the window you know it was a great moment and so the next day when he copied me on the email to the team he was assembling to do the project it was the email said are you project liberty and so it's it is just stuck and so off off um they went to you know issue a white paper and then release this back and then start building on it and and it is a a protocol combined with a a layer one chain that gives individuals um power in control and so now you have an identity when you're on the internet you're discoverable without having to go through any of the big platforms as I say the data is stored in a shared state and it it's not hackable because it's not sitting in a single location it's it's it's it's decentralized as well and your data is is portable as I said earlier the apps are interoperable and it is a far far better design for the for an internet that would suit and and meet the original purposes of a decentralized communication system and would meet and support democracy and would give us now a shot to return integrity and truth and trust to the to the internet so that facts would matter again and it would most importantly as a father of seven children uh i'm concerned about the impact on not just my kids but all kids and so it would start you know giving us a shot to really create a tool that was actually healthy and uh gave these kids back there their childhood so if people want they can go to our biggest fight.com I think that's where they get the book that's where you start to go into this rabbit hole of this movement that you're creating and they go down that rabbit hole to go to project liberty.com if not mistaken and then they can see all the work you do probably some of the apps that or do you call them apps I don't know if you call them apps but some of the projects that are being built in this ecosystem. Yeah the first the first use case to come on to DSNP is a is a is a web was a web to social media app with 20 million users by the name of me we and me we those 20 million users are moving over to DSNP now this 700 700 thousand of them have migrated and the rest are coming and that's just one app you know and there'll be 9 million 10 million apps in this new world just like there are 9 million apps in the existing internet and you imagine now with all these new apps operating the way I've described and being interoperable we have a whole new ballgame this is a Cambrian effect of growth and opportunity the wealth that can be shared now in a data sharing economy and the and and and the things that can be done to solve problems when you've restored integrity to the internet and just us having control of us again and and actually say designing the future we want not being dragged into one by these machines is you know I think very exhilarating and it really makes me very enthusiastic you mentioned our biggest fight.com would be the place I would ask your listeners to go I wouldn't call it a rabbit hole I would actually say whatever the opposite is that gets you going up into the sky and to a new you could I do because I do feel right now we're all kind of living in a cave and just don't realize that if we just looked up there's a there's a hole in the roof of the cave and all we have to do is climb out of that hole and there's a whole world out there that we can we can go find if we you know if if we do this so I see this as really a stairway to something very very positive so our biggest fight.com will take you throughout the project liberty and DSMP.org and all the stuff but all you need to know is our biggest fight.com and that and then you can go wherever you want share your comments with us join the fight that's the most important thing right now what we need to do is to get a conversation going and that because we do need as you say just to become a campaign that people feel like you know I'm going to dedicate some of my precious time to this because I am I too am concerned about the problem. I don't think you and I are the only ones seeing and feeling the problem out there. I think millions of people are and I think this is a way for us to get excited about like I said really this is our man on the moon project so I hope people take a few hours of their of their lives and read the book and and and and share with with me and with the project liberty team what they think because we just want to get it right it's not my biggest fight it's our biggest fight and we and we just want to get it right and if it means we have to change something or support some other idea we're going to change it and we're going to support it because this is about fixing the internet and then doing it correctly this time so that we can really have an awesome tool for technology and a tool up technology rather than something that is doing so much harm very quickly just the last thought to pull out of this if people read this and you want them to walk away with one thought one idea one big picture what would that thing be we can fix this we this is very doable because the the the one piece of you know three years ago when four years ago when I talked to people about this honestly many of them were just the eyes would kind of glaze over because it was people didn't see the harms and it was like yeah this is good but what what I have now is good enough now people are seeing the harms the zeitgeist has changed and so now when I talk to people the many of the most of them say this is terrific but is it possible because we're kind of stuck into the paradigm we have now I want people to know it's possible I want people to feel it's possible and I know it is and this is how change happens right you just you you put forward but you you capture people's imagination about what's possible and we we need to get out of the cave and and see that there's lots of possibilities here we we don't need to be taken advantage of by this technology we don't need to be a product or and dehumanized we we should own us and we can design and create the future we want and so if they take out that take from the book the sense of possibility and not just you know fantasy but I mean we can do this we can fix this mess and it can be awesome once we fix it Frank thank you thanks for writing this book thanks for project liberty thanks for taking this on it's it's a lot of work but you're gonna do it well do it we're gonna do it we're gonna do it