Lessons - The Billionaire Who Tried to Buy TikTok to Give It Back to the People | Frank McCourt Jr. - LA Dodgers Owner & Project Liberty Founder

In this lessons episode, discover how today's digital platforms shape behavior, influence public discourse, and challenge personal freedoms. Understand why current incentives make meaningful reform difficult. Explore the long-term risks of surveillance-driven technology and AI, and uncover what a more transparent, human-centered digital future could look like. 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 and GDPR. I don't think that even after those mandates, maybe the iOS update where people have 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 got it. You got to galvanize the people or is it like a two part solution to the problem? Well, let's, again, 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, the first stop is the CEOs of these companies who we now know know that their algorithms are doing harm. So you kind of think when people know they're doing harm, they would change something. And you've all seen the testimony in Congress with these CEOs and it's like theater, right? It's like, oh, I can't believe this stuff isn't really going on, this is horrible. And then nothing happens, right? So the CEO's not gonna do anything. And then the next stop in the industry The normal world, the one I grew up in, right, pre-internet, would be you go to the politicians and you say, like we did with tobacco. It's killing people. Like, let's get some regulation in place. But like I said, nothing's happening. And why? Is it because they're not educated on the tech and don't understand how it works? Maybe. 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, 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. So 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, the very problem that's causing them to continue to recycle and they're using the technology and it's further and further polarizing them. and making our political system 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% of people on one side at 50% on one side? And also why everybody online seems to echo the exact same view that you have? Yeah. So this is all the design. 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 half – because – That keeps us engaged and having to defend ourselves and this and that. So it's in believing we're totally right, right? And whereas the other person has exactly the opposite view and they're totally right. And we just continue to do that. It's just, it's really very predatory and very manipulative. And if I said to you, describe democracy, right? I don't think you'd say centralized, autocratic, surveillance-based. You know what 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, surveilling its people and so forth. But America? And it's like the tech is not a trivial thing that we use once in a while. We are connected to this technology 24-7, right? Whether we like it or not. And I talk to people and they say, well, it's not me. I'm not on social media. It's not just social media. The same model is used for shopping and for search and for everything. And we're now connected to the so-called Internet of Things. So even our... Refrigerator. Refrigerator, Alexa, or whatever. Everything. Your ring camera, your Nest, the thing that's watching your baby, the Siri, Alexa, and all that. And by the way, we've all learned that 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, and by the way, algorithms are machine learning. That's artificial intelligence. You know what I mean? This is just a, for me anyway, it's a fancy marketing term, right, of the same model that aggregate the data, right? In this case, they're called large language models, train it so that it spits out stuff. 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, right? That's how it works. Sometimes it looks like, well, that's pretty smart. Sometimes it completely hallucinates 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, right? So 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? Wouldn't we fix it? Which as a logic say, fix it first. That makes a lot of sense, but we're driven by the wrong things. And we're, because we're continuing to be fed, 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. Wow. When you think about 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 to democracy, echo chambers of hate and anger, talk about children's suicide rates going up. I mean, obviously, these people are super impressionable, like 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 just... The country will look nothing like it looks now, and all the... all what I love about America and democracy generally, and I loved about growing up, and I love about learning and getting educated, it's all going to look very, very different. I mean, as I said earlier, I don't know how you have a democracy that's with surveillance-based, just this invasive, exploitive technology that is autocratic. Because it is... The reason I chose Thomas Paine as my inspiration in the book was he, in 1775... asked his fellow colonists at the time, you know, before the United States of America existed, he boiled it all down to a simple choice. He said, do you want to continue to be a subject of a king, a monarch, or do you want to be a citizen? And you can be a citizen if you want, meaning you can have rights. You can, 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 can have those rights. We can be self-governed. We can create a government. We don't need a king. We can govern ourselves. You can own things, property, et cetera. Just a pretty revolutionary idea. And thankfully, our forebears chose citizenship and the greatest country in history was created. And to me, it's very saddening that 250 years later, we're sitting here having this conversation because we are actually giving up those rights, those hard fought and won rights to use the internet. It's wrong. We should be digital citizens, not digital subjects. And so why would we ever, 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, you know, Democracy 2.0 look like with a great trusted internet? I think it would be pretty awesome. What does the pursuit of knowledge look like? if we have collective genius, meaning everybody really participating, and it's not just a cesspool of information, you know, totally contaminated. Gated as well. Sorry? It's not gated. Exactly. It's open. And look, when I grew up, I got to make mistakes. I made a lot of them, and they were forgiven and forgotten. Now if you make a mistake as a young person, that mistake is there forever if it's online, and many of those mistakes are being used to harass kids and bully them and so forth. We've all met bullies growing up, right? Maybe one off or this or that. But to be attacked by a thousand or hundreds of, you know, bullies when you're a little kid, you know, when you're a 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 a mistake, I'm going to take my life now because I'll never be able to make it up. I have a young daughter who was in school, and one of her friends was sitting next to her, and she... wrote a little note being a little critical of the teacher, of what she was saying or something, and handed it to my daughter. And she scribbled something like, yeah, I agree or something, just trying to be a friend. And the teacher saw them passing notes, so she said, what's on that paper? And then she saw it was something about her. And she said, well, you're going to have to go to the principal's office. And of course, my daughter came home saying, I have to go to the principal's office. Am I going to be expelled from the school and this and that? I don't even know why I wrote it. And the teacher was trying to give them a lesson, right, about respect and also just what's proper and what's not. So they went to the principal's office and the principal said, okay, you know, 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 a mistake. She had learned her lesson and the piece of paper was thrown in the trash. She learned it's over, life goes on. If you do that same thing, 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 at the moment that was the way to be friends. But if you now make mistakes online and you're a young person, you can't make mistakes, right? And it's just, we're stealing. Childhood away from people, right? I mean, how is it possible to steal a childhood away from a child? So this is really just taking everything we love, or at least I love, and we're kind of giving it up for... to use it in kind of an awesome tool. We went through the history. It's a pretty epic what was created, and now everybody can be connected to it. But 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 U.S. owning me. I want to own me, and I would expect that you probably want to own you too. Thanks for tuning in. 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