None. You sound epic with that reverb
that's on your voice. So for anyone who's wondering
why your reverb is on me doing it.
Thanks for drawing attention to that.
Actually, at the end of the show, Jeremy and I have planned
a little little singing audition.
So that's why, you know, we want to spice it up a little bit.
You know, these talk shows are so boring.
People just talk and talk and talk, you know?
We were just talking a moment ago, Hakim.
So above phone was kind enough to send me this quantum.
What do you call it? Laptop notebook?
I don't know what the correct term is.
It is a beast of a machine. It runs Linux, your version
privacy orientated. It's completely secure.
I mean, it's a great machine. Jeremy yeah.
And you're, you are our first South African customer.
I want to say. Yeah, you probably are.
And yes, so our our privacy notebook, a privacy laptop, one
that's fully equipped to do local AI, so you can run really
large AI models on that machine. And some people might be
resistant to that. Some people might be excited
about that. We could, we could talk about
that. But it's essentially like a
gaming laptop with a privacy oriented operating system that
we wrote. It's based off of Arch Linux for
for those of you that use Linux, that's the one where, yeah,
what? I mean, what do you think about
it, Jeremy? Well I love the the fact that
you got NVIDIA and AMD. What are those Ryzen?
I don't know what any of this stuff is because I work mostly
on Apple, but I'm guessing this is all good quality stuff.
Definitely. And I mean, it's kind of, you
know, it's kind of was a good play in our book because we, we
were, we've been develop, developing this laptop since
back in September. And you know, we, we made the
acquisitions and now the prices for graphics cards and, and
solid-state drives and RAM is just skyrocket.
I mean, it's, it's crazy. It's like going vertical because
of this AI data centre grab. So it's like Jerome, you got to
carve your own slice. You got your own personal data
centre right there before they all get bought up so well.
You mentioned AI. Yeah, you mentioned AI.
I'm quite a fan, I think. I think the unbridled paranoia
is is probably unwarranted because like anything that's
tech based Hakim, it's a tool can be used for good and for
bad. 100% I, I couldn't, I couldn't agree more.
And I think we just got to get in that habit, which I, I think,
I think when you connect with your audience, you, you try to
get them to see the nuance and things.
And there's a lot of nuance with, with AII mean it could, it
could really take care of a lot of monotonous work.
Now, the problem is most people don't know this, but every time
you run a cloud AI query through Google or Open AI, there's been
analysis. There's was a Stanford study
here in the US showing the water usage every time you run that
query that uses up about a bottle of water this big, like
literally it costs that bottle of water.
So there, there are some supreme consequences too for using the
AI and we should just know that getting into it.
So This is why we encourage people to use local AI or
there's no water being used. When you use a local AI on your
computer, it's blowing, it's it's handling the heat with air
and it's pushing it out with a fan.
There's no water involved, right?
So there's this little difference that happens.
Well, you asked me what I think of it and it is quite a beast.
I have played with it. The battery's run flat and I
can't charge it. Why?
Because you sent me an American plug.
You're giving me a moment of self reflection here and it's
like we should really offer an international adapter for
people. We really should just do it.
I'm glad, I'm glad you got it. I'm glad it came in one piece.
And that must have been quite a feeling, right?
You're like getting into the laptop.
You're using it and then it's like I'm going to die.
The plugs make so much more sense to me.
I was just telling you a moment ago.
It's smaller. This is way better than whatever
we use. I think we use some sort of
British. I don't know what is this?
What do we use in South Africa? It's like a British European
hybrid. It's very big and clunky.
Your. Plugs are.
So much better. We should, we should name and
shame the person who came up with a 240 Volt standard.
Like I'm, I'm honestly curious. I've spent some time in the UK
and it's like, yeah, it's like you look at the plug in a room
and it's always front and centre.
Like it's like the showpiece of the room.
It's that. It's huge.
It's like wall art. Your your plug is similar to
what I saw when I was in China. China's got two different plugs
depending on where you are in the country and it uses this
same kind of what do you call this?
Like this, these thin little things, these these two bottom.
Prongs. Prongs are thin.
That makes more way more sense. Yeah, but you said they had two
kinds. So how do you know which
electronics to buy in in China like?
I just got both. Yeah, I had both with me.
I, I want to go to China this year.
By the way, Jeremy, we should talk about that affair, but I, I
want to go check it out. Yeah, if you go, I'll go with
you. It is.
It's an incredible country. But if we're talking privacy and
China, this is a, this is a very complicated conversation to
have. But having said that, having
said that, privacy actually is a complicated conversation
everywhere in the world, which is precisely why you guys have
brought out privacy driven tech. Oh, I mean, I, it's, it's a
really golden moment for me, Jeremy, because it's something
I've been warning about since the beginning of 20/20/2019.
And I think people were kind of dismissing it.
And now it's like the, you know, what do they say?
Chickens come home to roost. It's like, yeah, it's like, it's
like everywhere. It's in our cars.
Our our cars are spying on us and reporting to our insurance
providers. We have a unified surveillance
system here in the US Recent big news is that the Ring doorbells
from Amazon, you know, the little doorbells that watch you
when you come. So those are now plugging in
with the Flock camera system, which is in almost every town in
the United States. So now those two companies are
sharing data together at this new era of unified surveillance.
And it's yeah, it's I'm like, Yep, told you so.
But what the good news is that a lot of people are waking up to
it and interested in privacy. Now we were talking, we just
mentioned local AI and I, I know a lot of people have mixed
feelings on AI. Even my own following, when I
decided to do this webinar empowerment with ethical local
and Private AI had a lot of messages that came out saying,
are you going to talk about how it's destroying children's
minds? Are you going to talk about how
it's destroying the environment? I said, yes, let's, let's, let's
talk about it actually. So I, I think you'll appreciate
that there is a lot of nuance here, right?
All these, these data centers, which are gigantic, how they are
going to impact your life, how AI is truly going to impact our
life. And even with that being said,
to still find a way to use it as a tool to still find a way to
use it to benefit your life. After all, so much money was was
poured into this. If there is a way to get some
benefit out of it, we should know how.
So you can find this webinar on learn.abovephone.com.
It's free. All I ask for is your e-mail and
you could watch all these clips. So definitely do that and maybe
that'll get you prepared to get the same awesome workstation
that jeremyisusing@abovephone.com/germ.
Well, I'm not using it. I'm not using it right now
because the battery's flat. Maybe, maybe if you yeah, go
ahead. No, I was going to say, so I'm
looking at your icons on your screen there and I that is your,
that is your sort of visual design also.
Yes, we can't take all of the credit the so the themes are so
this is a really cool thing about the software we we've
chosen for above book this this is based on Arch Linux and the
reason why Arch Linux is is cool is because it has something
called the Arch user repository, which is a single place that
anyone can package software for other people to use so.
It's like it's like the App Store.
It's like the App Store, but instead of Apple or Google
trying to nickel and dime everyone to use it and having
control and everything, it's just regular, every regular
nerds publishing software for the people.
So it's like if you if you look up software on here, you're
going to find it like, so you might think that on Linux, I
can't use Spotify even, you know, even though that they
protect Israel's crimes and, you know, censor activists on their
platform. But you could if you really
wanted to. You might think that I couldn't
get Microsoft Teams. Oh hold on, you can't get
Microsoft Teams. You just have to know what to
search. Portal for Teams, here we go.
Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux.
So a lot of people port software so that it can be used on Linux,
and Arch Linux is the easiest way to actually use it.
You say Arch Linux, but I mean Arch Any.
If anybody knows anything about about Linux, Arch is one of the
more complicated, what do you call it?
Distros. Yeah, it isn't.
It isn't. It is if you, it's just so
different than other distributions.
So it's like usually when you start your Linux journey, you'll
start with a Ubuntu or something Debian based, which is uses a
long term release model. And what that basically means is
the the core packages on the system, they only get updated
once every few years. And it's a it's a massive
change. So when it's time for that new
long term update, you actually go through this process of
migrating everything and updating to the next version of
the OS. That's kind of scary for people.
Arch Linux is different it seems.
It seems more complex at first, but really it's a rolling
release sistro. So all the software on the
computer gets updated at one time.
That includes the apps too. So the beauty of using Arch
Linux and our our version of Arch Linux called above OS is
that every single one of the programs on the computer is
constantly getting updated. It's getting better.
If you want to update, you can also choose not to update.
But this means things gets fixed, things you're getting new
features all the time and things just get work.
Things work. So it's it's a really great
experience. And it's fast.
It is fast, man. Yeah, I mean, and so you're,
you're a Mac world. What, what would you say kind of
the responsiveness feels like a Mac versus this, this, you know,
to it's a very nice highly equipped Linux device, but what
would you say, how would you compare it?
No, it certainly seems on par speed wise.
It look, it takes getting used to because the, you know, the
way in which you operate is different, but I think the
principles are the same. And you know, you know that
there's no spyware, nothing can tap into the machine, and
there's a lot of security. There's so yeah, one of the
first things you have to do when you get your computer is, is you
actually change your encryption password on your computer.
And and I know there's a lot of smart people following Jeremy.
So I know a lot of you guys know about full disk encryption.
So I'm saying this for the people who don't know about it,
but if you don't have full disk encryption on your computer, if
someone gets their hands on your computer, they can literally
pull everything off it. They can literally log into your
account. It's it's actually not that hard
to do so at at the very least your computer needs full disk
encryption. And so when you get the above
book, the first thing you do is you change your full disk
encryption password so it is secured from other people and
hands on stuff. There's another thing I wanted
to mention. There's a lot of really small
beautiful things. My team showed me this one the
other day. Check the set room.
So I'm trying to tell you the temperature in the United
States. I can literally say, what is it
today? It's like pretty cold.
It's 40 in Celsius Celsius. Yes, because you Americans use
the imperial system. This is so funny.
It's a brand new feature. It's a brand new feature.
So. So I'm going to have to update
this demo laptop that I didn't, that I haven't updated for quite
some time. Yeah.
Americans, we use Imperial. It makes sense to our brains.
It's the foot. We actually measure feet.
I would put my feet on camera to show you feet are roughly the
same size as foot. I'm just kidding.
They're not. I don't know why we do that.
It would make sense if there was consistency.
So in the metric system, if something is 0°, it's freezing
cold and anything below 0 would be below freezing.
But what is freezing in Fahrenheit?
It's 30 degrees 00. Hey, it's not that.
It's not that bad. Wait, wait, wait.
What is boiling? What is the?
What is? What is inside in?
In metric it is 100°. I know that's so simple.
It's so simple. It's at 212° and.
Well, why wouldn't it be? Look, I don't have to worry
about that if I'm using my kettle.
I just crank that baby all the way up, you know, all the way
until and and, you know, I think that's bit of American
mentality. We just crank it all the way up.
I mean. Look to be fair though in the
inches. Inches is a weird one.
I think the only time inches really makes sense is is when
you're, you know, talking about the size of your junk.
Then you don't want centimeters or millimeters.
Exactly. I think, I think the whole world
should adopt inches. Me personally, inches and feet
to talk about our heights. There's no more.
Let's not do this, all right? Yeah.
My, my homie is 180 centimeters. You're making your homies sound
small centimeters. Or you can use decimeters.
Like honestly. So, Hakeem, one of the
advantages of using Linux is so I know that you said Linux, but
I can't wrap that around saying Linux.
I just said Linux because it's, it's, it rolls off the tongue a
little bit easier. One of the advantages is that it
has become simpler over the years.
I mean, it was a horrible, horrible experience 10 years
ago. I remember using Ubuntu around
2012 and, and it was, there's a lot of marketing around it, you
know, in the, in the geek community, but it was still very
broken. It required a lot of tinkering
and and it just for me became frustrating at the time.
Yeah, I I was just quickly looking up.
Linus would be probably closer to the correct pronunciation
because the Linus Tory Waltz, who created Linux, was named
after a cartoon character in Peanuts.
So, you know, Charlie Brown was named after a character.
So just wanted to say that. And you're right, Linux has been
traditionally a lot harder to use.
But things started changing around 10 years ago where
developers started to hit their stride.
There's all these, you know, technology was evolving so fast
and I think we reached a level of stability where a lot of
developers at the time decided to put their time into to Linux
as a passion project. So you had all these amazing
desktop environments, which actually this is, this is what
you're seeing. An above book is all the stuff
that won me over to Linux. For instance, things like
virtual desktops they had over 12 years ago.
Microsoft added this in the like the in the past two years.
It's crazy how far behind Microsoft was because the open
source community, they're just far more creative.
They're just, they're, they're more creative.
There's more features. Their focus is on use, putting
developing things they'd actually use instead of spyware
and things for corporations and things that can remotely manage
your computer. So that's a night and day
difference and you feel it. And because it is just focused
on creativity and nice features, there's less bloat.
So if if you have a older computer at home, it might be
something to try. It's kind of looking like it's
on its last legs. You might try installing Linux
on it and you'll see it'll it'll come into a new form.
I have a article on our educational initiative, Take
Back Our Tech. If you look at the operating
system section, Installing the Linux from Scratch to Save the
World, which is actually Linux from Scratch is actually a
distribution. And people, people who know it
hate me for for titling this tutorial this way.
They're like, it's not Linux from scratch.
Well, it is Linux from scratch. So you can go through and and
install. It just walks you through the
process. All you need is the USB drive
and you can install Linux. On any of your computers.
Why would I use Linux? Well, there's, you know, there's
push and pull factors. One of the things is Windows
Update, I'm sure. I think everyone that has at
least one story where they were working on something important
and Windows just started updating on its own.
You know, especially in the last few years where you don't even
have a choice anymore. And it's like update now or
update in four hours and you're, you're kind of hostage.
So, yeah, this, this computer doesn't stop randomly, right?
It's, it's doing what you tell, tell it to.
There's no agenda that is following.
You're in control. You're you are in control.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
And so you're in control and that's the security.
You know, there's a big security measure in there.
It's not just privacy. It's also security.
Because if Microsoft wanted to roll out a new update where
they're watching you at all times, they do it.
There's nothing you can do about it, right?
So your computer computing experience can change
dramatically. And it has, you know, Cortana,
Copilot, all of these things came as a result of forced
updates. So it just cuts you off from a
dark future ahead for computing. Yeah.
And you and I have spoken about the dark future head, I mean
digital ID surveillance and and the other thing is the
subscription model, I mean that doesn't really exist in Linux,
does it? Yeah, absolutely.
Where you have own, go ahead, you own your software.
You own your software and in many cases on Arch Linux, you're
actually building your software from scratch.
You're building your software. So so just to explain what that
means, you know, most of the time you download yeah, so so
you build your own software as well on above book, which
basically means you take it from its raw code and perform the
steps necessary to get it to become a usable program on
different operating systems like Microsoft and or Apple.
You're buying pre built packages.
So you have no idea what those programs actually do.
They're pre built, someone built it for you.
And and so it's just shift from absolving all of your
responsibility to Microsoft or Apple, who then charge you for
the privilege of buying software like 5 bucks or maybe 5 bucks a
year. And they're slowly trying to
push you in this direction where you owe nothing and you'll be
happy. And the the RAM shortages we're
experiencing right now perfectly plays into that.
Powerful computers are about to, they are going up into price.
They already have already. What does that mean?
We're all going to be using things on the cloud.
So people who have built gaming computers in the past, this was
one of my pastimes when I was a teenager.
They might not be able to do that again.
They might have to sign into a Microsoft gaming account to play
video games. And all of that processing
happens on a cloud data center, not on their computer.
They don't own. They don't even own the right to
game anymore. It's very, very sad.
But cloud computing is not necessarily bad either.
I mean I don't want to have my laptop stolen or my phone stolen
and lose all my data. Yeah.
Well, so yeah, it's, it's it's, it's interesting is if you can
trust your cloud provider, it thinks you know.
Would you create your own cloud though?
You can create your own cloud. You can, you can, you can create
your own cloud and that's, and that's the safest way, right?
Because it's in this day and age, there's always going to be
data compromises and even the biggest companies have these.
So if you're, if you're hosting something important like a
password vault, you just have to know that.
All right, if I'm saving this to the cloud, there it is.
I hope nothing happens to that company on on above book.
There are ways to do everything local first.
So we have a password manager built in which integrates with
the web browser. It's really easy to use and that
is saved on a file on your computer.
Now you can use different pieces of software like there's this
one called sync thing to sync it between your phone and your
computer and you can do that on your own.
And this requires no third party.
So as as these institutions begin to fail more, I think I
think people will step into the self responsibility of of their
tech. And that's really what we want
to champion. We've been focusing on laptops,
but I mean phones actually are used more than laptops.
They are. Are you also on an iPhone,
Jeremy? I am.
Has there anything been that's been like weird to you over the
past few years that kind of like rubbed you the wrong way or
interfere with your life at all? Or mainly shell.
I don't like, I don't know if this has to do with the iPhone
per SE, but I don't like the fact that you get ads popping up
depending on where you go on the Internet and somehow they're
connected to a conversation that you had.
So you're noticing that you're noticing that it's listening to
you. Yes.
Yeah, yeah, that's, that's one of the the worst things about
phones is that, you know, could, because these things are so
close to us. There's these massive
advertising networks and they're tracking you on your phone.
They're tracking the conversations.
You know, we, we get to hear from our customers and, and most
of our customers who switched to above Phone were sick of this.
They're sick of getting the really personalized ads and so
on. Above phone, which is our
privacy phone project, there are no ads.
There's literally no ads the because it's not running Google
Services, which is the entity responsible for serving ads on
Android phones. There's just no ads.
If you go on a website, you may see ads if the website has put
it there, but there's no phone wide advertising system.
And boy, that is such a lift to your stability of mind.
It gives you Peace of Mind and I think every device should be
like that, right? Ads should never be forced on
people. But you can also remove those a.
100 percent, 100% you can and we, yeah and and there's you can
use browser extensions and and so on above book you'll see it
is doing that, which is really nice on our on our VPN, we offer
AVPN as as well. It's through our suite of
privacy services. If you use that VPN, we're
blocking 10s of thousands of different advertising and
tracking websites as well. So, so there's multiple layers
of protection. That's the theme you'll find on
all of our products. There's multiple layers that are
protecting you. How easy is the above suite?
Well, on our devices it's it's
quite easy and you know, things have been integrated nicely so
they they fit in seamlessly. I'd say, I'd say it's quite easy
and there is documentation for pretty much everything.
You can get a little hint as to how it all works if you go to
kb.above.in and and there's a lot of different services.
This is kind of was our, was our SAS offering as you might call
it. It's a cloud offering.
All of these services run in the cloud, but the kind of the
difference is, is it's only cloud for the things that
actually need cloud messaging. You, you want to have some sort
of service out there running it for you because when your phone
or computer is online, it needs to save them and, and deliver
the messages to you. And the beautiful thing about
our messaging system is that it is end to end encrypted.
And so even when these messages are sitting in the messaging
server, we can't read them. So end 10 encryption is a really
great feature on our messaging. We also have the video
conferencing just also end 10 encrypted.
It's using the software Gypsy. Some of your viewers might know
about it. And there's all these different
features, I think services 9 and 9 in total that people can use
to replace the reliance on big tech communications.
One of my favorite things is giving the above book to
children. Why?
Because they completely customize it and they they make
their own operating system on it.
One of our team members, she has an above book and she got an
above book for her kids and it doesn't resemble the original
above book anymore because everything is customizable.
Like, let me just show you. So this thing, you know, these,
this, this taskbar, you can change every single part of
this, whatever icons are showing up down here, even even the
themes like the colors of the windows, like for instance, if
you wanted to, I, I left some little Easter eggs here, but
when you shake the windows, you might notice they're a little
bit jiggly. You can modify how jiggly the
windows are. That's, that's, that is the
level of customization. So, and Andrew, so I, I, I
updated the computer and so check this out.
So I want to say it's cold as heck today here in the United
States in Celsius. No.
OK, check out. So 50 Celsius, where is it?
No, it's converting it. It's converting it to, did I say
50 Fahrenheit? Oh, OK. 50F.
OK. So if I type in 50F, it
automatically converts it to 10°C.
So that's cold. It's pretty cold, right?
How big is South Africa? South Africa, I mean, that's
hard to answer. I think it's the 24th or 25th
largest country geographically in the world.
So I think a whole bunch of European countries can probably
fit into South Africa, but we're not as, I mean, maybe we're the
size of Texas. I mean the US is huge.
You're probably much bigger. Well, yeah, it's arguable.
But yeah, it's like the I learned a few months ago, Africa
is like ridiculously huge. I mean, it's like it's not
portrayed accurately on the map. It's like bigger.
Africa is very huge. If you want to fly across the
continent from where I am, which is at the bottom and you want to
fly to the top to say I don't know Dubai, that flight is 9
hours. Wow.
Yeah, no, it's not far at all. Yeah.
I hate, I hate long flights, so I I I feel bad.
But hey, at least there's a lot of different biomes in Africa.
Hey, you know, I was in Hawaii recently.
This was interesting. One of the Queens of Hawaii, she
treated her one of her islands, Kauai, as a garden for the
world. And so when she would have
diplomats visit or people from different countries, she said,
bring your seeds and plant them into the ground.
And so you have these African trees like everywhere on this
island and in Hawaii. They're like, they look like
they're from the Serengeti. I don't know, you probably know
the name for them, but they're kind of like they're flat or how
do I describe them? They're flat and they're kind of
sparse, kind of geometric, more more boxy than trees normally
are. They have like layers to them.
But anyways, you see like this amalgamation of trees from
everywhere. I thought that was really cool.
Now, yes, and you mentioned Africa, yes, an interesting
thought. Linux devices actually make a
lot of sense. On the African continent, where
there is a lot of poverty, costs can be quite a lot lower and
then therefore the the barrier to entry is much lower.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And naturally developing
countries are using Linux. Like when you look at the
numbers of people using Linux and Linux is market share, it's
the biggest. And in fact, in some countries
there's been like this, the snowball effect you have
countries like that are jumping to 40% Linux usage and which is
really wild to think about. You also it's, it's also just
spreading now from from developing countries where cost
was a factor to gaining independence from the American
big tech oligopoly. You know, I'm, I'm, it's, I
think it's, it's not Denmark, it's Germany is shifting their
entire IT stack away from Microsoft.
There's a few other European countries doing that as well.
And they're shifting to things like Next cloud, for example, or
LibreOffice. So big moves are are being made
right now and in computing and hopefully we'll we'll equalize
the playing field. People who are locked into the
Apple ecosystems or the Microsoft ecosystems find it
very difficult to break out, and if your starting point is
something decentralized and open source like Linux, then your
journey ahead is a lot easier. Yeah, sure.
Make a really good point. It's like to do it in a easy,
stressful way when there's not a lot of pressure on you, you know
there's not a deadline or you're still figuring out how it is the
way you work. Switching to Linux at that point
of time is is much, much better than spending years on a
platform that is corralling you into its walled garden and
getting you dependent, getting you dependent on how it works.
Unfortunately, that's what happens mostly.
Microsoft's pretty bad but, but for, for people who work in
enterprise OR corporations, but it's really Apple that get
people bought in to their ecosystem and make it very hard
to leave. And, and so for things like
FaceTime and iMessage and AirDrop and all of these cool
things, you know, I can't deny that they're cool, but the
problem is, is that they're only Apple things.
And once you're not paying into Apple's game, you don't get to
use them. So getting independence from
that early on and having a parallel tracked for how you do
things. And, and again, there are
alternatives to everything I mentioned.
It's easy to share files between your phone and computer.
And there's even tools coming out for the phones to that'll
make it easy to share, share files with strangers too.
But the, The thing is, is we need a network effect of enough
people using this technology to, to have its impact.
Because if there is some sort of game changing app or, or game
changing information that comes out, big tech phones are not
going to allow you to share that.
They're going to censor it right away.
This is just like in in China. When people, do you remember
this story where they were using AirDrop as a, as a form of
activism? What was the story?
They were they were using AirDrop.
Oh man, so there was, I'm trying to remember what they were
rallying about. I think it was a bank run
protesters. Oh yeah.
And and you know, this is if this was the zero COVID
restrictions, so the really bad COVID restrictions of the CCP,
they were, they were being censored on social media.
So they were starting to use iPhones AirDrop to send each
other documents. Like they would sit on the train
and one person would send a document to everyone there.
They'd get a notification. And then Apple quietly added
restrictions showing that, you know, preventing Chinese people
from using it and preventing just an easy file sharing.
So this is what happens, you know, when you try to use tech
to resist or to even share knowledge or try to help others,
they can just cancel your ability to do that.
So see. Yeah, before Apple's update,
Chinese activists could use AirDrop allows users to so many
anonymously send files directly using their Bluetooth, as long
as recipients have their devices set to be discoverable.
Before, Chinese activists could use AirDrop to disseminate
information to strangers without revealing their own personal
details. Now only they won't be able to.
You will actually have to set your discoverability to everyone
for 10 minutes before they switch back to contacts only.
Now if Apple had left this feature on, it would be it would
be kind of an instrument for social change.
You know, it's to sharing of information.
It's a good thing. It goes back into like saying
clouds, not necessarily a bad thing.
AirDrop is not necessarily a bad thing.
But when big tech gets its tentacles and everything, even
when it starts to work out well for people, it can, it can just
be shut off. And that is, that is the danger
of using these centralized abuse of big tech systems.
That's why we've got to figure out open source solutions.
That's a ramble there, sorry. The great thing with Linux is
that it is truly decentralized. Yeah, like we were saying
earlier, you know, it it has, it has a greater capacity to be
decentralized. It it is decentralized in the
sense that there's no one single body developing the core
software. It's not just Microsoft
Corporation that does Windows, it's it's several competing
organizations with their own flavor of Linux, all using the
Linux kernel, which is the lower levels of the computer that
supports the the various hardware and drivers of of the
computers you might use. So yeah, it's, it's a community
based decentralized model that is kicking ass.
I mean, where where is where is does does Windows have an
automatic way to convert? What?
What do you want to convert, bro?
I want to convert 5. Nine.
Yeah, bro, I'm, I'm, I'm five. I'm 5 feet tall actually.
And I'm, I'm, I actually know that's 1.524 meters.
Look at that. Those of you just kidding, I'm
messing with you. No, I'm not actually 5 feet.
I almost thought you are but. Now would that be sad?
That would be sad. I'm not actually 5 feet.
Let's see, I'll put in my. I feel uncomfortable putting my
real height in. What's my?
I'll say I'm 511. I'm one point.
See, This is why. This is why metric is inferior.
You really want me to say I'm one point 8.03 or 4 meters?
When you're talking about digital ID and pushing back
against surveillance and basically all the Agenda 2030
tentacles that are finding the way into our personal lives,
then you, you kind of want to go down this road, don't you?
Yeah, absolutely. There's we all.
We all have a very difficult choice to make.
And this is a choice that is mirrored in every facet of life,
whether it comes to your food, whether it comes to your
children's education. And that is inconvenience versus
freedom, inconvenience versus freedom.
And honestly, the tech, the tech space is the easiest choice you
have to make because all you have to do is move around and
click stuff, tap stuff on your phone.
And it's not, it's not hard work.
But the choice comes down to, are you going to play by your
own rules and maybe jump through a few hoops because you have
privacy, or are you going to be completely bought in to the
system and let it track every single aspect of your life?
I don't think people realize there is no limit to the
surveillance we thought they might be satisfied at just for
listening to our microphones on a 24/7 repeat loop and showing
us personalized ads. No, it's going to go farther
than that. People are now talking about
this even though it's a four year old patent, but they have
patents for the Airpods, the little Bluetooth earbuds that
people use on iPhone that can literally listen to your blame
brain waves using electrocephalogram sensors.
And so just giving you a hint, this is not going to stop.
They would like to read your brain waves.
There. There are Meta and another
company is actually working on tech that will take your brain
waves and convert it into sentences.
They've they've already started that work.
And so anytime you support one of these companies, you're
investing into that future with your time and your attention.
There's also the opportunity cost of not contributing your
time and attention to free and open source software.
And so this is a very important decision that needs to be made.
Do you? Think that there is a sense of
overt paranoia creeping in also. Or for for the public at large,
or for for my sphere or. Well, let me say it like this.
There are so many millions of people who are being tracked and
traced that you're not that important in in many ways.
They don't know actually that you exist.
Your information is just some long information string.
Yeah, so, so I, I I like the direction you're going.
It's like the counter argument is like, well, I'm using, I'm
using the big tech phone. Do they, are they really looking
at everything I'm doing on my phone?
Are they really looking? No, no, people aren't looking.
Probably not, but AI is looking and and inferencing your
behavior and your reaction into a group, into larger groups,
sets of millions and millions of people to do do world
simulation. What is the world's reaction?
For example, when Trump postures like he's going to annex
Greenland, What's the public response to that?
And people unwittingly don't realize they're in this, they're
in the system and it's a two way St.
It's not only that they're monitoring the global emotional
reaction of people through their devices, but it's also
controlling your emotions through through what you see on
your phone. And I think that's the more
insidious part of it is, is stealing your attention and life
force from what is presented on your phone.
And so I'd say that that's, that's even, that's a bigger
danger than the privacy in, in my opinion.
So by the time you go to abovephone.com/germ, which I'll
put up right here, you Scroll down to the laptop section, you
will see the quantum here. Now the quantum is our nice
nicest locally enabled. It's what germ has got and and
it's it's, it's a beast, right? It's it's, it's bigger, it's 15
inches. And then our older laptops here
they they run the same software. They do run the same software,
but they're that's just less powerful.
And I'll let you read into the specs, but you can you can get
an older laptop, but if you want the laptop germ has, then look
for the quantum. You can also get phones from
this page as well. And what's really cool too is
the 9 Pro XL. Anything that has 9 should be
able to run the same local AI, which is which is nuts.
But let's say you don't want to run local AI.
You've still got very good devices and they are not being
tracked and traced. Yeah, exactly.
You're spot on. It's like you're, you have the
security of this operating system which is protecting you
at low levels by cleaning out data every time it doesn't need
to use it inside your apps and and protecting you in this way.
And you can still have a very an excellent experience on these
these newer devices and the older devices.
Wow, that was that. I know it cut me off.
And you can still have these experiences on these newer
devices and the older devices. So, you know, you could be on an
encrypted call while navigating using your offline map.
You know, you could be downloading YouTube videos
directly from YouTube privately. So they're on your phone and you
have them forever. There's a lot of cool things you
can do. OK.
So then, that's the Segway. So can the lay the layman do
pretty much everything? Yeah, it's, it's, it's like 95%
of things you can do. And for the other 5%, there's
workarounds, right? Just to give people, yeah, give
people visibility into things they may not be able to do.
If they have a very, very big bank and they want to use the
app on their phones, it's possible that the bank will want
to, they'll want to enforce that you have a Google licensed
operating system because they want to be able to.
It's for security, right? It's actually not for security.
It's just for supporting the oligopoly.
For those people, they may have to use a web browser to access
their bank. And there's also a lot of banks
that are supported by this. So there, there are tiny things
like that. There's the, if you use big tech
features like iMessage, that's not a thing on this phone,
right? So you'll be using alternatives
and we'll point you to everything that you need to
know. Also, if you buy any device from
us, a phone or a laptop, you get a free call with a real live
person like myself. We have an amazing support team
of support engineers and we'll sit with you for an hour and
help you migrate and help you make these decisions.
What am I going to do for this app?
We'll help you migrate over so you can use your phone.
Where people might have a few hiccups is with their banking
apps. I think that's a very, very good
point. Yeah, And you know, I don't want
to mislead anyone into the experience, but this is just,
it's not, it's not anyone's on on the the Google site.
It's not the fault of the operating systems developers or
any of these open source developers that are trying to
make you more secure and private.
It is literally Google trying to enforce seeing that this
technology is getting popular. They're seeing this technology
is getting popular and trying to quash it.
They're trying to quash it. In fact, this is very big news,
but they're so scared about open source apps that people are
using and and that there are going to prevent you from
installing open source apps in 2027 on official Google devices.
So these are these are phones that have partnerships with
Google. We're talking Samsung, we're
talking Xiaomi, OnePlus, anyone who has a license deal with
Google. They were they were prepared to
prevent you to from installing apps outside of the Google Play
Store. They were ready to do that by
2027. Now they've walked back a little
bit, but just to tell you that they were going to lock down
this ecosystem. So with above phone, you're not
you're not impacted by that at all.
You can install apps from anywhere on the Google Play
Store, off Google Play Store. It's pretty great.
Yeah, you have to have your pros and cons.
Like which hill do you want to die on?
Something like maps? There's a big one.
Also maps. Yeah, we're, we're pretty happy
with our our mapping solution. So it actually it's 2 apps, it's
not just one. So we're using an app called Co
Maps and it's a really beautiful mapping app.
So it does turn by turn navigation.
You can save points on the map. And then and the most important
part about it, as you can download maps of your country or
the entire world, and once you've downloaded them, you can
navigate offline, right? You can put your phone on
airplane mode and travel around simply because it can do the
routing on the map locally. You don't need an Internet
connection. So we combine that with a web
wrapper of Google Maps because Google still has a monopoly on
points of interest. So you use this private
web-based wrapper that doesn't save any cookies or save any
information to Google. You get the address, you share
that with Co maps, and then you can get to where you're going
and it's great. And then over time, you start to
build your own, your own library of places in your hometown and
you can like organize them by food or whatever, and you start
to learn the town. That's, that's kind of the
beautiful part about this phone. It sets you up to use your own
authority and your mental faculties.
You you kind of think about it and you learn better instead of
just trusting Google. So the browser that that comes
with the laptop and the phone that that comes from from from
you guys, what what browser is that?
Is it Chromium? His base.
It's based on chromium. It's called Vanadium and it's a
it's a highly secure browser. It's using lower level hardware
features. Actually that's it's, it's set
up to use hardware features like memory tagging extensions, which
is just a fancy way of of saying the phone is very strict on
which apps or which processes use what memory on the phone.
So it's a very secure browser and it's developed by the
Graphene OS developers. So it's the main browser on
above phone. It's Chrome based like you
mentioned there. You can also install Firefox
browsers if you want. You can also install other
Chrome based browsers like Brave if you want.
But this is also a little bit of a trap because the browser might
be great, but what search engine is the user going to use?
That's a great question. It depends on on what they would
like to use by default. What do?
You use. Well, I use our own search
engine. This is a meta search engine.
So what's really cool about this?
It's a search engine that searches other search engines.
So it's not just searching Google.
You can go into its engines and actually configure which search
engines. I've used that.
Yeah, I've used that. What's it called?
So it's called search X is the software.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so we run a private instance
of search X that's just highly optimized.
And it's the there's no logs on on our search engine.
And so yeah, you can, you can do really cool things like turn the
engines on and off here. So, right, if I don't like the
results I'm getting from Google, I'll take Bing.
You know, Bing's are the worst. I'll take mojic and and pre
search, right. So you have control over that.
And there's really so much like check this out.
There's like there's Baidu search down here for I know Germ
would would maybe use one of these Chinese search engines.
Just kidding. So yeah, lots, lots of lots of
choice. I actually use Kogi KAGI and
I've been using it for about two years. corgi.com, I think it's
Japanese for liberty or freedom or something to that effect.
It is a premium search engines. You do have to create an
account, but do you have a favor?
Before you knee jerk, just look them up.
The guys behind it are very privacy orientated.
One of them, I think one or two of the guys comes from Brave
MIT. They are just driven by privacy.
They've got no idea what I'm searching apparently at least.
But their whole setup is is very driven by the community.
I strongly recommend them as a search engine also, And I mean I
I've customized my search results using using Cargi.
So I don't get anything from CNN or Fox for example at all.
Like nothing, I I've pushed Wikipedia results down to the
bottom for I can have them entirely removed.
But you can, you can rank your own search results and adjust
your your search. That's that's very, very cool.
Really cool. So you're telling me in your
searches you're like took the mainstream media outlets and
you're just like, all right, don't, don't bring them up
again. Genius.
That's genius, right? I mean, it's, it's really cool
because if you're a researcher and you're researching a very
controversial issue, you're going to have all this fact
checking come up. You could just literally block
all those fact checking domains and get to what you're searching
for. This is really cool.
I mean, you, you kind of turned me on to this.
And I don't think some of the features you mentioned are that
hard to build. So we might, we might be
inspired enough to, to bring some of these into our own
search engine. But that is really cool.
I like, I really love about those.
The reason why I brought it up is because so you've got your
privacy orientated devices, but the the trap is that you'll end
up using Google or some other big tech search engine and you
don't want to do that. Right, right.
It's this final layer of computing that you also have to
figure out. You're figuring out what you're
using on your computer, but also what are you connecting out to
the Internet to use. So service like Caggy is great.
And by the way, this important part of our technology, it is in
no way limiting anything you're doing.
You want to set Caggy as your defaults, your institution, by
all means do it. You can do it for Google.
You can use big tech stuff or alternate stuff if you want.
You have the complete freedom to, but it's your choice.
At the end of the day, you're not limited by any third party.
So super, super cool man. Thanks for sharing that.
OK, well let's come in for landing.
Hakim give me basically a summary of this discussion.
All right, so the imperial system is the best, hands down,
feet down. Just kidding.
Yeah. Jeremy.
Well, it's a pleasure to be on here with you.
And so today we talked about a lot and we talked about how
these AI data centers were actually hinting at how they're
about to change the face of computing to where in the
future, you won't even be able to buy a powerful laptop that
it'll just be set up to use cloud gaming services or cloud
AI services. You're going to rent your
compute power. And so one of the best things
you can do right now is to get yourself a reliable open source
computer like the above book. And if you want to go to
abovephone.com/germ, you can learn more about our computers
and that there is this new decentralized software movement
that is happening. And to, to it's very important
for you to start and to get technological literacy in this
area because it's going to come a point soon in the future where
your computer will be spying anyways just as much as your
phone is. I mean, it already is to degree,
but with things like digital ID could easily be integrated into
the computer. In fact, it already has some
countries that use digital ID. So to just be aware of this
ever, ever approaching surveillance grid and to carve
out your own piece of solace of, of, of quiet and where you can
do whatever you want and you won't be bothered by forced
updates. So if you want to learn more,
actually I think I think there are two places to start and that
would be both on learn.abovephone.com, you can
check out the Rise Above device and ecosystem overview.
And there's actually, so I talked about here, I give a
whole view. You just need to put in your
e-mail and you'll be able to see this and I'll give you an
overview of everything, the problems that these devices are
dealing with and actually what the experience is like on these
devices and answer a bunch of questions.
It's really great. So that's Rise Above the rise of
love webinar on learn.abovephone.com.
Then also check out Empowerment with Ethical Local and private
AI, which is how to use local AI on your devices and use it to
help you and also to understand the nuance of it.
So check those things out. And again, if you get a phone or
laptop from us, you're getting a free hour long call with a real
live person. They're there to help you 24
you're getting e-mail and chat support five days a week, 9 to
5. And this is this is our job.
This is our passion. This is what we're here to do.
Everyone in our company is, is part of the movement.
And this this is, I won't say a life or death mission to us, but
it's, it's very, very important. So we will if you are ready to
take the step, we're we're here from you.
I. Mean this is a great way to push
back against Technocracy. It is it.
Because they count on our own compliance, they count on us
picking out the two devices that are offered on the store.
They never expect us to go our own route.
And this is what the this age that we're about to step into to
get spiritual for a second. I do think there's a massive
shift that's about to happen where instead of going from this
oligopoly, where there's all this planning and coordination
and these big behemoths of companies and entities were
stepping into the age of, of self authority.
And so this could be a little step in your journey of self
authority. And another thing that comes
with. Your above book and well, your
above book is, let me remind you, an American plug.
Yeah, so. So thank you for that.
Let me make a note of this international adapter for
everyone except Germ. Because Germ already bought an
international adapter, we don't need to.
Give him one but. And is coming from China.
How funny is that? There should be a South.
African startup. There's a joke in there
somewhere. There's a joke in there
somewhere that. China is China is saving us.
All right, Hakim Anwar, thank you for joining me in the
trenches. Blessings.
Thanks Jeremy for having me.