Resist Mass Surveillance by Embracing Linux — Hakeem Anwar | Jerm Warfare

0:30You sound epic with that reverb that's on your voice. So if anyone is wondering why your reverb is on me doing it. Thanks for drawing attention to that. Actually, at the end of the show, Jermen and I have planned a little singing audition. So that's why. We want to spice it up a little bit. 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.

1:30It's completely secure. I mean, it's a great machine. Jermen, yeah, and you are our first South African customer. I want to say, yeah, you probably are. And yeah, so are our privacy notebook, the privacy laptop. And 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 talk about that. But essentially like a gaming laptop with a privacy oriented operating system that we wrote. It's based off of arch Linux for those of you that use Linux so that's the one where. Yeah. Think about it. Jermen. Well, I love the fact that you got Nvidia and AMD, what is it, what is it's Ryzen? I don't know what any of the stuff is because I work mostly on Apple.

2:32But I'm guessing this is all good quality stuff. Definitely. And I mean, it's kind of, you know, it's kind of, it was a good play in our book because we were developing the laptop since back in September. And you know, we, we made the acquisitions and now the prices for graphics cards 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 center grab. So it's like, Jermen, you got to carve your own slice. You got your own personal data center 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. A hundred percent, I couldn't, I couldn't agree more.

3:32And 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 AI. I 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 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 locally on your computer. It's blowing, it's, it's handling the heat with air and it's pushing it out with a fan.

4:33There's no water involved, right? So there's this little difference that happens. You asked me what I think of it and it is quite a beast. I have played with it. The battery's on 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. You really should just do it. I'm glad you got it. I'm glad I 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.

5:35It's very big and clunky. You all plug. So much better. We should name and shame the person who came up with a 240 volt standard. 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 center. It's like the show piece of the room. It's that big. It's huge. It's like, why? 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? These thin little things, these two bottom prongs, prongs of thin. That makes way more sense. Yeah. But you said they had two kinds. So how do you know what your electronics to buy in China? I just called both.

6:35Yeah, I had both with me. I want to go to China this year, by the way, and we should talk about that off-air. But I want to go check it out. Yeah. If you go, I'll go with you. It's an incredible country. But if we're talking privacy in China, this is a very complex thing. It's 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, it's a really golden moment for me, Jeremy, because it's something I've been warning about since the beginning of 2020, 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.

7:36It's like, yeah, it's like it's like everywhere. It's in our cars. Our cars are spying on us and reporting to our insurance providers. We have a unified surveillance system here in the U.S. 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 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?

8:39Are you going to talk about how it's destroying the environment? I said, yes, let's, let's talk about it actually. So I think you'll appreciate that there's 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 your 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 learned on abovephone.com. It's free. All I asked for is your email and you can watch all these clips. So definitely do that. And maybe that'll get you prepared to get the same awesome workstation that Jeremy is using at abovephone.com slash germ. Well, I'm not using it, I'm not using it right now because the battery's flat.

9:41Maybe, maybe if you, yeah, go ahead. No, I was going to say, so I'm looking at your icons on your screen there. That is your, that is your sort of visual design also. Yes, we can't take all of the credit. So the themes are, so this is a really cool thing about the software we've chosen for abovebook. This, this is based on arch Linux and the reason why arch Linux 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 contraven control and everything, it's just regular, regular nerds publishing software for other people. So it's like, if you, if you look up a software on here, you're going to find it.

10:41So 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, 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, if anybody knows anything 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 Ubuntu or something Debian based, which is a, uses a long term release model.

11:46And what that basically means is 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 distro. 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 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 get fixed, things you're getting new features all the time, and things just get work, things work. So it's a really great experience.

12:47And it's fast. It is fast, man. Yeah, I mean, and so you're in Mac world. What would you say kind of the responsiveness feels like a Mac versus this, this, you know, to, it's a really nice, highly equipped Linux device, but what would you say, how would you compare it? No, it certainly seems on-paw, speed wise. It looks, 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. Yeah. 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.

13:49But 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 actually not that hard to do. So 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, checked a 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. So yes. 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 have an updated for quite some time.

14:49Yeah, 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 zero degrees, it's freezing cold. And anything below zero would be below freezing. But what is freezing in Fahrenheit? It's 30 degrees. Zero zero. Hey, it's not that bad. Wait, wait, wait. What is boiling? What is what is inside in metric? It is 100 degrees. I know. That's so simple and it's so simple. It's a 212 degrees and well, why wouldn't it be?

15:52Look, 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, you know, I think that's a bit of American mentality. I just crank it all the way up. I mean, look to be fair, though, the inches inches is a weird one. I think the only time inches really make sense is when you, you know, talking about the size of the junk, then you don't want centimeters or millimeters. Exactly. I think, I think the whole world should adopt inches, me personally, interesting feed to talk about our heights. There's no more. Let's not do this. Oh, yeah, my homie is 180 centimeters. You're making your homie sound small centimeters where you can use decimeters, like, honestly. So how came one of the advantages of using Linux is, so I know that you say Linux, but

16:52I can't wrap it around saying Linux. I just say Linux because 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 it was, there was a lot of marketing around it, you know, in the geek community, but it was still very broken, it required a lot of tinkering, and it just, for me, became frustrating at the time. Yeah, I was just quickly looking up, Linux would be probably closer to the pronunciation because the Linux toward walls who created Linux was named after a cartoon character in peanuts. So, you know, Charlie Brown is named after a character.

17:52So 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 was all these, you know, technology was evolving so fast, and I think we reached a level stability where a lot of developers at the time decided to put their time into Linux as a passion project. So you had all these amazing desktop environments, which actually this is, this is what you're seeing on 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 past two years, it's crazy how far behind Microsoft was, because the open source community, they're just far more creative. They're more creative, there's more features.

18:53Their focus is on using, putting, developing things they'd actually use instead of spyware and things for corporations and things that could 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 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 Linux from scratch to save the world, which is actually Linux from scratch is actually a distribution and people who know it hate me for titling this tutorial this way. They're like, it's not Linux from scratch, well, it is Linux from scratch.

19:57So you can go through and install, it just walks you through the process, all you need is a 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 kind of hostage. So yeah, this computer doesn't stop randomly, right? It's doing what you tell it to, there's no agenda that has followed you in control. You are in control. Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

20:58And so you're in control and that's the security, you know, there's a big security measure in there. And obviously 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're not spoken about the dark future ahead. I mean, digital ID surveillance. 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, you own your software. You own your software and in many cases on Arch Linux, you're actually building your

21:58software from scratch. You're building your software. So just to explain what that means, you know, most of the time you download, yes, so you build your own software as well on a bug 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 Oracle, 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 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 five bucks or maybe five bucks a year. And they're slowly trying to push you in this direction where you own nothing and you'll be happy. And the RAM shortages we're experiencing right now perfectly plays into that.

23:01And the powerful computers are about to, they are going up and 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 past times 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 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 interesting is if you can trust your cloud provider, it thinks, you know, you can create your own cloud, you can, you can, you can create your own

24:04cloud. 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 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 a, on a above book. There are ways to do everything local first. So we have a password manager built in, which integrates with a 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 their tech.

25:05And 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. Is there anything that's been like weird to you or the past few years that kind of like rubbed you the wrong way or interfered with your life at all, or mainly chill? I don't like, I don't know if this has to do with the iPhone, to say, 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. It is. Yeah. Yeah. That's one of the worst things about phones is that, you know, could because these things are so close to us, there's use massive advertising networks.

26:07And they're tracking you on your phone, they're tracking the conversations, you know, we get to hear from our customers. And in most of our customers who switched to a 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. 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? I should never be forced on people. But you can also remove those 100% 100% you can. And we, yeah, and there's you can use browser extensions.

27:09And so on above book, you'll see it is doing that, which is really nice. On our VPN, we offer a VPN as well, is through our suite of privacy services. If you use that VPN, we're blocking tens of thousands of different advertising and tracking websites as well. 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? How easy is the above suite? Well on our devices, it's quite easy. And you know, things have been integrated nicely, so they fit in seamlessly. 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.

28:11And there's a lot of different services. This is kind of was our sass 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 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 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-to-end encryption is a really great feature on our messaging. We also have the video conferencing, which is also end-to-end encrypted. It's using the software Jitsi, some of your viewers might know about it. And there's all these different features, I think, services, nine in total, that people can use to replace the reliance on big tech communications. And one of my favorite things is giving the above book to children.

29:18Why? Because they completely customize it, and 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 when I just show you this thing, you know, this taskbar, you can change every single part of this, whatever icons are showing up down here, even the themes, like the colors of the windows. Like, for instance, if you wanted to, 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 is the level of customization. So, and Andrew, and so 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? Okay, check it out. So 50 Celsius.

30:20Where's it? No, it's converting it. It's converting it to, let's say, 50 Fahrenheit. Oh, okay, 50 F. Okay, so if I type in 50 F, it automatically converts it to 10 degrees Celsius. 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 21st 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 with the size of Texas, I mean, the U.S. 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.

31:23It's like. No, it's huge. 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 nine hours. Wow. Yeah, now that's not far at all. Yeah, I hate, I hate long flights, so I feel bad. But hey, at least there's a lot of different biomes in Africa. Hey, you know, I was in Hawaii recently, and 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 the silent in Hawaii, they look

32:23like 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. And naturally developing countries are using Linux, like when you look at the numbers of people using Linux and Linux as market share, it's the biggest. In fact, in some countries, there's been like this, the snowball effect.

33:25You have countries like that are jumping to 40% Linux usage, which is really wild to think about. You also, it's also just spreading now from developing countries where cost was a factor to gaining independence from the American big tech olicopoly, you know, and it's, I think it's, that'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 a Libre office. So big moves are being made right now and in computing and hopefully will 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

34:27ahead is a lot easier. Yeah, to make a really good point is like to do it in a easy, stressful way when there's not a lot of pressure on you, you know, there's on a deadline or you're still figuring out how it is the way you work switching to Linux at that point of time is much, much better than spending years on a platform that is corralling you into its wall garden and getting you dependent, getting you dependent on how it works. And unfortunately, that's what happens mostly Microsoft's pretty bad, but for people who work in enterprise or corporations, but it's really Apple that get people bought into their ecosystem and make it very hard to leave. And so for things like FaceTime and I message 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

35:29things 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 track for how you do things. 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 thing is is we need a network effect of enough people using this technology to have its impact because if there is some sort of game changing app 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 China, when people, do you remember this story where they were using airdrop as a form of activism, what was the story?

36:30They were using airdrop. So there was, I'm trying to remember what they were rallying about. I think it was a bank run, protesters. Oh, yeah, and you know, this is, this was the zero COVID restrictions. So the really bad COVID restrictions of the CCP, they were being censored on social media. So they were starting to use iPhone's airdrop to send each other documents like they would sit on the train and one person would send a document to everyone there that got 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

37:31knowledge or trying 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 send many anonymously sent files directly using their Bluetooth, as long as recipients have their devices said 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 context 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 their information. It's a good thing. It goes back into like saying, cloud's not necessarily bad thing. Airdrop is not necessarily a bad thing, but when big tech gets its tentacles and everything,

38:34even when it starts to work out well for people, it can just be shut off. And that is the danger of using these centralized abusive big tech systems. That's why we've got to figure out open source solutions. That was a rambled there, sorry. A great thing about Linux is that it is truly decentralized. Yeah, like we were saying earlier, you know, it has a greater capacity to be decentralized. It is decentralized in the sense that there is no one single body developing the core software. It's not just Microsoft Corporation that does Windows. 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 various hardware and drivers of the computers you might use. So yeah, it's a community-based decentralized model that is kicking ass.

39:34I mean, where is does Windows have an automatic way to convert? What do you want to convert, bro? I want to convert 5.9? Yeah, bro. I'm 5 feet tall, actually. I actually know that's 1.524 meters. Look at that. 5 feet. It's kidding. I'm messing with you. No, I'm actually 5 feet. I almost thought you're obit. Now would that be sad? That would be sad. I'm not actually 5 feet. Let's see. I'll put it in my... I feel uncomfortable putting my real height in. That's my... I'll say I'm 5.11. I'm 1. See? This is why metric is inferior. You really want me to say I'm 1.8.034 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

40:44kind of want to go down this road, don't you? Yeah, absolutely. 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, 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 their surveillance.

41:48We 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 brainwaves using electrodes, stuff, low ground sensors. And so just giving you a hint, this is not going to stop. They would like to read your brainwaves or there are meta, and another company is actually working on tech that will take your brainwaves and convert it into sentences, they've already started that work. And so any time 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

42:50open 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 the public at large or 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 many ways. They don't know actually that you exist. Your information is just some long information string. Yeah, so I like the direction you're going. It's like the counterargument is like, well, I'm using the big tech phone, are they really looking at everything I'm doing on my phone?

43:51Are they really looking? No, no, people aren't looking, probably not. But AI is looking and inferencing your behavior and your reaction into a group, into larger groups, sets of millions and millions of people to 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? When people unwittingly don't realize they're in this system, and it's a two-way street, 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 what you see on your phone. I think that's the more insidious part of it is stealing your attention and life force from what is presented on your phone.

44:51So I'd say that's even a bigger danger than the privacy, in my opinion. So by the time you go to abovephone.com, Sosh, 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 nicest local app enabled. It's what Germ has got. It's a beast, right? It's bigger. It's 15 inches, and then our older laptops here, they run the same software. They do run the same software, but that's just less powerful, and I'll let you read into the specs, but you can get an older laptop. If you want the laptop, Germ has that 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, shouldn't be able to run the same local AI, which is nuts.

45:55But let's say you don't want to run local AI, but let's say you don't want to run local AI. You still got very good devices, and they are not being tracked and traced. Yeah, exactly. You're spot on. It's like you have the security of this operating system, which is protecting you. You at low levels by cleaning out data every time it doesn't need to use it inside your apps and protecting you in this way. You can still have a very excellent experience on these newer devices and the older devices. Wow, that was bad. I know. It caught me off. You can still have these experiences on these newer devices and the older devices. You could be on an encrypted call while navigating using your offline map. You could be downloading YouTube videos directly from YouTube privately, so they're on your

46:59phone and you have them forever. There's a lot of cool things you can do. Okay, so that's the segue, so can the layman do pretty much everything? Yeah, it's like 95% of things you can do. And for the other 5%, there's workarounds. Just to give people visibility to 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 enforce that you have a Google license 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 are tiny things like that. There's the, if you use big tech features like iMessage, that's not a thing on this phone,

48:03right? So you'll be using alternatives and we'll point you to everything that you need to know. So 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 the 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 the Google side. 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.

49:06They'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 that they are going to prevent you from installing open source apps in 2027 on official Google devices. So 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 a buff phone, you're not, you're not impacted by that at all. You can install apps from anywhere on the Google Play Store, off the Google Play Store. That's pretty great. Yeah, you have to wrap your frozen cons like which hill do you want to die on? Something like maps.

50:07There's a big one also, maps. Yeah, we're pretty happy with our, our mapping solution. So it's actually, it's two apps, it's not just one. So we're using an app called Kobats and it's a really beautiful mapping app. So it does turn by turn navigation. You can save points on the map and the most important part about it is you can download maps of your country or the entire world. And once you've downloaded them, you can navigate offline. 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 Kobats and then you can get to where you're going.

51:11And 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 kind of the beautiful part about this phone. It sets you up to use your own authority and your mental faculties. You kind of think about it and you learn better instead of just trusting Google. So the browser that comes with the laptop and the phone that comes from you guys, what browser is that? Is it Chromium? It's based on Chromium. It's called Vanadium and it's a highly secure browser. It's using lower level hardware features, actually, it's set up to use hardware features like memory tagging extensions, which is just a fancy way of saying the phone is very

52:13strict 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 a buffoon, 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 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.

53:16You can go into a thing, it's an actually configure which search engine is right now. Oh, I've used it. Yeah, I've used it. What's it called? It's called search x is a software. Yeah, search x. Yeah, yeah. So we run a private instance of search x that's just highly optimized and there's no logs on our search engine. And so yeah, you can do really cool things like turn the engines on and off here. So all right, if I don't like the results I'm getting from Google, I'll take things are the worst. I'll take Moji in pre-search, so you have control over that. And there's really so much, like check this out, there's like, there's buy do search down here for, I know, Jerm would maybe use one of these Chinese search engines. It's kidding. So yeah, lots of, lots of choice. I actually use Koggi, K-A-G-I, and I've been using it for about two years, Koggi.com.

54:22I think it's Japanese for liberty or freedom or something to that effect. It is a premium search engine, you do have to create an account. But do you solve 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 very driven by their community. I strongly recommend them as a search engine also. And I mean, I've customized my search results using Koggi. So I don't get anything from CNN or Fox, for example, at all, like nothing. I've pushed Wikipedia results down to the bottom, for I can have them entirely removed, but you can rank your own search results and adjust your search. It's very cool. It's very cool. So you're telling me in your searches, you're like, took the mainstream media outlets and

55:24you're just like, yeah, don't, don't bring them up again. Genius. That's genius. Right. I mean, 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. When you kind of turn 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 bring some of these into our own search engine. But that is really cool. I really love about to those. The reason why I brought it up is because so you've got your privacy or untated devices, but that 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.

56:25You'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 Kagi is great. And by the way, this important part of our technology, it is in no way limiting anything you're doing. Kagi has your default search engine, 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. Okay. Well, let's come in for landing. Mark him. Give me basically a summary of this discussion. All right, so the Imperial system is the best hands down, feet down, just kidding. Ah, yeah. Jim, well, it was a pleasure to be on here with you and so today we talked about a lot

57:27and 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 slash germ, you can learn more about our computers. And that there is this new decentralized software movement that is happening into it. 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 and it was just as much as your phone is. I mean, it already is to degree, but with things like digital ID could easily be integrated

58:28into 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 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 talk about here, I give a whole view. You just need to put in your email 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 above webinar on learn.abovephone.com.

59:32Then 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. Check those things out. And again, if you get a phone or a laptop for months, you're getting a free hour-long call with a real live person, they're there to help you 24's. You're getting email and chat support five days a week, nine to five. And this is, this is our job, this is our passions, this is what we're here to do. Everyone in our company is part of the movement and this is, I would 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 where we're here for you. I mean, this is a great way to push it back against technology. Yeah, absolutely it is. It is because they count on our own compliance. They count on us picking out the two devices that are offered on the story.

1:00:35They 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, we're stepping into the age 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 German, because German already bought an international adapter. We don't need to give him one, but... And it's coming from China. How funny is that?

1:01:37There should be a South African startup that makes it... There's a joke in there somewhere. There's a joke in there somewhere that China is saving us. All right, Haki Manwa, thank you for joining me in the trenches. The last thing, the thanks journey for having me.