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? 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.
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.