Deconstructing Conventional

Hakeem Anwar: Your Phone is Eroding Your Privacy, Dignity, and Humanity - And How to Take Back Your Tech

• Christian Elliot • Episode 50

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Ever feel like your devices are listening to you? In this eye-opening conversation with digital privacy expert Hakeem Anwar, we pull back the curtain on the massive surveillance infrastructure built into our everyday technology. From phones that listen when they're "off" to health wearables that track your biometric data and share it with government agencies, the digital landscape has become a minefield for personal privacy.

Hakeem, founder of Take Back Our Tech and privacy-focused company Above, breaks down why Apple's privacy policies aren't what they seem, how vulnerable our cellular networks have become, and why SIM swapping poses a serious risk to our digital security. The conversation goes beyond just identifying problems to offer practical solutions that anyone can implement, regardless of technical skill level.

We discuss breaking free from the "walled garden" of big tech and how to make a smooth transition to a genuinely private phone. I share my own experience switching from iPhone to a de-Googled Android device, including the initial friction points and how quickly they were resolved with proper support. Hakeem explains the advantages of open-source software, end-to-end encryption, and having multiple profiles on your phone to separate private and work environments.

Perhaps most importantly, Hakeem addresses the philosophical aspect of digital privacy – why it matters now more than ever as we face increasing surveillance from both government and corporate entities. With developments like digital IDs, facial recognition at airports, and massive data collection initiatives like Project Stargate, the window to establish our digital sovereignty may be closing.

Ready to take control of your digital life and protect your privacy? Listen now to discover practical steps toward digital freedom and learn why the effort is absolutely worth it in today's surveillance economy. Your future self will thank you for the peace of mind that comes with knowing your personal data truly belongs to you.

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Speaker 1:

Hello everyone, welcome to episode number 50. My guest today is Mr Hakeem Anwar, and I was excited to do this interview for a few reasons. This in many ways marks a milestone for me personally. To be ready for the interview, I needed to accomplish something I've been meaning to do for a while now, and that was breaking up with my iPhone and switching myself and my wife to phones that offer real privacy. So I'll tell you more about that process of switching in just a second.

Speaker 1:

But if you heard my last interview with Mr Glenn Meter, or, as you'll hear Hakeem and I talk about in this episode, our personal privacy is not something big tech or big corporations or the government values at all. In fact, the reality is the opposite. They want to know everything they can about us, including where we are all the time, our personal biometric data, our spending habits, everything we look at online and I mean everything what comments you make, who you vote for, what opinions you have, and so on. And now they have the tools to capture and centralize all of that data. So some of you history buffs may know this quote, but the first message ever sent across the telegraph was what hath God wrought? Which is an interesting question because the message could also have read what hath Satan wrought right? The point is, technology is neutral and that can be used for good or for evil. It can be used for freedom and flourishing, or tyranny and enslavement and friends. There are a lot of people in power today who have their sights set on enslavement and high-tech data mining, which has exploded with AI, is their technological control mechanism of choice, and what I find when I discuss this topic with others is one of two typical responses. Many people are either sleepwalking into this kind of digital containment zone they're either unaware of the dangers of tech or they suffer from some level of willful blindness, thinking it just can't be that bad. And, by the way, if that's you, have you seen what's happening in Europe? If not, I'll encourage you to go back and listen to my last episode. But the second response I get when I talk about these topics and given that you're listening to the show, there's a good chance you're like me and that you're aware of the problem. But the barrier to exit from the walled garden of big tech, the friction of learning new tech, just feels like too much to take on in an already busy life, and or you just don't know how to part with some of the convenience you're used to. If that's you, I get it. That was my barrier to exit. So if the latter scenario is you, you can kind of consider this episode my gift to you to say that you can do this. I have lived it.

Speaker 1:

So before I play the interview with Hakeem, let me set you up with some honest expectations and give you a couple of lessons from the road I've walked in switching to a genuinely private phone and learning a new digital ecosystem. So, yes, you will have some friction in switching your phone. I won't tell you that it's super easy with no hiccups. But what I can say is sometimes you go huh, why is this app not working like I thought it would? Or what setting do I need to change? Sometimes it's usually something as simple as that. So you will have your own similar moments if and when you make the switch. But here's what I can also tell you you do not have to wander in a digital wilderness to make the switch. You might appreciate that those who sell you a new device also know something can come, that there's unique challenges with every person, and so, at above, each device comes with a personal coaching session to get you up and running. Plus, they have a live chat feature and regular calls where you can get your questions answered. That made it so much easier for me to make the switch. So, knowing that I would not be left adrift when I cut the cord from my iPhone, I found the support was great and it was patient, and the switch away from the big bro you know, the tech bro ecosystem has never been easier and gosh, I wish I had done it sooner. So, to reinforce my point, let me tell you a couple of other things that helped me make the switch more easily.

Speaker 1:

Knowing that I was going to do this, what I started doing was taking inventory of what I used on my iPhone the most, and essentially I was asking what would be painful to not have access to. And what I found was two things, and the first, I guess, is a semi-embarrassing level of what I'll call mental laziness, or even this Pavlovian response of mindlessly pulling out the phone when there was really no reason to do so. I realized pulling out my phone had become some sort of substitute for letting my mind wander or have white space or just think about other things and, as my wife put it, the new phone has become less and less of an appendage Like, in other words, one of you know it's it's. The use of it is more purposeful Now. It serves us and we don't just mindlessly consult with it.

Speaker 1:

The other important friction point I had to solve to fully make the switch was getting my head around how to not interrupt my day-to-day workflow of easily switching between my phone and my laptop to open files or click links, etc. So as a digital entrepreneur, I tend to do a lot of that each day and I'm happy to say I cracked the code and there are many ways. My new above phone can easily communicate with my Mac computer and I haven't lost any level of efficiency. That was a great problem to solve that I had to figure out. So, as you'll hear us talk about in the interview, one of the coolest things about the above phone is that you can have multiple profiles. So if you're someone who has to use various big tech tools for work, you can put them in their separate profiles outside your private ecosystem. And for me it's almost been kind of a fun game to think, okay, what can I do to replace that app? And sure enough, there are always ways to do almost anything you're talking about, and thinking one app at a time was a helpful process for me. So my point is you don't have to change everything at once, but I just love deleting an app from what I call my matrix profile, knowing that I've cut off one more place where my data is being mined and now I'm back in a profile where my phone is not constantly listening to everything I say or that my microphone or camera can't be turned on by a hacker. There's a peace of mind that comes with making that switch.

Speaker 1:

So if you've listened to other episodes, you know my show is not just about deconstructing conventional. It's about finding better solutions, and Hakeem and his team have some much needed solutions to the gross invasion of our privacy. Much needed solutions to the gross invasion of our privacy, and it's not hyperbole to say, at least in my opinion, that the digital realm is the front lines in the timeless struggle between freedom and tyranny. Okay, a few last details before I play the conversation you droid lovers can rub it in. I will admit yes, it's hard for me to say this, but the droid is a better phone than the iPhone, and once I got familiar with the interface I will say, yeah, it's much more efficient. So there you have it. Second detail is that a few times during the interview, hakeem did a screen share to visually reference what he was talking about. So for those of you who want to watch the interview, I will upload that to our Odyssey channel and I will put a link to the video in the show notes. Also, when I first met Hakeem years ago, he went by the name Romero, so late in the episode I accidentally slipped and used his old name. So forgive me for that gaffe. But lastly, and perhaps most importantly, hakeem gave me a coupon code for you to get a discount on a new phone and, above now, offers payment plans if paying in full for a phone is just a bridge too far. So those are two ways you can reduce the cost barrier to becoming digitally free. You can use the code TRUE50, t-r-u-e-5-0, for $50 off a new phone, and I'll put a link for that in the show notes as well.

Speaker 1:

Okay, quick shout out to those of you listening to the podcast inside the Healing United app. That, as you know, is an easy way to find the show notes for every episode. And if you're there, welcome to a free speech friendly app where we don't mine or sell any of your data. By the way, if you want a transcript of any episode, make sure you subscribe to our mailing list at healingunitedtoday. When I send out a newsletter about each episode, I also send out a link where you can get the transcript. Okay, my friends, please join the privacy revolution. It is so worth the effort and you will feel great about getting all the creepy tracking tech out of your life. So vive la revolution. Spread the word and thanks for listening.

Speaker 1:

Okay, without further ado, here is my interview with my fellow freedom friend and free speech lover, mr Hakeem Anwar. All right, hello everyone. Welcome to today's show. My guest is Mr Hakeem Anwar, and he and I have known each other for about three years now, isn't it? I think, yeah, that's about right. So we, it's been. It's been a while. It's been a while Christian, it's good to be back. It is good to be back. So do not know, he is the face behind the website. Take Back Our Tech and the company Above, which offers privacy-focused laptops, phones, tablets and a suite of applications to keep big tech from spying on you, profiling you and commoditizing everything about you. So welcome back, buddy. Good to have you.

Speaker 2:

It's good to be back and yeah, I mean, I feel like now this is becoming more important than ever, and I'm interested to hear too You've been using your above phone a lot more. How's it been it is?

Speaker 1:

a process that I'm emotionally calibrating. It took me a while because my big barrier to exit was just the inevitable friction I'm going to go through and waiting for the perfect time and I realized there isn't one, so let's get on with it. My wife had the unfortunate experience of my one-year-old throwing her iphone in the pool and we're like, well, I guess we gotta get a new phone and we're gonna have to live out our values now. So let's go do this.

Speaker 2:

so we've made thanks to your baby for being the great, uh the privacy advocate from the iphone in the water yes, he has this sixth sense about him.

Speaker 1:

Like this is this is not good for you, mom, get rid of this. And so, yeah, he helped us out, all right, so, before we get too much into the meat of this episode, give people a sense of your backstory. What got you so involved in the world of privacy focused tech? What events led you to the work you're doing today?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, I've. I've been thankful to have mentors from a young age, like around college, where I was exposed to how the world actually works and kind of like the hidden machinations of different industries. So I've been awake for a really long time. And then I kind of just switched into my career as a software engineer and I've done everything under the sun built web applications, mobile applications, robotic process automation, all these different sorts of things that I was picking up. But you know, I just knew my career wasn't really fulfilling. And working for startups and big tech companies alike, I was like, ok, how is this actually helping people? And I also got to see how they were treating their data on the other side, and it wasn't good, and so I was just kind of holding out, waiting for something. And then, in 2019, I met up with the guys behind the Freedom Cell Network, derek Brose and the team there, and they needed help with their tech infrastructure and I decided at the time OK, why not, let's help out a social movement and see what happens? I really believed in it and it turned out to be a really good idea, because the next year was COVID 1984. And so we had this. It was really interesting, right, we? We see the Internet, we see the real life as the place where things get done.

Speaker 2:

But in those early days where everyone was going crazy, we were turning to the internet to find common ground and to find people who still had their head on their shoulders. And so we had this giant movement form, and I found myself on the platform and found myself being able to be of service of others. And what I realized is people already have the important stuff down taking care of their health, not taking pharmaceuticals, you know being giving informed consent to what they care of their health, not taking pharmaceuticals. Giving informed consent to what they put in their body, all those good things like growing their own food. But they were kind of being naive on the technology side, and what was scaring me is they were building all these projects but they were depending on things like Google or Apple products, and for me I was way too paranoid to let that happen.

Speaker 2:

So, with my team, I decided hey, guys, let's figure out the best way we can work together while being completely self-reliant on our own software and our own infrastructure. And so we did that. We found a phone along the way that worked well with everything we were doing and six months later we had something so good it's like OK, maybe we can share this with others. So I launched, I started teaching people about friendly software, linux and de-googled phones, and then just turned into a company because there was so much demand. So we've been doing that for about four years now and we've got the phones, laptops, different communication services, now a data sim, and so all the good stuff.

Speaker 1:

Right on. Well, I can't wait to get into some of that, just because it's so much friendlier to move out of big tech now than it used to be, and you guys have been part of that. But let's see if we can frame the problem or just kind of ground people a little more on why this is worth the effort. So we've we've probably all had the creepy experience of we're talking about something and then the next day we get ads for that thing, but, um, that's talked about it, not searched for it, right. And I even heard a.

Speaker 1:

There's an article I read recently where groups of people, they turned their iPhones off and they sat around a table and talked about. You know, they just picked a topic on just the real estate in Nashville or whatever it was, and then the next day they would get ads for that Well, from their phone, listening to them when it wasn't even on, which is a different level of creepy, right. So you were the one that tipped me off a few years ago to just kind of what I've come to call Apple's fake privacy policies, and you guys have been able to demonstrate the differences between what, let's say, apple or big tech states as their privacy policy and what's actually happening. So give us some examples of, maybe, where we're being hoodwinked by the idea that big tech companies are actually looking out for our privacy.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, to give them some credit. So they say we're really, really private, and that might be true as long as your data stays within their ecosystem. So it's like, yeah, they can be private because they own the advertising platforms. Right, they're only sharing it with all of their different tools and services. And when you think about it, apple has a ton of different things. They've got an app store which makes billions in revenue. They've got their own web browser. They've got their own communication system. So maybe it's private within that ecosystem, but that ecosystem is immense, it's absolutely immense.

Speaker 2:

And so that's what we see when we look at Google and Apple is that they have ownership and stake in the analytics and advertising services on the apps that run on the phone. They have visibility into how the phone works and there's all this creepy stuff going on with the phones listening to us, and it's really unclear. Are the phones listening to us when they're off? Is there another device in the room that's also connected to one of your accounts that can kind of integrate the two? You know, do you have an Apple TV?

Speaker 2:

There's all of these questions you have to answer, and the problem is, when these big tech companies get way too big.

Speaker 2:

They invade in every single piece of your life and there's really no stop to it.

Speaker 2:

I mean, recently I've been learning about the new biosensors that they're putting in the Apple AirPods and the Apple Vision Pro headsets.

Speaker 2:

And that's really scary, christian, because now we're getting into a point where your health data is also going to be surveilled. So, yeah, these companies, you know they act like they're protecting your privacy, but in reality they're absorbing huge amounts of data and they're using you as the unwilling participant. I mean, you probably don't even think about it, but if you do have someone who has an iPhone that come to your house to connect to your Wi Fi. They send off your Wi Fi network along with the location of your house and that gets added to Apple's Wi-Fi positioning database and then other people can use that to figure out where they are in the world. They don't use GPS anymore, they use these new sorts of systems. So, yeah, it's really interesting to see how you become a part of the surveillance when you use these products, and I think that it's going to take a lot of us to break apart and do our own thing to be off the grid.

Speaker 1:

Yeah Well, and you were telling me before we started recording about the way these wearables not just track, you know, intimate personal things like brainwaves and heart rate and our women's cycles, but it's also has there's a backdoor for the government to come in and look at all that. So tell people a little bit about that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So Apple has been working on a series of health studies over the past few years and they're using these new wearable products that I think we're all used to right. A lot of people use the Apple Watch to track their workouts and heart rate and stuff. That's all fine and dandy. But now Apple's released this new Apple Research app where you can enroll in a study and these studies will accept data from your Apple Watch. They will send you different questionnaires.

Speaker 2:

So there is a women's health study that they did and they were asking women questions about their menstrual cycles, and also from their Apple AirPods, which can do hearing tests.

Speaker 2:

So with all of these three devices combined, they set along to do this really wide observational study of it, gathering every data point they can. They weren't going into it with a single question they wanted to answer, but they were like let's just collect all the data and we'll figure out the trends and insights later down the line. So that doesn't sound private to me. And then I guess I was the only one to go look at their privacy policy and if you look and you see that when you enroll in a health study, that data gets sent off to the FDA and Health and Human Services. So I was like, oh my God, why, why is that? Why is that happening in the first place? And I think it's this trend towards biosur, bio surveillance that we're moving into. You know, we're kind of we're seeing how governments and countries are trying to get ahead of the pandemic by doing more surveillance, even though it's all it's, you know, it's, it's all a scam. So I think Apple products and Google products eventually will be a really big shoo in for that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah. And one thing I've seen is there's kind of been somewhat a I guess I'll call it an apathy or malaise among some people, like, yeah, they're tracking everything, but what can I do about it? Or they'd kind of be rationalized. They're like, well, I, I don't, I'm not doing anything illegal, and if they want my data it's kind of boring and I'm not it seem not so bad. So sell me on the idea that I need to be concerned about this. What are risks we may not be thinking of? Is there anything you haven't mentioned in your comments so far?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean for sure, I think, the analyzing your brainwaves. That's far. I mean, it's probably not happening right now, but it will happen in the future. I think the things people have to worry about right now are things like digital ID, which you know. Apple and Google wallets are now being used as a form of digital ID here in the United States.

Speaker 2:

They're already being accepted at TSA in a handful of states like Maryland and others, and so we're getting close to a complete biometric ID system, and that's pretty dangerous. And what's crazy is that this feature becomes available to the billions of people who have phones all at once One software update and then this feature is available to you. They could also force you to use the feature if they wanted, if they wanted any of these features, like there was this case of the Department of Public Health in 2022 that they worked with Google in Massachusetts, massachusetts Department of Public Health and they were able to enable contact tracing. You remember, with contact tracing?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that was creepy.

Speaker 2:

It was super, super creepy and people forget that was a collaboration between Google and Apple. These are supposed to be like huge competitors, but they come together for you know the common good, or so they say. And so the way contact tracing worked is it turned on your phone's Bluetooth and send pulses out. At the end of the day, your phone would be like hey, here's the pulses I've got from other phones, and it would send it off to, like, your local department of health. And if any of those pulses came from someone who was infected, that's how they knew. Okay, you were in the presence of someone you know, go get tested. And it was absolutely ridiculous.

Speaker 2:

Bluetooth was not a good indicator for distance, but the crazy part is is they turn this on for every Google user. In Massachusetts that's my speculation, it was at least it was at least 1 million people they turn this on for without their knowledge, without their consent. So it just goes to show like you think you own your phone but you actually don't. You don't know what's going on in the code, and if they decide to roll out an update like that, who knows what they could do next? Right? So it's scary to be using technology like that, but there is a better way.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, and that's you. Think about that. I love technology. There's so many amazing things it does now, but in the hands of people who've broken our trust or tipped their hands to let us know, you're a commodity, excuse me, and we're just going to track and do what we want. That should give us pause to say why wouldn't you do it again? So you had a recent article that you wrote about just different vulnerabilities or ways that we are digitally, I guess, in danger. So you talked about the massive data breach it was last year at all the major telecom companies, the problem of SIM swapping, sms based attacks and then just kind of internet enabled crime. So talk to us about some of those things we may not be aware of and how vulnerable our data really is.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so, yeah. So I was talking about cellular data, and so cellular data in the United States goes through four major carriers and you get a phone number along with your little SIM card. You put in your phone. Any intelligence agency related to cybersecurity I'm talking like CISA, NSA, FBI, Interpol, like a lot of these international agencies came together to say that, oops, there's Chinese hackers in Western cellular infrastructure. And then they went as far as to say guys, don't send phone calls or text messages because they're probably being intercepted.

Speaker 2:

And now this has been going on, I want to say, since October of last year is when they disclosed oh, we think something's going on. There's still no answers. I mean, for you know, these foreign actors supposedly alleged foreign actors are so deeply embedded in the cellular infrastructure they still don't have any answers for us and they still haven't gotten them out. So they are recommending people to use internet-based applications right to communicate. So instead of using a phone call and a text, you use something like you could use something like a video conference, like what we're doing now. But what the these? What ended up and what everyone ended up recommending I also don't agree with, because there's like there's Signal which is funded by the US government. There's WhatsApp, which is a Facebook product. Right, these aren't, these aren't, these really aren't the go to technology.

Speaker 2:

So what we've been doing is we've been finding the solutions that actually do work, are decentralized or bottom up Anyone can run themselves.

Speaker 2:

And so what I'll bring on the screen for people watching at home, I'll kind of explain what I'm doing. But you can get an internet phone number or you can use an encrypted messaging service, which is called XMPP, and this is like a 25-year-old protocol, and when I say protocol, think of it just like a language that computers speak, and so anyone can write software that corresponds to this language and have a working messenger. Now the really cool part is you can send people messages, you can make calls to people, you can even make video calls, all the stuff that iMessage does. You can do it completely for free, and it's way more private because, instead of trusting Apple, anyone can run an XMPP server. You can even run your own. So the article was about hey, let's stop using cell service if it's going to be spied on anyways, and the people who manage and operate our cell service and they're supposed to protect it they're now saying not to use it, Then we should really be using internet-based communications.

Speaker 1:

Yeah Well, and it stops something like SIM swapping, where somebody can pretend to be you and get their SIM card or your SIM card put into their phone or your numbers now in their phone, and they can do all their two factor authentication, get into all your stuff or pretend to be that they can get to you through your SMS and they get you to click something and now they have access to your phone. And what you're talking about is a way around that, if I'm understanding it correctly. Is that right?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah. So this SIM swapping like you, like you described, is anyone could go to a cell phone store in the United States and be like hey, I'm Christian, I need a new SIM card, and if they have enough information about you Christian, they could pretend to be you, successfully impersonate you and then get the SIM card installed on their phone. Now, once they have your phone number, that's the backup phone number for your bank accounts. When you log into your bank account, you can even change your password with it a lot of times.

Speaker 2:

I have a lot of friends here that were SIM swapped and it's horrifying the things that they go through, like the level of abuse and attack that they go through from the SIM swappers right, because just because they decided to use the phone number as their second factor. And a lot of the times you know they don't even need to impersonate you. Sometimes it's just someone working on the inside at one of these big telecom companies, right, there's tens of thousands of employees, there's some bad eggs in there, and so our thought was okay, there's these risks to people. Why don't we make a data SIM or an eSIM that doesn't have a phone number attached to it? It's only data, and then you could use internet-based communications to talk over it and you're never at risk of there's really no incentive. Nor could someone steal your seller service because there's no phone number attached to it.

Speaker 1:

Okay, well, we'll get into that a little bit more when we talk about some of the products and solutions and features you guys have, but I want to stay high level for a second and just. This is not a political show and but whenever I record an episode, someone is in office. So talk to us about, maybe, what you see developing in terms of the digital landscape since the Trump administration has been in place. Have we all been saved and digital privacy is becoming the new standard, or are there reasons to be concerned that efforts to implement digital control are still moving forward?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, it really doesn't look good. It feels like the surveillance landscape is accelerating, and it's under the guise of protecting us, which is really common Hegelian dialect, right. But with the Trump administration they came in and they had this big mess to clean up of all these these illegal immigrants that are in the United States now. And so what did they do? Well, they decided to build a smart border wall and also to surveil social media in the hopes of capturing and rounding up these people and getting them out of the country. But it ends up having a very tightly locked and surveilled entry and exit for the borders, which, you know.

Speaker 2:

That sounds like a good thing, but it's also us that are being surveilled. It's also our movements that are being surveilled, and it's pretty scary to see that. Then there's also the joint venture between OpenAI and Oracle and SoftBank, where they're investing $500 billion. Now, I don't think the government's directly involved in this, but there is a massive amount of spending going into building data centers around the country, which are being used to house data scraped from AI or just ingest more forms of surveillance. So I do think we're heading into an age where it's becoming synonymous, and that's really worrying to see.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, is what you're speaking about? The Stargate project? Is that? All the tech bros got together and talked about how great it's going to be. We're going to take the lead in digital and AI and everything is going to be on the cloud, so to speak. And is that what you're? It's like a few days into his administration. That was one of the first press conferences they had.

Speaker 2:

Yep Project, stargate that's the one.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's the one where Larry Ellison if you guys didn't hear him talk a few times since then, that is like he is saying the quiet part out loud and telling us that AI will soon be so sophisticated the quiet part out loud and telling us that AI will soon be so sophisticated we can get information to police to prevent crimes before they happen, which is the scariest, like it's. That's. That's back to the minority report, to the idea that we can prevent you from even doing something if we sniff that you might be doing something we don't approve of, and that's the kind of people that are in the tech bros puzzle, and I think it's nothing else wise for us to be aware of that. And then all the billionaires who are they've been virtue signaling for years about saving the planet and the green energy, and now they're all getting behind the need for nuclear power because they just don't have enough energy to power these massive data centers. Those are significant.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there's another thing too. Derek Brose has been doing some good reports, along with Whitney from Unlimited Hangout, about Palantir, which is you know, we know that's the. It's like the venture capital arm of the CIA, and they just recently won a contract to modernize the IRS, and so you know, now they're getting access to the nation's financial taxpayer data. Additionally, they're helping out with the deportation and helping out with immigrations and custom enforcement. So it's like we're moving into this era where the government is being more and more privatized, and that's really scary. Right, the government? We only have so much accountability, but to these private corporations we have even less.

Speaker 2:

And some people might feel well, hey, you know they're carrying out a problem that needs to be solved, but what it really feels like is they're building the surveillance infrastructure. Right now, it's the immigrants that are the problem, but you know who's next? Is it people that are opposed to big pharma? Is it people that want to grow their own food? And with all these tools that they're building now, could they be used against us? That's what people really need to think about.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's just when they break your trust or when there's reason to be concerned about downsides, we ought to have our eyes wide open and not just be like, whew, we've all been saved. So I was most disappointed. I saw Kristi Noem recently talking about this urgency that everyone needs to go get their driver's license and turn it into a real ID, and it's shockingly. I can't believe the optics on this. The real ID comes with a gold star on the ID, which, for those of you who don't know, that's a throwback to Nazi Germany, when all the Jews had to walk around with a literal gold star that others could see to tell who they were and for them to do something like that or to tell everyone we need to have your ID digitized. Just I mean, at least pick a different color or give me a diamond instead of a star.

Speaker 1:

But that's part of what's out there in the public and if we don't at least say that may smell funny. I think we may be walked into something we don't want. So hopefully this episode can give you guys a clarion call to say maybe I should take a look at this and take this seriously. But even if somebody thinks we've been saved theoretically, we're one election away from reverting back to this dystopian censorship and central of everything in a kind of a social credit digital enslavement system. So, anyway, that's some of my thoughts, but add to that, or? Yeah, I think.

Speaker 2:

I believe with the whole real ID, I'm pretty sure you can still fly with your passport. So, if people are really not wanting to get it, which I totally understand yeah, because I mean a real ID is basically a digital ID. It's just, instead of it being stored on the server, it's stored on a chip in your phone and, of course, it's stored on your local state ID system. But yeah, so it's like we're creeping, inching along closer to this like national unified digital ID system, but it's being built in pieces, so that's really scary. The other thing, too people who have traveled have already noticed is they're starting to do facial recognition at airports all across the country yeah, yeah, do you.

Speaker 2:

So you see, did you see it?

Speaker 1:

yeah, I have to decline it. They just the the tsa agents lazily, just point to that, like, look at this. I'm like I don't want to use this. I have my id. You have to, you have to vocalize and I went to Europe in two different countries. In both of them that was the option. You just have to look at this camera.

Speaker 2:

There's no other option right.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So just eyes wide open that this is coming and your opportunity window to do something about it. We have it now. If they could install all this right now, they would have. They would have locked us in it.

Speaker 2:

But we have a time, and that's what that's why I'm excited to get this episode out there and give people options. So can always say no to you can at least the us. You can always say no to the checks. You can always say no to international flights too, um, and so that's what we have to keep doing, even though it kind of seems hopeless because, like eight out of ten people are doing that. Everyone's going along with it. But hey, you could be the one to say no and hopefully inspire the other people in line behind you.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, cool, all right. So before we get to some of the solutions you guys have, let's define a few terms so people can kind of track with us as we go through this. So define for me the difference between centralized and decentralized and maybe apply that to servers or whatever it is. That is the easiest way for people to understand that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so centralized would mean that one organization or set of servers, set of computers, is supporting all of the users. So like let's take an example something like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp or something there is one single unified infrastructure. You can kind of think of it as one single unit that is handling the communication for everyone. And so with that, because there's one organization behind it, they're able to see everything who is messaging whom behind it. They're able to see everything who's messaging whom, who's signing up to the platform, what are the amount of messages coming through that. And so this was kind of the old Web 2.0 model of building internet applications, this centralized infrastructure.

Speaker 2:

Now we see it's more common to use things like Web 3.0, which are decentralized, meaning that many people can set up their own services. So XMPP is a really good example of this. Anyone can set up an XMPP server. It's just like email. Email is a really good example of this too. Anyone can set up an email server, but an email server knows how to talk to other email servers, so it's your server that is responsible for the decentralization and you can store all your email on there. You can store all your messages on there and there's less surveillance because it's not one organization in charge of everything. Every person is responsible for their own email Now, this has changed a lot. Right. Is responsible for their own email Now, this has changed a lot, right. We've had things that were previously decentralized, like email, go into these mega email giants like AOL, yahoo, gmail, all of them, but I think we're headed back towards decentralization now, as people realize these services are just rotten.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, Some people may remember Hillary Clinton was famous for setting up her own email server when her time in the State Department, when she wasn't supposed to have done that. So there's reasons to have your data private and so decentralizing. Basically having your own server sounds like oh my gosh, I got to have a warehouse, or, like you know, people some make it feel a little more approachable the idea of having a server.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, I mean mean it could. It could be your own server. It's literally, you know, you could think of it as a computer running at your house that's open to the internet. Um, it does take a little bit of effort, but also, you know, decentralization could also mean hey, there's someone in your community that you trust, right, so a friendly neighborhood tech guy or even a company like above or there's. There's a lot of options nowadays that you can go to and they keep your server up and running, um, and also connect to the internet. I've, I've, ran stuff for my house. It's not as easy, right, because your local internet service provider is not going to be good as an internet provider in a data center, but, um, yeah, it's. Uh, there there are different options which I'm happy to talk about, like when it comes to using xmpp, easy ways to set up your own server so there's, there are a lot of options right on.

Speaker 1:

Well, hopefully that the skeleton we're outlining can give people just a little more insight into how they how to think about this puzzle. So another term I want you to define is open source versus closed source. What's the difference when it comes to that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so this has to do with the software code, right? So when you're using something like Facebook or Apple or Google, the software running on the phone is, nine times out of ten, it's hidden, it's proprietary, closed source, meaning that you can't see the program, you don't really know what it does, you're going off of actually using the device and it's not clear to you what information it's actually gathering. You could be putting all your personal info in. You don't know if that's just letting the phone do its thing or if that's actually being sent off to Google and Apple. And so information security researchers typically find out through other means, not by looking at the source code, but observing, like, what the phone is connecting to, how private something is, and it's been really bad. When they've looked at it, they found that your phone will connect back to Google and Apple every five minutes. It'll share IDs, unique IDs and stuff like that.

Speaker 2:

Then, on the other hand, open source is code that's actually visible to people, and there's different licensing schemes. Some open source licenses may say hey, you can use this code, just don't sell it to other people. So there's a bunch of different schemes within open source, but at the end of the day, it comes down to. You can read the code, you can see what's actually in it. It's kind of like having an ingredients label for the snack you just bought at the store versus just nothing. Here you go, here's some chips. What's in the chips, I don't know. So everything that you get and maybe on a de-Google phone or with our company is built on open source software. Everything from the software running on the phone to the apps on the phone Pretty much everything is running open source software.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, great, I love that analogy too. Like, and just eat these chips, trust us. That's kind of what we're asked to do with our apps. Like, yeah, every time I get an update on my phone or computer, I'm like great, what kind of where are you trying to track me? Now it's like I don't even want to update it anymore because I don't perceive it has my best interests in mind. So, okay, well, one last term and that's end to end encryption. Give people a sense of what that is, or what it pretends to be.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so encryption? Encryption is taking a piece of data. It could be like a letter to your mom and it's taking this piece of data and just shuffling it around, making it into gibberish so no one can actually read what it says. But you know the order in which you shuffled it right, so you have the key to the encryption. Now, end-to-end encryption is a little bit different, because the way most encryption works is you trust someone else to encrypt it for you. So if you upload it somewhere, maybe it's stored, encrypted, but it's your service provider that's actually encrypting it. So end-to-end encryption means no, you're the one actually shuffling it up on your device. So you have the key on your device, you shuffle it up and then you upload it to wherever it needs to go, and so the server in between, whoever you're communicating through, they can't actually even see what's being said.

Speaker 2:

So end-to-end encryption is really important. I mean, it's the highest standard for private communications and secure communications. You're responsible for encrypting it, and I know that sounds hard, but a lot of apps have made it really easy, for instance, the XMPP app that we use, which I'll bring up right here for those of you watching the show. So all of these messages are end-to-end encrypted. They're actually encrypted on your phone and they pass through the XMPP server we run for you, but in reality we can't even see the messages that are passing through our servers. So that's the gold standard. Everyone should try and be NTEN encrypted. Now there's other things too. There's the VPN on the phone, which will NTEN encrypt your network traffic. So it's encrypted on your phone, it's sent out to a VPN server, it's decrypted there and then it goes out to the internet. You get a response and then we send it back to you. So that also gives you a lot of different protection. But it's not.

Speaker 1:

It's not the same end-to-end encryption you'd think about when messaging or calling people yeah, yeah, no I love it because I've been using that app you're talking about and it's nice to know like it's like mailing something.

Speaker 1:

You know the post office can't open the mail, like this thing is only going to be read by the two people who are intended to get that, and so, anyway, those are some terms I wanted people to be familiar with because they got thrown around a lot when I was getting my head around the tech world and I'm like hang on, what are you guys talking about? So thank you for helping me help others understand that. So, all right, before we get to some of your solutions, the, I guess last thing I want to ask you is just kind of some of the. I can imagine somebody's hearing this and thinking, okay, you're making a compelling case, I ought to consider this switch, and yet there's this, there's friction or there's barriers to exit when it comes to doing that. So talk, I guess, on a philosophical level, about the mindset, whether that's ethical or logistical. What types of mindsets or framing concepts are helpful as one endeavors to disentangle from so many of the tools we've become familiar with? Give us some measured realism about this process.

Speaker 2:

I think a little bit of it is a trust fall, because you have all these tools that you take. You don't take it for granted. They're a part of your life, right, like iMessage and FaceTime. Like you, you understand now how you're going to communicate with your friends and family, and then you're moving on to a phone. It's a little bit of a trust fall, but the trust piece is that know that there are solutions for pretty much everything. It's just about you finding and walking through those doors. There's not really any barriers to entry. Once you have the phone in your hands and you read the resources, you realize oh okay, instead of FaceTime, I'll do a Jitsi video conference. And, my friends, they don't even need an Apple iPhone to do it, they can join it from their web browser. So there's a lot of little things like that. You need to trust that there are alternatives for pretty much everything, and there are. When it comes to navigation, or anything from navigation to office work, to conferencing, all of these things, they exist outside of these, out of these big tech platforms. In fact, all the big tech platforms are using the same software underneath the hood, but they're not telling you what it actually is. So I think that really helps knowing that there is something out there. And the other thing is that being willing to research a little bit, and we've done a lot of the groundwork for you.

Speaker 2:

When you get a phone, you also get access to a course. I think the course is like three to six hours long, but you don't have to watch all of it. You just go to the points that are necessary to you. The getting started one is quite short and it explains everything you need to do Going up, opening up the phone, just basic usage. If you've used an Android phone before, I think you can rest a little bit easier because this phone is based on Android, so a lot of things will be similar to for an iPhone user. Things will be a little bit different. But yeah, yeah, and what did you think? How long did it take you?

Speaker 1:

I'm still in process. I guess what's been helpful for me, and if it's helpful for the listener, was just taking this, taking on the mindset of a student. I'm here to learn. I'm not expecting this to be a frictionless process or like I instantly know where everything is and how to use it, and I've just taken on the mindset to chip away at it. The number of apps you already have on the phone. I was like, oh, and here's the new weather app, and here's the new podcasting app, and here's the replacement for the maps, and it's all there. I just have to get comfortable with other tools.

Speaker 1:

But slowing down and allowing time just to okay, I've got Saturday afternoon or I've got some time to play and learn a little bit more. And I found over time, because I've been doing this digital disentangle for a while, I've untangled several things about my digital footprint. But like moving a big rock of going from one phone to another or from one laptop to another, those to me I thought more like give me a half day and, sure enough, that's plenty to your point. Like the tutorials are here and I found you guys offer great support. I had really good support on my kind of enrollment call, if you will, when you get the phone and you kind of get your first orientation. That was super helpful and I just had to stop waiting for the perfect time and do it and so, yeah, it's been. It's been like. You guys greased the shoot really well.

Speaker 2:

Thank you and and and. Yeah, I really liked what you said about coming into it with a student mindset. It's like, yeah, you know you will need to learn, you need to learn these things, but I also find that practice is the number one thing. You can read about it. That's great, but also just like mess around with the phone and see what you can change, what you can do, how that changes things. That's you know.

Speaker 2:

That's why we're in business is because we have the best support when it comes to these types of things. You know, with every device that you get, you get free email and chat support. So we're, we're online, you know, five days out of the week and you can ask us questions, any questions that you have. And then we also did the uh, the free support call, the enrollment call, like you said, which I like that word, I might take it when you spend 45 minutes with you when you first get the phone and we help move everything from your old phone to your new phone, so that's really really helpful for people. It's also a face-to-face call, like with a real person, right? So it's tailored to you, right? However, you want to use the phone and there's a lot of ways to use this phone.

Speaker 1:

Yes, there are.

Speaker 2:

We'll make sure you're set up.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, a couple other things that were helpful were just the reality. I'm doing this as much for myself as my kids. I want them to grow up to not have to go through a big digital disentangle. I want them to just this is the ecosystem they live in. They know what XMPP is or they know what open source is, or they they're familiar with all the de-Googled stuff and Linux and graphene.

Speaker 1:

It's so easy and intuitive. There's. It's so similar and I remember we all had a day, if we're you know of age, where there wasn't, we didn't have an iPhone, and now we have one, or we didn't have a smartphone and it was unfamiliar to us the first time we did it. Well, okay, just go through that one more time and and you're free and that's there's value in doing that. So, um, one other thing you talked to comment on that if you want. But one other thing you mentioned to me years ago that really helped me understand the process was this idea of a privacy and convenience spectrum. So answer or comment on anything I just said, but also tell people about that spectrum, because it helped me kind of figure out where to go first.

Speaker 2:

Yeah yeah, the privacy convenience spectrum. So On one hand, you have more privacy and security. You're completely responsible for everything you're doing on the phone. I mean, in a lot of cases you can use this phone almost offline. So I'm talking like you can download all the maps to your phone. Once you have all your photos downloaded on the phone, they're on your phone. Just don't lose your phone.

Speaker 1:

Back them up somewhere.

Speaker 2:

And so that's kind of the trade-off is that, as you get privacy and security, but it's less convenient, and there are ways that the phone can be made more convenient too. But at first it seems like you lose a lot of convenience. But there is also, like, behind the convenience of Apple and Google and their photos, it's like, okay, you use Apple and Google photos, that's great, but do you know your photos are scanned by AI? You know your photos of your kids are being looked at by algorithms. I mean, that's like super creepy.

Speaker 2:

So there are some things that are just more important than life than you know having convenience, and so we want to have, we want people to have the best of both worlds. We think that it's wrong that there are two companies that spy on 99 of what people are doing. It's just wrong. And the more of us step up and say no, it's the better. It's just that what are you going to sacrifice? Just a little bit of convenience, um, and so, uh, yeah, depending on where you're at on the spectrum, um, it might seem harder at first, but it's more valuable in the end, because you can't just break you know, you can't break Apple terms of service and they can't just take everything away from you like they have in the past. To like regular, everyday people. They've shut down people's accounts, but people's really important info on their like, pictures of their kids and stuff They've just taken that away. So it's like, do you want to be the arbiter of your own data or do you want someone else to be?

Speaker 2:

And I'm doing a webinar, actually in the next couple of days it's next Monday, april 28th, at 12 pm where I kind of talk about okay, hey, so what is your privacy score? We can kind of look at all the different options that you're using when it comes to your laptop, when it comes to your phone web browser, search engine, all of these things and to just help you get get a big picture of how it all works and how how also our products can fit into that. So at the end of it, you can kind of check off the boxes I use this, I use this, I use this, I use this. What's my privacy score? It's here and what are my best ways to improve? Okay, well, I can do this, this and this.

Speaker 2:

So it's really really important. Right now we're at the phase where it's not affecting our lives, but it's going to get there soon, right? I mean, we can kind of see what's happening in China. If you want like a glimpse into the future, it's really not far away, I imagine like two to four years. But an everything app where your entire identity is connected to your phone and then you can get locked out of your finances, your whole life, just from a third party controlling your phone. Why would you let it do that?

Speaker 1:

Right yeah, why take that risk that nobody would ever do that or that there's no people in power who would want to do that, and just blindly trust? Give yourself an ability and the beautiful thing is we have time to do that now. Enough of us in mass can do this and it really gets hairy for them to keep going with that agenda. But anything else you want to mention related to that kind of the philosophical, kind of calibrating your emotions or your mindset toward making this move.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and so there's. There's this thing called the network effect. Network effect is the more people that are using something, the more valuable it is. So why is Google Maps so valuable? Because everyone uses it, because it has all the traffic data on it. All the businesses want to be on it. You want to be on it to find new restaurants, and so we're kind of at like the starting point for some of these new platforms. But just know, you're building towards the network effect. The more that you use these solutions, the more useful they are.

Speaker 2:

You get all your friends and family on something like XMPP, then it becomes even more and more useful.

Speaker 2:

You can set up group chats for them, and that's really where we are. We're at the starting stages of this and it's really interesting to see too, like the mapping app OpenStreetMaps, which I'll bring up on the phone here. But you can see that it's maps from all over the world. But when you look at, I think I'm in Tennessee, here somewhere, yep, in Tennessee. So when you look in Tennessee and you zoom in, you're not seeing all the restaurants pop up on the map and fortunately there are some, mind you. But when you go to, like Europe or the UK. Every restaurant, every store is on that map and it's useful. I actually didn't even need to use Google Maps, which blew my mind, but it's because there's more of this digital sovereignty movement there. People contribute to these maps, so just know that the more people using this, the more effort that gets put in it, it becomes useful and eventually we're back to square one, where these aren't just alternatives. They're better than big tech.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and we're just living out our values and you're part of the solution. It feels good to be doing that and in some ways I've heard one of my mentors describe it as not doing business with criminals. It just feels better to not be in business with serial felons who just pay a fine when they get caught doing something they shouldn't be doing, and so all right. Well, let's talk about the phone just a little bit more, because that's been my big push to get ready for this interview and to take the next step in, you know, protecting my family and our future. So there's three things I really have appreciated about the phone. One is the privacy suite. You talked about where to yeah, you can have a server and or you could just find somebody you trust and they can have a suite of options to kind of disentangle. So what have you got inside this privacy suite at above that is useful to help make the transition to a new ecosystem better yeah, absolutely so, with the privacy suite.

Speaker 2:

I'll just bring myself up on here. The privacy suite is it's like that last layer for your communications and the software on the phone. Okay, so there is a VPN right. Which VPN is super important to your internet privacy.

Speaker 1:

Tell people what a VPN does.

Speaker 2:

So VPN will tunnel your traffic. So normally you know you send your internet, you access the internet through your internet service provider. So they know exactly every website you go to. They know exactly what you're doing online, and so when you use a VPN, instead of going directly through the internet service provider, you go through an encrypted tunnel. So now your internet service provider they just see gibberish. They don't actually know what websites you're visiting, and that's super important on that aspect. Also, the website you're visiting let's say you're going to like a big tech website they don't actually know where you're coming from. From their side it looks like you're coming from the VPN server. So that's an important distinction there. It's probably the most effective and most impactful thing you can do for your privacy.

Speaker 2:

So we do run a VPN service. It works on the phone. It also works on the laptop. We run an email private email. We run a calendaring software. So with the email and calendar, you can start your own business with that. You can start to take clients, you can hold meetings, and we also have a video conferencing software that I mentioned earlier that you can use too. It's a lot like zoom, but private.

Speaker 2:

Once you end the call, there's no, you know, there's nothing left, um, so there's that. And then there's also a search engine which allows you to search from 60 other search engines, so you kind of get to choose. Actually, let me see, I I won't demo it here, but you can actually go and say, all right, I want it to search from bing, from google, from brave yahoo, and you can turn all those on or off, so it gives you even more choice in that. And the last thing is the encrypted messaging, which is based on xmpp, is the encrypted messaging which is based on XMPP. So anyone can sign up for free to an XMPP account.

Speaker 2:

But we run a professional server for you which doesn't log. It is more private, it's very reliable, it's running all the time. So that's why you can pay for our XMPP service and you get all these services, which I think is like six now, and we're coming up with another service too, which will be released really soon. So you get all those services for a hundred dollars a year. And, yeah, it essentially replaces all your needs for like a Google suite or for like an Apple suite, where we're making those services obsolete and you can use these instead. And they're all built on open source software and they work really well. Another thing I didn't get to mention is the internet phone number. Um, have you messed around with that at all?

Speaker 1:

I have. Actually I set that up, so part of my switch where my wife had to go instantly and keep her phone number, I have the luxury of like I'm playing with another phone number on that phone and getting familiar with like wait, I can make a call over the internet and I still have a number, and that's been fun to say. Because the second thing, there's the above suite. But then there's this new thing. I'm still getting my head around this data sim or the e-sim that you guys have.

Speaker 2:

So tell people about what that is and the benefits of it yeah, so the data sim, like we mentioned earlier, we're talking about sim swapping. We're talking about how phone calls and texts aren't private. So the data SIM is a eSIM. It's like a virtual SIM card. You might remember putting the SIM card in your phone. You don't need to do that anymore.

Speaker 2:

Most modern phones support eSIM and so we have an eSIM that.

Speaker 2:

We've worked with the best partners in most countries and we found really reliable, high speed data that you can just activate within five minutes.

Speaker 2:

So if you purchase our data sim, which you can go to abovephonecom slash data sim and there are a number of different plans you can get, so you can get it for the US, you can get it for Canada, you can get it for the UK and Europe and you can also get it for Australia, new Zealand and Mexico.

Speaker 2:

So you have all these different places and once you purchase a data sim, just scan the QR code and then, when you enter that country, you can activate it and then you have reliable, high speed data. Now you won't be communicating with a phone number in the normal sense, but you can use things like you can use any internet-based app, so that could be the internet phone number, like we were talking about, that will work anywhere in the world. So the internet phone number, you have a us or canada phone number and now you can use this anywhere in the world to make international calls with this data sim as well. Yeah and so? Uh, yeah, we've, we've tested it, we've gone into, like, the remote regions of the us to test how fast it is, and it's, it's super fast and reliable.

Speaker 1:

So that's why I can validate that. My wife is out of town and I was able to use that. I think it's jmp or something, is it? That's whatever the app is. I just dialed that. She's got my new phone number in her phone now and and we can talk just fine, it sounds. I don't notice any difference or drop off, so that's a cool feature I had not heard, ever seen anywhere else yes and um, your, uh, your wife too.

Speaker 2:

If she wants to keep the same phone number, she can also port her phone number into jmp, the internet phone number. So you also have that option too. Like I said, there's there's a lot of options. Once you get on your free call with us, you know we'll show you exactly what you do or we'll talk, talk over some options with you. But okay.

Speaker 1:

well, the third thing I wanted to highlight because that may maybe the coolest part was this idea that you can have different profiles on the same phone, which I guess in some ways is especially important for people like me, who we have businesses that still need to interact with a lot of these old big tech tools that we've come to depend on. So I actually named my other profile, the matrix, so now I can log into big tech and they can have their little bubble and they they can't track everything I'm doing and I can log out of that on the same device and log back into my private ecosystem. So tell people a little bit about that. That maybe I didn't cover in my comments there.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so the user profiles feature. So that's a feature on the phone, and so what it lets you do is it lets you set up encrypted, separate containers on the phone that are completely separate data-wise. They can't access data within the container. So you've got your main profile. It's the first profile you get into when you go on the phone, but you can create a phone within a phone and within the first profile you get into when you go on the phone, but you can create a phone within a phone and within the secondary phones you can throw in the apps that you probably don't want running all the time.

Speaker 2:

Now, these are the apps that are most likely to listen on you Facebook Messenger, games, social media apps. I mean these apps that typically all have microphone permissions, and that's actually how they listen to you. You can put them in the secondary profile and then, when you're on the main profile, the secondary profile will be off, but when you want to switch back, it's always there. So it's perfect for social media too, right, there's this health aspect to it, where you don't want this social media like. You don't want to be doom scrolling all day, so it's off. Uh, it's only there when you need it. And then another cool thing that I guess it's worth mentioning too is if you use things that are dependent on Google services, like YouTube or Gmail, normally that won't work out of the box, but you can install Google services, and you would normally do it in a secondary profile, so you can have your cake and eat it too, too, and it'll be completely separate from what you're doing on the main phone yeah, I found that to be a way to just it's.

Speaker 1:

It's slowly just weaning me because there's just one extra layer of friction to switching. It's not that convenient, like I'll just do it, and my wife even described it. She's like this phone has become strangely less of an appendage, so it like it's not this constant thing at my hip all the time and there's just enough friction. I'm like I know why I have this now I'm trying to get away from that and we're putting it in smaller containers where it serves us now rather than mindless, whatever engagement we may have before. So that's been a side benefit. I guess in hindsight it makes sense, but we didn't really see it coming as much as Makes me really happy to hear that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so it's been. There's obviously friction points and there's elements where, like I kind of feel like who moved my water dish, like where is the thing? And I don't know how to use this yet, and yet I've been able to temper that. Okay, I'm not going to let that frustrate me, I'm just going to accept. I did this for a reason I want to be an example to my kids. I want to make sure that I'm doing what I can to honor my values, and so we made the jump and it's just been rewarding. So thank you for what you do and for putting all this together.

Speaker 1:

As I went through some of the learning curve or just the calls, I've been on getting up to speed. It's been, man, I'm so glad somebody else is taking care of this. I feel like it's what I do as a health coach. For other people they get overwhelmed with so many shiny objects and layers of complexity and to me I don't see the complexity. I'm just like, oh, I can fix that, I know right what to do, and you guys do that with all this tech. So well done. Anything else you want to say about the data or the that we didn't cover, specific to the phone or your ecosystems there.

Speaker 2:

No, I just want to say thank you for for being adventurous enough to do that, and I hope it doesn't. I know there's like tiny frustrations, but yeah, it's a little bit of persistence, it's a little bit knowing that we're always here to help you when you need it, and so I hope you reach out. I've been hearing good things from my team too. They like help you when you need it, and so I hope you reach out. I've been hearing good things from my team too. They like supporting you and you have really good questions. So, yeah, yeah, so right now, we so we have a special code for everyone who's listening. You can use code true, true, 50, t R U E 50 for $50 off, and then this will get you a $50 off any device in the store. If you go on our front page, you'll see that we have the phones, we have the laptops. I'll just talk a little bit about our phones briefly, then our laptops and what you can expect.

Speaker 2:

So phones, we have a number of different models. We've got the 9 Pro XL, which this is a bigger phone, hence the XL. We also have the 9, which this is a really nice phone. This is the phone I use currently, and the 9 is just very modern. So it's got 12 gigabytes of RAM, meaning that you could have open like a billion apps. It's got an amazing 48 megapixel excuse me, 50 megapixel camera, so this is like the best phone that you can get on the market, and you can get it private right now too. And the pixel 7 and 6 are very good phones too. Just their updates will only go on for a few more years, whereas the 9, in the 9 pro xl, you'll have updates till 2031, so I mean your phone will outlive cloud schw, which is a pretty cool thing, Right.

Speaker 1:

I did not expect that reference, but anytime we can outlive Klaus Schwab and his illness, that would be great.

Speaker 2:

And then we have the Pixel tablet as well. So this is everything you love about the privacy phone. We put it in a tablet. The only thing the tablet can't do is it can't connect to cell service. But it can do everything else right. You connect it to Wi-Fi at home. You can use it to watch videos I didn't get to show a lot of the stuff off, but maybe we can do it later. You can actually like record. You can download the YouTube videos you're watching directly to your tablet. So it's a really nice device to entertain the kids, download some educational content, some podcasts and stuff, and just use it at home.

Speaker 2:

And lastly, we also have the laptops, which I really like the Aluminum 6. That's our latest and greatest laptop here. It's got a really nice metal body. It also flips around 360 degrees so you can kind of turn it into a tablet. It comes with this handy dandy um, let's see if I can pull it out. It comes with a nice stylus as well. Here we go stylus in my hand right here and so you can draw on the screen and all that kind of stuff, um, which is really really nice. So it's kind of for more, more for creatives, but it's a really powerful laptop too.

Speaker 2:

Then we have some of the older models here the Carbon, which is a two and a half pound business laptop, so super light, super sleek, really powerful. The Aluminum 5 and the Starter, which are on our budget line, but all of these are running a Linux-based operating system. Same thing with the phone. We found all of the alternatives and you can also get the programs that you're used to running, like I'm talking Zoom, microsoft Teams, spotify. You can still use this stuff on above book, which is what the laptop is called. So don't be afraid, ask us if you have questions. There's a little chat with us button on the bottom right hand corner and we'd love to talk to you and see how we can help you out.

Speaker 1:

So what you're saying is, we don't have to also go back to 2015 in our tech hardware in order to go private. We can have the best stuff available today and be private.

Speaker 2:

That's right. It's not just an alternative. It's better than big tech.

Speaker 1:

Nice, I love it, Okay. Well, one last question I want to ask you is the carrier. So do you have any? I'd love an excuse to break up with AT&T, and I have the impression and I want you to confirm it I think I can actually save money on the monthly bill by switching to somebody else. Now what would you suggest if I'm looking for a new carrier related to my digital footprint or being able to connect with other people?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so if you just want that, do you want the data or do you also want the phone number?

Speaker 1:

yeah, let's say both, just so people listening can can consider what they're. They can compare their phone bill to what they might save yeah, just if it's just saving on your phone bill.

Speaker 2:

There's a number of different ones. There's a us mobile which we like, and there's a mint mobile as well, but there's a lot of these resellers which will just work off AT&T or the other big ones but may give you a cheaper plan. So if you look into like mobile resellers or any of the companies I mentioned, you can save a lot on your plan and hopefully that gives you some more spending cash for yourself. Also, our data sims are a little expensive, however. You can get plans that start at $18. So that also might be something if you don't need a cell phone attached to it traditionally. And, of course, you can use our internet phone number. So let's say you got the monthly five gigabyte plan, which is $19 a month. Then you would get your internet phone number, which is $5 a month. So all in all, you're paying $24 for an internet connected phone, which is really really cool, and then the larger plans are more expensive. But hey, there's lots of choices for people.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, okay, cool. Well, I just wanted people to see that there's options there and maybe a name or two. That's a little more privacy focused in terms of telecom. So thanks for that. All right, ramiro. I'm sorry, hakeem, is there anything particular? It used to be Ramiro Last time I talked to you. So, hakeem, is there anything else that we did not cover today that you want to let people know about?

Speaker 2:

Let's see. Yeah, please join us for the webinar. Again, it's happening April 28th at 12 pm Central Time and you can go to abovephonecom slash webinars. It's the Privacy Score webinar and if you want to learn more, if you're like, okay, that was a lot of information at once I encourage you to go to learnabovephonecom. My team has committed me to doing one large webinar. That's one to two hours every month, and we do this for free. We don't charge anything. We just ask for your email and then you get access to all of these. So if you want to learn about privacy and how it actually works on the phone, we have lots. I think it's like 12 different webinars now. So please check this out. It's free and you'll learn a lot. So I hope it gives you some good leeway.

Speaker 1:

But, Christian, I'm really excited.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I'm excited because I think you're turning out to be pretty handy on the phone, and it's really cool that it's a family thing right, because I'm sure when your wife has trouble you can help her out, and vice versa.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, or actually my kids. We got them a Gab phone originally as their first phone, which eventually will move to something more like this. But the um they're helping us actually like oh, I know how to use a droid. Like I don't know how to do this thing, where's the flashlight? Like so, or how to turn, like, vibrate, like where is the button? Oh, there is no button for vibrate, okay, anyway. So, yes, it's become easier. They speak that language, they do.

Speaker 1:

I want them to grow up with this rather than fumble around with an old fuddy-duddy like me when they're older, like I don't know how to do this. So, yeah, thank you for making this easier. It's great to call you a friend and I appreciate the hard work you guys have put in. Man, it's so much easier to digitally disentangle than it used to be. So if you guys can't make it to his webinar coming up, then the replay will be available. You webinar coming up, then the replay will be available. You can always find this stuff. But, yeah, there are good people out there doing good work making this, you know needed option easier and easier for us.

Speaker 2:

So thanks for what you do. Thank you, Christian. It's been awesome being a whole human with you here.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, buddy, all right, we'll talk to you again soon Bye. Bye.

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Christian Elliot

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