Transcription
I would be scared if I was you. That's that's all. Why you look at me like that stuff?
I'm trying to be positive. I know. I understand what you're saying. So innovative.
Look what they did to the crypto people at the beginning of crypto. They put him in jail. There's a guy we just interviewed. He's still on house arrest with an ankle monitor cuz he was doing crypto and the people who run the world were afraid of it at the time. Well, now they're all getting into crypto yet they still have those guys in jail.
Hey everybody, welcome back. We have a special guest with us. Hakeem Anoir is a technologist, entrepreneur, activist who left a corporate software engineering career to focus on the threats posed by technology on personal freedom. He's the founder of above agency which creates privacy first devices like the above phone and the creator of the #takeback tech educational initiative. His work empowers individuals to reclaim digital independence through pro privacy open-source software and secure communication services. Welcome to the show Hak Anoir. How are you doing buddy? Thanks for coming.
Hey Jimmy, it's good to finally meet you and excited to be here. Thanks for having me on.
So uh tell tell us what this is all about. What what are the things you're worried about and how does uh your technology fix it?
Yeah. So, I wanted to chat with you about the data center issue because I think that's the most important issue we're we're facing right now and I don't think people realize how their phone and laptop fits into it.
So, tell me how it fits into it.
So, yeah, this for the past six months I've been working on something called the AI data center map. say list of all the data centers in the United States. You can visit it at a data centermap.org.
Here I have it right here. Here it is. Right. So tell me what I'm looking at.
Yeah. So in 2025, uh, six companies spent $2.5 trillion on data center projects. That's project Stargate, OpenAI, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and then everyone else piled on. uh this is you know speculation or greediness from these other real estate developers. So everyone jumped into data centers and what we're looking at now is that um from data from this map which I believe to be the most comprehensive resource on the subject we're looking at 384 hyperscalers that have already been built uh using about 10% of the total US power demand and and that's at a low floor and we're only about uh halfway through this buildout. There are another 300 data centers planned.
And so what what are the so you you're saying that the data centers that are already built are now using 10% of the power in the United States.
Yeah, that's the floor. They probably use more. But yeah, so there's there's 35% of these already built data centers I I don't have data for. So um this map is to help crowdsource that information. So yeah, out of the 300 that are remaining to be built, the AI power use will quadruple and then at that point it'll get to 40% of the US power supply.
But uh Kevin Oli tells us that they're building their own power plants around these data centers. What do you say to that?
I I have lots of doubts about that. Um one, it's impossible to build so much power. It simply it simply cannot happen, right? Um already we're looking at the amount of data centers that are already built that would be 12 full-size nuclear plants to power it. So realistically, yeah, they'll offset some of the electricity. A lot of these uh developers are are building on-site nuclear or hydroelectric or all these different things, but in reality, they're going to be pulling from the grid, too. And we're already seeing uh major backups in grid interconnection. So in the Northeast, we're seeing the wholesale power costs triple actually and we're also seeing that in Urkott. So it's impossible to say that they'll offset it with uh with the power they build. And you know, you have uh so the ones in red according to this uh there's this is where the current water stress are. So if it's red, it's a severe water stress. And if it's like yellow, it's mild. So it doesn't say, first of all, why do they need all this water? How do how does water cool a data center? Why can't they just use air conditioning?
That's a really good question. Yeah. So like the the bad guys here, the ones we should be scared of are these hypers scale data centers. And before before these AI data centers, we used to run everything on normal data centers which used a reasonable amount of power. So just to give you some perspective, a server rack in a conventional data center used about five kilowatts. Uh so a hypers scale server rack uses about 20 times as much. And the reason it uses so much power is because these AI chips have billions of transistors inside them. Um so the Nvidia Blackwell popular professional AI chip has 200 billion transistors inside of it. So these these AI chips each of them are performing a trillion trillion calculations per second. Uh these things get so hot at full load it's comparable to the surface of the sun. So you know they've got to cool that down somehow and that's why they're using all this power and water.
But like so what do they do? They spray it with water. I don't understand what the where the water comes in.
Well, yeah. So, they they pull it from the ground or they pull it from directly from municipalities. They usually have contracts municipalities and what they do is there's different cooling systems, but essentially they um output the heat and um have water nearby so that it heats up the water and then they just cycle the water out through cooling towers and they just let it evaporate and disappear into the atmosphere. Now a lot of these data centers are now saying they have closed loop systems but in the reality we just have to take their word on it because uh there aren't any companies there aren't any companies that are fully even metering their water use. So they say hey we've got these new efficient cooling technologies and I say okay let's put a water meter on that that everyone can see how much your water uh how much water you're actually using. When I looked at Google's transparency report, uh, which Google's supposed to be the most transparent, I found this little, uh, thing in the fine print. Going to bring it up one second. So, just in this fine print, they're saying that, hey, the water withdrawal is based on meter data when it's available. Uh, at the offices where it isn't available, we we do estimates. Now, the thing is, all right, fine. Uh metering isn't available all the time, but if you look at these transparency reports, they don't tell you which ones are metered and which ones aren't. It could literally be one data center that's metered. So when they say that, hey, we're using new efficient cooling technology, it's like, okay, show me the proof that you're not using millions of gallons a day, which is what academics estimate. That's what looks to be on point to me.
And so, okay, so what is your plan?
Good question. So, you know, the the companies that are behind this, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Google, Apple, they account for 41% of this data center growth, they're the main companies pushing it, and the CEOs all want to have the biggest and baddest AI fleet, but no one asked for this. So, it's they're on a massive ego trip. These are risky decisions, and uh it's not even hard to see that these projects are going to fail. So, China already went through their their boom in 2023 and 2024 and 80% of their data centers are sitting empty. The MIT was reporting that this past year. So, it's disgusting. But what ends up happening is we're still all using these companies products. Their search engines, the social media, the phones and laptops with AI embedded in them, and there's no way to turn it off. This this is the new normal. It's all a part of the tech that you use. So when I talk with people about this issue, you know, they tell me they're emphatically against data centers, but they don't realize they've already made a choice to justify the existence. So for me, the solution is a personal choice. And you know, this is really important to say right off the bat um because a new Wired article came out just the other day and it shows that the FBI and local law enforcements are now uh suspecting anti-A activists and you know they're on watch list now at US Fusion Centers. So, I have to make this really, really clear. I don't believe in violence. I don't believe in sabotage. That's not the way we're going to fix this. It's all of our own personal choices and awareness that we can bring to each other. This is a peaceful solution we need to pick.
And what is the solution? The solution is is one to replace all of our reliance on these big tech platforms to not use your social media, to not use their phones and laptops because they're spending billions of dollars on this stuff and it is harvesting your data. So, you know, on on a normal Google phone today, you have Google Gemini, which can't be turned off. It is hoovering from what you're typing in on the keyboard to your emails that are coming in. Apple Intelligence is doing the same thing on their end. So if you cut them off from their data, there's really no point to having a data center. So it will take a massive movement for people to replace the reliance. But there are solutions. Uh the above phone has been around for 5 years now. It's a popular dooled phone that I'm sure your audience has has heard of in some way. And um I'm calling for everyone to ditch their big tech devices, throw them out, and replace them with better better stuff.
So, you're saying that uh I should get rid of my my iPhone and use an above phone?
Yes. Or something or something like it, right? Like these the these dooled phones are uh they do everything a normal phone can do. In fact, I'll bring it up on the screen here.
Well, this would this would this would make you the new Elon Musk if everybody switched over to your phone, right?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I don't think so because because the way the products are are designed is to reduce people's reliance. They're they're they're local first, right? So, you know, Elon's made some big moves this year to make uh X's API private and to charge for that info. Everything we're doing at Above is open source and self-hostable, which means that even though we run it on our data center and it's ran very private, it's anything that you can do, you can take it home, you can do it yourself. And I think the communities of the future are going to be responsible for their own services, their own internet services. So this is what the phone looks like, right? It's no different than a normal phone, but um you have alternatives for everything, right? I could go to Newipe and I could watch the Jimmy Door show here and actually I can I can listen to it without ads. So there aren't ads on uh anything um that you see on this app and you can even download the video directly to your phone. Right? So this is how we start breaking down the middleman and having less reliance on them and actually keep the data on our own devices where it belongs.
So instead of using you the YouTube app, you use a different app on your bum phone to watch YouTube videos.
Yeah, that's a big part of it. you know there's there's one the operating system which we we'll talk about that but basically removing the reliance of Google and Apple services for everything and then there's also the apps that you use normally if you use an app I'll just use an example here we'll go to this application store called the Aurora store and we're going to log in anonymously because we don't even need any sort of account to log into it and then we can uh you can still get all the apps that you would normally use here. But um to give you an example of what you would find on a normal app is is a bunch of trackers. So you go in here and you scroll down and you see that there's nine additional companies within this application. Uh nine additional companies. So you know Google branch Facebook and so when you use Above phone you're actually using alternative apps which are completely open source. They don't have these third party companies in them. they don't have this hidden nasty stuff. So yeah, it's it's all about what the apps in software don't have. Uh I I've never heard of this. Uh and you know I'm in this space so that's wild. Has anybody here ever heard of this?
I haven't heard of it but I have a question. I'm curious like how is somebody not going to come in and just buy it from you? How are they not just go hey you know what I want to take you over. How are you not going to get you know
Yeah. Like, so like if Google offers you $20 billion, are you going to say no?
I'm going to say no because that's that's my karma. And um I I honestly don't need that much money. You know, this this company's doing well. I started it with $3,000 in my pocket in 2021. And our mission is to our mission is to support people and stay independent. So um there is no outside investors with a with a stake or voting rights and we want to keep it that way because that's how this should be done. So like the whole reason I even started this AI thing is because our customers were asking us to build an AI service. Now we're already running an email service, calendar, video conferencing, and a search engine, file sharing, and more. But I started to look into this AI service. So that's why we're doing it. And um it's it's a human effort, right? I'm not saying that what I'm asking people to do today is easy. There's it's like moving a house. You do have to move over all this data. And God knows Google and Apple don't make it easy. They are very threatened. So they make it a walled garden that's hard to escape. But um just through people power, through the people in this company and through our educational guides and resources, we make it as easy as possible. And at the end of the day, it's worth it. So um if Google approached me for $20 million, I wouldn't take it because there's a mission that matters more.
30 million, no billion. I mean, they bought Instagram for $20 billion that they would just give them a they have unlimited resources. So, uh,
are do these phones right now cost like on average about $1,500? What's the average phone cost?
Yeah, good question. Um the cheapest phone started around 7 or 800 bucks and um the newest generation of phones cost the newest generation of phones cost about a thousand and then our most expensive phones cost like what you were saying 1,600 bucks or so. So, if I buy the phone, does it come with all these app? So, I don't I if I buy the above phone, I don't ever have to use a YouTube app and I can still have all the uh YouTube videos I want to watch and all the same kind of interaction that I have normally on YouTube.
Good question, Jimmy. Yeah. So, so because you're not logging in, you can't do stuff like commenting, but you can still consume all the videos. Um and uh Yes. So yeah, it's just as easy as as getting the phone. You have different apps that you use. And if you really want to, you can install the official YouTube app, too. But by default, it it doesn't even support it. You would have to go ahead and install additional things for it to be able to work. So this is a phone that for first of all, there's no ads on it. So God, what a improvement that is to your your your psychology, your psyche. Um, but there's also it's not feasible to do things like run digital ID on it. There's simply those services don't exist. That also means things like, you know, Google wallet don't exist. Um, and so there there this is just something to know as you move over to to this phone. It leaves all the crappy stuff behind, but you can still use most of the apps you want.
So what what if I want to do so if I want to do a a like a a search? Normally I would do a Google search or I would use DuckDuckGo. Uh what would I use on your phone?
Yeah. So let me search for you Jimmy. This is a part of our search engine. And what you can do is this is a a meta search engine. So if you can see it um you can actually go in and you can pick what search engines you want to search from. So, our search engine sits in between you and the other search engines, and you can just enable which ones you want. So, all right. Um, Google's giving me shitty results, so I'm going to turn that off. And I'm going to turn on Brave and Duck Go and Moi and Pre-Search. And now I can just work with these. Save that. And now I can search for Jimmy Door. And it works just like a normal search engine, but this is a way to keep it private. Um, and there's also no ads coming through. Don't you hate those ads that end up in your search results? So, it filters those out. It keeps you private and it gives you more information than you normally have access to.
And so, it you and it doesn't track you at all.
That's right. Yeah. I mean, everything we do at Above is is privacy first. Privacy by default. So, we run these software services on our own data center. It's our own data center. We're not using third parties. How where do you get where do you get your power and water for your data center
that I can't tell you that's a secret um and through through through a power company? Yeah, through a power company and and the data center at least our particular infrastructure in this data center does not use water. It's all air cooled. And so uh going back to the AI data centers, you know, there's there's a threshold you have to cross before you can't use air to cool them anymore. And it's pretty dangerous. And also to be fair that like anytime you use power for anything, you are using water. It takes water to generate power, right? To cool the infrastructure, whether it's geothermal or or nuclear or coal or whatever it is. It takes power. So to be fair, it probably does use some water, but it doesn't use water in the same way AI data centers do. And we don't have an AI service yet. So if this really works the way you say it does and people start using it, you know, they will come and crush you, right?
I think I think um I think there's a lot of good people who have the same idea right now. I'm just I'm I'm just one person and there are a lot of people having the same idea and that's what I think is going to be the difference here. This is people power right now. you have um these data center developers who are literally spending trillions of dollars and they're going up against communities. Well, this is the same thing. You know, these ideas are what's important. Um everything we're doing, we're not creating reliance on us. We are simply letting it making it easy to use open- source software that anyone can get out there. So, we have our own custom additions of things. Our phones and laptops are so easy. You just turn them on, you can start using them right away. uh for a lot of people it's very hard to ask them to use Linux and get them to start working with it but our our products make it easy and um we're just one of many so it's like anything that we do we can open source and make available to everyone
so
so I kind of recognize my piece of the puzzle
so if a lot of people start using the above phone you'll have to add more data centers right
you would you would think so um but but so like here's the thing um So like Microsoft and Google, these giant companies with billions of users a piece, we're talking like a sizable chunk of the entire world, they were running all of their infrastructure on uh 4 gawatt. 4 gawatt. Now, you know, you've been you've been following you've been following the data center news, so you probably know places like Kevin Olri's data center is 9 gawatt. So already this one data center is using more power than the global footprint of Google and Microsoft combined. Yeah. Like you know I think as if these open-source ecosystems grow there will be a power usage but it's insignificant. It's it shouldn't even be compared to these AI data centers through a whole another beast.
Wh why why would your data centers use significantly less power? Is it what is it? because most of the data centers that are being built are used for surveillance and you're not going to be doing that. Is that the reason?
That's that's part of it. You know, it's a conventional data center. So, it's like um it's not an AI data center. Um all of these uh new hypers scale data centers that are being built exist for one reason only, to process pabytes of data. So, we're talking like all of the content on the internet or maybe all the real-time footage coming in from all the cameras, right? It's meant to handle this scale of data. So, a conventional data center like let's say you're running one for updates of a phone. You're not going to need you you do not need that much compute. You do not need that much storage. For instance, you know, the Netflix data centers, every all the traditional technology we were using pre2023 was running on these data centers just fine. The entire earth was running just fine before AI came along.
So I can I can get your computer, I can get your phone, I can get all the net I get my Netflix subscription. I can get that.
Absolutely. Yeah, you can still you can still use your your big tech apps. you know, I don't encourage people to use them, but if they really need to, they can. I also am going to show you one more thing. Um, but yeah, you can still use the apps that you use. Let me see. Let me find you. Netflix here. Boom. There's the Netflix app. You can you can get it on the phone if you want. You may have to install Google services for this particular app, but it's a much safer version of Google services than you would normal have normally have on a phone that would usually have God mode on it. So yeah, there's ways to get the stuff you want. Obviously, there's some lifestyle choices you can make, but you know, you're not uh you're not completely cut off from the things you do day-to-day.
Okay. Uh what what is there any downside to this?
Yeah. So people people moving from iPhones will have to give up their the FaceTime and iMessage and I know a lot of people struggle with that. So we we did build alternatives, right? We have this encrypted messaging app that you can use. Um and so this is a service called XMPPP. It's a software called XMPPP.
I would be scared if I was you. That's all. Why you look at me like that stuff?
I'm trying to be positive. I know. I understand what you're saying. So innovative.
Look what they did to the crypto people at the beginning of crypto. They put him in jail. There's a guy we just interviewed. He's still on house arrest with an ankle monitor cuz he was doing crypto and the people who run the world were afraid of it at the time. Well, now they're all getting into crypto yet they still have those guys in jail. So, you don't you don't think they're going to jail this guy this guy?
It hasn't, you know, it's run through my mind. I was actually at this event um uh fundraising for the defense of the six or seven people that are now in prison for for writing software. And all I can say is that I trust in I trust in God and I trust in my guardian angels, you know, that's all I can really hope for, but I'm just kind of doing what what what I'm called. And uh yeah, to to to share this. So like this is this is just software. This stuff has existed for 20 years. You know, if I bring it up again, it's like if is that really worth jailing me for? I think it'd be pretty funny. Um but I I hear your point. Trust me, it's I've thought about it a lot. So, this this is a uh this is a chat protocol that could replace Telegram or WhatsApp. So, you can actually send images. You can you can record voice messages. Hey, I'm live on the Jimmy Door Show right now. Check me out on my offline voice keyboard.
And so, the the people you would be texting with, you know, that they would also have to have one of these phones. They they could they have a regular phone or it's only going to work on your phone?
Yeah, great question. Yeah, so they can use a regular phone. There are some services. So, I just showed you XMPPP. That's the chat protocol. You'd have to have an account for that, but it does work on iPhone and it is free. So, you could get your iPhone friend on on it really easily. So, if I had the above phone and I had your texting app and I texted someone and they didn't have that app, they wouldn't receive that text.
So, let So, there's there's a solution for everything, right? So, this is um this is a messaging service that allows for endto-end encrypted communication. So, that's one way to communicate. You know, Jimmy, it's like, you know, using Signal or or WhatsApp. It's like another flavor of that that's that's more private. And then if you actually want to have a phone number attached to it, you can do that, too. We we bridged this with a we partnered with another company that bridges these chats out to the phone network. So now you can pick your US or Canada number. You can see I have Eve's number here, right? It kind of looks like that. So, you get to pick your own number and then for $5 a month, you can send international texts and have uh make international calls with the same exact number, except instead of using the normal phone app on your phone, you use this app and you use a dialer. Um, you can do everything that you would normally uh need to with a phone, you could do group texts. Uh people can leave you voicemails and yeah, I mean, it's $5 a month, so you can actually save on your phone bill. The last thing is is because this works over the internet, you know, the initiation is over the internet, you don't need a SIM card in your phone. So now you can have a normal phone number, but then you can have also have this one on top of it. So there are, sorry to complicate things, but there is a solution for everything.
So the answer is yes. So, somebody who doesn't have an above phone or any of those apps, they can still call me on my above phone and they can still text.
Totally.
And they can still text me.
Totally. Yeah. Absolutely. And you know, that's a good thing to mention like whatever service you're using is it's if it's one of the big guys like T-Mobile or Verizon, you can bring that service over to the Above phone. You just take your SIM card and you plug it in and then it's activated on this phone.
Okay. All
right. This is going to sound silly, but my friend, she was just talking to me. I know this is going to sound silly. She says that she wants to be a spy. Is this the kind of phone that would give them the kind of privacy necessary?
Sounds silly.
I know it does, but I I really want to know.
I want to be a spy, too. Yeah. Uh, absolutely. Like, this is this is the highest level of security and privacy that you can get as a consumer. Like unless you're in like a unless you are a spy, you're probably using a different phone. But frankly, the the companies that are paid millions of dollars to break into phones um and they advertise themselves to law enforcement cannot break into this phone. They literally don't advertise that they can that um they can do anything to this phone because it's impossible. But they do advertise they can break into Samsung's. They do advertise they can break into iPhones and Google phones.
So yeah, this is the highest level of security you can get. Hey.
Okay.
So, wow. It's it's sounds revolutionary and groundbreaking. Um, we'll see. We'll see what happens. Everybody, come see me on tour. I'll be in Spokane, Tacoma, Los Angeles, special video panel show with special celebrities. And then we'll be in Levittown, New York, Rosemont, Illinois, and Chicago. Go to jimmy.com for a link for tickets.