Straight, No Chaser
Understanding Freedom through Money, Technology, Economics and Philosophy
Straight, No Chaser
Jordan Bravo - How to Break Free from Big Tech Surveillance
What if the technology that promises to simplify your life is secretly working against you? In this eye-opening conversation with Jordan Bravo, host of the Sovereign Computing Show, we pull back the curtain on the hidden costs of our digital convenience.
Jordan shares his gradual awakening to digital surveillance, starting with the Snowden revelations that exposed how intelligence agencies maintain direct access to our service providers. Once an enthusiastic Google user, he describes the "gross feeling" that developed as he realized his every digital interaction was being monitored and monetized without his consent.
The concept of sovereign computing emerges as a powerful alternative – not about rejecting technology, but embracing it on your own terms. "These tools should not be doing anything in secret that somebody else programmed them to do against your best interests," Jordan explains, drawing a compelling comparison to traditional tools that don't siphon your energy back to their manufacturers.
Perhaps most disturbing is the revelation about cloud services: when your photos and documents are stored by third parties, you're essentially asking permission to access your own memories. "We are being infantilized," Jordan notes. "It's kind of like saying you're not capable of managing your own stuff, so let us do it for you."
For those feeling overwhelmed, Jordan offers practical, incremental steps toward digital sovereignty. Start with a password manager like Bitwarden, then gradually reclaim control of your calendars, contacts, and other digital essentials. The surprising reality? Privacy-focused alternatives like GrapheneOS work seamlessly with almost all common apps.
Ready to take back control of your digital life? Discover how you can have both modern technology and true ownership of your data. Your journey to sovereign computing starts here.
Links:
Get in touch with Jordan Bravo
sovereign@atlbitlab.com
Links:
www.bitcoinforbusiness.io
X: @gavingre
X: @BTC_4_Biz
Primal: GavinBGreen@primal.net
NOSTR: npub12qv07tpwk8x8fy2uuqczghpappap395npuxvsx8pgksh97pezv7s8r7qta
Welcome everybody to the show. This is the Straight no Chaser podcast, where we talk about human freedom through technology, money, economics and philosophy. In today's show we have Jordan Bravo. Jordan has an amazing podcast called Sovereign Computing where he goes through ways that you can just limit the amount of information that you release about yourself out into the wild world of the internet. It's a fantastic series and I really think you should go and check it out if you find this interesting. Jordan is a super smart guy, has spent a lot of time looking into privacy technology and a lot of people seem to think that privacy comes with a bad connotation, like it's a secrecy thing thing, something that you have to hide or you only use it if you have something to hide. But I think as you listen to Jordan speaking, you will soon see that it's really about just keeping your information to yourself and you decide at what point you want to release information to somebody else and how much of that information you want to release so super interesting else and how much of that information you want to release so super interesting episode. Can't wait to get into it. Excellent, okay, we are live and we are recording. Welcome to the Straight no Chaser podcast.
Speaker 1:Today we're joined by Jordan Bravo. Jordan has his own show, in fact a podcast show, and his is called Sovereign Computing, and that's really the topic that I want to chat to Jordan about today. So, jordan, thank you for giving up some of your time. Appreciate having you on the show. Thanks for having me, gavin Great. So, jordan, the first. So you have a show. It's called so computing. Um, before we get into the details of the show, um, I just wanted to ask you, uh, what was the your sort of aha moment when you realized that, uh, not all is as it seems and, uh, we've sort of given up privacy, we've given up our sovereignty? I'm just curious to hear what the moment was. Was it something you were always aware of, or did you have a point? Did you go down a path and suddenly realized you were not on the path you thought you were on?
Speaker 2:It was a gradual process, but I could think of several aha moments. One of them and I'm probably not unique here was the Snowden revelations in roughly 2013 or 2014, where we learned that the NSA and other intelligence agencies had a direct pipeline to the service providers and internet service providers, mobile service providers and they were just listening to everything. Their motto was collect it all and then they could go through it later. So that was shocking, of course, and felt like a real violation of privacy. And then, as more and more data started to come out, I started to. I was originally a huge fan of Google, this up-and-coming company, and they did things right. They had nice UX, they were fast and they were constantly churning out new products seemed like a great company, and I've always been a fan of technology, and so I was really into Google and I was using Google everything. And then, when these Snowden revelations came out, and then later, more and more stuff started to come out about how Google was. The reason they were providing these amazing products for quote unquote free is because they were using the vast amounts of user data that they were gathering to drive their advertising engines, and then, kind of as a corollary, they were also piping all of that data to the NSA and other surveillance agencies. So the more I started to learn about this stuff, the grosser and grosser of a feeling I got when using my technology, because here I was thinking that I was interacting with an inanimate object where I'm able to put my thoughts down and do research just like you would in any other context, and instead I'm learning that, oh, all this time everything that I've been doing has been monitored and it just felt like a complete violation. And so I started to go down just pragmatic tips. Here and there I would research for how to at the time I was using Windows and I would research how to reduce the time I was using Windows and I would research how to, you know, reduce the amount of telemetry that Microsoft is collecting or how to turn off these things here and there. And it was a gradual process.
Speaker 2:I remember the was not spying on its users at all. It was a fairly private operating system and over time, every time they would upgrade Windows and have a new version, there would be some new little bit of data gathering that they were doing on you. And even if you had changed that setting to make it more private, they would unchange it. So in that version upgrade they would reverse the changes that you as the user made in order to add more data collection, and eventually it got to a point where it was such a constant effort to fight Windows against all that data collection that I said there must be a better way.
Speaker 2:And so, through some research, I discovered Linux as an alternative operating system, and as I started to use it I immediately felt that sense of privacy back again and feeling like I own this piece of equipment, the software, this hardware that I'm running the software on, and it's not acting against my interests, and so I think that was my evolution. There is I, that was my evolution there. It was sort of multiple touch points, but a gradually increasing intrusion into our lives by technology run by third-party actors that don't have our best interests in mind.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, that's really interesting to hear that. Yeah, that's really interesting to hear that. You know, I think I had a pretty similar experience in terms of I'm not really a developer myself, I don't consider myself a techie kind of a guy, but I do sort of enjoy technology and I remember being like really enamored with you know, technology. I remember as a kid I was in primary school my dad brought home a. They were called microcomputers then I think not even PCs, zx, spectrum, commodore 64, these kind of really old sort of first microcomputers. I don't know if you ever used any of them, if I'm giving my age away here.
Speaker 2:Those were a little before my time, but because I'm such a computer enthusiast, I have studied some of the history of it, and so I'm familiar with those devices.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay. So I mean, I remember my dad came home from. It was a Saturday morning. He came home and said, hey, check out this thing I just bought and we sort of had to plug it into a tv. It didn't come with a screen of its own and it had this sort of tape deck with audio cassette tapes that you had to upload your uh, your software, or connect, send the software into the computer via a tape deck. It was very, very basic, but I remember when, as things started improving, it was just amazing to see the sound quality getting better, the video quality getting better, all these cool things you could do.
Speaker 1:Um, so, yeah, technology is really an interesting thing, but, um, I do agree with you that um, uh, in the beginning you know when you start getting these things given to you for free. I think Facebook was a little bit like that as well. They came along and it just seemed to be this cool little. You log onto this website and they've got these funny little things. You can play a bit of a game, you can send a photo to a friend, you can connect your friends, and yet I don't know why it didn't occur to me at the time that this must be costing somebody a fortune, and how they're making money out of it. I guess you had the same realization. But what do you think it is about this kind of software that we seem to think that that is okay to be free? We don't seem to think, or we never used to. What was it that got us into thinking this is free and this is okay?
Speaker 2:I think it was just because we were trained that way. And by that I mean we're surrounded by all of these companies offering these great tools and we see everybody around us using them and being productive and communicating with a wide group of people. It's not like these tools don't have upsides. I mean they're huge benefits. So you see everybody around you using these tools and not mentioning any downsides or trade-offs and you use it too and you just assume okay, everything is as it should be.
Speaker 2:And why would I think that anything nefarious is going on? You know, you have to really be either an experienced software person or be a highly skeptical, skeptically minded person to even doubt that there's something wrong there. So I think it's sort of the natural default state of us to just assume that it's okay. But then you have people who might be older, more experienced technology people, software developers, that kind of thing, and they know how stuff works under the hood and they are start ringing the alarm for everybody else, saying, hey, this is, this is something fishy is going on here. You guys are exposing yourselves to all of this data collection. So for me, I mean, that's just how I I was raised with um, computers and technology, and there was no real point at which anything ever made me think they're not doing it in my best interest, so kind of like if you look at the converse side of the story I just explained of how I saw the Snowden revelations and then other research that I did after that.
Speaker 2:Up until that point I had no reason to doubt that these tools were doing exactly what they said and no more. So I guess that's how I see it.
Speaker 1:Okay. So, coming back to your show, jordan, you have a show called Sovereign Computing. I'd like to just stop right there, as we've just started, and just look at the name Sovereign Computing. Can you just explain why you chose that name and what that concept actually means to you?
Speaker 2:yes, I think I got the idea for the name from the company start nine. They make a uh, they make a sovereign server operating system and and I refer to them a lot because I think they make a great product and I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but I just I'm a fan of what they do. But the reason I mentioned that is because sovereign computing it means computing, and by that I mean devices that could be laptops, desktops, mobile phones, smartphones, your Bluetooth devices, your home IoTot devices, your smart tvs, any kind of computing hardware and software, which is you're using it in a sovereign manner. That's a manner that is you own it. It is not, you're not renting it from a third party and it is not acting in a way that's against your best interest. It does what you tell it to do and nothing else, and it is not secretly sending your data away. It's not spying on you, it's not censoring you, it's not preventing you from using it in any manner that you want. And the reason that I use the term sovereign computing is it's because it's broad enough to encompass all of the different topics that I think think are important.
Speaker 2:So, for example, on the sovereign computing show, we discuss things like bitcoin, linux, graphing, os, privacy, self-hosting and a lot of similar topics, but there's already podcasts and shows out there on bitcoin. There's plenty of them. There's also episode um, excuse me. There's also podcasts out there on self-hosting and there's podcasts out there on linux and there's podcasts out there on privacy, etc. But I wanted to be able to cover all of these topics because these are means to an end and that that end is sovereign computing. That end is being able to live your life where you have ownership over your technology, and not the other way around. So you are not a slave or a tool of the tools that you are using not be doing anything that you are not telling them to do. They should not be doing anything in secret that somebody else programmed them to do. That is against your best interests.
Speaker 2:And when we think prior to technology, like modern technology in terms of computers and computing devices, this was a pretty common concept where the things that we use, we know that they're only working for us and doing what we tell them to do. So I've given this example before. It's a little bit of a tortured metaphor, but you think about pre-industrial era. Let's say you were using a hammer and a saw to build a structure. When you're hammering that nail in with the hammer, when you're hammering that that nail in with the hammer and you're sawing that wood with your saw, you are not worried that there is somehow that the uh hammer is siphoning off a part of your energy that you're putting into swinging it and sending that to the hammer manufacturer so that they can store it up and use it later, right when you're sawing, you're not worried that that the uh, the saw manufacturer is somehow profiting from your ability to saw and that it is weakening your structure.
Speaker 2:you know, that just seems ridiculous, but with the modern computing age, we live in a cloud computing era where we are constantly connected and therefore we have these invisible pipelines of other organizations like governments and companies, directly into our homes. You know, if you think about it, your internet connection is a pipeline to the outside world and to other people and other organizations, and so, because we can't see it you know, whether it's wifi or ethernet, it's digital.
Speaker 2:There are mammalian alarm bells, our evolutionary, evolved mechanism for danger that somebody's intruding into our homes. But it's happening. I mean, it's actually taking place. And so if we can't control what's going in and out of our homes and what's going in and out of our brains and our devices as we're reading and learning things, watching things, we really have no control over ourselves. It's almost like a bodily autonomy thing. You know people whispering in your ear when you're asleep and giving you subliminal messages of something that goes against everything you believe in. So that's kind of happening all the time, as we are using our devices and not able to control and take a firm stance on what information is coming in and out.
Speaker 1:Yes, I must say the way you've expressed your show. I mean I enjoy the way you've done it because the topics you cover seem to be the things that I use every single day. It's in my day-to-day life. It's from my mobile phone to my laptop, to the apps or the software on both of those, and how that relates to privacy. So I think that's the part of your show that really resonates with me.
Speaker 1:Is it's practical, uh, day-to-day, real life stuff, that it's not a um, a philosophy that is like a weird thing out there that has no application in real life. I mean, you're talking about really the things every single one of us is using day to day. What I did find interesting about you were talking about the intrusion into your life. I'm not sure if this is an episode that you are planning on speaking about, but the Internet of Things you know a term that's been around for years now, but a lot of that talks about smart devices, smart homes, everything inside your house, and you just mentioned the intrusion into personal lives. What is your view about that move towards smart homes, smart devices, iot?
Speaker 2:I definitely have thoughts on that, but I do want to take a quick digression. Something I wanted to add is that the approach that I'm taking is because I'm not the only person who recognizes this issue. There are many people who have, and some people's reaction is to go completely caveman. It's to say, you know what, if I can't control this technology and I can't trust it, I'm not going to use it. I'm going to go live in a cabin in the woods and I'm going to be completely low tech, and that way they can't get to me, they can't spy on me, they can't surveil me, they can't censor me, can't spy on me, they can't surveil me, they can't censor me, and that approach is not attractive to me. I love technology. I still want to continue to use technology in the modern world and take advantage of all of the benefits that it offers, but I want to use it in a way that serves me and my family and the people I care about, rather than some other nameless organization that doesn't have my best interest at heart.
Speaker 2:So that's why we focus on these things. We get into the nitty-gritty details of how to use, use things day to day and still use them in a manner that achieves that same purpose of being private and secure and sovereign, but allows you to still have the vast majority of the benefits of these technologies, so you can have your cake and eat it too. Just takes a little bit more thought ahead of time and a little bit of learning and how to do these things differently. And so to go back to your question about IoT devices, I think, in a similar way that our standard computing devices that would be in most people's minds, that's a laptop, a desktop or a mobile phone, these things have become a bigger and bigger part of our lives and become more and more useful as general purpose computing devices. They've also the companies that provide them have pushed more and more surveillance and control onto those devices over time. In that same way, I think we've seen a increase, a gradual increase, in intrusiveness of these smart home and IoT devices.
Speaker 2:I'll give you a perfect example TVs used to be dumb quote unquote before smart TVs, and that's where you just plug in your audio and video inputs into them and they basically just act as a monitor. They're just piping in raw data, displaying it on the screen and projecting the sound out of the speakers speakers. However, now they are running an operating system that runs apps from. You might have streaming apps from places like netflix and apple tv and these kinds of things, and that means that these companies have put in their own software into that tv and it now is doing all kinds of stuff that you have no control over. So, instead of just being doing what it's supposed to do, which is to display video and project audio, instead it is also monitoring what you watch and uploading that to Netflix and Apple and Hulu and all of those places so that they can run marketing campaigns on you and track yourulu and all of those places so that they can run marketing campaigns on you and track your usage and all of that. What's even worse is that the hardware also has its own surveillance built into it.
Speaker 2:On a recent episode of the Sovereign Computing Show, we talked about a news item of how there is a firmware level surveillance mechanism now built into many smart TVs. In that episode, we go into details of how you can disable it, but one of the best things that you can do for any smart TV is to just not use the smart function. In other words, don't connect it to the internet. Just take your hdmi cable or whatever kind of audio and video input output device that you have attached and just plug it into the tv, just like the good old days, and that's a surefire way to not be surveilled. Because if you don't connect your smart tv or smart device to the internet, then it might be recording and keeping track of your usage habits, but it can't report that anywhere. It has no way of sending that back home to the mothership, so it's effectively cut off, and that's just like a quick and dirty tip for mitigating a lot of that surveillance in modern IoT devices for mitigating a lot of that surveillance in modern IoT devices.
Speaker 1:Okay, now that makes a lot of sense. I mean, I don't have any IoT devices in my house, but I see adverts for smart coffee makers and get your shower running while you're two minutes away from home and have your favorite song playing on the half hour, the stereo as you walk in the front door and you know all these little conveniences that I suppose would feel kind of cool to experience it. But there is the other side as well. It's what's happening to the data, and I think that's what you are referring to here, just in that example of the smart TV.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's definitely a trade-off or trade-offs plural. And in addition to the data collection surveillance, I want to comment this from I'm not a lot of data and, as I said, I love technology, but I have tried to use technology in a way that these companies sort of push, where it's like everything is connected all the time and my shower is turning on to the right temperature and my coffee is going off. And to anybody who's ever tried to live like this, it is not worth it. It is uh like, let's set aside the data collection part for a second, just hypothetically. You it's, it's not being tracked, it's not being surveilled, this is all under your control. I don't find that enjoyable. It's kind of exhausting and it's a constant maintenance burden to be hooking everything up and making sure, like I'm looking at my smartwatch every five seconds, oh is my coffee maker doing what it's supposed to be doing?
Speaker 2:Is my shower heated to what I want, you know? Is my garage door open, like it just becomes? At what point do you does your entire life get taken up by just constantly maintaining all of these apps and smart devices that you've attached to your life? And this is I realize this is a personal choice thing right here, but I'm honestly asking you. I mean, have you ever tried to use smart stuff and found it just to be not worth the hassle?
Speaker 1:the hassle. Well, I don't think I've tried to do any of these smart devices in my house, like the coffee or the shower, but the one example I can give to you is the very first smart watch I got. It was actually a sports watch and I bought it because it could track, you know heart rate while I was running and things like that, uh, cycling. Um, and the watch had this feature where you could receive notifications from your phone and I thought, oh well, this sounds quite cool. Um, I mean, this was many years ago. Um, so I switched that feature on and I don't think I lasted more than about four hours and eventually I just shut that feature off, because every time my phone beeped, my watch beeped, uh, and I very quickly realized I'm getting double the annoyance, uh, for every single notification that's coming in.
Speaker 1:Uh, it was strange. You know, watch, beep, phone beep, watch beep, phone beep all the way through the day. And so, as I say, I lasted five hours. I shut that thing off. I've never, ever, gone back to it again, um, and I mean that's a fairly basic example, I think these days, with apple watches that people have, they're so used to glancing at their watch the whole time. Uh, it probably seems normal, but uh, yeah, that level of uh like mental energy that you're burning in the back of your mind constantly with all this notification stuff was not for me at all. Um, I mean nothing to say. There's anything wrong with the, the apple watches, but uh, I appreciate what you're saying. Trying to maintain some sort of perfect nirvana in your house with all these devices is probably going to slowly drive you mad yeah, I agree, I think it's a notification overload and that cognitive burden like you mentioned.
Speaker 2:Now, if people want to do that and they enjoy it, I'm I'm all for it. You know I'm not gonna. Uh, I think that's a personal choice, but I would say, consider the cost and the trade-off in terms of your data being leaked and surveilled and lack of control that you have over your personal data.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. I do want to go back to something that you mentioned earlier about. You know. Some people decide they're going to live like a hermit in some mountain cabin to get away from the technology, and I agree with you that that, for me, is mountain cabin to get away from the technology, and I agree with you that that, for me, is not an option. I do love technology. I think it's incredible what it does for us, and you know there are some things like if you take Bitcoin, for example, I mean that is pure technology. If you choose to cut yourself off from technology, you choose to cut yourself off from this freedom money. So that, for me, is one example right there. For anybody that says to me they want to go live in a log cabin in a mountain somewhere and get away from technology, I think you give up perhaps a bit more than you think you are.
Speaker 2:Agreed. I wanted to add that when we use technology the way that most of us naively do, in terms of the way that big tech companies push on us, without taking into consideration these trade-offs that we've been talking about, one thing we don't realize, or that most people don't realize, is that when you have a third party who is holding your data, you don't actually own that data. So, when I have my pictures and videos that I take with my family and it goes from my phone and uploads it to my Apple iCloud account or my Google Drive account, for example, if you read the terms of service, you actually have no legal claim to that data. They can cut you off from it at any time. And also when you don't have it stored on your device in a way that you control and it's actually being hosted by a third party. What you're actually doing every time you want to look at a photo or one of your own documents or anything like that is, is you're raising your hand. This is all happening electronically, so this is a metaphor, but you're raising your hand and you're saying dear mr apple, can I access my own data please? Or dear mr google, can I look at my own photos that I've taken with my own phone, and to me, this is just. This is humiliating. This is we are is humiliating, this is we are being treated like children, we are being infantilized. It's kind of like saying oh you, you are not capable of of managing your own stuff, so let us do it for you and don't worry your pretty little head about it, and I just find this to be revolting, and so this is part of the.
Speaker 2:What feels good about taking back your control of your own tech is that you own it and nobody, no other company, can just arbitrarily decide to change their terms of service.
Speaker 2:Maybe one day you wake up and you no longer have access to all of the data that you thought was yours, but when you, when you take back control of it, you have it in your own sovereign stack, as we like to call it computing stack. That's not a problem for you. You could have it for 50 years, you could pass it down to your children and you know that you don't have to be locked into any ecosystem, right Like I don't have to. When I'm making the decision on my next smartphone to buy or my next computer to buy, I don't have to take into account the whims of what Apple has done recently. I don't have to worry about oh, is this going to be compatible, or am I going to be locked out, or do I have to keep paying for a higher tier subscription? No, all of that is just. It's gone, because you know that you own it and you have the final say in what happens to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because I think the amount of data that we collect or produce with our photos, our videos, over time, it's massive amounts. It's gigabytes of stuff and it's sort of difficult to move that. If you're with one hosting service and all your stuff is on there, whether it's iCloud or Dropbox or whatever it may be if you've decided, well, you don't like the service anymore, how do you actually even just practically moving that to another service is just, it's a nightmare. You know it's using massive amounts of bandwidth. It's going to take a long time to copy all that stuff over. And then I think the other thing is that you haven't actually removed it from the initial service that you were using. You know you've just made a copy onto a new service, so that data is still out there on the original service provider.
Speaker 1:It comes back to that. You know you've just made a copy onto a new service, so that data is still out there on the original service provider. It comes back to that. You know that it's saying about. You know, once it's out there, it's out there. There's no way of ever getting it back. Is that something that you sort of talk to people about?
Speaker 2:Be careful what you put out there, because it's impossible to ever delete 100% you put out there, because it's impossible to ever delete 100 and the. The unfortunate truth is that most of us have already uh, put a lot of our data out there. However, I don't want to depress people and make them think it's hopeless, so I like to focus on the fact that you can reduce your digital footprint and you can stop leaking data into the future. Furthermore, there's not just the worry about some other company having your data, but, going forward, you want to be able to control your data. So, for example, there's the whole surveillance risk and the risk and the the downside of companies having your data let's say, your photos and your videos just in terms of we don't like other people to snoop into our private lives, but there's also the risk that they cut you off from that and you don't have it going forward. So if you take control of your data and and move it from one of these third-party providers into your own custody, going forward, no matter what happens, you will not be cut off from your data. So I think that's a huge benefit that people should think about and maybe work towards moving their data into their own control, and I also realized I recognize that people this is a lot of work to do, especially if your entire day-to-day workflow is based on, let's say, google or Apple or you're using all of these third-party services, and so I encourage people to take a gradual approach to this.
Speaker 2:Don't try to change everything overnight. You're just going to get overwhelmed and frustrated and you're going to give up. So what I say is try to change one thing at a time, use it for a while, get used to it and then move on and change something else, and then the next thing you know, over the course of months or maybe years, you will have removed yourself from the clutches of all these third party nefarious services. So I like to say my advice is to get started by going for the low-hanging fruit, taking a first step that's really easy to do. That can make a huge difference in your life, and my recommendation would be if you don't already use a password manager, then start using one.
Speaker 2:My favorite is Bitwarden, but there are many others available and once you start doing this, you no longer have to try to keep a million different passwords and login information in your head. You just remember one master password that you don't have uploaded anywhere. You only need to know that one, and then your password manager will keep track of all of your logins and passwords for you. And this is actually a huge first step, I think, for most people, because most people's lives digital lives are scattered all over the places. You know they've got dozens or hundreds of services and accounts that they're signed up for. They don't know what's where, they don't even know like what passwords they've used, having to reset their passwords. So I think starting with a password manager is a great first step for people to take a little bit of, take charge of a little bit of their digital lives.
Speaker 1:Yeah, actually I really appreciate what you said there earlier about taking charge and just starting with something small. So when I was going and looking at the episodes that you've put out, the subject matter that you've covered, I was kind of curious. The first one you did was calendars and contacts and I remember thinking to myself wow, that's like a small little thing. I almost thought you would probably have started with something bigger. Like you know, browsers or email or something that's you know has maybe carries more significant data. But thinking about it now in terms of what you've just said about starting off small and easy, I think calendar and context now makes perfect sense as a great way to start with something small, something easy, something everybody understands and making sure that you're not just sharing that information out there. So I guess the question is was that the rationale behind how you decided to structure the episodes and the topics that you covered the episodes?
Speaker 2:and the topics that you covered. Yeah, and I drew a little on my own experience. When I wanted to de-Google, de-apple, de-microsoft all of that stuff, one of the first things I noticed was whoa, I'm using them for my calendar and contacts sync. A lot of people, especially if you're using Android, for example, all of your contacts and your calendar entries, it's all synced to Google and you just don't think about it, it's automatic. And similarly, if you're on iOS, all of your stuff is synced to your Apple iCloud account all of your contacts and calendars. And so when you stop using those services, it's immediately apparent to anybody who's using a smartphone or just modern living is oh how do I store all of the people that I know, the contact information, and sync that and my calendars? You know everybody uses a calendar digitally. So this is a.
Speaker 2:If you don't have a solution to that when trying to move away from these services, that would be a barrier to entry. It would be a non-starter for most people. If people can't have some way of syncing and controlling their contacts and calendars, then they're just not going to be able to move off of these platforms. So that was my motivation in doing that. First, because it's actually a separate piece that you can extract. For example, you can keep on using Gmail or Microsoft's email, hotmail, whatever it might be but if you move your calendars and contacts into something more sovereign, then that's like a good first piece that you've done and you can get used to that workflow. You can still set appointments and contact your friends and family, but you can kind of get a taste for what it's like to not be stuck with one of these big providers.
Speaker 1:Okay. So when it comes to you know you've got your work life, you've got your personal life, you've got your personal life and obviously many companies have the software that they want you to use and you're probably limited in what you can do about moving away from that. So what is your advice to people into how to separate the two?
Speaker 2:into how to separate the two. Well, I think most people already have some separation between the two because sort of out of necessity, right, like if I'm working for a company and they give me a laptop and it's running Windows and Outlook and those kinds of things that we use for the company, typically the company policy is I'm not allowed to use the laptop for personal reasons.
Speaker 2:So I think a lot of people are used to that sort of separation right there, but you can certainly use two different things. I'll give you an example. My company that I work for uses Google as like a Google business account. So for our calendars and our meetings we use google, and so I have a separate browser that I sign into that has keeps the cookies, keeps me signed in when I want to do like a google meeting, and then for the calendar, I have the separate calendar feed plugged into my calendar app.
Speaker 1:but but I also have my personal one and they can exist side by side without conflicting with each other. Okay, yeah, no, that makes sense. I suppose I'm probably thinking about it from my point of view where I am a business owner and my stuff is kind of all mixed up together. You know, I have is kind of all mixed up together. You know, I tend to email my friends from my work email address because it's my business. I'm not having anybody telling me how I can and can't use company resources. So I think I probably need to do a little bit more thinking and I suppose it's the same for any other sort of entrepreneur or small business owner as well as to keep that line separate between personal and work stuff. Otherwise it's really a mess. I mean separating that is quite difficult.
Speaker 2:Yes, and also you are in the fortunate position where you, as your own boss, you get to decide what technology you use, and so you aren't necessarily stuck with using one of these big tech providers.
Speaker 2:That's nefarious. So you can actually choose for your business a lot more sovereign software stacks. There's a ton of good options that are available for businesses to use that are more sovereign. You know it doesn't have to be only for individuals. I'll give you an example.
Speaker 2:In Germany, the German government and large parts of the German economy businesses have switched over to using NextCloud as their sort of office and productivity suite. They moved away from Microsoft 365 and Google's business suite. This was a couple of years ago and there was news articles about it, but they made that choice and they operate their country with no more greater or lesser issues than any other country that's using a Microsoft or a Google type solution. So these solutions do exist out there. Another one off the top of my head is Matrix, so where traditionally, a company might be using something like Slack or Microsoft Teams.
Speaker 2:Instead there's a lot of open source projects out there and other organizations, especially in Europe, where privacy digital privacy is a little more of a top of mind, it's, matrix is used as an enterprise solution. So there's certainly a broad. There's a large amount of solutions out there for businesses and I like to cover that in the Sovereign Computing Show as well. I don't personally own my own business, but I do recognize that we need to have these solutions for businesses as well, not just individuals, because businesses make up a large part of the economy and a large part of the user base as well for these services, a large part of the user base as well for these services.
Speaker 1:We're coming up close to our time, but I guess my final question for you, jordan, is, of all the topics that you've covered and I'm just mentioning a few I guess I'm going to shell out your show a bit, but some of the topics you've covered is the calendars and contacts that I've mentioned earlier. You've spoken about messaging emails, mobile phone numbers, file storage, browsers, how to do private payments, app stores and how to work around app stores, mobile OS. Of all those topics that you've covered, what has been the most surprising for you in terms of ease of use and was easier than you thought?
Speaker 2:I would say the mobile operating system episode. I talk about using more private operating systems on your smartphone and, specifically, I have been using a different type of Android called Graphing OS, which is Google completely removed from it, and I thought that it was going to be a really handicapped experience, that I wouldn't be able to use all the apps that I use, and I have found that 99.9% of the apps work just fine without it. There is one app Cash App that currently has an issue that I've been trying to resolve and it may or may not end up working, but I have banking apps, I have productivity apps you know all the usual stuff and it just for the most part, works completely seamlessly, just like your typical Google-laden Android.
Speaker 1:Well, for some reason, I knew you were going to mention an episode of yours. I have not yet gotten around to watching or listening, so I'm going to make a note right now to go and check that one out. I have heard about the graphene os and I'm really curious to to just learn a bit more about that. Um, jordan is any topic you sort of want to cover, or something. Final thoughts you want to talk about on the show itself, or maybe a bit about some up and coming topics that you want to cover in your show.
Speaker 2:One topic that we've covered recently was how to use AI and LLMs large language models. We talk about the spectrum of completely surveilled and censored options to the other end of the spectrum, where you're hosting your own models and accessing them in a very private manner, and then some in-between options. So if anybody out there is curious, they use LLMs and AI chatbots, but they want to know what are the options for doing it in a more private manner that's not leaking all of their data. Then check out the episode on sovereign AI.
Speaker 1:Excellent, and I think that is the latest episode that you've just dropped, isn't it?
Speaker 2:I believe so. It might be two episodes ago but I'd have to double check. But the show is called the Sovereign Computing Show and I am currently fixing an issue where it's not searchable in the Apple App Store. But if you search for Sovereign Computing and you don't see the show pop up, check out the ATL BitLab podcast that's ATL space, BitLab B-I-T-L-A-B, and that will get you to the proper feed.
Speaker 1:Excellent, jordan. If anybody wants to ask you some questions, pick your brain that kind of a thing. What would be a good way for anyone to reach out to you?
Speaker 2:You can email me at the show at sovereign at atlbitlabcom. That's s-o-v-e-r-e-i-g-n at atlbitlabcom, and we will. I will read your feedback. If you want me to keep it private, just let me know in your message. If you want, if you think it's okay for me to read your feedback on the show, then let me know and I will do that as well.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Thank you, man Jordan, appreciate your time. It has been so great talking to you. I love your show. I've learned so much from it and I look forward to every episode. It does sometimes take me a week or two to catch up on some, but it's definitely one of the podcasts I always listen to every episode. It does sometimes take me a week or two to catch up on some, but it's definitely one of the podcasts I always listen to, so I appreciate your time. Thanks for coming to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Outro Music.