Ep. 569 w/ Arie Trouw CEO/CTO/Co-Founder XYO
Welcome to Building the Future, hosted by Kevin Horek. With millions of listeners a month, Building the Future has quickly become one of the fastest rising programs with a focus on interviewing startups, entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs, and more. The radio and TV show airs in 15 markets across the globe, including Silicon Valley. For full showtimes, past episodes, or to sponsor the show, please visit building the future show dot com.
Kevin Horek:Welcome back to the show. Today, we have Ari Troe. He's the cofounder of Xyo Network. Ari, welcome back to the show.
Arie Trouw:Thank you, Kevin. I was, excited to be back on here.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. I'm excited to have you back on the show. It's been about a year and a little bit since we last chatted, and I'm I'm really curious to know what you're up to. And there's a ton of stuff that I want your thoughts on. But maybe before we get into that, let's get to know you a little bit better and start off with where you grew up.
Arie Trouw:So, yeah, I've I've been running software for a long time. I've, I'm a a technologist and, datist, fundamentally, but I I love starting companies and creating solutions also. So, you know, I've been been doing this for, 30 years, I guess it is, at this point. I'm getting pretty old. But That's awesome.
Arie Trouw:Yeah. I've it's really my my only thing in life is is is making cold solutions and trying to solve large problems.
Kevin Horek:Very cool. So walk us through maybe your career, just some highlights along the way, and then let's dive into what you're working on today.
Arie Trouw:Okay. Well, historically, I, was a software engineer, so I went to I went to college. I moved to California when I was about 26. My wife was about 7 months pregnant with our first daughter, so she wasn't so happy about that. But we moved to California because I wanted to be in the industry where there was software.
Arie Trouw:In New York at the time where we were living was much more finance and all those things. There wasn't a huge entrepreneurial scene there. So I moved to Southern California and wanted to get a lot of experience in a small company entrepreneurial world. Did that here under a couple great mentors that I had, and became a consultant after that just so I could kind of build up a nest egg to be able to to take a pause from that and start companies. And, you know, you can kind of you save up money, you start a company, you fail.
Arie Trouw:Rinse and repeat until you succeed, and then that's kind of what I did.
Kevin Horek:No. Very cool. So walk us through what you're doing today because it's really timely, I think, with what's happening on the web and the Internet in general right now.
Arie Trouw:So I've been working on xyl for the last, you know, almost, what, 5, 6 years now. And, we're really focusing on on the the data of of cryptography and the the Internet. And, it's really important for us to understand why we have data and what's going on. We see a lot of the the warts that's appearing nowadays. You have deep fakes, you have AI, you have all these different issues.
Arie Trouw:I think a lot of people are very aware of the problems, but the question becomes a solution in many cases. And so focusing on, you know, like, how do we actually harness data in a safe way and how do we do that? And to me, the most important thing I can't put it into 3 different words. There's, there's sovereignty, there's provenance, and there's, permanence. But I started using immutability, actually, instead of permanence because immutability is actually more important because permanence is almost impossible.
Arie Trouw:You know, the sun could expand and the earth goes away and it's gone. So immutability is important where you can tell change, you can tell it to lead it. But the sovereignty part is where it's very important for me to be able to do something, like verify if something is true or not without having to go ask an authority. And that, you know, comes into, for example, if there's a, you know, article or a post or any sort of a datagram I'm looking at, if I can verify that without having to go and, you know, just either trust the source, which is, you know, the API I got it from, or go and trust a different source that's going to verify it for me, I feel a lot better about that. And then also, if I can tell actually where it came from, if I can see the records of where it was originated from, it's a lot more comforting as well because you know this person sends it or that person sends it.
Arie Trouw:And then the immutability is very important because if a person changes or edits it, you you want to know that that happened or you know something has gone there. So if you have those three things, to me, you've pretty much solved a lot of the problems you see today with AI, deepfakes, and all those sorts of things. How you make those three things happen is the hard part. Right? It's Sure.
Arie Trouw:What we're working on is is is trying to make those three things look easy to the end user but hard internally.
Kevin Horek:Okay. So how do you actually go about doing that with what you're building? Because to your point a second ago, that's extremely difficult for the user.
Arie Trouw:Yeah. So, well, the user experience, you you don't wanna change it. So we're trying trying to lean on a lot of the web 2 user experiences, but there's a lot of things you can do that are sovereign. We actually have things nowadays that are sovereign already. Like, for example, an SSL key or, you know, or in the crypto world for a reason, an address.
Arie Trouw:I can generate an address for Ethereum without having to ask permission or request one from somebody or apply for it. I just basically run an algorithm on a computer and generate an address. So we have some sovereignty in that. So that's a really good example of sovereignty. Zero dollars proofs are great examples of sovereignty also where I can, prove that there's something in a datagram without even seeing what's in the datagram itself.
Arie Trouw:But those are also very difficult to come by. The 0 proof or, you know, the sovereign concept we lean on a lot is hashing. So once you've hashed a piece of data, if a person changes it, that hash changes as well. So if you hash data and then take that those those hashes and you interwind them in blockchains, if you change the hashes, the whole blockchain breaks and and goes away. You see this with Bitcoin or Ethereum, where, you know, the previous block hash is the way that they link them together.
Arie Trouw:So that's a sovereign concept there as well. So so just, like, interweaving all these sovereign technologies for your system is how you make it where a person without having to go and ask somebody else can do something. And then there's also the question of intermediaries. Right. Where if I want to be able to do something peer to peer, that's much more sovereign than if I have to go through a service in the middle.
Arie Trouw:Like, for example, Google Hangout is, you know, Google can turn off my ability to have Google Hangouts. But if I have a peer to peer conferencing system, then I can have a conference with somebody without having to go through Google. So building those peer to peer technologies is is the goal there. But then you have problems with ISPs, for example, don't let you open up ports and and those things. So there are ways to do peer to peer technologies as well, and you have to lean on some of the current technologies that are out there to do it.
Arie Trouw:But really, it's a collection of all those little EPD pieces and making customers aware of which things they're doing, which are sovereign, and which things they're doing which are not sovereign so they can pick appropriately.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. It's interesting. It seems to me, and I always gauge this based on kind of my nontechnical friends or kind of family members. When they start mentioning stuff, then I'm like, oh, okay. This is like a real mainstream kind of thing.
Kevin Horek:So how do you, like or why do you why do you think people are actually starting to really care about this stuff other than kind of the people like you and me that have cared about this stuff for years?
Arie Trouw:Well, I think part of it is because people have been using the word sovereignty more and more in conversations. I when I've gone to conferences this last year, I see people either giving talks or on panels using the word sovereignty, which makes me really happy because there's not really good words to describe that concept. You know, people kind of conflated with freedom or agency or those things where sovereignty is different. And I think the reason people are starting to look at that is because there's becoming more and more questions of of truth and, you know, is this person telling the truth? You know, whether trusting countries, trusting companies, trusting politicians, and being able to verify.
Arie Trouw:Because even if you go and look at a website, for example, about like a fact checking website, usually those are biased as well. So they're going to fact check it in a certain way. So if you could actually fact check something independently, that's a lot better than having to rely on somebody else fact checking it for you. And I think long term, the goal would be for people to have their own AI, even for that reason, to help them fact check stuff or to to do things. So if I have AI that I've trained to do something with my data and with data that I want in there, I may trust that AI more than trusting, you know, a news outlet or a a large company or a nation to tell me what the truth is.
Arie Trouw:And so being able to to have that autonomy is something which I think people want because the trust, you know, trust has eroded a lot, since, I'd say, the seventies eighties when Walter Cronkite was on TV and everyone just trusted Walter Cronkite. Right? So that trust has gone away and people need a new way to be able to verify things. And there's not that many great solutions for that.
Kevin Horek:Yeah, that's fair. And so many people can get wrapped up in believing something that's not true. Right? And they'll literally die on that hill sometimes. And you're like, Yeah, but if you actually go do your research, you can prove that that's not what yours, like, made up, right?
Kevin Horek:And we've seen that a ton with certain types of the population. And I find even like, really smart people that are very logical can get trapped in it as well, which I always hope kind of really find fascinating.
Arie Trouw:Well, I think that's one of the problems also you see with, people arguing or disagreeing. Often people disagree about the answer, but they don't take the time to take the steps backwards and see, well, where do they agree? Because the only way to actually come come to agreement on something is you first have to take steps backwards to find, you know, what your commonality is. If you can't find a commonality at all, there's you're never gonna agree on anything. So Yeah.
Arie Trouw:You know, if you step backwards and you agree on a commonality, you can both agree that that's a fact. And then when you go forward, if you disagree on something being a fact, then the who wants to assert that in the argument as being a fact or a reason why the argument should go a certain direction is on them to prove that the fact is true. It's I think a lot of people think that the way that you argue is I say something and it's up to you to prove me or my statement not true, which is that's not how it
Kevin Horek:works. Interesting.
Arie Trouw:I have to prove my statement to be true as opposed to you having to disprove it because a person will say something, you know, is that, you know, completely the world's flat. As I said, well, why do you say the world's flat? Well, you know, no one's ever proven to me it's not. But if if everything is true until proven false, that's not science. That's not scientific method.
Arie Trouw:Method scientific method is you assume it's false until you can prove it's true. And that's that seems to have been lost by a lot of people.
Kevin Horek:No. I yeah. I 100% agree. So I'm curious. I wanna dive a little bit deeper into x y o, and and how do people actually leverage what you're building with what they're building?
Arie Trouw:So the the idea of X Y O is is a protocol, like many of these things. And so there's certain rules of how it works. And the the primary concept in X. Y. O.
Arie Trouw:Is proof of origin chains. So we make these these blockchains, kind of like an Ethereum blockchain, but they're not shared ledgers. Most people are more familiar with the shared ledger concept of Bitcoin or or Ethereum, but that's very inefficient because everybody has to verify the same block chain. Everybody stores the same data on there. It becomes exorbitantly expensive.
Arie Trouw:So what we do is a a form of a tangle where each person has their own block chains and each person has their own thing. So, for example, a person can fire up our website and, on a computer, and when they do that, it starts up a node on their in their browser actually, which can connect to other nodes. But it also it 1st and foremost, it runs independently. It makes its own blockchain. It stores its own things.
Arie Trouw:And then if somebody else wants to look at that, that structure which it made is verifiable based on my public address. So I say, hey, I made this whole bunch of data here and I signed all these in this structure. If I give you the hash of the tail of that that blockchain, then the rest of it basically can't be changed. You know, I can go and and give it to you later on. And for example, I can even not show you the data of some of these blocks.
Arie Trouw:I can have blocks in there where I've never shown you the data, but I've just shown you the hash. And then later on, if I need to prove what was in that block, I can show you the data that made that hash because it's really difficult to manufacture false data that matches a hash after the fact. So it's really used more in an independent system basis. And then those systems can talk to each other without having to trust each other because they can verify the data via those signatures.
Kevin Horek:Okay. Very cool. Can you give us maybe some use cases that people have leveraged your tech to actually use? Like, I I think people could probably think of some, but can you give us some?
Arie Trouw:Well, some of the simplest ones are, for example, if I wanna take the the prices of Uniswap tokens or other coins out there and record those somewhere and then give you an answer of over time, Being able to store those in a way where there's a history of those and you can see that data whenever you want to. And what are we basing our answer of our trajectories on? That's a very simple case where you have the origin and the provenance of that data. Where did it come from? Did it come from a centralized API?
Arie Trouw:Did it come from, you know, Uniswap? Did it come from those different things? And then we merge them into one thing. So that's a sample, app that we have on our website where it just it shows how it's being used. Things that are being worked on now, there's, for example, having conversations, whether it's it's like a a communications channel, like a Twitter or or like a email thread, where if you're speaking to somebody, you can verify it's coming from that person because that person's signature is on there.
Arie Trouw:They can also verify that they haven't removed anything from that chain. So, secure communications is something which we're very interested in. And we definitely have some people working on that right now as a solution that that they're using our technology for to be able to to basically prevent AI or deepfakes from being put in there where a person's confused even in an email where, you know, how do you know where email came from? There are some technologies like DMARC and DKIM if your solution if you're familiar with those that are really kind of help you do that. But, if you have a blockchain along with that, you'll also get the sequence, stored there permanently as well.
Arie Trouw:And so, you know, even delivery systems, for example, you know, where do your package get to? And if each of the warehouses that goes near signs the blockchain, then you know it's there and you can verify it independently. So we've we've, you know, done projects like that as well.
Kevin Horek:Interesting. So because, like, phishing and stuff has become so popular whether it's email or text or whatever, is there, like, a way then that, like, like, companies could build that, say, in their email clients where it says, like, this is verified to be, actually from your phone company, or This is from this company, and this company, and this company, like into just like a regular email client, like your Gmail client or something because these some of these attacks are getting like, very good and you click on a link and you give somebody full control of your computer or your device or whatever, like, or is that just kind of a little bit like fear mongering and that's not really an issue for most people? Or or where are we kinda at with that? Do you know what I'm getting at?
Arie Trouw:Well, I think that's becoming more and more common, especially in the crypto space because people, you know, it's it's hard to claw back, you know, transaction they didn't mean to send. But Right. Also other financial fraud situations, people are doing this all the time. And the simple solution for a technological standpoint is, you know, like DMARC on email works that way where there's a public key that's stored in DNS that the the email client, like Gmail, can go verify that this email actually, you know, gets signed by the server that this DNS says should have signed this thing before it came to us so they can filter it out. But the problem is people are easy to socially engineer.
Arie Trouw:So I've seen phishing scams where they just did a really good job of making the email look like a bank. You know, say it's Wells Fargo email or whatever it is, it looks just like it and everything. But if you just took the time to look at the from email, it's like wellsfargo@gmail.com or something like that. You know, it's it's not even, you know, they're not trying to spoof the the domain for Wells Fargo. They're they're just relying on the fact that a person's gonna look at that, and they're very familiar with the way the email looks because they've gotten them before from the same company that they they skip checking those other things.
Arie Trouw:So that's where it becomes difficult, where how does Google verify the content of that, you know, to since it's not coming from that domain, they can't say, well, did this domain sign it? Because it didn't have to sign it. So you kind of need AI for that, where the AI will look at that and be like, well, this is something which if I were a human, I would think is a Wells Fargo email, even though it came from some completely random thing, like a Gmail account or whatever it is. Maybe I should flag that. So it's email specifically is a difficult solution or difficult problem to solve because of the fact that people verify emails primarily through familiarity and, like, what they see in the email and how it's rendered, not through things like the source email address or the domain it came from or the signature.
Arie Trouw:So getting people to change their behavior or at least clients to make it more, you know, obvious to a person that this is potentially not from the place that they wanted to come from makes it harder for them to be socially engineered. But, you know, there's a case recently where they did a whole deep fake where they they mimicked an entire board of directors of a company video conference to get somebody to send a bunch of crypto, I think it was somewhere. That's pretty involved. Getting getting people not to fall for the things which their brains gotten so used to verify. Like, you know, like the fact that I got I'm almost a 100% certain I'm talking to Kevin right now, but, you know Yeah.
Kevin Horek:I guess. Yeah. That's interesting.
Arie Trouw:Video over there, that's that's not even you.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. It's interesting. So it's almost it's like well, and you could correct me if or you have a different opinion on this, but it's almost up to software vendors to implement as much of these measures as possible. I'm not saying it's not incredibly challenging. It's just it's probably easier than trying to get to change user behavior, especially people that have been doing it for a long period of time.
Kevin Horek:It's not going to be perfect, but I think AI and blockchain playing together can at least help to verify certain things, and it's maybe up to the software vendors to actually implement that instead of trying to change the user behavior. Is that or what are your thoughts around that?
Arie Trouw:Yeah. I think that's, you know, like, for example, if you were to put a big banner on the top, which, like, says, like, the domain it came from, like, you know, take Gmail. If if it had a a domain source on there, it's like this came from Gmail, this came from wellsfargo.com. This came from where it was. That would probably be much more likely for a person to be able to determine, like, why did this Wells Fargo email come from Gmail?
Arie Trouw:That doesn't make sense. Yeah. But they make it small and kind of in gray because, you know, people don't like that. Like, users don't want to see a giant, you know, thing that was telling you where it comes from the domain because it doesn't help them at all. Normally, you know, it helps them in the case where they're being being a scam.
Arie Trouw:But normally, it's why are you wasting all this time and just show me the domain of the thing. A place where I think they've done a good job with that is the lock icon in browsers where people have gotten used to now saying, well, you know, there's there's no green lock there or there's a red lock that's unlocked and says, you know, it's the wrong domain for the thing. So they've conditioned people to check to see what it says in the in the header there on whether or not
Kevin Horek:it's actually something
Arie Trouw:that's supposed to go, but they don't have the equivalent for email.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. That's interesting. Well, and I'm just trying to run through my head just like other apps that are outside of email that, yeah, you're right. Like, if you put up with a banner saying like this might be fraudulent, like, eventually, people would just be, like, well, I see that all the time. It's probably fine.
Kevin Horek:Like Yeah. Right? Where you'd have to get them to be that, like, lock thing where people, like, oh, that's actually, like, an issue. Issue. Right?
Kevin Horek:Because they don't see it, like, where email's bad because you get so well, most people, I think, get so many spam messages. Right? And you'd be constantly seeing that banner, which is interesting. But you wanna see that banner because because getting hacked or, like, getting your credit card hacked, like, it's a monumental task of, like, trying to get back your money and update everything across the web. Like, it's a huge pain.
Kevin Horek:Right? But we're willing to sacrifice convenience sometimes for that. Yeah. That's interesting.
Arie Trouw:Just kind of kind of a 2 part solution. You know, companies like ours need to provide the tools, the technology and the cryptography to be able to solve the problem. But then the companies which are providing the front ends and the UIs and the solutions also need to make sure they expose that to the user. A good example is I don't use Telegram at all because on Telegram, you know, if I go on any any Telegram channel, the next thing I know there's like 4 ARIs on there and they're all asking for people to send them, you know, X. Y.
Arie Trouw:O. Or something like that. And there's it's really hard to tell which one's me and which one's real because you can just change your username to whatever you want to. Where if you go on, like, Slack, for example, it's a lot harder to mimic me. It's still possible, but it's a lot harder to mimic me.
Arie Trouw:Or if you so or even on Twitter for that reason, it's I'm I'm at r hro. So, you know, somebody else could probably be, like, at r hro 1 or whatever it is, blah blah blah. But it's a lot harder to to mimic me. Where on, like, Telegram, they've they've designed their UI where the actual username that's actually going to differentiate me from somebody else is so hidden that no one notices it.
Kevin Horek:Right. Yeah. That's that's no. That's a really good point. So I wanna dive a little bit deeper into more of what you and the team are building because it it's actually really innovative, and I think people tie blockchain to crypto and NFTs, and they're you can use them together, but they're completely separate of each other.
Kevin Horek:So where are we kind of at and and what exactly are you building and and how could people just, like, leverage what you're building with or without kind of crypto and NFTs because I think people still tie those things together, and it's not really fair to do that. And I think with what's happening with crypto lately, especially NFTs, people are just like, oh, that's garbage. Nobody uses that anymore. It's like, no. No.
Kevin Horek:No. There's a lot of good uses for it, and a lot of people are using it. And a lot of people that are being negative about it are using it every day, and they don't even know. Do you agree with that, or what are your thoughts around that?
Arie Trouw:Yeah. NFTs are one of those things where it's like the the fundamental technology for it is really pretty cool and amazing. It's just
Kevin Horek:Totally.
Arie Trouw:The whole speculative tool of market aspect of it is kind of, you know, really tainted it for many people out there. Like, I would even argue that the datagrams that we have inside of XBEL where you have a, you know, data with a hash and that's stored is in a weird sort of way an NFT. It's a non fungible piece of data. It's not very
Kevin Horek:complicated, but
Arie Trouw:it's each one's unique. So they're non fungible. You don't you don't have like 40 different copies of the exact same piece of data. They each have their own own hash and they can even assign ownership to them if you want to. So in a weird sort of way, we kind of use NFTs conceptually as the building block for how we store data in our system.
Arie Trouw:But it's not there's no, like, marketplace for our NFTs, you know, so there's no value for us, you know, some Right. Buying and speculate on them, which is a complete different concept there. But what we're trying to build right now is we're going to be coming up with a thing we call X y OS, which is a layer which you run on top of your nodes. So when you're running an XyOS node, this is the UI for it's kind of like, you know, gnome or kde that you would have Linux. And so it's a UI and you can make it a lot easier for users to be able to use something that's peer to peer and sovereign without even realizing how it's working underneath it and how we're using blockchain and cryptography to actually accomplish that.
Arie Trouw:So, you know, in that case, I could put photos on there. And then if somebody were to connect to my my, you know, note on my computer, I can, you know, approve their address. And if they're a friend of mine, you know, I can say, well, you can see these photos. But the photos only exist on my computer. They don't get stored in the cloud somewhere or potentially deleted.
Arie Trouw:You could back them up if you want to. You could you could use a cloud archivist to store them in our system. But without that, it's just peer to peer. It's a completely sovereign system. So I can share pictures.
Arie Trouw:I can share comments or notes or documents with people in a completely peer to peer situation, which is very similar to me as the early days of the Internet where I would have my own web server, my own email server at home, and you'd have your email server at home, and they just kind of talk to each other, you know, on, you know, web 1.0 terms. But with web 2.0, that that part of sovereignty and that peer to peerness has gone away. So our XyOS, or XyOS, as we call it, is really a way for people to be able to to easily use solutions and applications that or dApps that do peer to peer sovereign concepts for them and really illustrate the power of x y o.
Kevin Horek:Okay. Very cool. So how do people actually go about leveraging the technology and how are you helping kind of blockchain developers and and people that are looking to become blockchain developers?
Arie Trouw:We have a a bunch of SDKs. So we, our primary SDK is written in, TypeScript and JavaScript. So that's where the majority of people were to use it there. And, they can use it as little as just the the raw protocol where it know, it does the payloads and the bound businesses for you. Or we also have React SDK.
Arie Trouw:So if you wanna make a website that is uses our system to be able to store stuff and and render things to do all that, you can also use our our React wrappers for it. One of the cool things that, our system also does kind of as a side effect, which I I like like a lot, is the fact that you can make a true, like, sovereign single page app where it's a or a web app where when, you know, how on Google Mail, like, if you disconnect from the Internet, it can still, like, you can author a piece of mail. It's just there in the queue, and the next time you connect, it actually will send it. So our system, because we have, we use IndexedDB on the browser to actually have an archivist there. So we have local archivist to store stuff.
Arie Trouw:You can completely use our system without the Internet in a browser. And then when you connect to the Internet, it then starts, like, going again and and transferring data. And then when you stop, it's it's still there. So, being able to make an application or some sort of a solution that really wants to work offline and work sovereignly, is something which is hard to do for most people where we make it way easier because just it's kind of plug and play way of making, local only or local first website.
Kevin Horek:No. Makes makes a lot of sense. Can you give us some use cases of maybe customers that have have leveraged that? Like, why would they wanna potentially do that? Obviously, like, the obvious ones are if people are traveling around an airplane or something like that, but what what other use cases have you seen with that, feature and functionality?
Arie Trouw:Well, an interesting, use case is is games. Right? So Sure. If you feel like World of Warcraft way back when Yep.
Kevin Horek:Yep. I did. Connection
Arie Trouw:to the server, you know, after about 10 steps, the thing stops and it's like, oh, you can't keep on going because, they can't trust anything that comes from your computer because you could be, you know, speeding up your character or you could be teleporting to different places. You could be cheating in the game. So really the game in that case runs on their server and users have like a thin client, kind of like a mainframe with a thin client viewing the game. And as soon as that link goes away, it stops. But with our technology, what you can do, like, for example, a card game, what we've done is, if I, you know, pick 10 cards and then you pick 10 cards, we can then exchange hashes of what the 10 cards are.
Arie Trouw:Now we've both, like, locked in what our hands are, and we can go ahead and play it. But I can spend as much time as I want to make my cards. I don't have to go and make my hand on a server. We can independently play a turn without being online. So, you know, it really besides allowing you to work offline, it also allows you to offload a lot of the work to the client.
Arie Trouw:And it's kind of like that's the boomerang effect where throughout the history of computer science, we've gone between thin client and thick client and thin client and thick client. And I think it's really time for it to go back to thick client as opposed to being this thin client thing where you just log in and you look at your Facebook stuff on Facebook or that sort of a thing. This also allows for AI, for example, if I were to have a bunch of datas on my computer that I don't want to share necessarily with OpenAI or Microsoft or whoever, I can actually have that data used as a learning set on my own computer. I can share the learning set if I want to afterwards, but the data I train it on, I don't have to go and share it with everybody else. So and but besides the sharing and the privacy aspect, it's just not feasible for, you know, any of these companies to build data centers large enough for everybody's learning such to be crunched by all these different GPUs to be able to learn on them.
Arie Trouw:So distributing that to all the different clients is a lot better. Interesting.
Kevin Horek:No. That's that's actually, like, a really fascinating use case. Well, and even just the cybersecurity angles that that could come with too. Right? Like, just it's gotta be almost unlimited.
Kevin Horek:Is that fair to say?
Arie Trouw:Yeah. Well, it's the first step to not having your your data stolen or hacked is not having it on somebody else's server. You know, there's a saying in crypto, not my storage, not my keys, or, where basically it's like, yeah, if you have a a cloud cloud wallet, for example, or somebody else has access to your private key. So effectively, it's, or it's not by crypto, not by or so not by keys, not by crypto. But, it's like, you don't have you're not sure that that's not going to get stolen or taken or whatever it is.
Arie Trouw:And so, even like, look at FTX, like, you know, if you deposit your money in FTX, you know, it's not really your crypto. So somebody else owns it and they promise to give it back to you sort of a thing where if I have it in a cold wallet, for example, I know that that that's safe there. So the easiest way to not have people access your data or take your data is to not socialize it. And so if you want to store, you know, one of the use cases I was talking about recently, which I that was really cool is for AI, if you want to be able to have it trained on all of your behaviors and all your idiosyncrasies and all like who you are so it knows how to answer questions for you.
Kevin Horek:Yeah.
Arie Trouw:What you really want to do is put a camera on your head and have it observe you 24 hours a day. Now, do you want to have video and audio of you 24 hours a day on somebody's cloud server? Probably not.
Kevin Horek:No. Yeah. Fair enough.
Arie Trouw:AI, which is learning from you to actually observe all those things. So, you know, like, how you wash yourself in the shower is probably something that, you know, the AI should learn so it knows which soap to order for you from Amazon. But it's something which you want to keep local. You don't you don't wanna have to upload that to have somebody go and and learn off of that to give you a a better AI assistant, for example.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. That's actually really fascinating. I think, well, since we last chatted, AI has obviously been around for a number of years, but it's kind of become mainstream because of the chat gbt's of the world and a few others. But how do you think that AI is really kind of going to change the Internet and and just jobs in general based on what you're seeing out there?
Arie Trouw:Well, I think it's already changed the Internet jobs in general quite a bit. So, obviously, it's even better way to search the Internet. I use chat gpt to, you know, find out things about code or, you know, various questions where it's a lot faster for it to come up with those answers than for me to go and try to use Google and comb through the different sources that are out there. I think students are using it a lot more for research and being able to write papers. They're even cheating by using it to write the entire paper for them in some cases, which has changed that.
Arie Trouw:I think that's also happened in jobs where the efficiency of many people have gone up substantially because they can use that. Or even in some cases, if you're a small company, as an entrepreneur, one of difficult things is, you know, you only have 3 or 4 people, and you all need to be able to do 10 people's shops. And so to go out and hire a specialist that's like a copywriter, for example, used to be a requirement. Now it's like, well, I can just use ChatGPT as a requirement. You know, it's maybe it's not as good as that copywriter, but it's 80% as good.
Arie Trouw:And I can't afford the copywriter. It's way better than I am. So for all the tasks that you're not an expert at, having chatGPT be the next best thing is hugely important. And I think a lot of companies are doing that now. That's why I think we're seeing some interesting changes in employment structures as companies where I think the focus of where they're hiring has changed in many cases because there's certain roles that could be 80, 90% replaced with chat GPT and certain roles which can't be.
Arie Trouw:So I think that's already happening. I think the biggest place where it's still going to happen is the personal AI where, you know, it's your own personal assistant. It's even mimicking yourself and being able to have like, like, the Harry Potter painting where you have the painting that speaks to you. Right? It's like you take a photo and then, you know, you know, it's sitting there, but you can ask questions and it's actually, you know, a 3 d version of myself who can interact with you as if it's real.
Arie Trouw:Those are the solutions that are are gonna be fascinating to me.
Kevin Horek:No. Yeah. It's interesting. It's interesting because, like, I moved away from Google for probably 90% of my search. My default search engine now, it actually goes to Reflexity, which is another chatbot.
Kevin Horek:Google that haven't heard of it, but it's the same concept, like, you use chat gbt, like, using that. But if you were to ask me, like, 6 months or a year ago, I would've been, like, probably not. But, like, now it's, like, I use that probably 90 plus percent of my time compared to just, like, where you just be Google searching constantly and trying to find stuff. And, sure, it might take a second longer to get results, but it's pretty close majority of the time, right, of what you're looking for without having go through 10 links or a couple links. Right?
Arie Trouw:It's actually net net is it's faster because, you know, yes, each result's faster with Google. But if you say if it's a search 10 times where you have to go Yeah. You know, figure out if it's the correct one, the time from question to answer is faster with the AI search engines, basically.
Kevin Horek:Totally. So do you think it's really going to change how developers develop and blockchain on and just kind of in general, or or where do you think that kind of some of these tech jobs are gonna go with AI?
Arie Trouw:Well, I think it's it's like any any career. You know, it gets eaten up from the bottom up, not from the top down. And so, a mediocre or a really poor engineer who's just basically cutting and pasting code and, you know, making a website for somebody that practically you can make in Wix, those jobs are gonna go away first because, you know, it's probably already the the case where where AI can probably do a better job than that guy because he's just not that good at a job. Where if you start asking about AI, like, how should you architect something? Or, you know, how do you improve the efficiency of something or optimize those?
Arie Trouw:It gets more and more difficult. So but I think the problem is there's especially in the software engineering world, there's, you know, it's a it's a pyramid. Right? There's the even though you think of the, say, the bottom 25% of software engineers as from a quality standpoint or from a skill set standpoint, should I say, as being 25%. But it's probably more like 75% of software engineers fall in the bottom 25% of of quality.
Arie Trouw:And then you have the better and better ones on there. So you have maybe 75% of your of of the software engineers at risk of being Or even in the cases where, like for me, you know, I probably would hire less junior software engineers because I can have ChatGPT do the job for me. Or, you know, like where I would normally just say, oh, I got this repetitive task. I'll have a junior guy do it. Now I can just, you know, have ChatGPT do it for me.
Arie Trouw:So all the industries are going to, I think, have this bottom up cannibalization where, like, you lose the the less experienced and less skilled people. And I think it's also gonna make it more difficult for people out of college to get to get that experience that they need to be in the top of the pyramid. So I think it's it's both a pruning of the current workforce, but also I think it's a barrier for the future workforce, which is probably a bigger concern for me.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. No. I agree with that. So for somebody that's kinda coming out of school, what advice do you give to them so they hopefully can get that kind of first job or second job when they're kind of a junior?
Arie Trouw:I think a lot of it is is just you have to to hone your skills. You have to get good at it. You have to and if you're gonna find a mentor that's willing to work with you, that's the best thing. And another thing that also makes it worse is the work from home situation we have now after COVID. It's a lot harder for a junior engineer or junior employee of any sort to actually learn from a mentor when they're working remotely.
Arie Trouw:So you have to find a mentor that you can work in the same office at and learn from them. But that's difficult because that time is something which those mentors only have so much of. So they're gonna try and pick the best and the brightest to to work with. So it's difficult. You know, it used to be kind of like, you know, you go to to any college in the United States, you get your 4 year degree in computer science and you're guaranteed a, you know, a near 6 figure salary, you know, graduating.
Arie Trouw:I don't think it's gonna be the case 10 years from now. I think it's going to be much more of a struggle for people. I think it's the same thing that you had with doctors. You know, doctors used to be, you know, the seventies. You know, you get your MD, you know, you're gonna be a millionaire by the time you're 50.
Arie Trouw:Right? Which back then, $1,000,000 was a lot of money too. But nowadays, there's there's plenty of doctors that, you know, they probably make the same amount of money as software engineers. Yeah.
Kevin Horek:Because Or less sometimes.
Arie Trouw:Or less. Yeah. It's been commoditized in many ways. So I think software engineering is really going through that same phase that it's been due for that. And we think we have to some degree an over overpopulation of software engineers.
Arie Trouw:But at the same time, I would say that people should learn how to write JavaScript or how to how to do software engineering type things because it helps you in other jobs. Like if you're a content writer or a marketer, being able to know how to write JavaScript things to be able to cut and paste your pixels and implement to websites is a skill. So I think software engineering to some degree is going to, for many people, move from being a vocation to being a skill that they need for other jobs.
Kevin Horek:That's actually really interesting. Yeah. I will say as, like, somebody that's been a designer basically my whole career, just the no code tools or low code tools have been an absolute game changer for me, right, where I don't even need really a developer now to build an MVP, maybe a crude V1 of something like an idea where before I could maybe struggle through it for months at a time, but it just you usually lose interest in the project before you launch, Right? Where now we're talking days or weeks. You can have something where it would take me years maybe to get some something up, right, in kinda my spare time.
Kevin Horek:And so I think even just leveraging some of the AI tools as you're you're going up. And, like, I've been leveraging a bunch of, like, the tools even on the design side, like, even to generate some ideas quick or test some heat mapping ideas or just do some certain things that almost gets you even 20, 40, 60, 80% through something. So I think leveraging that especially early on in your career or if you've been added a number of years has really been helpful to me. Well,
Arie Trouw:important also for people to know what the AI is doing. So it's one of the things that Yeah. People that use those, as you say, the the no code or low code tools, but they don't understand, like, CSS, for example, at all. So it's like, when something goes wrong, they're like, well, they don't know how to fix it. They don't understand what went wrong.
Arie Trouw:So I think it's still important for people to have a limited understanding of what's actually happening under the covers when the when the tool is doing something for you. So when something goes wrong, potentially, or at least it helps you understand why something may not be possible. You feel like, well, you know, I'm trying to do this, and it's not working for some reason. Once you understand what it's trying to do, you'll know why it's not working. If you just try it a different way, perhaps it'll work.
Arie Trouw:So I don't think it those tools preclude a person from having a cursory understanding of how technology works. It just precludes them from having to be an expert at those. And it's kind of what I was saying before, like, I don't have to be an expert at copywriting. I can use ChatGPT to copyright for me better than I can copyright because that's a skill which I would not say I'm, you know, the top 10% person of so, you know, especially for the skills where, you know, it really allows people to focus on their their expertise and then still get, you know, 70, 80 percent quality out of their non expertise. That's all it.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. No. That's an interesting way to put it. So I'm curious. I wanna talk a little bit more about is there any other features of the platform that we haven't really covered today that, you know, people could leverage in their apps or their current apps or their new apps?
Kevin Horek:And then kinda how easy is it to get started with an app that I've maybe had for a number of years?
Arie Trouw:Well, we're launching our, the XylOS thing I was talking about before, and we're launching our builder program, at the end of the quarter. So that's probably the best time for a person to to start using this, because it it does 2 things. It gives you the SDKs and the tools to be able to build things. But one of the deals we've had with developers is it's kind of hard for a person to to try it out. It's kind of like asking a person to write an iPhone app without an iPhone.
Arie Trouw:And so now with the X by OS, it gives you like a little test environment where it's like, oh, you write this app and do something, but you can just pop it into our our X y OS node and you can see it running right away. And so, it really gives you a test environment as well as like a user's environment. So that's why we've kind of been dragging our feet a little bit with, the builder program to get it out when a person actually has a way to more easily test something. It's kind of like the Ganache and truffle suite that they have for Ethereum. Because before that, if you tried to write smart contracts before you had truffle and ganache, it was really difficult.
Arie Trouw:Right? So we're kind of in that stage, you know, where, yes, it's all technically there. You know, if a person understands how to do it, you know, we can walk them through it. But it takes a lot of hand holding for us to have a partner actually build something which we've gone through that experience, which is one of the reasons why we're trying to build the the tools and the, the dev environments to be able to have people more easily create something that has an immediate feedback to look for them that's that's awesome. So, you know, they can spend a few hours and build something that runs and is cool, and they can share with their friends.
Kevin Horek:No. Makes a lot of sense. So and there's probably mixed opinions on this, but how much of a product should you potentially put on the blockchain from day 1? Should all of it, some of it, depends on the feature set, or what's your thoughts around that?
Arie Trouw:I think that's a really difficult question. It's because the problem is if you if you were absolutist and you say, well, I'm gonna put everything on Ethereum. You're gonna end up with people having to pay 100 of dollars, you know, per minute or whatever it is. Yeah. It's just not practical.
Arie Trouw:So conceptually, like I would say, like, you want to put as much as you can on the blockchain because it's dice. But really, I think what it comes down to is you have to to figure out, well, which things benefit from it and which things don't. Because, you know, having something that's that's running on a shared ledger that's that's centralized, like that Oreo, it's it's got that pinch point. That's not important. Like, for example, you wouldn't render your I've seen people actually make rendered things through blockchain.
Arie Trouw:It seems like it was an EOS app that was Space Invaders and the entire Space Invaders engine was running on EOS. It's like it was a really cool tech demo. But what you really just want is you potentially just want to throw the high scores. Yeah, maybe it's just the high scores you want to put there or you want to put the seeds for the randomizer of the game on blockchain. So so knowing which things have the best bang for your buck that you put on blockchain is, I think, the first step.
Arie Trouw:And as blockchain gets more and more efficient, you can put more things there. Our our goal at X whale, actually, one of the things is to to make it so that, our system, despite the fact that it's blockchain based and it works the way it does, it's actually easier to use and more efficient and faster than, like, using Mongo or or an equivalent web 2 solution. That's very difficult because it does more things. You have to sign things and you have to, you know, do additional work there. But we're much closer to that goal than a shared ledger like Ethereum or or Bitcoin is just because of the fact that we don't have to have a whole bunch of parties do the same thing over and over again.
Arie Trouw:So, you know, it's it's hard to know what that level is, but it's definitely not a 100%.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. No. That I agree with that. That makes a lot of sense. So how do you guys monetize the platform then?
Arie Trouw:So, well, right now we have the coin app. It's, it's really what our our our user first experience is. A person can store their data on there, and and use that for, basically producing data for our XBYO network. And then they can get paid on there for that data by getting coin in the coin app. And then they can redeem that for X, Y, L.
Arie Trouw:So that's kind of how it closes the loop where, you know, we pick the consumers of our data and then the consumers of our data end up paying them. So we have a cycle there of how the the value goes into a circle. It's a great way also for us to onboard people onto crypto which have not been using crypto before. It's it's a very easy to use app on a phone that people are very familiar with. And you don't have to have, like, a wallet to it isn't like, you know, install the ETH client first sort of a thing.
Arie Trouw:It's much easier than that. You can just kind of get started and then, you know, redeem from there. So that's really our path to getting people to be interested in there. And then from there, transitioning them into XBIO. So we make revenue from coin right now.
Arie Trouw:That's kind of what our primary coin driver is. Our goal this year is to to expand that to have, a lot more revenue opportunities, with the actual XYO network and, people using that and some services that we're gonna be launching for that as well.
Kevin Horek:Interesting. No. That that makes a lot of sense. So we're kinda coming to the end of the show, but is there anything else that you'd like to cover today that we haven't related to x y z o or or x y o or any other kind of advice you'd wanna pass along?
Arie Trouw:Not really. Actually, I just think it's a it's a very exciting project. I've been working on it for a long time. It's really a different way of looking at crypto and the benefits of it as opposed to, you know, everyone's just trying to make the faster, you know, shared ledger or their the more NFT. So I think that there's there's different ways to solve the the goals of what the, like, the Cypherpunks wanted.
Arie Trouw:They wanted sovereignty. They wanted permanence and provenance and those sorts of things. So I think focusing on those is what makes us special as opposed to focusing on trying to make, you know, an existing solution to those better or or different or or that sort of thing. So focusing on the goal of what we're why we're trying to do it is important. I I think that's what a lot of people should be looking at also when they look at different crypto projects is why are they doing it?
Arie Trouw:What's the goal? What are they trying to achieve for that? What's the the purpose of what they're doing? And so, you know, we're we stand out that way. And also, you know, you know, we're a US company, and we're, you know, we're registered here in the US.
Arie Trouw:We file twice a year as a company, that sort of a thing. So, I think our transparency is something which is very interesting, for compared to most of the the market out there.
Kevin Horek:No. Yeah. That's that's really interesting. I'm curious, where do you think the state of crypto and NFTs is these days? And do you think they're both gonna become or, like, popular again?
Kevin Horek:Or, like, is it kind of all doom and gloom and it's gonna go away?
Arie Trouw:I wouldn't say it's unpopular right now. Bitcoin has been doing well. They have the ETP out there. And so, it's it's not I wouldn't say it's people are that down on crypto at large. I think people are down on NFTs to some degree.
Arie Trouw:I think we're basically in the same state kind of where AI was before a couple of years ago when ChatGPT came out. I think you need that that killer solution. We need someone that could be, like, hey. I you know, we've done this with with crypto, and it's really interesting. And now I understand why using crypto is better and different.
Arie Trouw:And that's where I see XBYO going with our XBYOS, where a person can use that and they'll be like, oh, this is really cool. This is a great solution. I'm going to use this. And then, Oh, yeah, by the way, I didn't even realize it's using crypto and it has all these other benefits as well. So getting a person to to enjoy a solution and then finding out that it's crypto and it has sovereignty and has all those aspects, I think is the right way to to go there as opposed to, oh, this is really painful, but it's crypto, so just bear with me and, you know, deal with the pain, which is where I think a lot of the solutions are nowadays.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. That's actually really good advice. But how will we close the show with mentioning where people can get more information about yourself, XYO, and any other links you wanna mention?
Arie Trouw:Yeah. Well, go to xy0.network to be able to get, information about what we're doing there, what our projects, is. Obviously, you can find our token on, Coinbase and on a variety of different different things out there. We also have our stock is traded on x y x y l b on, on t zero. I think we're the highest volume stock on there most days.
Arie Trouw:So, very excited about the the wrap securities that t zero has been providing for us. So, you know, we're a publicly traded company from that standpoint because it's it's considered over the counter. And then, also, you can go to xylabs.com if you wanna read more about the company behind xyo.network, and all of our corporate filings are there also available and and that sort of a thing.
Kevin Horek:Very cool, Ari. Well, I really appreciate you again taking the time out of your day to be on the show, and I look forward to keeping in touch with you and have a good rest of your day, man.
Arie Trouw:Thank you very much for having me on, Kevin.
Kevin Horek:Thank you. K.
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