Ep. 569 w/ Arie Trouw CEO/CTO/Co-Founder XYO

XYO is a tech protocol designed to improve the validity, certainty, and value of data. The blockchain behind COIN. ERC-20 Token: $XYO

https://xyo.network

Episode Transcript

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(00:22):
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Kevin Horek (00:31):
Welcome back to the show. Today, we have Ari Troe.
He's the cofounder of XyoNetwork. Ari, welcome back to
the show.

Arie Trouw (00:38):
Thank you, Kevin. I was, excited to be back on here.

Kevin Horek (00:41):
Yeah. I'm excited to have you back on the show.
It's been about a year and alittle bit since we last
chatted, and I'm I'm reallycurious to know what you're up
to. And there's a ton of stuffthat I want your thoughts on.
But maybe before we get intothat, let's get to know you a
little bit better and start offwith where you grew up.

Arie Trouw (00:59):
So, yeah, I've I've been running software for a long
time. I've, I'm a a technologistand, datist, fundamentally, but
I I love starting companies andcreating solutions also. So, you
know, I've been been doing thisfor, 30 years, I guess it is, at
this point. I'm getting prettyold. But That's awesome.
Yeah. I've it's really my myonly thing in life is is is

(01:22):
making cold solutions and tryingto solve large problems.

Kevin Horek (01:26):
Very cool. So walk us through maybe your career,
just some highlights along theway, and then let's dive into
what you're working on today.

Arie Trouw (01:34):
Okay. Well, historically, I, was a software
engineer, so I went to I went tocollege. I moved to California
when I was about 26. My wife wasabout 7 months pregnant with our
first daughter, so she wasn't sohappy about that. But we moved
to California because I wantedto be in the industry where
there was software.
In New York at the time where wewere living was much more

(01:54):
finance and all those things.There wasn't a huge
entrepreneurial scene there. SoI moved to Southern California
and wanted to get a lot ofexperience in a small company
entrepreneurial world. Did thathere under a couple great
mentors that I had, and became aconsultant after that just so I
could kind of build up a nestegg to be able to to take a

(02:16):
pause from that and startcompanies. And, you know, you
can kind of you save up money,you start a company, you fail.
Rinse and repeat until yousucceed, and then that's kind of
what I did.

Kevin Horek (02:26):
No. Very cool. So walk us through what you're
doing today because it's reallytimely, I think, with what's
happening on the web and theInternet in general right now.

Arie Trouw (02:38):
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 cryptographyand the the Internet. And, it's
really important for us tounderstand why we have data and
what's going on. We see a lot ofthe the warts that's appearing
nowadays. You have deep fakes,you have AI, you have all these

(03:01):
different issues.
I think a lot of people are veryaware of the problems, but the
question becomes a solution inmany cases. And so focusing on,
you know, like, how do weactually harness data in a safe
way and how do we do that? Andto me, the most important thing
I can't put it into 3 differentwords. There's, there's
sovereignty, there's provenance,and there's, permanence. But I

(03:22):
started using immutability,actually, instead of permanence
because immutability is actuallymore important because
permanence is almost impossible.
You know, the sun could expandand the earth goes away and it's
gone. So immutability isimportant where you can tell
change, you can tell it to leadit. But the sovereignty part is
where it's very important for meto be able to do something, like
verify if something is true ornot without having to go ask an

(03:44):
authority. And that, you know,comes into, for example, if
there's a, you know, article ora post or any sort of a datagram
I'm looking at, if I can verifythat without having to go and,
you know, just either trust thesource, which is, you know, the
API I got it from, or go andtrust a different source that's
going to verify it for me, Ifeel a lot better about that.
And then also, if I can tellactually where it came from, if

(04:07):
I can see the records of whereit was originated from, it's a
lot more comforting as wellbecause you know this person
sends it or that person sendsit.
And then the immutability isvery important because if a
person changes or edits it, youyou want to know that that
happened or you know somethinghas gone there. So if you have
those three things, to me,you've pretty much solved a lot

(04:28):
of the problems you see todaywith AI, deepfakes, and all
those sorts of things. How youmake those three things happen
is the hard part. Right? It'sSure.
What we're working on is is istrying to make those three
things look easy to the end userbut hard internally.

Kevin Horek (04:41):
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 difficultfor the user.

Arie Trouw (04:50):
Yeah. So, well, the user experience, you you don't
wanna change it. So we're tryingtrying to lean on a lot of the
web 2 user experiences, butthere's a lot of things you can
do that are sovereign. Weactually have things nowadays
that are sovereign already.Like, for example, an SSL key
or, you know, or in the cryptoworld for a reason, an address.
I can generate an address forEthereum without having to ask

(05:11):
permission or request one fromsomebody or apply for it. I just
basically run an algorithm on acomputer and generate an
address. So we have somesovereignty in that. So that's a
really good example ofsovereignty. Zero dollars proofs
are great examples ofsovereignty also where I can,
prove that there's something ina datagram without even seeing
what's in the datagram itself.
But those are also verydifficult to come by. The 0

(05:34):
proof or, you know, thesovereign concept we lean on a
lot is hashing. So once you'vehashed a piece of data, if a
person changes it, that hashchanges as well. So if you hash
data and then take that thosethose hashes and you interwind
them in blockchains, if youchange the hashes, the whole
blockchain breaks and and goesaway. You see this with Bitcoin

(05:54):
or Ethereum, where, you know,the previous block hash is the
way that they link themtogether.
So that's a sovereign conceptthere as well. So so just, like,
interweaving all these sovereigntechnologies for your system is
how you make it where a personwithout 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

(06:16):
able to do something peer topeer, that's much more sovereign
than if I have to go through aservice in the middle.
Like, for example, GoogleHangout is, you know, Google can
turn off my ability to haveGoogle Hangouts. But if I have a
peer to peer conferencingsystem, then I can have a
conference with somebody withouthaving to go through Google. So
building those peer to peertechnologies is is the goal

(06:37):
there. But then you haveproblems with ISPs, for example,
don't let you open up ports andand those things. So there are
ways to do peer to peertechnologies as well, and you
have to lean on some of thecurrent technologies that are
out there to do it.
But really, it's a collection ofall those little EPD pieces and
making customers aware of whichthings they're doing, which are
sovereign, and which thingsthey're doing which are not

(06:59):
sovereign so they can pickappropriately.

Kevin Horek (07:02):
Yeah. It's interesting. It seems to me, and
I always gauge this based onkind of my nontechnical friends
or kind of family members. Whenthey start mentioning stuff,
then I'm like, oh, okay. This islike a real mainstream kind of
thing.
So how do you, like or why doyou why do you think people are

(07:22):
actually starting to really careabout this stuff other than kind
of the people like you and methat have cared about this stuff
for years?

Arie Trouw (07:30):
Well, I think part of it is because people have
been using the word sovereigntymore and more in conversations.
I when I've gone to conferencesthis last year, I see people
either giving talks or on panelsusing the word sovereignty,
which makes me really happybecause there's not really good
words to describe that concept.You know, people kind of
conflated with freedom or agencyor those things where
sovereignty is different. And Ithink the reason people are

(07:52):
starting to look at that isbecause there's becoming more
and more questions of of truthand, you know, is this person
telling the truth? You know,whether trusting countries,
trusting companies, trustingpoliticians, and being able to
verify.
Because even if you go and lookat a website, for example, about
like a fact checking website,usually those are biased as

(08:12):
well. So they're going to factcheck it in a certain way. So if
you could actually fact checksomething independently, that's
a lot better than having to relyon somebody else fact checking
it for you. And I think longterm, the goal would be for
people to have their own AI,even for that reason, to help
them fact check stuff or to todo things. So if I have AI that

(08:33):
I've trained to do somethingwith my data and with data that
I want in there, I may trustthat AI more than trusting, you
know, a news outlet or a a largecompany or a nation to tell me
what the truth is.
And so being able to to havethat autonomy is something which
I think people want because thetrust, you know, trust has

(08:55):
eroded a lot, since, I'd say,the seventies eighties when
Walter Cronkite was on TV andeveryone just trusted Walter
Cronkite. Right? So that trusthas gone away and people need a
new way to be able to verifythings. And there's not that
many great solutions for that.

Kevin Horek (09:11):
Yeah, that's fair. And so many people can get
wrapped up in believingsomething that's not true.
Right? And they'll literally dieon that hill sometimes. And
you're like, Yeah, but if youactually go do your research,
you can prove that that's notwhat yours, like, made up,
right?
And we've seen that a ton withcertain types of the population.
And I find even like, reallysmart people that are very

(09:34):
logical can get trapped in it aswell, which I always hope kind
of really find fascinating.

Arie Trouw (09:41):
Well, I think that's one of the problems also you see
with, people arguing ordisagreeing. Often people
disagree about the answer, butthey don't take the time to take
the steps backwards and see,well, where do they agree?
Because the only way to actuallycome come to agreement on
something is you first have totake steps backwards to find,
you know, what your commonalityis. If you can't find a
commonality at all, there'syou're never gonna agree on

(10:02):
anything. So Yeah.
You know, if you step backwardsand you agree on a commonality,
you can both agree that that's afact. And then when you go
forward, if you disagree onsomething being a fact, then the
who wants to assert that in theargument as being a fact or a
reason why the argument shouldgo a certain direction is on
them to prove that the fact istrue. It's I think a lot of

(10:22):
people think that the way thatyou argue is I say something and
it's up to you to prove me or mystatement not true, which is
that's not how it

Kevin Horek (10:30):
works. Interesting.

Arie Trouw (10:32):
I have to prove my statement to be true as opposed
to you having to disprove itbecause a person will say
something, you know, is that,you know, completely the world's
flat. As I said, well, why doyou say the world's flat? Well,
you know, no one's ever provento me it's not. But if if
everything is true until provenfalse, that's not science.
That's not scientific method.
Method scientific method is youassume it's false until you can

(10:53):
prove it's true. And that's thatseems to have been lost by a lot
of people.

Kevin Horek (10:57):
No. I yeah. I 100% agree. So I'm curious. I wanna
dive a little bit deeper into xy o, and and how do people
actually leverage what you'rebuilding with what they're
building?

Arie Trouw (11:11):
So the the idea of X Y O is is a protocol, like many
of these things. And so there'scertain rules of how it works.
And the the primary concept inX. Y. O.
Is proof of origin chains. So wemake these these blockchains,
kind of like an Ethereumblockchain, but they're not
shared ledgers. Most people aremore familiar with the shared
ledger concept of Bitcoin or orEthereum, but that's very

(11:32):
inefficient because everybodyhas to verify the same block
chain. Everybody stores the samedata on there. It becomes
exorbitantly expensive.
So what we do is a a form of atangle where each person has
their own block chains and eachperson has their own thing. So,
for example, a person can fireup our website and, on a
computer, and when they do that,it starts up a node on their in

(11:52):
their browser actually, whichcan connect to other nodes. But
it also it 1st and foremost, itruns independently. It makes its
own blockchain. It stores itsown things.
And then if somebody else wantsto look at that, that structure
which it made is verifiablebased on my public address. So I
say, hey, I made this wholebunch of data here and I signed
all these in this structure. IfI give you the hash of the tail

(12:15):
of that that blockchain, thenthe rest of it basically can't
be changed. You know, I can goand and give it to you later on.
And for example, I can even notshow you the data of some of
these blocks.
I can have blocks in there whereI've never shown you the data,
but I've just shown you thehash. And then later on, if I
need to prove what was in thatblock, I can show you the data
that made that hash because it'sreally difficult to manufacture

(12:36):
false data that matches a hashafter the fact. So it's really
used more in an independentsystem basis. And then those
systems can talk to each otherwithout having to trust each
other because they can verifythe data via those signatures.

Kevin Horek (12:51):
Okay. Very cool. Can you give us maybe some use
cases that people have leveragedyour tech to actually use? Like,
I I think people could probablythink of some, but can you give
us some?

Arie Trouw (13:01):
Well, some of the simplest ones are, for example,
if I wanna take the the pricesof Uniswap tokens or other coins
out there and record thosesomewhere and then give you an
answer of over time, Being ableto store those in a way where
there's a history of those andyou can see that data whenever
you want to. And what are webasing our answer of our

(13:22):
trajectories on? That's a verysimple case where you have the
origin and the provenance ofthat data. Where did it come
from? Did it come from acentralized API?
Did it come from, you know,Uniswap? Did it come from those
different things? And then wemerge them into one thing. So
that's a sample, app that wehave on our website where it
just it shows how it's beingused. Things that are being

(13:44):
worked on now, there's, forexample, having conversations,
whether it's it's like a acommunications channel, like a
Twitter or or like a emailthread, where if you're speaking
to somebody, you can verify it'scoming from that person because
that person's signature is onthere.
They can also verify that theyhaven't removed anything from
that chain. So, securecommunications is something

(14:04):
which we're very interested in.And we definitely have some
people working on that right nowas a solution that that they're
using our technology for to beable to to basically prevent AI
or deepfakes from being put inthere where a person's confused
even in an email where, youknow, how do you know where
email came from? There are sometechnologies like DMARC and DKIM

(14:25):
if your solution if you'refamiliar with those that are
really kind of help you do that.But, if you have a blockchain
along with that, you'll also getthe sequence, stored there
permanently as well.
And so, you know, even deliverysystems, for example, you know,
where do your package get to?And if each of the warehouses
that goes near signs theblockchain, then you know it's

(14:47):
there and you can verify itindependently. So we've we've,
you know, done projects likethat as well.

Kevin Horek (14:53):
Interesting. So because, like, phishing and
stuff has become so popularwhether it's email or text or
whatever, is there, like, a waythen that, like, like, companies
could build that, say, in theiremail clients where it says,
like, this is verified to be,actually from your phone

(15:15):
company, or This is from thiscompany, and this company, and
this company, like into justlike a regular email client,
like your Gmail client orsomething because these some of
these attacks are getting like,very good and you click on a
link and you give somebody fullcontrol of your computer or your
device or whatever, like, or isthat just kind of a little bit
like fear mongering and that'snot really an issue for most

(15:37):
people? Or or where are we kindaat with that? Do you know what
I'm getting at?

Arie Trouw (15:40):
Well, I think that's becoming more and more common,
especially in the crypto spacebecause people, you know, it's
it's hard to claw back, youknow, transaction they didn't
mean to send. But Right. Alsoother financial fraud
situations, people are doingthis all the time. And the
simple solution for atechnological standpoint is, you
know, like DMARC on email worksthat way where there's a public
key that's stored in DNS thatthe the email client, like

(16:05):
Gmail, can go verify that thisemail actually, you know, gets
signed by the server that thisDNS says should have signed this
thing before it came to us sothey can filter it out. But the
problem is people are easy tosocially engineer.
So I've seen phishing scamswhere they just did a really
good job of making the emaillook like a bank. You know, say

(16:26):
it's Wells Fargo email orwhatever it is, it looks just
like it and everything. But ifyou just took the time to look
at the from email, it's [e-mail] or
something like that. You know,it's it's not even, you know,
they're not trying to spoof thethe domain for Wells Fargo.
They're they're just relying onthe fact that a person's gonna
look at that, and they're veryfamiliar with the way the email
looks because they've gottenthem before from the same

(16:47):
company that they they skipchecking those other things.
So that's where it becomesdifficult, where how does Google
verify the content of that, youknow, to since it's not coming
from that domain, they can'tsay, well, did this domain sign
it? Because it didn't have tosign it. So you kind of need AI
for that, where the AI will lookat that and be like, well, this
is something which if I were ahuman, I would think is a Wells

(17:10):
Fargo email, even though it camefrom some completely random
thing, like a Gmail account orwhatever it is. Maybe I should
flag that. So it's emailspecifically is a difficult
solution or difficult problem tosolve because of the fact that
people verify emails primarilythrough familiarity and, like,
what they see in the email andhow it's rendered, not through

(17:32):
things like the source emailaddress or the domain it came
from or the signature.
So getting people to changetheir behavior or at least
clients to make it more, youknow, obvious to a person that
this is potentially not from theplace that they wanted to come
from makes it harder for them tobe socially engineered. But, you
know, there's a case recentlywhere they did a whole deep fake

(17:54):
where they they mimicked anentire board of directors of a
company video conference to getsomebody to send a bunch of
crypto, I think it wassomewhere. That's pretty
involved. Getting getting peoplenot to fall for the things which
their brains gotten so used toverify. Like, you know, like the
fact that I got I'm almost a100% certain I'm talking to

(18:16):
Kevin right now, but, you knowYeah.

Kevin Horek (18:18):
I guess. Yeah. That's interesting.

Arie Trouw (18:20):
Video over there, that's that's not even you.

Kevin Horek (18:23):
Yeah. It's interesting. So it's almost it's
like well, and you could correctme if or you have a different
opinion on this, but it's almostup to software vendors to
implement as much of thesemeasures as possible. I'm not
saying it's not incrediblychallenging. It's just it's
probably easier than trying toget to change user behavior,

(18:47):
especially people that have beendoing it for a long period of
time.
It's not going to be perfect,but I think AI and blockchain
playing together can at leasthelp to verify certain things,
and it's maybe up to thesoftware vendors to actually
implement that instead of tryingto change the user behavior. Is
that or what are your thoughtsaround that?

Arie Trouw (19:07):
Yeah. I think that's, you know, like, for
example, if you were to put abig banner on the top, which,
like, says, like, the domain itcame from, like, you know, take
Gmail. If if it had a a domainsource on there, it's like this
came from Gmail, this came fromwellsfargo.com. This came from
where it was. That wouldprobably be much more likely for
a person to be able todetermine, like, why did this
Wells Fargo email come fromGmail?

(19:27):
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 thedomain because it doesn't help
them at all. Normally, you know,it helps them in the case where
they're being being a scam.
But normally, it's why are youwasting all this time and just
show me the domain of the thing.A place where I think they've

(19:47):
done a good job with that is thelock icon in browsers where
people have gotten used to nowsaying, well, you know, there's
there's no green lock there orthere's a red lock that's
unlocked and says, you know,it's the wrong domain for the
thing. So they've conditionedpeople to check to see what it
says in the in the header thereon whether or not

Kevin Horek (20:04):
it's actually something

Arie Trouw (20:05):
that's supposed to go, but they don't have the
equivalent for email.

Kevin Horek (20:09):
Yeah. That's interesting. Well, and I'm just
trying to run through my headjust like other apps that are
outside of email that, yeah,you're right. Like, if you put
up with a banner saying likethis might be fraudulent, like,
eventually, people would justbe, like, well, I see that all
the time. It's probably fine.
Like Yeah. Right? Where you'dhave to get them to be that,
like, lock thing where people,like, oh, that's actually, like,

(20:29):
an issue. Issue. Right?
Because they don't see it, like,where email's bad because you
get so well, most people, Ithink, get so many spam
messages. Right? And you'd beconstantly seeing that banner,
which is interesting. But youwanna 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

(20:52):
money and update everythingacross the web. Like, it's a
huge pain.
Right? But we're willing tosacrifice convenience sometimes
for that. Yeah. That'sinteresting.

Arie Trouw (21:01):
Just kind of kind of a 2 part solution. You know,
companies like ours need toprovide the tools, the
technology and the cryptographyto be able to solve the problem.
But then the companies which areproviding the front ends and the
UIs and the solutions also needto make sure they expose that to
the user. A good example is Idon't use Telegram at all
because on Telegram, you know,if I go on any any Telegram
channel, the next thing I knowthere's like 4 ARIs on there and

(21:23):
they're all asking for people tosend them, you know, X. Y.
O. Or something like that. Andthere's it's really hard to tell
which one's me and which one'sreal because you can just change
your username to whatever youwant to. Where if you go on,
like, Slack, for example, it's alot harder to mimic me. It's
still possible, but it's a lotharder to mimic me.
Or if you so or even on Twitterfor that reason, it's I'm I'm at

(21:44):
r hro. So, you know, somebodyelse could probably be, like, at
r hro 1 or whatever it is, blahblah blah. But it's a lot harder
to to mimic me. Where on, like,Telegram, they've they've
designed their UI where theactual username that's actually
going to differentiate me fromsomebody else is so hidden that
no one notices it.

Kevin Horek (22:03):
Right. Yeah. That's that's no. That's a really good
point. So I wanna dive a littlebit deeper into more of what you
and the team are buildingbecause it it's actually really
innovative, and I think peopletie blockchain to crypto and
NFTs, and they're you can usethem together, but they're

(22:25):
completely separate of eachother.
So where are we kind of at andand what exactly are you
building and and how couldpeople just, like, leverage what
you're building with or withoutkind of crypto and NFTs because
I think people still tie thosethings together, and it's not
really fair to do that. And Ithink with what's happening with

(22:46):
crypto lately, especially NFTs,people are just like, oh, that's
garbage. Nobody uses thatanymore. It's like, no. No.
No. There's a lot of good usesfor it, and a lot of people are
using it. And a lot of peoplethat are being negative about it
are using it every day, and theydon't even know. Do you agree
with that, or what are yourthoughts around that?

Arie Trouw (23:02):
Yeah. NFTs are one of those things where it's like
the the fundamental technologyfor it is really pretty cool and
amazing. It's just

Kevin Horek (23:08):
Totally.

Arie Trouw (23:08):
The whole speculative tool of market
aspect of it is kind of, youknow, really tainted it for many
people out there. Like, I wouldeven argue that the datagrams
that we have inside of XBELwhere you have a, you know, data
with a hash and that's stored isin a weird sort of way an NFT.
It's a non fungible piece ofdata. It's not very

Kevin Horek (23:28):
complicated, but

Arie Trouw (23:29):
it's each one's unique. So they're non fungible.
You don't you don't have like 40different copies of the exact
same piece of data. They eachhave their own own hash and they
can even assign ownership tothem if you want to. So in a
weird sort of way, we kind ofuse NFTs conceptually as the
building block for how we storedata in our system.
But it's not there's no, like,marketplace for our NFTs, you

(23:51):
know, so there's no value forus, you know, some Right. Buying
and speculate on them, which isa complete different concept
there. But what we're trying tobuild right now is we're going
to be coming up with a thing wecall X y OS, which is a layer
which you run on top of yournodes. So when you're running an
XyOS node, this is the UI forit's kind of like, you know,
gnome or kde that you would haveLinux. And so it's a UI and you

(24:13):
can make it a lot easier forusers to be able to use
something that's peer to peerand sovereign without even
realizing how it's workingunderneath it and how we're
using blockchain andcryptography to actually
accomplish that.
So, you know, in that case, Icould put photos on there. And
then if somebody were to connectto my my, you know, note on my
computer, I can, you know,approve their address. And if

(24:34):
they're a friend of mine, youknow, I can say, well, you can
see these photos. But the photosonly exist on my computer. They
don't get stored in the cloudsomewhere or potentially
deleted.
You could back them up if youwant to. You could you could use
a cloud archivist to store themin our system. But without that,
it's just peer to peer. It's acompletely sovereign system. So
I can share pictures.
I can share comments or notes ordocuments with people in a

(24:54):
completely peer to peersituation, which is very similar
to me as the early days of theInternet where I would have my
own web server, my own emailserver at home, and you'd have
your email server at home, andthey 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 sovereigntyand that peer to peerness has
gone away. So our XyOS, or XyOS,as we call it, is really a way

(25:17):
for people to be able to toeasily use solutions and
applications that or dApps thatdo peer to peer sovereign
concepts for them and reallyillustrate the power of x y o.

Kevin Horek (25:33):
Okay. Very cool. So how do people actually go about
leveraging the technology andhow are you helping kind of
blockchain developers and andpeople that are looking to
become blockchain developers?

Arie Trouw (25:45):
We have a a bunch of SDKs. So we, our primary SDK is
written in, TypeScript andJavaScript. So that's where the
majority of people were to useit there. And, they can use it
as little as just the the rawprotocol where it know, it does
the payloads and the boundbusinesses for you. Or we also
have React SDK.

(26:06):
So if you wanna make a websitethat is uses our system to be
able to store stuff and andrender things to do all that,
you can also use our our Reactwrappers for it. One of the cool
things that, our system alsodoes kind of as a side effect,
which I I like like a lot, isthe fact that you can make a
true, like, sovereign singlepage app where it's a or a web

(26:30):
app where when, you know, how onGoogle Mail, like, if you
disconnect from the Internet, itcan still, like, you can author
a piece of mail. It's just therein the queue, and the next time
you connect, it actually willsend it. So our system, because
we have, we use IndexedDB on thebrowser to actually have an
archivist there. So we havelocal archivist to store stuff.
You can completely use oursystem without the Internet in a

(26:50):
browser. And then when youconnect to the Internet, it then
starts, like, going again andand transferring data. And then
when you stop, it's it's stillthere. So, being able to make an
application or some sort of asolution that really wants to
work offline and worksovereignly, is something which
is hard to do for most peoplewhere we make it way easier

(27:12):
because just it's kind of plugand play way of making, local
only or local first website.

Kevin Horek (27:21):
No. Makes makes a lot of sense. Can you give us
some use cases of maybecustomers that have have
leveraged that? Like, why wouldthey wanna potentially do that?
Obviously, like, the obviousones are if people are traveling
around an airplane or somethinglike that, but what what other
use cases have you seen withthat, feature and functionality?

Arie Trouw (27:38):
Well, an interesting, use case is is
games. Right? So Sure. If youfeel like World of Warcraft way
back when Yep.

Kevin Horek (27:45):
Yep. I did. Connection

Arie Trouw (27:47):
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 thatcomes from your computer because
you could be, you know, speedingup your character or you could
be teleporting to differentplaces. You could be cheating in
the game. So really the game inthat case runs on their server
and users have like a thinclient, kind of like a mainframe
with a thin client viewing thegame. And as soon as that link

(28:10):
goes away, it stops. But withour 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 youpick 10 cards, we can then
exchange hashes of what the 10cards are.
Now we've both, like, locked inwhat our hands are, and we can
go ahead and play it. But I canspend as much time as I want to

(28:30):
make my cards. I don't have togo and make my hand on a server.
We can independently play a turnwithout being online. So, you
know, it really besides allowingyou to work offline, it also
allows you to offload a lot ofthe work to the client.
And it's kind of like that's theboomerang effect where
throughout the history ofcomputer science, we've gone

(28:51):
between thin client and thickclient and thin client and thick
client. And I think it's reallytime for it to go back to thick
client as opposed to being thisthin client thing where you just
log in and you look at yourFacebook stuff on Facebook or
that sort of a thing. This alsoallows for AI, for example, if I
were to have a bunch of datas onmy computer that I don't want to
share necessarily with OpenAI orMicrosoft or whoever, I can

(29:14):
actually have that data used asa learning set on my own
computer. I can share thelearning set if I want to
afterwards, but the data I trainit on, I don't have to go and
share it with everybody else. Soand but besides the sharing and
the privacy aspect, it's justnot feasible for, you know, any
of these companies to build datacenters large enough for

(29:34):
everybody's learning such to becrunched by all these different
GPUs to be able to learn onthem.
So distributing that to all thedifferent clients is a lot
better. Interesting.

Kevin Horek (29:44):
No. That's that's actually, like, a really
fascinating use case. Well, andeven just the cybersecurity
angles that that could come withtoo. Right? Like, just it's
gotta be almost unlimited.
Is that fair to say?

Arie Trouw (29:58):
Yeah. Well, it's the first step to not having your
your data stolen or hacked isnot having it on somebody else's
server. You know, there's asaying in crypto, not my
storage, not my keys, or, wherebasically it's like, yeah, if
you have a a cloud cloud wallet,for example, or somebody else

(30:18):
has access to your private key.So effectively, it's, or it's
not by crypto, not by or so notby keys, not by crypto. But,
it's like, you don't have you'renot sure that that's not going
to get stolen or taken orwhatever it is.
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 theypromise to give it back to you

(30:40):
sort of a thing where if I haveit in a cold wallet, for
example, I know that that that'ssafe there. So the easiest way
to not have people access yourdata or take your data is to not
socialize it. And so if you wantto store, you know, one of the
use cases I was talking aboutrecently, which I that was

(31:06):
really cool is for AI, if youwant to be able to have it
trained on all of your behaviorsand all your idiosyncrasies and
all like who you are so it knowshow to answer questions for you.

Kevin Horek (31:12):
Yeah.

Arie Trouw (31:13):
What you really want to do is put a camera on your
head and have it observe you 24hours a day. Now, do you want to
have video and audio of you 24hours a day on somebody's cloud
server? Probably not.

Kevin Horek (31:24):
No. Yeah. Fair enough.

Arie Trouw (31:26):
AI, which is learning from you to actually
observe all those things. So,you know, like, how you wash
yourself in the shower isprobably something that, you
know, the AI should learn so itknows which soap to order for
you from Amazon. But it'ssomething which you want to keep
local. You don't you don't wannahave to upload that to have
somebody go and and learn off ofthat to give you a a better AI

(31:47):
assistant, for example.

Kevin Horek (31:49):
Yeah. That's actually really fascinating. I
think, well, since we lastchatted, AI has obviously been
around for a number of years,but it's kind of become
mainstream because of the chatgbt's of the world and a few
others. But how do you thinkthat AI is really kind of going
to change the Internet and andjust jobs in general based on

(32:13):
what you're seeing out there?

Arie Trouw (32:16):
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 usechat gpt to, you know, find out
things about code or, you know,various questions where it's a
lot faster for it to come upwith those answers than for me
to go and try to use Google andcomb through the different
sources that are out there. Ithink students are using it a

(32:39):
lot more for research and beingable to write papers. They're
even cheating by using it towrite the entire paper for them
in some cases, which has changedthat.
I think that's also happened injobs where the efficiency of
many people have gone upsubstantially because they can
use that. Or even in some cases,if you're a small company, as an
entrepreneur, one of difficultthings is, you know, you only
have 3 or 4 people, and you allneed to be able to do 10

(33:00):
people's shops. And so to go outand hire a specialist that's
like a copywriter, for example,used to be a requirement. Now
it's like, well, I can just useChatGPT as a requirement. You
know, it's maybe it's not asgood as that copywriter, but
it's 80% as good.
And I can't afford thecopywriter. It's way better than
I am. So for all the tasks thatyou're not an expert at, having
chatGPT be the next best thingis hugely important. And I think

(33:24):
a lot of companies are doingthat now. That's why I think
we're seeing some interestingchanges in employment structures
as companies where I think thefocus of where they're hiring
has changed in many casesbecause there's certain roles
that could be 80, 90% replacedwith chat GPT and certain roles
which can't be.
So I think that's alreadyhappening. I think the biggest

(33:44):
place where it's still going tohappen is the personal AI where,
you know, it's your own personalassistant. It's even mimicking
yourself and being able to havelike, like, the Harry Potter
painting where you have thepainting that speaks to you.
Right? It's like you take aphoto and then, you know, you
know, it's sitting there, butyou can ask questions and it's

(34:06):
actually, you know, a 3 dversion of myself who can
interact with you as if it'sreal.
Those are the solutions that areare gonna be fascinating to me.

Kevin Horek (34:15):
No. Yeah. It's interesting. It's interesting
because, like, I moved away fromGoogle for probably 90% of my
search. My default search enginenow, it actually goes to
Reflexity, which is anotherchatbot.
Google that haven't heard of it,but it's the same concept, like,
you use chat gbt, like, usingthat. But if you were to ask me,
like, 6 months or a year ago, Iwould've been, like, probably

(34:37):
not. But, like, now it's, like,I use that probably 90 plus
percent of my time compared tojust, like, where you just be
Google searching constantly andtrying to find stuff. And, sure,
it might take a second longer toget results, but it's pretty
close majority of the time,right, of what you're looking
for without having go through 10links or a couple links. Right?

Arie Trouw (34:58):
It's actually net net is it's faster because, you
know, yes, each result's fasterwith Google. But if you say if
it's a search 10 times where youhave to go Yeah. You know,
figure out if it's the correctone, the time from question to
answer is faster with the AIsearch engines, basically.

Kevin Horek (35:15):
Totally. So do you think it's really going to
change how developers developand blockchain on and just kind
of in general, or or where doyou think that kind of some of
these tech jobs are gonna gowith AI?

Arie Trouw (35:33):
Well, I think it's it's like any any career. You
know, it gets eaten up from thebottom up, not from the top
down. And so, a mediocre or areally poor engineer who's just
basically cutting and pastingcode and, you know, making a
website for somebody thatpractically you can make in Wix,
those jobs are gonna go awayfirst because, you know, it's

(35:53):
probably already the the casewhere where AI can probably do a
better job than that guy becausehe's just not that good at a
job. Where if you start askingabout AI, like, how should you
architect something? Or, youknow, how do you improve the
efficiency of something oroptimize those?
It gets more and more difficult.So but I think the problem is
there's especially in thesoftware engineering world,

(36:14):
there's, you know, it's a it's apyramid. Right? There's the even
though you think of the, say,the bottom 25% of software
engineers as from a qualitystandpoint or from a skill set
standpoint, should I say, asbeing 25%. But it's probably
more like 75% of softwareengineers fall in the bottom 25%
of of quality.

(36:35):
And then you have the better andbetter ones on there. So you
have maybe 75% of your of of thesoftware engineers at risk of
being Or even in the caseswhere, like for me, you know, I
probably would hire less juniorsoftware engineers because I can
have ChatGPT do the job for me.Or, you know, like where I would
normally just say, oh, I gotthis repetitive task. I'll have

(36:58):
a junior guy do it. Now I canjust, you know, have ChatGPT do
it for me.
So all the industries are goingto, I think, have this bottom up
cannibalization where, like, youlose the the less experienced
and less skilled people. And Ithink it's also gonna make it
more difficult for people out ofcollege to get to get that
experience that they need to bein the top of the pyramid. So I

(37:19):
think it's it's both a pruningof the current workforce, but
also I think it's a barrier forthe future workforce, which is
probably a bigger concern forme.

Kevin Horek (37:28):
Yeah. No. I agree with that. So for somebody
that's kinda coming out ofschool, what advice do you give
to them so they hopefully canget that kind of first job or
second job when they're kind ofa junior?

Arie Trouw (37:41):
I think a lot of it is is just you have to to hone
your skills. You have to getgood at it. You have to and if
you're gonna find a mentorthat's willing to work with you,
that's the best thing. Andanother thing that also makes it
worse is the work from homesituation we have now after
COVID. It's a lot harder for ajunior engineer or junior
employee of any sort to actuallylearn from a mentor when they're

(38:02):
working remotely.
So you have to find a mentorthat you can work in the same
office at and learn from them.But that's difficult because
that time is something whichthose mentors only have so much
of. So they're gonna try andpick the best and the brightest
to to work with. So it'sdifficult. You know, it used to
be kind of like, you know, yougo to to any college in the
United States, you get your 4year degree in computer science

(38:24):
and you're guaranteed a, youknow, a near 6 figure salary,
you know, graduating.
I don't think it's gonna be thecase 10 years from now. I think
it's going to be much more of astruggle for people. I think
it's the same thing that you hadwith doctors. You know, doctors
used to be, you know, theseventies. You know, you get
your MD, you know, you're gonnabe a millionaire by the time
you're 50.
Right? Which back then,$1,000,000 was a lot of money
too. But nowadays, there'sthere's plenty of doctors that,

(38:47):
you know, they probably make thesame amount of money as software
engineers. Yeah.

Kevin Horek (38:51):
Because Or less sometimes.

Arie Trouw (38:53):
Or less. Yeah. It's been commoditized in many ways.
So I think software engineeringis really going through that
same phase that it's been duefor that. And we think we have
to some degree an overoverpopulation of software
engineers.
But at the same time, I wouldsay that people should learn how
to write JavaScript or how tohow to do software engineering

(39:14):
type things because it helps youin other jobs. Like if you're a
content writer or a marketer,being able to know how to write
JavaScript things to be able tocut and paste your pixels and
implement to websites is askill. So I think software
engineering to some degree isgoing to, for many people, move
from being a vocation to being askill that they need for other
jobs.

Kevin Horek (39:33):
That's actually really interesting. Yeah. I will
say as, like, somebody that'sbeen a designer basically my
whole career, just the no codetools or low code tools have
been an absolute game changerfor me, right, where I don't
even need really a developer nowto build an MVP, maybe a crude

(39:54):
V1 of something like an ideawhere before I could maybe
struggle through it for monthsat a time, but it just you
usually lose interest in theproject before you launch,
Right? Where now we're talkingdays or weeks. You can have
something where it would take meyears maybe to get some

(40:14):
something up, right, in kinda myspare time.
And so I think even justleveraging some of the AI tools
as you're you're going up. And,like, I've been leveraging a
bunch of, like, the tools evenon the design side, like, even
to generate some ideas quick ortest some heat mapping ideas or
just do some certain things thatalmost gets you even 20, 40, 60,

(40:35):
80% through something. So Ithink leveraging that especially
early on in your career or ifyou've been added a number of
years has really been helpful tome. Well,

Arie Trouw (40:45):
important also for people to know what the AI is
doing. So it's one of the thingsthat Yeah. People that use
those, as you say, the the nocode or low code tools, but they
don't understand, like, CSS, forexample, at all. So it's like,
when something goes wrong,they're like, well, they don't
know how to fix it. They don'tunderstand what went wrong.
So I think it's still importantfor people to have a limited
understanding of what's actuallyhappening under the covers when

(41:07):
the when the tool is doingsomething for you. So when
something goes wrong,potentially, or at least it
helps you understand whysomething 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 whyit's not working. If you just
try it a different way, perhapsit'll work.
So I don't think it those toolspreclude a person from having a
cursory understanding of howtechnology works. It just

(41:28):
precludes them from having to bean expert at those. And it's
kind of what I was sayingbefore, like, I don't have to be
an expert at copywriting. I canuse ChatGPT to copyright for me
better than I can copyrightbecause that's a skill which I
would not say I'm, you know, thetop 10% person of so, you know,
especially for the skills where,you know, it really allows

(41:49):
people to focus on their theirexpertise and then still get,
you know, 70, 80 percent qualityout of their non expertise.
That's all it.

Kevin Horek (41:57):
Yeah. No. That's an interesting way to put it. So
I'm curious. I wanna talk alittle bit more about is there
any other features of theplatform that we haven't really
covered today that, you know,people could leverage in their
apps or their current apps ortheir new apps?
And then kinda how easy is it toget started with an app that

(42:20):
I've maybe had for a number ofyears?

Arie Trouw (42:23):
Well, we're launching our, the XylOS thing I
was talking about before, andwe're launching our builder
program, at the end of thequarter. So that's probably the
best time for a person to tostart using this, because it it
does 2 things. It gives you theSDKs and the tools to be able to
build things. But one of thedeals we've had with developers
is it's kind of hard for aperson to to try it out. It's
kind of like asking a person towrite an iPhone app without an

(42:44):
iPhone.
And so now with the X by OS, itgives you like a little test
environment where it's like, oh,you write this app and do
something, but you can just popit into our our X y OS node and
you can see it running rightaway. And so, it really gives
you a test environment as wellas like a user's environment. So
that's why we've kind of beendragging our feet a little bit
with, the builder program to getit out when a person actually

(43:08):
has a way to more easily testsomething. It's kind of like the
Ganache and truffle suite thatthey have for Ethereum. Because
before that, if you tried towrite smart contracts before you
had truffle and ganache, it wasreally difficult.
Right? So we're kind of in thatstage, you know, where, yes,
it's all technically there. Youknow, if a person understands
how to do it, you know, we canwalk them through it. But it

(43:28):
takes a lot of hand holding forus to have a partner actually
build something which we've gonethrough that experience, which
is one of the reasons why we'retrying to build the the tools
and the, the dev environments tobe able to have people more
easily create something that hasan immediate feedback to look
for them that's that's awesome.So, you know, they can spend a
few hours and build somethingthat runs and is cool, and they

(43:49):
can share with their friends.

Kevin Horek (43:51):
No. Makes a lot of sense. So and there's probably
mixed opinions on this, but howmuch of a product should you
potentially put on theblockchain from day 1? Should
all of it, some of it, dependson the feature set, or what's
your thoughts around that?

Arie Trouw (44:11):
I think that's a really difficult question. It's
because the problem is if you ifyou were absolutist and you say,
well, I'm gonna put everythingon Ethereum. You're gonna end up
with people having to pay 100 ofdollars, you know, per minute or
whatever it is. Yeah. It's justnot practical.
So conceptually, like I wouldsay, like, you want to put as
much as you can on theblockchain because it's dice.

(44:33):
But really, I think what itcomes down to is you have to to
figure out, well, which thingsbenefit from it and which things
don't. Because, you know, havingsomething that's that's running
on a shared ledger that's that'scentralized, like that Oreo,
it's it's got that pinch point.That's not important. Like, for
example, you wouldn't renderyour I've seen people actually
make rendered things throughblockchain.
It seems like it was an EOS appthat was Space Invaders and the

(44:56):
entire Space Invaders engine wasrunning on EOS. It's like it was
a really cool tech demo. Butwhat you really just want is you
potentially just want to throwthe high scores. Yeah, maybe
it's just the high scores youwant to put there or you want to
put the seeds for the randomizerof the game on blockchain. So so
knowing which things have thebest bang for your buck that you
put on blockchain is, I think,the first step.

(45:19):
And as blockchain gets more andmore efficient, you can put more
things there. Our our goal at Xwhale, actually, one of the
things is to to make it so that,our system, despite the fact
that it's blockchain based andit works the way it does, it's
actually easier to use and moreefficient and faster than, like,
using Mongo or or an equivalentweb 2 solution. That's very

(45:41):
difficult because it does morethings. You have to sign things
and you have to, you know, doadditional work there. But we're
much closer to that goal than ashared ledger like Ethereum or
or Bitcoin is just because ofthe fact that we don't have to
have a whole bunch of parties dothe same thing over and over
again.
So, you know, it's it's hard toknow what that level is, but

(46:01):
it's definitely not a 100%.

Kevin Horek (46:04):
Yeah. No. That I agree with that. That makes a
lot of sense. So how do you guysmonetize the platform then?

Arie Trouw (46:12):
So, well, right now we have the coin app. It's, it's
really what our our our userfirst experience is. A person
can store their data on there,and and use that for, basically
producing data for our XBYOnetwork. And then they can get
paid on there for that data bygetting coin in the coin app.
And then they can redeem thatfor X, Y, L.

(46:33):
So that's kind of how it closesthe loop where, you know, we
pick the consumers of our dataand then the consumers of our
data end up paying them. So wehave 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 whichhave not been using crypto
before. It's it's a very easy touse app on a phone that people

(46:57):
are very familiar with. And youdon't have to have, like, a
wallet to it isn't like, youknow, install the ETH client
first sort of a thing.
It's much easier than that. Youcan just kind of get started and
then, you know, redeem fromthere. So that's really our path
to getting people to beinterested in there. And then
from there, transitioning theminto XBIO. So we make revenue
from coin right now.
That's kind of what our primarycoin driver is. Our goal this

(47:19):
year is to to expand that tohave, a lot more revenue
opportunities, with the actualXYO network and, people using
that and some services thatwe're gonna be launching for
that as well.

Kevin Horek (47:31):
Interesting. No. That that makes a lot of sense.
So we're kinda coming to the endof the show, but is there
anything else that you'd like tocover today that we haven't
related to x y z o or or x y oor any other kind of advice
you'd wanna pass along?

Arie Trouw (47:47):
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 adifferent way of looking at
crypto and the benefits of it asopposed to, you know, everyone's
just trying to make the faster,you know, shared ledger or their
the more NFT. So I think thatthere's there's different ways
to solve the the goals of whatthe, like, the Cypherpunks

(48:10):
wanted.
They wanted sovereignty. Theywanted permanence and provenance
and those sorts of things. So Ithink focusing on those is what
makes us special as opposed tofocusing on trying to make, you
know, an existing solution tothose better or or different or
or that sort of thing. Sofocusing on the goal of what
we're why we're trying to do itis important. I I think that's

(48:31):
what a lot of people should belooking at also when they look
at different crypto projects iswhy are they doing it?
What's the goal? What are theytrying to achieve for that?
What's the the purpose of whatthey're doing? And so, you know,
we're we stand out that way. Andalso, you know, you know, we're
a US company, and we're, youknow, we're registered here in
the US.
We file twice a year as acompany, that sort of a thing.

(48:53):
So, I think our transparency issomething which is very
interesting, for compared tomost of the the market out
there.

Kevin Horek (49:02):
No. Yeah. That's that's really interesting. I'm
curious, where do you think thestate of crypto and NFTs is
these days? And do you thinkthey're both gonna become or,
like, popular again?
Or, like, is it kind of all doomand gloom and it's gonna go
away?

Arie Trouw (49:17):
I wouldn't say it's unpopular right now. Bitcoin has
been doing well. They have theETP out there. And so, it's it's
not I wouldn't say it's peopleare that down on crypto at
large. I think people are downon NFTs to some degree.
I think we're basically in thesame state kind of where AI was

(49:38):
before a couple of years agowhen ChatGPT came out. I think
you need that that killersolution. We need someone that
could be, like, hey. I you know,we've done this with with
crypto, and it's reallyinteresting. And now I
understand why using crypto isbetter and different.
And that's where I see XBYOgoing with our XBYOS, where a
person can use that and they'llbe like, oh, this is really
cool. This is a great solution.I'm going to use this. And then,

(49:59):
Oh, yeah, by the way, I didn'teven realize it's using crypto
and it has all these otherbenefits as well. So getting a
person to to enjoy a solutionand then finding out that it's
crypto and it has sovereigntyand has all those aspects, I
think is the right way to to gothere as opposed to, oh, this is
really painful, but it's crypto,so just bear with me and, you
know, deal with the pain, whichis where I think a lot of the

(50:22):
solutions are nowadays.

Kevin Horek (50:24):
Yeah. That's actually really good advice. But
how will we close the show withmentioning where people can get
more information about yourself,XYO, and any other links you
wanna mention?

Arie Trouw (50:35):
Yeah. Well, go to xy0.network to be able to get,
information about what we'redoing there, what our projects,
is. Obviously, you can find ourtoken on, Coinbase and on a
variety of different differentthings out there. We also have
our stock is traded on x y x y lb on, on t zero. I think we're
the highest volume stock onthere most days.

(50:56):
So, very excited about the thewrap securities that t zero has
been providing for us. So, youknow, we're a publicly traded
company from that standpointbecause it's it's considered
over the counter. And then,also, you can go to xylabs.com
if you wanna read more about thecompany behind xyo.network, and
all of our corporate filings arethere also available and and

(51:16):
that sort of a thing.

Kevin Horek (51:18):
Very cool, Ari. Well, I really appreciate you
again taking the time out ofyour day to be on the show, and
I look forward to keeping intouch with you and have a good
rest of your day, man.

Arie Trouw (51:24):
Thank you very much for having me on, Kevin.

Kevin Horek (51:26):
Thank you. K.

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