The Graph co-founder Yaniv Tal launches Geo Debates for web3 social

0:00I'm Ashton Addison from the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have with Yanval who co-founded the graph the protocol that made blockchain data open and queryable to that thousands of applications depend on. He stepped away from that to quietly build something new and that project is GIO an open knowledge network and today they're

0:20launching their first product. Excited to dive into this with Geo Debates. Yanv thank you for taking the time.

Thanks Ashton it's great to be with you. Likewise, and I can imagine it's launch day with years in the making. And we're speaking on the day of. You must be super busy and there's a lot to catch up on and I, you know, we like to, but

0:42this is about as new as it gets. So excited to dive into this and maybe we can start with a little bit on the backstory. You know, the graph is being used by thousands of companies, infrastructures, and developers, and now you're moving over to more of a consumerf facing application. Maybe you can start with that story on you built something incredible and now you

1:01you yourself have pivoted to more of the consumerf facing apps.

Yeah, so founded the graph back in 2017 and we were we were really one of the first infrastructure protocols. I mean we kind of defined that category and we really believed in the vision of web 3, right? that the web was too concentrated into the hands of a few you know big tech companies and that we need

1:26to make things open composable interoperable give more power to individuals so that you're not locked in and I still believe that every bit as much today as I did back then and so you know the graph was really successful at at an infrastructure level is really serving like you know the things that people were building on blockchains and a lot of that has been DeFi you know

1:47it's a limited set of kind of applications and For me, you know, I was looking at this and I'm like, clearly like web 3 still does not exist in the way that we always saw it. And, you know, for me, it's such an important thing to work on because, you know, we do need to give people more power, not have it so concentrated. And, and in today's information environment, it just

2:11feels like it's so hard to know what to trust. And we need better verifiability and better coordination systems. And so, you know, to me, the only way to really push things forward, you know, because I didn't see it happening. I didn't see it working. It was like, we have to go out and we have to do this ourselves.

Yeah, I agree. And I love that

2:35vision because I felt the same way in 2017. We founded a consumerf facing application for, you know, blockchain based ticketing. And it's like there's so many use cases. of course financial industry decentralized finance is super important and that's an early use case but blockchain is going to be touching everywhere where you know outside of finance all of the industries

2:57that have data or transactions entertainment social and I think that the social part especially needs some catching up on we need to update and bring the power back to the people

100% couldn't agree more

you know and when you pivoted from the graph, you know, you did you self-fund this whole thing and you've been working heads down sort of in the bare market. I

3:23think we're coming back now, but throughout the bare market, sort of heads down just building this the entire time.

That's right. Really have not taken a break, have not, you know, taken a beat. It's it's been, you know, straight from that in 2022 to self-funding GIO. And so essentially had to start over with the team, you know, put a team together in place. Fortunately, you

3:47know, there were a lot of people that really, you know, believed in the vision of web 3 and you know, what, you know, I've been trying to build, for, the last, I mean, while. So, we've got a really great team and, yeah, it's taken four years now. We have actually released little things along the way but you know what we're building is really I mean a core internet

4:10protocol you know so you think of something like HTTP and so imagine both trying to do the protocol and a consumer app at the same time

you know that's that's a really tough thing to do because they're almost diametrically opposed right like a protocol's job is to be stable and perfect and never change right and then a consumer app's job is to iterate and

4:33evolve and you know meet consumers where they are. So doing both of those together has been, you know, quite the challenge. And, you know, because we're trying to build a foundation for web 3, you know, it's you can't scale the thing until it's really ready. And you don't really know when it's ready until you've just tried a lot of different things. And so that's really

4:55been, you know, the process over the last four years of, you know, lots of different use cases, lots of different, you know, things that we're trying to really get the full landscape of what does it take to build open, composable, interoperable applications, right? That are verifiable. And there's just so many different layers to that to finally get to like a polished consumer

5:22app. Definitely and I'd love to dive into the application more and we can get into the protocol later which is super important. You know, Bitcoin has been a revolutionary protocol and be great to live up to its standards. But on the consumer app, you know, on the so social side, maybe we can paint a picture for the problem that Gio is

5:45actually solving. And may and maybe I just pretense this by saying this is different than other social applications, but over the years we've seen people try to build decentralized Twitter, you know, alternatives to web 3 to web 2 social media that everyone in the world is on and we can't seem to get it right or at least there's no network effect. So people stay stuck on

6:08these apps that we don't want to use, you know, and also they're consuming our time and our life and it's like we need to get away from this but we need to find what's that magic key that allows us to move into web 3 on the social side.

Yeah, great question. So, Geo is a network for organizing knowledge that we can trust and you can actually build any

6:30type of application on top of that foundation once you structure the knowledge in an open composable verifiable way. And so, the key insight that I think a lot of people, you know, missed and it took us a while, but you know, we always kind of had an inkling is the trick to getting web 3 right is in how you structure the information. And the way that you structure the

6:54information is in a graph, [snorts] right? Not just any kind of graph, but a knowledge graph. And so knowledge graphs, right, are the most flexible way of representing information where you have entities and relations between entities. And these relationships can be like free form. And so you don't have to know upfront how everything is connected, but over time you can create

7:17those connections. And that provides better context and understanding. and it's something that can grow and grow and grow and the original architects of the web actually understood that. So Tim Berners Lee and those guys were actually trying to build something called the semantic web which was this exact idea. But there were a bunch of things that were missing back then and

7:38some issues in their original implementation that made it like never really get traction, never really work. But they understood like this is what the web was supposed to be. And now we have AI. Now we have, you know, crypto open decentralized networks. And those are actually both of the things that we were missing that we needed to actually build this open composable graph of

8:00knowledge and information. And so [snorts] in web 3, you know, we saw experiments like Farcaster, like Lens, and you know, many of them they didn't have the success that we all, you know, would have wanted. And I think that you know one of the core reasons was first of all they didn't understand that key insight. So, you know, they were still building like specific

8:23applications, right? They were building like the social app, right? Where it's it's just posts and maybe you can like respond to posts, but that's an application specific data model versus having an open generalized, you know, connected graph of any type of thing, any type of application, right? That's what really creates the network effects. You need that open graph model. And then

8:48you know you can build all kinds of applications and those applications they need to be differentiated right they can't just be like another Twitter clone

or it's going to be really difficult to compete against Twitter [laughter]

so you need the open graph you know [snorts] knowledge graph data model and then you need to build you know new

9:05experiences and if you do that well we can really make this web 3 thing happen. Definitely. No, that sounds really exciting and I feel like your experience building the graph has influenced this in you know building the right architecture for consumerf facing application but also the introduction of AI and more people are now connecting you know using MCPs and APIs to all of

9:31their applications. Everything's sort of interconnected and this feels like the perfect time to integrate both of those things into like a social application. 100%. So, you know, I think for a moment, you know, the crypto web 3 people were probably looking at AI, you know, and saying like, damn, you know, those guys are moving really fast. There's all kinds of interesting things

9:49happening over there. But the reality is, I think AI and crypto are really going to go handinand, you know, and web 3 specifically. And in a lot of ways, the acceleration of AI, well, not only enables web 3 in a way that was difficult to do before. But it's really going to accelerate it because what AI is doing is it's giving people these really powerful tools where

10:16suddenly they want to have more control because they have these powerful tools and they don't want to be limited. So suddenly now you want your agent to have access right to all of your data, all of your information and you want to have full control, right? You don't want it to be like locked and with like random rules and siloed and controlled by, you

10:37know, all of these different companies. I mean, you can connect to them with APIs and MCPs, but it's not the same. You know, if you have all your data in one place, organized the way that you want, you can update it, you have no limits, right? Like, you're just going to be way more effective. And so that's what people want. You know, we're also seeing people like Vibe Code apps

10:55and that's [snorts] so powerful. So, you know, AI is accelerating this transition away from these like one-sizefits-all centralized solutions. Now, it, you know, people want to do things themselves and they have that power, but we still need to solve some of the core primitives, right, that really enables that. And that's where Web 3 comes in, right? That's the composability, the

11:17interoperability. Okay, how do we structure this stuff? So that you can actually you know have composability and interoperability across applications and then once you do that then you know how do you actually you know build up trust in a distributed setting right because when you have you know these centralized platforms then everybody can just like trust those platforms right

11:43Twitter's going to take care of that Google's going to take care of that and then we can trust the platforms and that's it. Well, now suddenly if I'm dealing with a million people that I don't know, you know, we're just, you know, directly, how do we build up that trust? So, that's exactly what Web 3 was meant to address. And so, these two technologies are just going to

12:02supercharge each other. And I think we're going to see a lot of exciting things.

Definitely, I agree. I'm excited to see the crypto part and the verification and underlying protocols support that authenticity in social. I feel right like right now in the social platforms there's there's two things that are making it crazy. The first is that

12:24everyone's making AI content, AI videos, and you it's getting to the point where you can't really tell what's real and what's not real. And secondly, the company, you know, they don't really don't put enough disclaimers to let people know like, yeah, you know, people are posting AI or fake news and it's like or music and people listening to

12:46this music all day. They don't even know that it's not created by humans. And it doesn't really say anywhere.

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. So, I think verification, you know, building a web of trust, right? All of these things super important to do right now.

Definitely. And now further on growing geo debates on the debate side as the first product in geo. Can talk to me

13:12about that? You know, there's a lot of debates on the internet on Facebook comments and people going back and forth and on X especially. But none of it is really I don't know if it really get we're getting the amount of value out of it that we should be.

Yeah. So today we launched Geo Debates and it's a new social app for short form video debates and what we want to do is

13:37help you know elevate the quality of discourse online and you know remind people that we're all just people and actually we should be exploring you know ideas and that by you know the process of debate we can learn more about each other. we can learn more about what's happening in the world and hopefully get a little bit closer to truth.

so, we just launched this today

14:02and we're really excited to see you know the types of conversations that people can have on this new platform. The you know we want to be having discussions about the biggest issues every day and hopefully people will be able to find you know high quality you know conversations and discussions and then what we want to do is help structure that in a way that's better

14:25than exists on any of the social platforms today right because you know most of what we see on social it's really just feeds right it's a single feed and it's whoever shouts the loudest you know goes the farthest and you can end up in some you comment, you know, maybe like rabbit hole thread, but then like that context is really lost.

And really what we need is a way to grow

14:46knowledge over time so that we can move, you know, further and further and build better and better alignment. So by adding structure to the conversations, we think that's going to enable you know, well, first better conversations, but also you know, us to really, you know, hopefully build some alignment over time. H yeah, it definitely can get lost and you go

15:09down the rabbit hole and there's never really a you know who won this debate. So with geo debates, how do you as a as a consumer of it? Maybe you're not actually producing the content. Do you comment to take a side? Do you vote? How does exactly does that work to contribute to the to the conversation?

Yeah, it's a lot of it is really around voting. And so if you go to

15:34geo debates, you'll see an explore page where you can see recent debates. We also have, you know, other pieces of content that's part of this knowledge graph. So you might see some news stories or things that are happening and individual claims and you can take a position on these claims. So, you know, whatever the topic is, you know, it could be, you know, the war in the

15:56Middle East or in Europe or you know, local politics, health, AI, right? There's all of these, you know, topics that are controversial and people are trying to figure out like what are the facts and like what should we do about these different situations? And so that gets broken down into these individual claims that you can vote on. And then

16:18People can choose to debate each other on a claim and that kicks you into this kind of video, you know, live debate experience with somebody that you get matched with. And so you can view those debates and if you click on one of those debates, you get this like Tik Tok style interface. So you can just keep swiping to see the conversations that people are having.

16:39And if you're interested, you can jump into one yourself.

That's very interesting. And I'm curious, you know, when when these claims come up, I feel like if you have better information, you know, something is true, you know, it's great to vote on it, but there's also, at least in with the crypto niche, you know, people are putting their money

17:01where their mouth is. So is that something that is involved at this stage or at a later stage where people can actually bet or you know back their claims if they believed it to be right to put money up.

So to me I think that we should separate you know ma matters of fact and opinion from for example let's say predictions. M

17:28

so you know prediction markets have have obviously been really big over the last few years super interesting and exciting and you know that is a place where I think making bets makes a lot of sense because you know we're talking about something that nobody can know right a prediction is something in the future and nobody knows for

17:47sure so you know we might as well bet on it and then at some point in the future we'll find out whether or not that thing was true. It should be easy enough for us to agree so we can settle the bet. Perfect use case for betting. Now matters of fact and matters of let's say taste or preference I don't think they work that way and I don't think

18:10you want to like corrupt that process right if imagine if like in the scientific process you know you could just spend a little more money and then [laughter] you know your theorem's true surprise you know like I don't think that's how truth works. I don't think that's like how our political system should work, right? That's called corruption, you know, when money

18:28impacts, you know, the political process. So, I think we need better systems of coordination to, you know, better discover truth to get people aligned. Now I do think that you know money plays a role and that's you know for incentives because there is work to be done to organize knowledge and it benefits a large number of people to have better you know

18:53more organized more more trustworthy information is something that benefits a very large number of people and so I think it's worth incentivizing that work but you know I would keep those things distinct. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great great perspective. And with the debates, you know, right now with AI, it seems like you ask a question, you get an answer, and it's

19:18like, well, that must be the truth, or at least I'm trusting AI. This is the single source of truth that this is the correct answer. And maybe that's not always the case that people are talking about hallucinations or, you know, it just agreeing with whatever you say. Doesn't most of the time it doesn't disagree. If you say, well, isn't it this, which is wrong, it'll say, yeah,

19:36yeah, just to agree with you. Is that something that won't happen in geo debates that you know the hallucinations of AI or sort of agreeing with your personal perspective can you avoid that?

Yeah. So you know I think the hallucinations are becoming less of a problem. you know the models are getting like quite good the like intelligence

20:02right but you still end up with the problem of you know what is the AI answering the question against right what is that ground truth and for that we still don't have an answer right so you know if you ask AI a question you know it'll use the tools that are available to it right it might do some some web search it might you know look a few things up and it's like okay here's

20:25what I found here's your answer right? But did it look at the right sources? Were those sources correct? You know, according to who? So, you know, you kind of have that problem of ground truth and I think we still don't have a good solution to that. So, that's really is a, you know, what go aims to address. You know, we believe that you get to the

20:45truth by having an open system that lots of people can participate, right? where you know things are open to debate and there's challenge and there's all of this kind of you know process and you're compounding and you're adding context and more people and more knowledge and more information over time and through that process over time you

21:07can get closer to truth. And so if it's open, anyone can participate, you can build reputation and you have really powerful tools, then you know over time we can all build up this you know verifiable knowledge graph that becomes more and more you know trustworthy and dependable over time.

Definitely. And when when you do search AI, yeah, it goes into the web and it

21:30looks what people were debating on Reddit as an example and you know people can be lying there and it could pick that up and be like okay well that had some up votes but that doesn't mean it's the truth and I guess that's where geo debates comes in right is

exactly now I think another you know element that we're seeing these days is you know you hear this about this thing

21:50called the dead internet theory

right and I think that's really accelerated you know the Fact is like, you know, the comment threads aren't exactly the same as they used to be, right? And maybe some of that is the sloppification, right? Now you're like, okay, is this even a person? Why why am I wasting my time?

But before it was the centralization,

22:11right? It was like this is just owned by Facebook. Why? Like why am I giving Facebook my time, you know? like [laughter] and so like I think there was this time you know in the early internet where people were willing to spend their time and their creative energy having discussions and like contributing right to this open thing and the less it

22:34became open the less people really wanted to like give their creative energy and so I think that like you know by creating you know an open composable web it'll be worth people's time because they know that they can continue to use anything that they create, right? Any time that I spend to contribute my knowledge, to contribute my thoughts, to organize whatever, I'll be able to keep

23:00using that and it right like it is improving my own like and you know workflows or knowledge because you know I have access to that. I'm not giving it away but why not make it open and then I can also build reputation, right? other people can benefit from it too. And so we get back to this, you know, open web.

Mhm. Talk to me about launch day moving

23:22forward in the first quarter. How can you and the team make geo debates, you know, grow rapidly? Is it is it more content, more claims, more people that want to be content creators and actually put up videos, you know, how how can you scale it?

Yeah. So, I mean, if your audience that's watching, if we have any content creators in the crowd, I mean,

23:46we would love to see you on Geo Debates. I'd love to get you up there. And whatever you're interested in, you can participate in a debate and we'd love to see you there. And for everyone else to just check out the conversations that are happening and to vote, you know, I think we want to have an impact on the world we live in, right? I think a

24:05lot of people have this feeling that like, you know, maybe there's there's less and less, you know, ways to, you know, exert your agency, to have an influence, maybe the system's corrupt, like whatever it is, like we got to change that around, right? We need people to believe in the future and to know that they can make a change. And I think the open web is going to

24:26make that possible. So, you know, what can we do? I mean, we want to find interesting people in every field. And you know, I think what we do is I mean, it's, you know, we create a platform. So, it's it's a way for people that have knowledge or interests in any type of thing to be able to express their opinions, to meet other interesting people. So, there's a great community

24:46aspect and we're giving people powerful tools and my hope is that, you know, we're going to see really great coverage in a lot of the areas that are really kind of impacting people. And I', you know, I'd love to help bring focus to some of the most important, you know, debates or topics and just get more people involved.

Definitely. I would love to see that,

25:10too. I'll do my best to be one of those content creators. What's the best way to access the You said it's a web app. How do you access it and how can you make it convenient for non-technical people?

Yeah, so Geo Debates is available today. You can just go to geobrowser.io O and hit explore and right away you're going to start seeing you know some of

25:31the top debates that are coming out and you know more debates every day. So that's available now and you know we really made it so that you don't have to be technical to use it at all. It is you know a crypto application. It's it's on the Ethereum blockchain on a on a layer three and so it's all open and composable and verifiable but you

25:55know the users don't don't really have to know that right they're creating an account using privy it's all abstracted and you know it's just like any social app you upvote you downvote it's super easy to use

awesome sounds great and I'm always interested in the technical background but as we know you know for blockchain to be adopted adopted in the

26:16mainstream the end users can't know they're using blockchain.

Exactly. [laughter]

Yeah.

So, all all the best with this. I'm looking forward to creating some content, doing some votes. We'll leave a link to Geo Debates in the show notes. Would love to follow up if not before the end of this year to see the progress and you know, wishing

26:37you and the team all the best and let's follow up in the near future.

Thank you so much, Ashton. Yeah, really enjoyed the conversation and looking forward to chatting more. Hopefully seeing you over in the geoververse.