 I wanted to put this video out a while ago, but time was just not on my side and today what I'm going to do is put that video out that I promised a long time ago and what this is it's the interview I did with amp founder co-founder Tyler Spalding and we did an actual interview itself with Tyler a couple of months ago and here's us just talking about what amp is the amp token, ampera and a couple other different things that was just you know pretty much on the surface and I will link that video in the description below title ETH is a long way to run with inflation dead and amp flexa and if you don't know if you're familiar with Tyler of course he is the co-founder of flexa previously at NASA building rockets MIT alum and of course ampera and the amp token so what we talked about in this interview was actually a recording before we did the actual interview itself and we just went over just some basic things we talked about regulatory clarity where things are going we took a lot of look at the parallels between the history of the internet and what happens today and then really just can not knock down the nuts and bolts so there's a little bit more in-depth than the on-surface interview that we did which we released a couple months ago so without further ado here's the interview with me and Tyler Spalding. It's an e-commerce company in 1996 so I lived through all that and it was this is a scam this is a fraud this will never work customers don't I mean you read this and you're actually kind of stunned because we're 20 years on the other side right but there was literally I can remember on like Barron's leaflet magazine when this was out there's literally a amazon.bomb and they have a bomb on the cover with bezos on it saying no merchant will ever sell on amazon what an absolutely terrible idea you're losing all these investors money why are you doing that I mean that's just one of many many other examples but there you go all right see I didn't make it up I know exactly what you're talking about because I use this all the time as as an example of people just to hang in there because people they get they get short sighted like well it's just you know the price is down so the so the project sucks like well it's not doesn't work like that because you know like you talked about e-commerce there was remember the day when uh it was all the regulation to get forth because state by state it was hard to get the tax situation oh yeah oh yes I know way way too much about tax taxes laws and having lived through that as well yeah but I mean because we're all enough to remember those days and and I remember when before the internet and when the internet came out people like they're not they're always people always tell me the government will never allow this to happen because this this free flow of information I'm like maybe it will never happen and then of course it went through and then it's the same thing here with with crypto and bitcoin I think that's why I like your products the things that you're trying to do make payments but make payment so people don't understand what's going on underneath the hood no one cares no one cares no one cares when you when you take your phone you scan it or tap it again something all you care about is you get the service in return right only thing that people care about so you know building that and if you can make it better and by better it means it needs to be faster cheaper right and you can do that right so maybe it can't be necessarily faster and summons this is maybe but the cheaper is very very possible when you start looking now using that infrastructure but then also harnessing other sort of payment paradigms that I think people have completely neglected because we live in this world of we have credit cards therefore I spend this I get rewards I'm in this cycle underprivileged people pay for my privilege to be able to use my credit cards because they're the ones revolving on credit paying ridiculous fees sitting in a debt cycle forever that's all also abstracted away to the end user that's not good marketing to say here's your great platinum card with all of these benefits you're keeping a thousand people in poverty and their families because you are benefiting from it like that's not a great marketing message and and this isn't like secret this is all out there's been reports that Kansas City Fed has a great paper on it I quote a lot and like this is wide open right but that's a lot the times how capitalism works and so I'm not necessarily saying this is this entirely evil system but what if you can have something that's comparable that's just as fast that has infrastructure that then works and you don't have to have that economic model and now people can start paying with assets that they want to communities that they want to assets they want to support communities they're part of using loyalty points and expanding what you've in your definition of money or assets or value are that is just undeniably powerful and we're we're leading that way so that's just inevitable for me when you know we first started this it was I remember telling people oh yeah the you know companies like Facebook will will make a digital token and they're going to explore money you know an intra platform money people like that's nuts they'll never do that like Facebook have no interest in ever building something like this and not only in this cycle right not only do that come but then something you know why what bigger ambitions that I think people thought and that you know didn't really work out for a variety of reasons but not technical ones I can tell you that and not interest or market interest I can tell you that it wasn't those reasons so it will evolve it will continue to evolve because if that if what Facebook was trying to do is inherently very very valuable right um it's going to happen it'll happen in some manifestation because you have Amazon and Walmart and other multinational companies that you know the underlying economics of that don't change internationally right so everyone sees this so it's coming and we'll see how it's all going to evolve but uh extremely powerful um and just inevitable so anyway sorry for uh no a little tangent thing well it's a good tangent it's a tangent to talk about especially when you brought up you said the reason behind with with Facebook and Libra and one of the issues that I see was it was it was regulatory uncertainty and regulation clamping down and it seems like if we don't get regulation right things can't move forward I have a problem on this channel and the problem on the channel is like when I say regulation I get lambasted because people say you we don't need regulation in crypto and digital assets because we're our own person we're our own people and we control what happens we don't need the government to tell us I'm like I understand that part but there's a problem that if we can't move forward we can't allow things to flourish here in the States I mean it'll just go someplace else it'll happen but I think we need some kind of clarity and this is where like I run into a lot of roadblocks with people yeah and and one element of that in you know and I've been in crypto for more than 12 years at this point so like really talking with people throughout this process is is yes that's absolutely an angle to take which I personally really believe in but the other reality is if you want payments let's say or money you are going to have to interface with businesses that again are multinational businesses or businesses that have so much complexity to them outside of just processing payments that you can't just erase because you like a different version of money so you have to understand that that connecting to these archaic systems some good some bad that's just all part of the process and that there's an entity that has thousands and thousands of employees and how they pay them and how that is structured and how they pay their vendors and their operating expenses and all this other complexity that has evolved some of it very positively over the course of a thousand years some of that works very well I mean I look at it and take a step back for just you know even one second and say yes there's a lot of really bad things in the news and frustrating things in the news regarding you know global politics or events or maybe even you know specific to us and regulation in our world and broad and all these other bad things and that's absolutely true but at the same token I can go outside and I can buy whatever food that I like in a major city and I can go you know rent an apartment and do all these other things and there's a lot of things that are actually pretty cost efficient and really effective and you go back and we have air conditioning we have heating we all these great things whatever refrigerator and you know a hundred years ago you don't really have that you really have indoor plumbing so when you start comparing it to some advancements it's very easy to get caught up in how bad everything is or how frustrating it all is when you start comparing some of the other advancements what we do have from these other systems whether they're economic sociological or government you know created so yeah worked out really well um this is just always kind of keep that you know and I'm not trying to say everything is all fantastic by any means but there's always going to be some sort of a balance now there's a there's a lot of good out there it's just people just don't want to don't want to see it sometimes yeah negative sells more uh negative and uh trying to complain around things and uh having you know the attention grabbing headlines for sure yes exactly the clickbaits so so tell us so what i'll do is is today because uh i think well first of all let me ask you this how can i help you get to where you where you want to go how can i help you how can my channel help you guys ah so um let's say i'd say there's two there's two main pieces um so um not sure how much you have looked into things what we have uh basically flexa is doing its thing absolutely probably seeing a lot of information around all of that but in growing all of that um i personally have now even forked off uh with another now um a whole group of global contributors to where we're building a new collateral protocol um that ultimately we think is going to end up servicing flexa in a dramatically more powerful way than it currently works um but we sort of realize that the fundamental aspect of powering flexa so enabling these collateral based payments we're sort of at the top of the tip of the iceberg and so as we look to say how do we make this better how do we accept payments more globally and how does the system actually work across all different ports of open source wallets non-constitutional wallets all these things um we wanted to make small tweaks into how this would work to make it more efficient and you know in true crypto fashion going down the rabbit hole it turned into an entire thing hole of this is way bigger more complex and actually more valuable than we ever even imagined and so we realized it wasn't something that even made sense to solve within the confines necessary of flexa to make it as powerful as it can be so that's what impera is in that it's a basically it's collateral protocol i can go into more detail it's um very boring and very straightforward but we think very powerful um and so it's just a mechanism now to enable uh collateral to be shared across platforms in real life across apps people um you know and there's other details that anyway if you're a question yeah what so talk to me well real quick so i understand and and when we talk about these things you know of course we dumb it down as much as possible mostly for me and of course for my subscribers but for for impera when you're talking about about the collateral he's talking about all types of collateral or he's talking about like like reward points and everything else that are just out there it's it's going to be anything um i mean anything more broadly defined but they're going to be assets that are more appropriate for collateral so some things that are more liquid things that people have that they want to use as collateral so in our current framework like ether or bitcoin are great examples of that yeah um and we actually are trying to look more for like uh yield bearing assets um so assets that you can basically hold that are earning some sort of uh yield generation on top of them whatever that looks like right not related to us but an asset that maybe inherently has that those features um and they could even be like fully regulated project like uh products like tokenized T-bills which we've seen which are amazing that already there's uh from what i've even seen over a hundred million dollars worth of those like fully regulated products already in the market even after launching a few months ago so i mean there's going to be a landslide of things they're going to be available for this um but yeah so there's that um so from uh from an awareness perspective or sort of uh the the help on our side it's one people just being aware of this other protocol how they could integrate it within other projects they might be working on or know of when they start seeing some of these issues pop up in other protocols like oh man this this unparalleled thing might help this um or just the peer spending on flexa itself um uh spending digital assets whatever those are whether they're the the typical ones or stable coins or basically anything um that movement is really starting to grow and i think start building momentum and the more that gets talked about um when we were at like flexo when we were through the you know last market cycle we were literally getting like thousands of inquiries per day from merchants looking to accept this stuff so oh yeah oh yeah i mean not big ones they're small ones but oh absolutely i mean it's just so overwhelming you can't even come close to servicing it um but if we have so so talk so like i'm a retailer and i want to take payments because i don't want to pay the strike and paypal fees of 2.99 plus 30 cents per transaction fee right which i have to do on my businesses so they're saying you know integrate this with with us as much as possible take as much crypto so we can reduce the payments is that what it's all about which which i i think would be more for flexa yeah for flexa yes right um so on the flexa side and it's even easier than that we try to already integrate with everything they already had so it's literally just a turn something on um and then ampere now is a technology that will power collateralization within flexa um and that seems a little more complicated that really is but it's not it's more of a oh we're going to use ethereum for processing transactions is like a similar analogy so flexa right now is using ethereum and a product called flexa capacity we have to stake collateral separately into pools backing protocols and this is all gosh to also be clear this is all totally abstracted from the user or even the merchant no one knows this is all happening this is just how the technology work they can know so it's like we don't hide it but it's not you know it's not you don't ever need to care right much as you use um you know your uh microsoft excel or google docs you don't need to know the database that's actually storing that information like you don't it works for you so that's how that um uh that product currently flexa works and now what we've done is we've generalized a collateral um protocol to basically message that collateral exists how it gets locked how it's securely basically secured against transactions and we've done that in a totally generalized way um which also then makes it you know 10x more usable for flexa is doing today because there are little limitations on on flexa being able to open this more permissionlessly um two other types of wallets and assets and that's a lot of minutia on the details of why so i'll hand wave and just say there are complexities uh which now we we have solved through this protocol and it turns out in doing it this oh wow this actually is applicable to any sort of a transaction um so we are looking at it a lot more myopically um than what it actually can become and that's why i'm really excited about it despite being so excited about everything that flexa had done being with that project for five years this was not something i was going to just slowly walk away from like that i've been in payments for a long time and i'm very proud around what is there so it had to be something that was so entirely compelling that also happens to amplify the goal i already had so now i get to you know do even more i'm rising kind of the the tide to ride all of the ships with the ship i'm you know most proud of but now i actually have to build something as a primitive that affects everything more globally in that you know that's sort of that like challenge or kind of overall you know perspective i need otherwise i'm not i can't just jump into something and like you know dedicate my life to that so sure well i mean you've had a long a long lineage of working in payments so of course it makes sense so hey so so back i can give a i don't know i guess uh if we're recording this too and you're kind of splicing things maybe this one we can't say publicly but i can give you a quick example gotcha okay and then just to back up for a couple things you said you were talking about ampera and then amp token and then you know flexa and you talked about when you were you know to do this with ampera for collateral and of course it's a pain in the ass right now that you know i'm guessing you're talking about using the ethereum network yes absolutely and so you can you can just say we're not going to do that anymore because it's a pain we're going to use ampera for collateral and we're going to do away with this and whatever's going to happen with there and the uh the fees everything else we're just going to use this collateral version and that's why you're doing that it uh yeah it's similar it's um so impara is a contract on ethereum still so it's still using the underpinning security of ethereum okay but rather than just a collateral token used in a not that extensible smart contract the way that flexa is using it now we've made it so rather than taking something like flexa capacity which there which is the smart contract which governs the collateral usage of verifying collateral is there verifying a transaction has taken place all the mechanics around that yeah which it works um we're basically generalizing that and just saying rather than having that contract using amp now um you know specific reflexive payments what if that got re-engineered to make it you know 100x more powerful and open and fully decentralized usable for any transactions which now then flexa can use so now it's a more generalized got you yep okay perfect yeah you know what so that was there was this question because i was asking people you know what kind of questions you got for tyler and uh dany b okay d