He has listened intently, nodding appropriately, even occasionally furrowed his brow to telegraph that he's deeply invested in what is being said. But five minutes into the ChumChat meeting being transmitted on a cheap 13 inch flat screen tv rewired to videoconference, Willie Earl Scott tries not to appear dismissive at the ideas being bandied about but knows it's only room in his eyes for absolute originality and total ownership. For instance, the chat application that they're now conferencing on is called ChumChat Messenger and is one of several dozen features currently being rolled out on the ChumCity.xyz platform, itself a mega social+services site of sorts that's yet to be fully implemented and launched. Why? Because Willie wants to enter the social space on par or better than his giant online contemporaries. And "Because of financing," admits the visionary, who's created a multifaceted social media network platform that, when calculated fully in its completion, has a future valuation estimate of upwards $1 billion dollars or better if done correctly, yet who has yet to seek a single investment from Sand Hill Road or the Street or the Saudis. (He is rumored, however, to be in constant communication with the grandchildren and nieces of some of society's most affluent families).

He's in his cell, an insular 8×12 cheekily nicknamed the Temple, on Holman's death row — the only wing left operating in the now virtually empty Atmore facility — in small town lower Alabama, sipping grape Kool aid from a plastic red Dixie cup and looking quite calm for a man with a death sentence hanging over his head. Willie's known for asking lots of questions, often to things he already knows the answer to but wants other perspectives and plans for various possiblities.

Willie Earl Scott really is a visionary. He possesses the typical eccentricity that most geniuses are known for (Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg), yet his climb is much more steeper.

Here's an Alabama prisoner, long condemned to die for a murder he maintains and quite possibly didn't commit (an Obama-appointed federal judge in Alabama, Abdul Kallon, was considering his appeal for release before abruptly resigning in January 2023), yet he spends his days nonetheless radiating optimism while trying to first envision then manifest a world where healthcare isn't broken and patients actually get the treatment they need at a cost the can afford. He figures all he needs to do is bring transparency to a system that, by design, is anything but clear. So he's decided to start with his state of Alabama.

"If you take the drug Humira to treat the skin condition plaque psoriasis, the cost is $35,000 annually. If you have insurance where you work, as more than 150 million Americans do — or in this case, 1 million or so Alabamians — it will foot most of the bill. That's $350,000 over ten years," Willie gives an example, after fidgeting from a sense of them wasting time, something he dislikes. "Yet a cheaper solution exists, it's a handheld light-therapy device called Zerigo that is just as effective at only a 10th of the cost. Most patients and employers don't know about it, because their insurer doesn't approve this treatment. So everyone up and down the line is paying way too much. The point of this is to let Alabama know about it, and hopefully the country."

"This" being another application, called CityDocs, on his ChumCity.xyz platform, a feature for not simply conversing with a local doctor at anytime and booking appointments but short-circuiting everything from the deductibles and coverage limits to the life-sapping paperwork that only adds stress to whatever is actually ailing you. "Employers hate insurers, doctors hate them, hospitals hate them, everybody hates them for raising costs while usurping billions in profits. But you're never going to see BlueCross BlueShield saying, 'Next year, we're going to reduce our earnings and reduce our profits to help the healthcare system operate more efficiently. Thus I've calculated that if ChumCity gets just a million users in Alabama to, say, leave Facebook and subscribe instead to our site, we could actually cover all those Alabama citizens' insurance bills, and be better at it. I mean, I know I'm only one person, yet I don't have thousands of shareholders to enrich—though when I do have them, they too will be Alabama account holders." Cleverly Willie has devised a strategy first incorporated by Samuel Adams craft beer founder Jim Koch, making all early ChumCity.xyz Pro Account subscribers stakeholders in the actual company by giving them between 20 and 100 shares in the platform. Considering that once-lesser social networks like Snapchat and Pinterest initially went public with over 600m shares, that ultimately got as high as $90 per share, it's not impossible to imagine majority of Alabama residents becoming ChumCity shareholders.

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Since 2021, the black statistic-turned-libertarian entrepreneur from Birmingham has been learning to code and channeling his creativity from a concrete box. He's most effective as a chief executive in the tech aspect and bigger picture type of guy, preferring to recruit smart young engineers fresh out of university and give them direction for his creative designs. Zerigo exemplifies the illogic of our health care system, yet health care is hardly the only industry being disrupted where Willie is attempting to add his own spin or angle. ChumCity.xyz is looking to underwrite everything from grocery shopping to food delivery to banking, challenging current industry heavyweights like Instacart and GrubHub and Chime Financial, to name a few. All starting in the local Alabama market, with plans to branch out into the nation whole. Sounds fanciful and overly ambitious? He's actually built it, and will probably be eating into other platforms' customer base and revenue after a single full round of funding.

"I never wanted to be a boss or try to build it up all on my own, but that's the logical outcome when muhfuhs shun you for stuff and you know better," Willie says. A marketing genius where his other efforts are concerned, he has impressive business awareness, and points out that Thomas Edison was more marketeer than scientist. "Oftentimes I feel as though I have to be, because Ian got no stepdaddies or sugarmamas in this business. I'm CEO, CTO, VC as well as first employee, which is okay. But I'm not allowed to play. Time is precious both in business and in life." He then recalls advice BET founder Robert Johnson said then-cable broadcasting huncho Dr. John Malone gave him when he first launched: "Get your revenues up and keep your costs down. And Bob Johnson say that was his only Harvard MBA schooling right there, in a single sentence."

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The individual funding of multiple major endeavors by Willie Earl Scott, meanwhile, comes in no small part from books, with creative and often eye-popping content wholly churned from his cerebral machine of a mind and published largely in ebook format via Amazon Kindle system with little overhead. Revenues up and costs down, indeed.

His best known work, Heaven and Hell on Earth, by Willie Earl Scott (first published by France's renowned Editions du Seuil Press, in 2003), is an epic crime thriller about streets and theology that undoubtedly solidified his standing as a great novelist and became the flagship tome for his self-owned GlobalStorm Publishing, which has since published almost exclusively some four dozen outrageously scandalously yet beautifully written taboo erotic novelettes under the author's old street handle Willie Redd, which have been removed from many online book stores, but, to date, have nonetheless sold over a million copies collectively using a direct-to-consumers email list.

Building an empire largely from the bowels of a half-century-old Alabama state dungeon is itself an incredulous feat, arguably the most impressive act ever performed by any writer, entrepreneur, or felon, of any sort, but Willie Earl Scott is as incredible as he is controversial. Extremely gifted and easily animated by everything from artifacts to artistry, he is an amicable brainac of sorts, a mix of egghead and ebonite, whose leadership style could be described as responsible but relentless, even ruthless. Walt Disney with street cred, if you will. Though well conscious of time, considering his circumstances, Willie Earl Scott embodies the opposite version of the Silicon Valley trope: "move fast and break things," possessing an unwavering emphasis on perfection and how things look as much as performance, with a telltale slow and thoughtful Alabama drawl and demeanor which exudes a kinda authenticity that in his multifaceted dealmaking with various individuals of necessity here and there has proved to be both disarming in it alacrity and brutal in its effectiveness. Being underestimated, it seems, dismissed and hated even, as both a convicted statistic and as a conservative, has had the effect of gifting Willie Earl Scott with an invaluable tool in business: the element of surprise.

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"You have to be a strong person to try and achieve and believe as I do. But my haters give me life," Willie says goodnaturedly. Then more seriously: "I do think I have something to prove."

Aside from incendiary local media coverage nearly twenty-five years ago, few people outside of Alabama had actually known the name Willie Earl Scott, who, at 19 years of age, was an excommunicated Birmingham street shotta turned budding Bayou rap sensation with New Orleans' Cash Money Records, when, in 1999, he was shockingly (and some say wrongly) charged in the sudden death of a ten-year-old girl, and, after a scandal-plagued editor for the truth-challenged Birmingham News' admittedly exaggerated evidence against the otherwise affronted teen in her daily for headlines, subsequently sentenced death. In 2002, Willie sued claiming libel and fake news, and the editor was let go, while Willie was left requesting retrials from death row.

So, of course, there's definitely the Willie Earl Scott who has since bore his soul and now, gradually, sees his own truths being told. The Willie Earl Scott we should know. His unyielding innocence but also his uniqueness and idiosyncrasies displayed throughout his life: About the former hitta who, as a youth, had been released from prison after a two-year stint and went on to reinvent himself in nefarious '90s New Orleans, where the middle school dropout showed enough business savvy to open his own neighborhood gameroom as well as a bible-and-breakfast eatery in part of an old revitalized cathedral; the proven songwriter who put on shows and briefly found himself on the roster of the then-fledgling "Cash Money Millionaires"; the teenage performer who shot his own scandalous indie film in the French Quarter then later managed to sell out copies of said film a block or so over on Canel Street; the former hood who almost singlehandedly turned the Crescent City's infamous 9th Ward Florida Projects into something of a performance square in the arts for peewee younglings on Sundays one Summer.

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"I promise on God, Willie Redd was set to be the biggest kid to come out our state in late '90s with the music," recalls James "Jimmy" Newhill, a former DJ who admits he was once a card-carrying member of the anti-Willie Redd movement, which he says definitely still exists. "In B'ham though, a lotta guys do the same thing or similar bits, everybody wants to be a star and nobody wants to see the next man make it, which is doubly true among black folks. We truly internalize the whole crabs-in-the-bucket mentality. Every dude think he's special until a guy like Willie Redd walks into the room, so he was never gonna win over most folks in this city even before the cases, which everybody now know he didn't do, by the way, because the lil girl's momma confessed to her own momma before she smoked herself to death in '04. Her own brother said it, yet now they all mum, or dying. God don't like ugly. Look how big Willie Redd has gotten now, bigger than the city, more than plain ole rap."

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After the nightmare of being charged with capital murder — which costed the young artist family, friends and folks rendering him persona non grata — and a sentence of death, Willie spent the past quarter-century in what can only be described as a valley of death, and it has all but transformed him. If what do not kill you only makes you stronger, then Willie Earl Scott is arguably one of the mightiest minded men one will ever meet. He is, among other things common in neither a corrections institution or contemporary society, what's known as an impresario of art and innovation, an industrialist and independent enterpriser who, after mixing convict attributes with higher learning and launching the aptly named Inacell Records, released two mixtapes-for-sale, Back From The Dead and North Central Callin' which lyrically and very casually showcased his stripes and stars earned out of storied old '90s street beefs during a time often referred to as World War G, while simultaneously exhibiting real vulnerability and prophetic revelation with repeated examination of the corruptible nature of so-called "cool culture," and all over rather revolutionary sounding soulful tracks, both original and jacked, that were clever and contagious as they were confrontational, fabulously leaning into the realization that he'd been blacklisted in some corners and calculating pretty brilliantly that he was, not simply too righteous an antihero to regulate, but, in American culture it was infact the original villains who people remember.

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After the albums dropped in 2016 and 2017, Willie Earl Scott, while in solitary confinement on Alabama's death row, again became a target of what some called yellow journalism. His long time nemesis the Birmingham News led the local media attack, hitting him more or less for having so much moxie. That week of negative coverage, Back From The Dead and North Central Callin' sold a combined 50k download units between Apple Music, Google Play and Amazon Music. Soon, however, labels came after him for unauthorized usage of copyrighted beats, which ultimately forced the removal of the albums from streaming and sale sites.

"It was a few bad apples that spoiled a whole bunch, to keep it a hunnid," Willie says of the copyrighted instruments. "I mean I've always built the plane while flying it, so... But it's different now, this time around. I'm much more official now, more deliberate, decisive, and no less inclined to independence."

Both albums being pulled was what, in part, finally moved the conservative to assert his autonomy and create more sovereign social and service platforms, from a host of conservative-oriented sociopolitical newsmags to notably outstanding ChumCity.xyz, with its slidable touchscreen animated maps that places several dozen internet service applications at the fingertips of ChumCity users, which already numbers several million registered users and counting. Brilliantly compiled and beautifully constructed, and absolutely the top topic of conversation across communities. Yet clearly at the beginning stages still, not yet fully realized in all its potential, and the one man composing everything is, as he himself jokes, "Alabama slow."

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In 2019, Willie Earl Scott, ever the conceiver with can-do belief and a bountiful imagination, would launch GlobalStorm Films, producing several fairly provocative investigative reports and interesting docudramas that would cause waves as far as Africa. His savvy, it's been said, is in knowing exactly what at-home would accept or want to see: exposés on local leaders, foreign dictators, criminals of various degrees, etc., often infused with visual evidence of corruption, outlined criminality and conflicted interest in a cinematic lens. Produced in periodic multiplies on a miniscule budget but with a convincing rawness that rings loudly, the films recalls an otherwise undisclosed history and lays out a well of information on their subjects, providing the sort of soundbites that delight and knowledgeable nuggets far too juicy to be left on some cuttingroom floor, forcing actual officials far and wide to defend themselves, as was the case with Angola's now former president José Eduardo dos Santos, or ban the sale of Willie Earl Scott films altogether, as the current government of Zimbabwe would ultimately do and something GlobalStorm then briefly averted by releasing following films as works by Willie Earl Jackson instead (the Ortega government of Nicaragua banned the erotic thriller book trilogy "Jezebel," by Willie Redd, for similar reasons).

A more direct and even dire response was that locally, of the more lawless, in and around Birmingham. In a couple films, "Dangerfield: The Boogieman of Birmingham" and "Damu Godda: The Legend of Willie Redd" in particular, Willie uncover alleged criminals and review supposed criminality in both the drug business and black Democrat politics from every decade as far back as the 1970s, mildly postering and methodically picking apart known persons, prominent and otherwise, pissing off people and almost relishing in it.

"Apparently there's an unspoken rule in the streets among criminals and regular hoods as well as community leaders, that you don't discuss shotcallers and local statesmen without their permission or without them getting a cut, and definitely not in a negative manner," explains Adam Sinek, editor-in-chief of SouthernDynasty.vip

"Donald Goines wrote about the local powerbrokers of his day and probably paid with his life. 50 Cent famously rapped about them and was shot nine times because of it. Now, here's Willie producing whole films. Though we can very well call him the trifecta — writing, singing and screening about them like he don't give a damn, darling. And none of it is going unnoticed."

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Both former Birmingham Mayor William Bell and his predecessor Bernard Kincaid actually reached out to request that he either review their records in full or make revisions. A federally incarcerated drug dealer sent word to Willie's mother indicating his displeasure, the implications being clear. Willie, now allergic to conflict but not one to cower if called upon, sent word back through the man's family: Prison has taught you nothing. He too got the message.

From state corrections to the street corners there is this universal feeling towards Willie Redd, a mixture of natural jealousy, unspoken admiration and a little fear even, that bleeds into this extreme swirl of speculation about the handsome prisoner who's something of a unicorn, a sense that he just might be messianic, and always a recurring feeling of reverence for that fact that he's managed to pull off such magnificent feats with practically no help after being both caged and cancelled. Several words that kept coming up to describe Willie Earl Scott was "authentic" and "strong" and, almost to a person, "genius."

"I'm so Stevie Wonder to silliness and drama," Willie says. "Also Ion care what you gotta say about me. I mean I have to produce, I have to create, to demonstrate an ability to generate at a massive rate but also do things that's very rarely been done, if ever, by an individual with my traits and in this state, and I have literally no time to waste."

Then, as if forgetting he was being interviewed, and without asking to be off the record, he goes quiet, gets startingly real: "Ya know, I always prided myself for protecting women, black women, grew up in a house full of females, got a sister, with countless nieces and girl cousins, and look what I go get myself accused of! My innocence is a historical fact, but a man is only good as his code and his ability to take care his clan. I mean, where I'm from, you're either an asset or a liability, and I been a liability for too long. My mission now is to bank a billion dollars or better and to be a pillar of my community, a prime producer in my state, protector of my country even." And if he must build a bonafide empire to meet these goals, then so be it.