RealmIQ: SESSIONS with ALEXANDER MCCAIG

 In this episode of RealmIQ Sessions, Curt Doty interviews Alexander McCaig, the CEO of Tartle. They discuss Tartle's innovative approach to data ownership and monetization, which empowers individuals by giving them control over their data and enabling them to profit from sharing it with corporations. The conversation spans topics like AI, ethics, the evolution of web technologies, and how Tartle is redefining data value and its role in AI development.

Key themes include Santa Fe as a hub for innovation, the historical juxtaposition of culture and technology, Tartle's unique approach to data privacy and monetization, and the ethical challenges surrounding AI and data ownership.

Topics Covered

1. Tartle Overview: The technology and philosophy behind Tartle's data marketplace.
2. Data Ownership and Monetization: How individuals can profit from their data ethically.
3. AI and Ethics: Challenges in AI data acquisition and compliance with regulations like GDPR and HIPAA.
4. Web3 Principles: Integrating decentralization and blockchain for ethical data management.
5. Innovation in Santa Fe: The cultural and technological nexus of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
6. Challenges in Building Ethical Tech: Balancing altruism with business incentives.
7. Empowering Individuals Through Technology: Democratizing data and giving people agency in AI evolution.

Quotes 

1. Alexander McCaig:
   • "Data is the new gold, and for the first time, people are seeing how much it's truly worth."
   • "Tartle has no ability to see, use, or move your data—we built it to empower users, not exploit them."
   • "You can vote with your data; where you choose to share it shapes the systems of the future."
2. Curt Doty:
   • "Santa Fe is at a crossroads, blending the oldest traditions with cutting-edge technology."
   • "What technology needs right now are alt-tech companies doing things the right way."
   • "You can't lead with technology—you have to lead with how you're changing people's lives."
3. Alexander McCaig on AI Ethics:
   • "AI companies need to buy data directly and ethically—no shortcuts, no exploitation."
   • "We’re giving individuals the financial and ethical choice to shape AI with their data."
4. Curt Doty on Web3:
   • "Web3's principles are pure; the challenge is removing bad actors and focusing on how it benefits humanity."
5. Alexander McCaig on Monetization:
   • "We charge companies a service fee, but the data's full value always goes to the individual who owns it."

To learn more about TARTLE, visit https://tartle.co/

Transcript

Hi. I am CURT DOTY with RealmIQ, my AI consultancy, and this is our podcast RealmIQ Sessions where we talk about everything, AI with international AI leaders and AI founders. Please give us a follow or subscribe today's guest. is one of those A. I. Founders, Alexander McKay, who's the CEO of Tartle, leading global initiatives that empower users through data ownership and advancing the Tartle Big seven impact framework.

He has expertise in business development risk management consulting private equity, he's managed multi-million-dollar projects across public and private sectors, and we live in the same town santa fe, new mexico, welcome. Alex. Love to Talk to you today and thanks for joining our show. Oh, most definitely CURT.

It's   It's a very welcomed opportunity to come here and join and You I suppose the odds of us being in the same town were quite slim, but no coincidences in this world. And I'm sure the data will show that in time. But thank you for having me on. Yeah. So yeah, I think we're both trying to make, Santa Fe a hotbed or what, what I call the, the new Silicon Mesa country of the world.

So, let's see if we can do that. I don't think that's actually quite a bad idea. And what I find unique about this place for Santa Fe, New Mexico or New Mexico in general, since the late 1930s, early forties, we've had the highest technology in the world was designed here with some of the brightest minds, actually the brightest minds. 

And Oppenheimer, hello. Right? Yeah. More precisely when he hired. Yeah. Yeah. And what's interesting about its juxtaposition with the cultural, he heritage of this area when it comes to the Native Americans and also the buying culture that come up here through their temporary travels for ceremonies of the sort. 

You have the oldest tenants of human civilization and also the highest technology kind of split in two different areas.  And what we're seeing now is there's a unique opportunity in New Mexico and even in Santa Fe, where you and I are both at, that we can combine these things together and actually find a mutually beneficial path when they’ve been exclusive historically.

But I think when they're married, we can have a really interesting evolution for human beings as we're adopting these new technologies we talk about, like artificial intelligence.  Yeah. No, it's a very interesting, nexus. Santa Fe is kind of at the crossroads of America.  both the oldest origins of America, the native American routes, Spanish, trails, the old Santa Fe trail, linking the east and the west.

And so, I think it's a great, epicenter for positioning us as a new destination and intersection of technology. So, let's get into, your background a little and what led you to start turtle and explain what the hell is turtle. Yeah, no, that's a, that's a good question. So, I guess I'm going to be talking for a bit. 

So, my background is in finance, for its majority. Okay. And, apart from the work I was doing in private equity and sorts, I was doing a lot of private research myself and I had noticed that, Oh, 60 percent of the people that participate in the world financial markets don't have access to credit products. 

Now to me at that time, I'm like, that's ridiculous. I mean, everybody should have the opportunity to participate. I mean, they are participating right now, but through a woefully inefficient, underfunded and, Under collateralized market for themselves. If they're in any other country, that's outside of Western banking regulation. 

So, I was like, is there a solve for this? What can we do? And my initial impetus and thought for this is like, why don't we find a way to get people access to these products, bank accounts, credit products, whatever they might be, even in a micro format. But in order to do so, we needed to have something to collateralize against.

And what better than collateralizing against information? Data. Now we had seen that 4. 3 billion people had access to the internet in some rudimentary format through their phones. And that's only grown over time over the years, exponentially.  And we, we wanted to give access to these products.

We're like, why don't we, we'll just create financial products, whatever they may be, and we will do the underwriting using people's data.  But we ran into a massive headwind. And I say we, because I started this with my co-founder, Jonathan Shellen, from New York city. If not, we are., good friends, old friends, and this was a very altruistic path who wanted to head down and figured this could really help a large majority of the planet. 

Our greatest headwind came to the fact that we can't collateralize or underwrite people if we don't know the value of it.  And this was the same for everyone everywhere. It’s how much is that data actually worth? Now we had seen thematically that post Cambridge Analytica and the value of Facebook ads and Google ads dealt with this targeting of profiles of consumers online. 

And steps further, there was a lot of data being sold back to the financial services industry from people like TransUnion, like experience selling profiles of Americans back to these companies. So, Curt Doty can be sold, either a new banking product or a new credit card. And you get them all the time in the mail.

I know you do most likely from Capital One., they're a big buyer of this information.  Now, when we, we had seen this and we ran into this headwind and we saw what was currently going on with the data and the changes socially within the market, we had a general long-term idea that things would inevitably, tend towards data itself as the most valuable asset.

Now in order for that to be unlocked in terms of its, its value globally, we needed to create a marketplace for this data. A marketplace that somebody had to establish. The clear publicly traded value for a single piece of information. Now, typically this world has been very black box, and it took a long time for us through a lot of conversations, working with these larger corporate entities that dealt in data trading to figure out just how much they were spending on people's information and doing it without people actually knowing.

And industries, even the ads industry is a multi, multi, multi-billion-dollar industry, just based off profile on h and beings, who is the most appropriate person to show an ad to at a specific time. But this is the most, I would say the lowest tier of value back to human beings, right, or civilization that could happen by using data.

Now these products had only become more advanced over time through the aspect of machine learning and artificial intelligence. So, for Tartle, we started to create a product that was like, okay. In order to unlock this and strike a balance between the people who are generating this data and the people who need it, we need to have an effective mechanism for the storage, copying, transfer, and monetization of that personal data. 

And if we could do that, we could establish that publicly traded value. And so all the dreams and aspirations of creating these banking products and all these other things we wanted to do actually would inevitably be created by the people that were using and adopting this technology. So, AI firms, the banks, major healthcare corporations, all of those groups have come to us to do that very thing.

They're like, we need to get a handle on this data. We need to have direct access to the Curt Doty’s, and we need to request from them this data in the most ethical audit trail formatted and compliant process because we've invested so much capital into these larger ERP systems to ingest this data and then run an analysis on it. 

Those investments are only any good if we continue that pipe of information.  So, through a broad stroke of luck and good time, we had created a foundational technology, which we, we do hold the patent towards, for on the copying, storage, transfer, and monetization of cons er data. And we are allowing the public to do that very thing.

Vault all of that data that they're generating online into a secure data vault. Tartle has no access to it.  And then when a company comes to them and says, Hey, we want these 15 data elements., would you be willing to permission that data off to us? We will give you X amount of dollars in return. That's the facilitation of that fabric between party A and party B using turtle technologies. 

Okay. Hold it right there. Okay. So, you, you built, the shell, let's say that is the holder of at least those 15 points of data companies come to use and say, we, we want access.  And then you give it to them, but there's a monetary transaction. And let's just talk about that money flow for a second. Yeah, that's a good question.

So, there's a lot of unique characteristics to data. So, determining how to price this thing was a function of our own research over time, from what people were currently paying, how much they'd be willing to pay as a premium to get what is called enriched, highly contextual data sets, and also reducing the liability on it.

And then making sure that that price worked. With the people who were choosing to permission that data off, which would be the cons er, right? Or a patient of healthcare data.  So that container, which you're talking about is housing all of these different data elements. And each of them can range in value from a 10th of a penny up to 250, 500 that we're seeing now, which is incredible. 

And the cool part about that is in the past, people weren't receiving anything, nor did they understand how much their data was worth.  there were early hypotheses that people are like, ah, my data is not worth much. Or, oh, why would I be a part of that? If people have already taken my data from me online? 

Yes, there are some aspects to the fact that data has been taken from them online, scraped about them, profiles built.  That information is hopefully quite static, and these systems are relying on longitudinal, very variable data to train themselves and get better over time. So, what happened was, is when the characteristics of data essentially have a higher refresh rate, which you can appreciate, right?

The better the refresh rate, the newer the information is, the higher the value associated with it. Those things were all put into this container you're talking about. And then from that, people were actually extracting a higher aggregate value for their information over time.  And this thing has taken off.

There's 2 million people, actively on our system, monetizing their data back to larger corporate entities the LLMs, the AI and ML firms, the slightly smaller ones, financial services, healthcare, market research, you name it, but the tech as a whole has now started to establish that record of what that data value actually is.

And so now for the first time in history, people are seeing how much that data is worth and it's becoming very, very attractive. And those all the initial theories that people had are really becoming codified for the ones that said this is a high value piece of information and the ones that are very like non valuable.

And you can see that data is the new gold as they say. Yeah, as Matthew McConaughey says. Yeah. So that's very interesting. So, when you talk about static data versus now, it's more dynamic or refreshed.  And you're housing it., traditionally people's understanding of whatever data they've given up might be correct me if I'm wrong, just through applying for a credit card, applying for an Amazon account, it's your name, address, some of your likes, dislikes, maybe that type of data.

Is that what you consider the static data? That's historically. Yeah. Those are static. Yeah. Curt Doty is not changing his name much. And infrequently, does he change address or phone number? And this is becoming a common occurrence for human beings globally.  Now, for many companies, even the largest healthcare companies, they don't know what language people actively speak at the house. 

So, in their simplicity, if I'm trying to deliver educational knowledge on healthcare, if I'm not delivering it in Portuguese, it's not doing me any good going out to try to connect with the community to have the outcomes I need if I don't understand that data point for what's being spoken in the house.

And the only way they can do that is engaging directly with, these individuals and collecting that data from them. You see where I'm going with this? Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Very good. And so, the static data is static, but what they're trying to do now is actually marry much more of that variable data, the things that are observing CURT DOTY, the systems he's interacting with.

Yes.  User behavior. Yeah. User behavior, rich, rich contextual information. And because compute power has increased so much, they can now treat every single individual as their own individual outlier, rather than having to l p some aggregate under some statistic calculus. Now I can actually compute and just ass e everybody is their own independent actor, treat them as the outlier and be efficient in understanding those profiles as long as the data comes in.

So, for them, they need to find that unlocked for establishing that. That record back with the people that they want to engage with and turtle is a core technology for them to do that  Okay, so just explain the mechanics So we talked about the fact that you have the container you have the data you have two million plus users  On the cons er side who have given you their data or permission to use their data or is that customer side?

It's a very important nuance that you're talking about, CURT. So good question.  So Tartle and this, the same, the fabric of our technology, exactly matches our patent, which is out there. And you could read it if you really want to get a nosebleed.  Tartle has no ability to see your data. We have no ability to use it, move it.

Anything we have no control over it. We wanted to make sure that at the absolute fundamental level There was nothing that could perversely incentivize to use these things to our advantage So we have designed the system so that people are self-responsible for their vaults of information And when they put those things in there They're the only ones that have access to it and when that access wants to be permissioned When we give them an opportunity and say hey, there's an opportunity We link those parties together and so they can say, do I want to share these data points out of my vault to these people at this time for this price?

Yes, or no? And it's as simple as that. And so that's where that connection mechanism is. So, what happens is there's a consider it as self-vaulting. People aren't giving these things to us. We only opened up the bank, which people go in and essentially filled their deposit boxes. And we can't even see what they're filling them with. 

Well, that is very interesting and altruistic. And I, I admire that., I do have, I worked with two startups dealing with, people’s personal vaults, digital vaults, right. At the end of the day, One reason I finally left was that they saw the data play and they said they're going to sell it.

It's like, yeah, I left. I said, well, that's no, that's not right. No, it's very enticing. Yeah, you're sitting it. You're sitting on it, right? It's just like Dropbox, right? It's like sitting on just a mountain of everything. And they could easily say, Yeah, we're going to let a I train. We're going to license it to open a I and they're going to train on everything in Dropbox.

It's like, What are you? Are you fucking kidding me? No, I know you're out of your mind. And same with Google Drive.  Well, who knows what's happening there? But people should definitely read their term and conditions because, Yeah. Do you really want Gemini reading through your emails?  Emails, pictures, everything.

Think about what you put on Google drive, which automatically, if you signed up, all right, saves everything on your desktop. It's like, wow. Okay. What are you talking about? Yeah. So, so I applaud your effort to, Certainly, be, create an opaque capsule. yeah, correct. Contains everybody’s, information and you're facilitating. 

Access through permissions based on who's signed up, correct? And you've monetized it. Meaning corrects me if I'm wrong, where right now, yeah, someone's tracking my behavior on my smartphone where I walk, where I talk, who I talk with, geolocations, button clicks on any one app. It's all trackable, right?

Behavior, whether by the individual app or by. Apple on my smartphone, so I have no control over  like Assigning a value to it like hey, you can't do that If you're going to do that than pay me money what you're saying is  this data has value  and is There a remuneration to the owner of that data, which would be Us, the people, the person who's signed up, are they getting a check?

Are they getting something in their bank account? Because that's exactly what they get. It's not a crypto play. It's one of those other things. These companies, these larger corporate entities are willing to pay cash. Now, the interesting nuance here is this.  Tartle does not take any of that value from you.

So CURT, if I came to you and offered you 250, for some piece of medical information from you. You get a hundred percent of that value. Tartle then chooses, charges a service fee on top of that to the buyer. So, the buyer plays a X plus service fee.  Do you see that? It's because we want to make sure that the people who rightfully own that data get a hundred percent of the value for it.

And these companies have enough of, the financial wherewithal to pay the service fee on top of what they need to pay for that data. Now the beautiful part about it is that the data comes with an audit trail, and this is a big thing for very conservative clients, right? So, if you are, an AI company and you're coming to Tartle and you're purchasing data, right?

And because you want to enrich these things and train them, and we can get into details about that later if we want.  You want to make sure that when you're sourcing it, you have a record of where it came from and you need to verify that because when the courts come and knock and you want something to hold up and say, look, I actually sourced this data from Curt Doty at this time for this price on this dataset with this specific license.

I have this right here and there's a public record of it. That is a huge thing for these companies, especially given, the restrictions with GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and any of the other regulatory frameworks that are coming out around data itself.  Especially HIPAA. It's been around a while.  Yeah, no, HIPAA's been around a while.

And the interesting part about HIPAA, HIPAA was designed for the protection of personal health information for, a patient. Say, for instance, me.  But that was only under the protection when it's a third party transferring my data to another third party.  Now, when it comes to the unlock for medical data in the industry, people have the ability to share any medical data about themselves as identified as it needs to be to whoever they want, whenever time they want to.

So, for instance, CURT, I could sit here on this call, I can say, Hey CURT, I just had this surgery the other day with this doctor. This is what happened. These have been my, historical ailments and this is the resolve from it. This is all the things that happened. I've, I voiced with you my medical history and I have every right to do so.

No one can stop me from doing it, but I'm choosing to share it. That same mechanic is also built into what happens through Tartle. So, healthcare firms or AI companies can come in or pharmaceutical and actually request that health data from people directly without any of the headache or nuance or total inefficiency of having to source it from anywhere else.

But the beautiful part of this entire thing is that through this established relationship, these companies are building a lot of goodwill back with people because people now have a choice. People can say what's going on and they are willing to share. And we've seen they're actually more apt to sharing their data because they have a choice in the manner They're not as locked down and if you can give them a financial incentive, A lot of them will share everything under the sun. 

Well, yeah just back to hip So, this idea of I have medical records with the doctor in California. I live in New Mexico now.  I have to have some surgery or there's an emergency operation and they need access to the data. I am unconscious or something in a, in an ER. My wife is not there to give permission, whatever. 

You're saying that the HIPAA laws allow to the transfer of that information to base on its professionals talking to professionals, over someone's health, and there, their outcome, which they want the patient, in this case, me to live. And so, we need to know whatever. The doctor in California knows about me, right?

Is that what's happening currently? Yeah, that's correct. And to horrify you a little bit further, a majority of the healthcare record, transfers now still happen via fax. I wish I was joking and yeah. So now these, these unlocks are the technology like turtle is in the, in the private realm of private companies looking to source this data. 

Actually, opening up the impetus and the ease of transfer of medical information from patient to any other connected party. Now, Epic tried to do this, and they've done it with Share everywhere, but it's still a woefully inefficient process. But we're starting to see more of those unlocks because you get to bring your medical record with you.

You can imagine in the future that somebody will build a technology on Tartle, on top of Tartle, that's specifically dealing with, Hey, scan this QR code, you can immediately ingest my medical record, it gives you everything that you need. Right? Yeah. And that's one of those, that's one of those big unlocks.

 , but yeah, and that’s, that's a lot of the use for you see it in the healthcare industry. But what's, what's cool, what's rich about this through the onset of artificial intelligence and just to evolve this conversation for a moment, the larger enterprises have had boatloads of data, and they really didn't know what to do with it.

And in the past, they've hired a lot of data scientists to kind of like r mage through this stuff and like try and get an answer from it. Yeah. The perplexity is now the, the clods, the GPTs are selling these private models that go on top of these enterprise systems, right? And essentially called spaces or whatever they may be. 

So now the companies are re incentivized to go back out and be like, Oh my gosh, talk about ease of analytics. We got to start p ping the same with more data. So now they're coming to us and they're like, we want to unlock more of this data to help train these models. So Tartle has found itself. At the forefront of connecting cons er or patient data zero- and first-party data directly into these systems to train very unique insights into these enterprise models.

And so, the, the AI aspect of it is like, Hey, we have all the systems to do the analysis. Now, now our focus is on getting as much data as possible.  Okay. So yeah, we get into, AI and ethics and certainly from the AI community who has not been above board and how they’ve gotten their data, but there's certainly hungry for it, right?

For all the reasons we've talked about before, now they're coming to you and, there was one story about. Mr. Elon Musk, President Musk, or whatever you want to call him now, who said, hey, upload your x rays to Grok, and then we're going to create our database that way, so that we can, Diagnose you based on everyone's at chest x rays or something being in in their data set Which is no one should do that.

Well, no two. It's unethical and so, how are you different from Elon Musk just saying? Yeah, just give us your materials and We're going to solve you're going to cure cancer Yeah, so, in the instance, what you're talking about a couple months back when he asked for the model training of Grok and said, upload your x ray, x ray imagery. 

 , what you're asking the public to do is give you one of the most valuable assets about themselves in a medical sense and use it to train your system for your own financial benefit.  And give them nothing back in return. You can't ass e that just giving them the insights they already had from their doctors after the x rays were taken and then say, Oh, grok's going to give you better insight.

More often than not, the people are already, they're past that ailment. So, what you've given them as a novelty, you've taken as billions of dollars and essentially market cap value for training your model when you otherwise couldn't have got that data in the first place.  Now, what we are doing is we're saying, look, don't do that process to your public.

If someone is asking you for this data, if they are an LLM, if it is a grok. You should force them to actually come to systems like Tartle and buy that data directly from you. Because at this point you have no provable way that you uploaded this data to Grok at this time, you held the license to it, this was specifically your x ray image, you've given all of that away and you have nothing in return to show for it.

That's a bad move. So, a lot of this is also beholden on the public and public education. So Tartle steps into a long educational process to tell consumers like, look, this is a new technology for you. This is something that is going to empower you financially and also through choice. And you can help decide how these systems evolve.

And it's almost like people used to say you can vote with your dollar.  Take it a lot like voting with your data. Your data, depending on the systems you choose to share it with, will help those systems evolve. So, if it's something you're passionate about, share it with that. But make sure there's a record of that sharing and you're actually getting something financial in return because these companies very damn well know for sure how much that data is worth.

Well, very interesting. It's so interesting because you're spanning, business, commerce, retail, healthcare, it's really ubiquitous because we are the data and it’s all about every business in the world wanting it. And you're right in the middle, which is a good place to be, right? But I don't think everyone knows about you.

So, what are you doing, like, to campaign, in a sense, to create awareness of what you're doing and how you’re amplifying what is an altruistic way and a monetized way to, empower people?  knowledge and money, people's data and people who don't realize what they're sitting on. Yeah, a hundred percent.

So, it's important that we lean into the people that find great successes on Tartle., we've paid out a lot of money to these folks. There has been a huge transference of value for data, back to these groups. In the earliest days, when we first started this business, we saw that people would write in and say, look, I just sold the data packet for 20.

I'm from South Africa.  I have been able to feed my family of four for the next two weeks. And at that moment we knew we had something really special. We knew we were actually making an impact. It was, it wasn't outside of the data and the knowledge thing, but moving people out of, states of economic despair because now there was a new annuitize, something that they had in droves and they were creating it all the time, but now there was an unlock for it.

And so, for us spreading the word and people joining Tartle, by the way, it costs nothing. It's free to join Tartle. We'll never charge you anything for it.  When they hear about the success stories of others, they're very up to doing it. And I know there's too many people on it, but there's almost 10 billion on this planet.

We got a lot of work to do, but a lot of it is building trust because I'm so much of that trust has been damaged from other companies through the abuse of these processes.  And so like, why is it that people would say, Oh, I'm going to put my data into Tartle. It's going to be one more company that's going to probably turn against me.

So, we had to make sure from the foundation, Tartle had no access to it. We couldn't control it, do any of those things. Our whole impetus philosophically, technologically patent based supported by the U S government.  We had to make sure that everything aligned, and nothing was hypocritical. And our whole goal is to continue to drive that value back to the cons er.

And if we can do that, both parties win. And it creates a very balanced system taking that approach. And so that artificial intelligence, these companies, these products or services you with, you use, the more you interact with them using something like Tarl, they become more personal, they become timelier, they become more valuable when you're actually engaging with that tech.

But the fundamental basis of all that technology comes down to the data. So, the more you share, Or choose to share the better outcomes you're going to see from engaging with those groups from engaging with that new app or website, and that's what's being built over time. So, for us, getting the word out, it is leaning into those, those really big winners.

Yeah, those case studies.  Well, when you think about companies like clear, right, who are getting very specific data, Because people like the convenience of, cutting in line at the airport. Yeah., again, convenience, and then, well, what's the real cost of that for that convenience? Well, you've just given away some pretty personal data.

Mm hmm. And what are they going to do with that besides let you cut in line? Yeah, you don't really know what you're giving up. So clear sits on top of something called the trinsic network. You heard of this?  Yeah, intrinsic is an identity management network and clear is a part of it. It's just a larger framework of about 100 million identities that there are  they sit on top of but again What it is just it's a storage record of this this personal information But the only benefit people got from it, like you said was the ability to skip a line  I mean, I know it also sounds great at Disney World, but you'd be surprised how much data Disney's actually collecting on you already, right?

Yeah. It's really a psychological study, the entire thing, and that's where they get a good control mechanism. And I'm not to fear monger here, but we need to recognize where there's aspects of us, being controlled, how we're sharing these things and how these systems are developing, and do we want to take a stance for the development of those systems?

Do you want to be responsible enough for it? And the cool part is you can be responsible and financially benefit from at the same time. When most of the times I think in the world, it's like, well, if I'm going to be responsible, it's not really financially lucrative for me. Well, those days are over now. You can actually marry both of those universes together.

And that's what we see with technologies like turtle. Yeah. Okay. So, the, the idea of tracking and auditing, are you using blockchain to do that? Yeah, that's exactly, that's a good question.  So, we know that there's a lot of, different forms of blockchain out there, and many of them, because they, start on an economic base, they have fees associated with the use of those on chain systems, especially when they become publicized, and people have to mine stuff and verify that network, what have you.

So, we recognize many aspects of that blockchain, those blockchain systems, and we engineered out the weaknesses in them and brought in something that works for them, hundreds of thousands to millions of transactions every second without any of the fees or inefficiencies associated with it. So currently at this point in time, it's a privately run blockchain.

And we have that audit trail publicly for everyone to see. And in the future, we will give that blockchain out to the public and they can all do secondary verifications on it.  That's a web three principle. And right now, we are living in the world of marrying web two into web three. And web two is really these larger corporate entities.

How do we get them to, yeah, how do you use big tech and how do you transition them over to something like, how do you get them to adopt it? So, it's a, it's a long-term play, but yes, we use the fundamental tenants of blockchain technology to run that audit trail record. Yeah.  Yeah. I have a fairly good understanding about web three.

I was in the space for two years with a. Social media platform that was going to be the kind of web three social media platform and track transactions and renumerate creators for their content as it traveled through their web. So, all those are good ideas.  Unfortunately, that startup didn't get funded and had all kinds of other troubles.

But I did immerse myself in a lot of the concepts that we were developing, at least the interfaces for. Because I was the chief creative officer in charge of UX and marketing. So, we were developing, I had a UX team and a marketing team, the UX team was awesome. And we were just. Okay, we don't, we don't have the dev team yet because there's no investment, but we have  the vision and now we need to create features that ironically,  Three years ago, we're ahead of their time and we realized that we designed them out and they were all these AI features that you now see in every kind of video platform and social application platform.

We were dealing in designing those interfaces, not knowing exactly how we're going to implement them, but we knew about machine learning at least at that point.  And so, it was fascinating because we felt very future forward and we're being very altruistic in terms of empowering creators not only to Not only own the copyright of their content, but monetize It as it went through the chain and also monetize other contributors to a piece of content you have Duets, right?

It's like well that duet helped make that Whatever original video more popular than ever on tik tok, so they should get something right?  Anyway, so that was all good, right? It was all innovation for good. That was our kind of mantra it's like we're only going to develop features that took an altruistic path to help pay or help monetize YouTubers and content creators because they're the hardest working people in show business that never make money.

Basically, it's only like 2 percent and Mr. Beast billionaires, right? So, anyway.  So, I learned enough about that and learned about DAO’s, right? And this autonomous type of movement towards, away from governments and big tech controlling everything. And that was what has appealed to everyone in terms of decentralization.

Certainly crypto, right? And that's very appealing. Yeah, no. Crypto is like resurging, lately. And so, a year ago, two years ago, I said, yeah, web three is dead.  it can never happen, but, but the underpinnings of it.  Sound, the tenants. Yes, pure. And, but we had a lot of bad actors, driving it.

And it's like, okay, take away the bad actors. Let's get back to how it benefits humanity. People, all the things that, The governments aren't necessarily watching out for him. Big tech is just trying to monetize. So, I think it's fascinating that you're integrating those tenants of what three into your product.

 , because they're there to use for good, right? It's just, it's just bad actors who use it for bad that eventually get found out and get thrown in jail.  that's why we needed to establish that balance and.   , turtles technology. It was right for the time, and it continues to be even more ripe.

And as people start to see more of that value in their information, more so than they thought before. And that social narrative continues to grow while government restrictions come down. It's good for everybody at this point. And mind you, you can't go to corporate entities and say, Hey, let me teach you about web three, why you should be using this frankly for them, they don't, they don't give a shit, and you don't go ahead.

I mean, I get it. They could shareholder value. They got to hit, like that's their only incentive is financial incentive. But if you can meet them in a world that they're already used to completely underpinned by web three technology and not even have to talk about it. And then just give them something very transactional and say, Hey, here's the same thing you were getting, but I'm going to get you elevated and you're going to do it ethically.

That's where the sale was. And that's where the sweet spot is. And many of the people that come to understand what turtle does, even in the corporate sense, become personally interested first and then they bring it to the business and then they're interested in their business. But for many, they want to understand how this work for me does as a consumer, as a patient, whatever it may be personally in my life.

Because it allows them to see both sides of that market allows them to complete that picture and say ah, I see how this would fit into what we're doing at our corporation. I see how Alexander sharing all of these implicit data points about himself. Rick's rich contextual private data can help train my LLM or AI better than anybody else.

I can actually do new novel things. There's an avenue for it. Yeah. I so appreciate that. And are you the CTO or the CEO? Like who's your tech group. Yeah, no, it's a very good question. So, I'm the CEO of the company, CEO, COO, right? Just, I guess I combined both of those. We have chief technology officer, Dania Simmons.

She is a savant when it comes to the architecture of this tech., she's done an incredible job, carrying through the original philosophy and tenants and making sure that those things are exacted in what we're doing and we're actually delivering that value and balance back to both parties. And that comes from a very robust marketplace architecture.

And she has a whole team of developers that work with her in support of that. And we have, some of the finest marketing people around that work on our side, customer support.  Strategy like you name it. We've been there and we've done it Yeah, and I appreciate that because when I was in the web 3 space no one knew what the hell it was.

Yeah, and You can't lead with the technology you had to lead with the benefits of how you're changing people's lives And then they understand that, and our play was Being in control of your content and monetize it in new ways. It's like, well, I understand that as a content creator, as a Podcaster or whatever and so that was the hook, but you can't lead with technology.

People don't understand it No, and they don't need to understand it, just like I always use the analogy of, the light switch I go and turn on that light switch and magically light happens. I don't really understand how it all works. I don't need to, but I like it, and I trust it. What it happens as long as it's simple, it does what it says it's going to do, right?

That's the benefit. So, it's like, yeah, I like light, light switches. Fantastic. Conventional light bulb. Sure. Fantastic. I don't know all the underlying technology and I don't need to. And hopefully we're moving towards that world. Certainly, in the world of AI, because People are getting empowered in all different ways, certainly creatively and what they're able to generate.

They don't necessarily need to understand it, but it's empowered them in new ways., and now we just need a channel that technology and creativity to do good things. Yeah, and that's, it's possible and it's up to the people using that technology. To decide if they want to do good with it is up to them to put the data into those systems to make them do magical things. 

Yes, another podcast for that whole topic., and I have to say, you were, a guest speaker at our new El Sailon series here in Santa Fe, and you did a fabulous job. within a very tight time framework of explaining where AI is at currently and how it's kind of eating itself alive and gave a new understanding to our audiences certainly on What is training on why it needs data and how new companies are approaching that data acquisition and training in different ways.

And those are the companies to watch versus just the original.  Sinners, I call them, at Google, and OpenAI, even though I do use a lot of that stuff, and I'm careful about what I put in. But thank you. You're a great panelist, and you're a great talker today. Thank you so much. Yeah, no, I appreciate the invite.

I mean, you bring me on here, I'm happy to discuss whatever you want to talk about, CURT. Yeah, well, we'll keep the conversation going, but we got to end the podcast, and I just want to thank you so much for coming on to our little show. And, for those of you tuning in, catch more of our Realm IQ sessions on your favorite podcast platforms.

Please follow and subscribe. Smash that subscribe button., you can also follow us on TikTok and LinkedIn. Alexander, thanks so much. It was a great, great time, great discussion and I, I learned a lot about your product. I'm excited and I love the fact that, you've built it in a way that is altruistic and that's what technology needs right now is a bunch of alt tech companies doing things the right way.

So, thank you. You're most welcome.   what is right is reasonable. And what is reasonable is right. Thank you for having me on CURT. Okay. Thank you. 

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