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My name is Mark Rubin, and I'm a dream weaver. I hope these widgets help you weave your dreams into reality.

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This is a story about tracking, tracking animals and animals. Our tracking was people. I learned the very basics of tracking at the tracker school through Tom Brown Jr. and his grandfather stocking wolf in the summers of 1984 1985. And I learned the basics of tracking at that school, the wilderness school based on Native American philosophies about living in harmony with nature, and multi generational planning and really, really important topics about how living things can can thrive. In habitat. As I

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mentioned, one of the things I learned there was was tracking skills basic tracking skills. Tom Brown Jr. told a story about stalking wolves who had passed away a lot that before and stalking off told him this story and Tom Brown had seen this is that stalking off could outrun a deer

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and stalking wolf would would run see some tracks on the brown deer track. He knew everything you could know about the animal from the tracks, male, female, obviously type of animal Wait, any injuries, whether it was tired, he could outrun a deer. So he would see the tracks and he would start running. And he would run for days, chasing animals, he would eventually

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catch cats, the deer catch up to it because it would be exhausted from running, he would run off every night, he would just run days. When he caught it, he would kill it in ceremony, tickets

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life, say a prayer and continue his life. And I thought that there was so many fascinating aspects of that story. That still intrigued me today. And one of the things that I thought of when I heard that story was what other animals could a human outrun. That's what I was thinking what other animals could a human on could you outrun? You know, like, given endurance given strength, given our capacity to store food and water in our bodies, and availability of food and water and a habitat? What other animals could we outrun? And I listed some that I thought, but this got me thinking about distance and time, distance and time. And already at this point in life, I was good at measuring distance and time. So I had a good sense of time and timing, how long things took and a good sense of distances. I've spent a lot of time in the woods and I'm a backpacker. I always was a backpacker, since I was 12. So I know about distance and time and carrying capacity, and resource availability, water, food, whatever shelter. So I was thinking about these things before this, this school, but then I was really thinking like the details of it like look, what other animals could you outruns that it was a year later, I was at the beach, three hours away. It's called Ocean City, Maryland. This was 1986. And I was carried out a bunch of stuff to the beach. And I was setting up the chairs and stuff for everybody else to get out there. And I was just looking around for tracks in the sand. And I was looking around at the people that were around me and I'm just trying to go backwards from from their tracks, from the people through the tracks all the way through to where they were, I could see who was left handed and right handed in the track. Because people tend to carry things in their predominant hand. And things that people bring to the beach are heavy. And it's easy to see tracks in the sand. So it was like a you know, it was easy to see the different depths of the footprints, left and right, and come up with an assessment of who was right handed. And it was lucky that I was never very good at this, it takes a tremendous amount of practice. I had a tracking box that I made was like a little sandbox. But in practice with it enough to be good at this. This is like a real skill or skill of observation. I was I was looking at these tracks in the sand, just thinking about people and who the people were around me different ages, different body types. Men, women, children, dogs, even different things around me. I started thinking about the map of the world. The people who lay out the maps, who are the people that design the roads, who are the people that design the communication, infrastructure and architectures who designed the food delivery mechanism. The people that designed the arch, okay, that can build over a river and be more efficient, because time is money. And if you can go on a straight line. It's that are those people, the people that lay it out. And I was thinking, if I was one of those people when I was laying out the map of the world, and I was laying out an information architecture in the world, which was a way to pass notes, okay, store and forward later became the internet by basically having a note that a runner carries to a spot and then takes a rest while another runner picks it up and runs in another direction, and moves that information around an empire.

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And I thought there would be a constraint of distance and time, the

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optimal I was thinking, like, what would be the optimal distance. And the first thing I think of is what is the animal that is carrying this message, and it was a human. And then I was thinking, Well, what is the optimal human to deploy on this task of moving messages around, and it's a 16 year old boy, which is how old I was, at the time. Because a 16 year old boy is usually too young to fight in a war, hadn't reproduced yet in the societies was usually fast, had a tremendous amount of endurance, and could operate on less food. And so I realized, if I was laying out an architecture to move information around a planet, that the unit of work that I would use would be like a 16 year old boy, if I could do that, because then I could have enough soldiers later, if I needed them. And also people could be reproducing, which expands the Empire. You know, so if I was like, just the kind of person that was putting this together, that's how I would do it. So then I thought, well, how far can a 16 year old boy run in one day, because that would be the spacing. That would be the maximum spacing between everything that I would ever see on the planet earth that was designed this way, is that if you're laying out a new empire, there's a certain capacity to do work or a unit of work, which in this case, is a runner gay, which is how far can one runner run for one day, and how many messages can they carry? That's the that's, that's what you're pushing around. So I did an experiment I ran, I got up from where I was sitting. And it was like maybe nine in the morning, I ran 50 Miles versus something that's not hard to do when you're 16. Hard to do. Now, I just ran in one direction. So I got tired and ran the other way. And I really, and I figured, if I was running for my life, that I could run 45 miles on the sand. If I was running for my life, I had to do it, like in one full day of the summer. And I'm sure people can run more than that. And that's what I thought I could do. So I knew that in the architecture of the world, the distance between the shelters where these runners rested, was always going to be less than 45 miles, because that was the beach where it was flat. So adjusted for altitude, elevation, temperature, water availability, food availability, if the best case scenario was was a flat beach with plenty of water, and I could do 45 mile by provisioning with water as I went water fountains and stuff that that would be the maximum distance. And I seen that all over the world, all over the world. This distance is the maximum distance between the shelters where these learners slept. And I came up with this idea, logging the tracks in the sand. And I guess in a practical sense, in terms of business, this is related to the unit of work that an employee can do. In one day, how much or how much work can somebody do at a particular process in one day? How many phone calls can one salesperson make? How many Pay Per Click ads? Can a marketing person verify how many jobs can a person do physically with their bodies and still stay healthy? So this was a really good observation.