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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. I always like walking around old empires, on old roads and old trails. And I've been doing this in the world since 1992. In in Turkey and Greece, Europe, and then later, Thailand and Israel. And I like the old roads and trails, because I used to still do measure the distances between building. And I said earlier, one of these videos about the idea that the buildings are spaced a certain distance all over the world, because they're designed by a person who understands the time is honey, the person who designs these empires is trying to optimize the rate, that information can flow through the civilization, because that's the lubricant that keeps that holds things together. And all the stories that move with these messages, hold the civilization together, travel stories, about common beliefs, and shared values and things. So basically, designing around this information unit is critical to ensuring longevity in a civilization. And so for fun, I would go to walk around these civilizations and measure the distances between things, but also look around and ask myself with every step why things were placed where they were, what were the strategic advantages, tactical advantages, maneuvers, exit strategies? Which way was the sun? Would that create an advantage or disadvantage as someone was coming over the hill? Would it be better to have a look out on the hill? Was there a building on that hill? So someone could send a signal across the valley to the other building? All the time looking around wherever they put the cannon? If the cannon was here, where would it be indefensible? How many times was this place over one? Did they move again? Did they increase the range of the cabinets? How many versions of cannons are here? Did they have bands around him to keep them from blowing up? Until they figure out the rifling technology that came later? Where did they store the gunpowder? How close was it? Could it blow up by mistake? How many times did it? Where would I put the moat? Where how big should the drive is V, where would I put the archers, wherever they put the cauldron of boiling oil, whatever it was that was happening, then I would look at these structures and compare to what I would have done if I was the person designing that civilization or empire. Every step I took along the way. And I've been studying these architectures at least from the ground, you know, from from my eyes, and my feet, walking and looking and thinking. And also thinking about where they put the temples. And the alignment of the structures to to the seasons, the positions of the stars at different seasons. This is the moon positions of the sun, these patterns of behavior that humans have that connect us to the harvest cycles around us. And the cycles of motion around us. She was all over the world, but a temples aligned a certain way. And that's by design, by a person that designed it to align it with nature. And reasons why are infinite. So it's hard to try to imagine like, you know, the ultimate reason why this is. But one of the reason is reasons is because it connects the people who are operating the civilization to the rest of nature, through geometry, positions of things, length of shadows, angles between things. And this is something that holds societies and civilizations together, because it creates a common framework for belief. If you know like the lunar cycles, and you know that there's going to be the Eclipse, a lunar eclipse or solar eclipse. And then knowledge is is in a small group of people that either have that knowledge was given to them or they have some kind of machinery to keep track of these things either whether the technology, the heavy machine, technology could just be a calendar system. Or it could be a machine gears that tells them where the planets are Mertens Sun is and things. And using these these technologies, for people that don't know them, is a type of magic. And even if it's not a magic, it's a belief in something, then it makes sense, like the world makes sense. So if you put the temple in the position that the sun comes through the window on the day of the harvest, that's good enough to keep the harvest happening every every year on the same day, basically. And on the other side of the year when it's dark and It starts to become light, having having ceremonies and physical structures that match the cycles, makes it real, that someone knows something about something in the universe, and makes all the rest of the stories believable. So as I was walking through these, these old civilizations, I noticed some things that are common. And this is a story about my trip to Peru in 2007, with the guys that later became my partners one year later. And this is about empires, and I'm planning my empire. And I organized this trip to Peru with these guys. Because I liked them. We were friends. And I wanted to walk in the woods with them for a couple of weeks. And in the jungle, just to make sure that they were the guys that I wanted to spend the next couple of decades of my life building something with an empire with. So I organize this trip to hike in Peru on the Inca Trail, I had a few reasons. In addition to wanting to hang out with these guys in the woods. All the other empires I visited on foot, were old and had been taken over by other empires. And when you think about footprints on the ground, if you're reading the footprints, and you've had, you know, 1000s of years of people walking on that ground, it's hard to figure out the moves of the first person that ever like put the civilization together. Everyone else came after, and improved it or destroyed it or whatever they did. But the first person who was the first person to stack a rock in the shape pyramid, what happened the day before that there was a party. And before that, the person who put it together was meeting with with the construction crew leaders, and before that, they were meeting with the storytellers and before that with the priests, and so on all the way back. And so like the people that put these things together, and there's a certain order of things that occur. And so this is the thing, these are some characteristics of empires that that I'd seen before. But on the Inca trail back to that, that was an empire that never got conquered again. So someone, someone came out of the jungle and united a bunch of tribes in South America, built roads with taxation, move information around in these in these units called Kiku. And runners moving them around the Empire. These runners stayed in shelters along the way, optimal distances. But I knew it when I went there. This is no one ever conquered this civilization, it just it just died. Because of the conquistador scheme and whatever else happened, then it would be fresh. And this facts would be visible to me. So I wanted to go see hike on the Inca Trail and walk on these old roads, to see the footprints of an ancient architect, and try to figure out why people think very good. Along the way of analyzing this, I was thinking, as I was walking on this trail, I was thinking about the business I was in, which is a franchising business. And the commonalities of scaling an empire, like with land and soldiers, and whatever, and building a franchise system. And so these are the properties that I noted is the first one is empires need to be distributed, just spread out. And that's because they're gathering energy from a habitat. And it doesn't matter if you're gathering money, or you're gathering wood, or you're gathering food, there's a certain capacity for a habitat to provide those things for a certain number of people. When you get past a certain size, you have to expand. And the bees do this to something called swarming. So the first characteristic is distributed. second characteristic is viral. There has to be a viral component, and undefine viral as a component of a story that spreads for no money. So a joke is a viral story. If I tell a joke to somebody, and it's compatible with their psychology, there's a whole list of things that make a joke compatible, which is related to the idea that it has to be like a surprising thing. People hearing this story can't imagine themselves as the victim or villain of the story has to be somebody else. And there has to be some kind of like surprising twist. That's absurd. And a couple other characteristics. And then people laugh It's an involuntary reflex. They laugh It's the laughing reflex. But what's interesting is you can't tickle yourself. And so So anyway, no eight knowing the how these things these these words, there's a viral component of a civilization that So, if it's good enough civilization, then then someone will remark to somebody who's not in the civilization, hey, this is a good civilization. Come over here, we got better, you know, whatever rules are fair, you know better food, more vacation days, whatever it is, there's more holidays, and whatever. And then you can recruit people to join your empire for no cost because people are happy. And they're just sharing the happy stories. And so that's the viral component of this. And you can do this also intentionally we're storytellers, in a civilization. And so having a civilization has a written language or some kind of way to transmit information allows the word viruses called stories to spread. The next one is nodal, which, which is has nodes. And by a node, what I mean is a way for a unit operation to survive on its own with minimum amount of knowledge inside resources called resources. From a centralized location, it's basically that an autonomous entity, a node that operates by itself, gathering energy from its habitat, money, food, wood, okay, they know what to do that simple, they know what to do. But it's tied together with a common framework, common operating system best practices. This one, this one, this one, this one, this one, all of them are tied to our best practices operating operating system, and their individual nodes of operation. And the last one is organic. And by organic, what I mean is able to utilize local resources. They don't require importing of resources to survive. And so what you end up with in this environment, is something that's distributed. It has a viral component, nodal operating structure, and organic, which means it gathers all the resources locally. And if you think about a franchise system, that's what that is, does, you take a thing that works, and you move it to another habitat, and then you scale it as much as you can, and then you move into another habitat and scale as much as they can. And a junk removal company that covers all of North America is distributed. The viral component is the marketing messages that you may have heard of one 100 got junk. nodal are the local franchise operators. And organic is because a franchise II we don't need anything from the corporate office, other than some common operating systems for how we do this service, training, Logos shirts, and how we move the money around through the system, which is the same exact thing as the Inca Trail, and having a village here, and then building a road and then putting the village over there and building another road and putting a village over there. And another with all the same rules have the same beliefs, all the same stories. The same money if there's a unit of money, the same language, written language or language with knotted ropes, the key boo, same language so that you can transmit the information around through the Empire. And I learned this walking around on all roads, modeling everything