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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. This is a story about architectures. And this kind of architecture is related to empire building empire building architectures. And an empire building architecture has three basic components. It creates value for the world, which is a way to exchange work with other people in different ways, through the exchange of value and worth, so a way for people to trade. And in my world, that's business. So that's that's where that component is found. The next side is creating value for yourself, which is about learning and self awareness. And third side is creating value for a tribe, which is about community architectures. I've seen these three architectures all around the world, walking on old roads, and measuring the distances between buildings with the number of steps I take, and looking at the kinds of buildings that are spaced in this way. And some of the buildings are for communications, which is about passing messages back and forth through the Empire. And some of the buildings are for topping off inspiration, which are religious structures and buildings that are the same distances that a person could walk in one day. And this story is about a trip in Peru, I can on the Inca Trail. And on this trip, I was hiking with a bunch of guys that are now my business partners. We've been partners for 17 years from this trip. And this story is about how I was able to visualize this architecture of value creation, creating value for the world creating value for the self and creating value for the tribe. The story starts day one of this trip up on the Inca Trail. And it was hard. And it was high elevations and it was fast, we were moving fast. In the first day, I became separated from everybody else because they were in really good shape. And I'm an average shape. So they were far ahead. We caught up at night though. And on the second day, I was up at this high peak, second highest peak on the trip. And I was catching my breath, the top of his mountain, it was a beautiful, beautiful spot in the world have magical spot in terms of terrain, and the view and the air temperature and pressure and humidity and all the elements that make things special, memorable experience out of the top of this mountain, and leading up against this ancient temple, catching my breath, try not to fall over. And it was it was not a lot of oxygen that high up. And I was trying to you know, go fast. And as I was on top of this mountain, I realized that to my right was the jungle. And it was moist and smelled like life. And to my left was the desert all the way to the sea. And it was cold and dry. And I was at this this peak of this mountain like this like like it was only three or four feet wide at this strip where I was I could feel the different temperature and humidity and the wind was blowing and above my head right above my head on this peak up here. The clouds were forming, like right above my head, like right there like I was in the weather in the clouds. And it was magical to be in the weather where the clouds were forming. And the wind was blowing in a different smells. I am able to visualize the temperatures across my body and scale models, gradients. Honestly I'm able to I always do is a more accurate way to say always aware of this. That's where I like to wear a lot of layers so that my body is pretty much at the same temperature because it's distracting when my left toe left and big toe is five degrees colder than the rest of my body. Nevertheless, I'm up there just standing there and I decided I realized that if I stressed my arms out like this love right that the temperature gradient across my body to my fingertips wouldn't be the biggest temperature gradient I would ever experienced in my entire life. Biggest one in nature, because that was the part of the planet where I was at where it was like the continental divide an entirely different ecosystem to my right, then to my left, so I stood there with my arms outstretched. And while I was just catching my breath, try not follow her with my arms outstretched, feeling the temperature difference across my body and visualizing it in this proportional way. And feeling the motion of the wind and watching this gradient shift around like a, like a dance, across my body of temperatures, and humidity. I started thinking about business. I was in business for a few years by that. And I was just thinking, just thinking about email. I was also thinking about the road system of the Inca Empire that we were walking on, that I was standing on that was built by people in exchange for protection, and also food storage and infrastructure things. So was designed by someone who designed this road system. As a way of connecting these remote villages together, I was thinking about the communication architecture of the Incas, which is called a key poo, which is knotted rope, which was like their email. And they had these runners running around on these trails, these these kids running around moving these knotted ropes around moving the operational information around the Empire. And this was a store and forward architecture, just like the internet, packets of the internet is that the message would go to a resting spot. And then either another runner would grab it and spread it out into nodes in different directions to move the messages around, or that same run away, keep running the next day. But the spacing is what was interesting to me. Because as I've I've learned is that time is honey. And basically people who lay these things out know that and optimize the distances to minimize the amount of energy it cost to move information and maximize the velocity of the information flow. Makes sense? I'm thinking about that I'm thinking about that in the context of email, at least back then, in organizations, especially organizations that were not well structured, there's a lot of CC's on emails back then. So you would get an email and there'd be like, 20 people CCD on it, and then everyone would like to reply all to everybody. And then emails would bounce around forever, completely ineffective as a mechanism to convey information, and always annoyed me that that that was the best we could do as like human beings. It was like an email list of like CC and I was thinking I was comparing that to the ICA architecture? And how how would these keep who that that would never happen? Because it took too long to recreate a key poo. So you had to think clearly about the message and think, who was the recipient of the message? And how long would it take to get there, things like that, like you had to be very, very mindful of these messages back then, because you were spending calories and people to move them around expensive. So I was thinking about that. And I was also thinking about my architecture that I use in business, which is based on back then one side of a geodesic structure that organizes the business functions. So that's creating value for the world. I already knew that one. I knew it in a different way than this geodesic way, but I knew how things were connected in business. And how, for example, design is connected to marketing and designs also connected to production. And then you've got, you know, sales, and you've got, you know, deployment, you've got all these different parts of a business that are all connected in different ways. And you're just moving. But that's what the emails are moving is messages between people into different departments back and forth and a certain way. I've known that way for a while. But when I was standing there, and I was visualizing this temperature gradient across my body shifting, and I was imagining the road system of Inca empire that I was walking on. And I was imagining the messages being passed back and forth. I started thinking like, what if I could design an email system so that you could email the system, email, send an email to a central place, and somehow based on an architecture, that the email will be routed only to the minimum number of people in the organization that needed to know that that message. That was what I was thinking about was like, what would be a system that would work like that, and based on the business functions and roles of people in a business and the content in the email. So that's a no different than a person reading, keep who there's not a rope, and then deciding where it needs to go. Okay, that's the same idea. Is that analysis sort of combining so and then I was like, what would it be the structure of that? What would it look like? If I design that not just for the side of creating value for the world, which is business. But the side that's about creating value for yourself, which was about learning and self awareness, and the tribal architecture design. And I stood there, I was imagining all these things, the other moving things around in my head, I ended up with this full geodesic structure that has these three different sides with all these cross functionally connected components. And when I visualize that, I knew that I would use that architecture for my Eco project when I was ready, because that is an architecture that allows the design of value that is an architecture that enables value to flow between the business side which is the side that creates the money, which is the energy of human work, to the side that enables people to learn, which improves efficiencies. And then the people that are learning together can form a community around these ideas. That is a way for us in architecture, to create an empire. I learned a lot walking around old roads. And this trip to Peru in 2007 was really transformative