Every interaction is an ask for change.

Even something as simple as saying hello asks someone to go from not paying attention to you to paying attention to you. An advertisement asks someone to consider buying something. A video asks someone to stop scrolling and watch.

Every interaction is a request for a small transformation.

But there’s a limit to how much you can change someone at once. You cannot take someone who barely understands arithmetic and expect them to understand the matrix multiplications inside an LLM in an hour.

The distance between where someone is and where you’re asking them to go matters. I call this distance delta.

The smaller the delta, the easier the ask.

Now, if your worth is measured by the cumulative change you bring into the world, you have two ways to create it. You can bring a large change to a small number of people, or a small change to an enormous number of people.

I was interested in the second.

And that led me to a question: Where is humanity psychologically concentrated?

People aren’t particularly original. Most of us want more money, a beautiful home, someone to love, an easier job, and the freedom to travel.

Imagine plotting humanity on a psychological map. You would probably find enormous clusters of people wanting roughly the same things.

Someone who dreams of visiting Paris is already interested in Paris. Showing them beautiful photographs of the city is a very small ask. You aren’t asking them to suddenly develop an interest in French architecture. You’re simply giving them something they already want.

So my original plan was to map these psychological hotspots and create content around them.

I tried doing that.

It was too fucking expensive.

Too many variables. Too many assumptions about people’s beliefs, motivations, desires, and circumstances.

Then I opened Instagram.

And I realized that almost everything I was watching was either a dream, a nightmare, or a hallucination.

A Ferrari driving through Monaco. A beautiful woman dancing. A billionaire talking about his success. Someone travelling through the mountains.

Dreams.

A financial collapse. A cheating scandal. AI taking everyone’s jobs. Some horrible event happening halfway across the world.

Nightmares.

And then there are funny cats, absurd memes, and completely bizarre situations that resemble the strange, nonsensical things you might see in your sleep.

Hallucinations.

Instagram is a dream factory.

Someone comes home after working all day, lies down, opens Instagram, and sees a Ferrari. For a few seconds, that’s their Ferrari. They see a beautiful villa in Italy, and suddenly they’re imagining themselves living there.

It’s a little realm of magic where people can briefly experience lives they don’t have.

And what makes your life easy is that dreams are shared.

Millions of people dream of wealth, beauty, romance, intelligence, freedom, and status. Their nightmares are often the opposite: poverty, rejection, loneliness, stupidity, captivity, and irrelevance.

I no longer need to map everyone’s psychology individually. I can start with the dreams and nightmares that people already share.

That gives me a much simpler way to create content.

First, identify a common dream or nightmare.

Then find the smallest delta between that dream and the information, idea, or object I want to introduce.

Finally, turn that connection into a spectacle.

For example, suppose I want to make a video about sapphire rings.

I could explain their chemical composition, hardness, and optical properties. But most people aren’t dreaming about mineralogy.

They might, however, dream about royalty, romance, expensive jewellery, and beautiful weddings.

So I make a video about Princess Diana choosing her engagement ring.

The audience comes for Diana. The ring becomes interesting because it belongs to her story. And suddenly I’m able to talk about sapphires without asking the audience to develop an entirely new interest.

The same principle works for AI, finance, technology, or practically anything else.

Dream → Small Delta → Spectacle.

The first step should require almost nothing from the viewer. But the dream itself can be enormous.

You can ask someone lying in bed to imagine owning a yacht. You cannot ask them to get up and earn a yacht.

That’s the difference.

And perhaps that’s what much of the internet is doing. It isn’t necessarily helping people live different lives.

It’s letting them experience those lives for a few seconds.

The job of a creator is to find a dream people already have and give them a little piece of it through a screen.

And do yourself a favor. When you go on Instagram next time, look at the videos. You can easily classify them into dream, hallucination, or a nightmare. Like the videos you will see, the colors, the contrasts, the people in them, they all feel straight out of a dream. A really cool car, a really sexy mansion, a really picturesque beach, or every person in the video looks like a supermodel. or how there is shit ton of money in a random video. Everything is very dreamlike. Or you will see something like divisive content, rage bait and whatnot. And it’s very nightmare like, hey, my world is getting uprooted. Everything is pushed to the extreme. In such a way that it feels very dream-like. It’s it’s almost a platonic version of what we would consider a dream or a nightmare or a hallucination.