A little bit of math, history, and common sense.

A few days ago I found myself in a curious conversation that made me ask a simple question with a complicated edge: do we still inhabit the same reality, or did something fracture—splitting the world we knew into a “former” reality and a “current” one? The distinction is subtle. Reality always moves from past to future, ceaselessly generating a new version of itself. Yet until recently that new version was threaded through with the axioms of common sense. Now, those axioms seem to have been swapped for a common misconception. If you still live in the world where common sense rules, what follows will be clear. If you’ve drifted from that world, reading this may be hard. I’ll try anyway.

The setup is familiar. The hunt for new prospects never stops—people who need precise targeting by net worth because their products and services exist for buyers who can actually afford them. Web searches, new companies, new names, cold emails, long-awaited replies, standard questions—dreary. You know the drill. Then came a reply that broke the monotony: the marketing director of a logistics firm that specializes in transporting and storing fine art and other objects that require delicacy. Young, bright, undoubtedly talented, almost certainly ambitious—and, it seemed, already living in another reality. Their clients, however, still inhabit the one I’m writing to you from. We began to correspond: basic questions, perfumed with a light, tasteful snobbery and a very reasonable skepticism. My answers, at some point, stopped being about winning the prospect and became about the game itself; after nearly twenty years, you learn from the first few words whether a thread will burn or fizzle. When a deal looks unlikely, curiosity takes over: how far can you travel into someone else’s mental world—a contemporary on the calendar, perhaps two city blocks away—and yet it feels like stepping through the wardrobe to Narnia. And that’s not just a metaphor.

The inflection point came with her reaction to our pricing—more precisely, to a simple cost example. Context matters. UHNWI data offers two basic packages: one-time content distribution and an exclusive agreement. The first is a one-off—think a Kinder Surprise egg: you will get something, but not necessarily what you wanted, even if that option exists. The second is a long game that ultimately delivers what you’re actually after. Explaining the one-time option, I wrote that sending a single message to a billionaire costs €9.5; therefore 100 messages to 100 billionaires cost €950. Finger-count math, for the avoidance of doubt. And right there, something slipped. I must have brushed the membrane between realities. Most people would mask their feelings with a neat “Thanks, not interested.” Not this time. She wrote—every letter wearing a smirk—that for the same money she could reach (she named a platform) an audience dozens, even thousands of times larger. Interesting, isn’t it? It’s a test. If you feel no inner dissonance at that line, you probably live in her new reality. My point here is not to convert you or pry your eyes open—though the red pill sits right beside you; you either don’t see it or don’t want to.

What’s worth debating? On €950 (or USD, pick your poison) you can indeed reach a far larger crowd. The question is: how many of them are actually billionaires or centi-millionaires—or, if we’re being generous, multi-millionaires? That’s exactly what I asked. I would have paid to sit inside her head when that question landed—not because it’s clever or weighty, but out of anthropological curiosity: the moment a citizen of one reality tries to process a signal from another, governed by alien priors. Perhaps it was a rushed answer that felt witty enough, but she wrote: “I don’t need billionaires. I need clients.” When you read that, you see the system defending itself—stable, self-consistent, unwilling to violate its own laws. And yes, who cares whether my client is a billionaire or a line worker—if I’m selling chips or canned beer. But if we’re talking about moving art or antiques, a crate of rare wine, or anything that demands exacting storage and handling, that’s not the same as finding a moving company on Craigslist to shuttle boxes from one Brooklyn ZIP code to another (insert your local analogue). I don’t think she fails to grasp this; she chooses to write it, hinting that the platform’s filters will sift out enough golden grains—and that there will be more than a hundred of them.

And here’s my question to the residents of the new reality. I haven’t been there, so I’m ignorant: I don’t know how things work in your branch of the world. Please enlighten me: is it really true that by reaching X people a day for $950 you’ll generate enough sales to justify that investment? Given that your service is priced such that, for the same money, you could pack and move all your belongings from one end of the country to the other—and that this is comparable to packing a single painting? If that’s how your world works, take me there. That’s Narnia proper: you step through the wardrobe (our wardrobe is a screen), spend $950, and each time you come out ROI-positive. Oh—who said ROI-positive? No one did. The promise was merely higher probability. Leads. In my reality, there are just two states of matter: sold or not sold. It doesn’t matter how many people asked, “What do you do?” simply because some platform tossed my message into their attention window.

Let’s warm up with a little probability. What’s the chance of a sale if you spend $950 to place an information packet in front of 100 billionaires (hand-picked by name after doing the internal work of choosing the most promising) versus the same spend on any Ad platform? There’s a digression here for mathematicians, but the short answer is plain: with equal spend, your probability of a sale is higher when you reach 100 pre-qualified billionaires than when you rack up 1,000,000 impressions—even when those impressions were “filtered” by your digital gurus, PhDs in the sacred art of ticking boxes in ad dashboards. One caveat: UHNWI data lets you inject your message into the UHNWIs’ attention window, but you must choose who they are; or you take our premium 36-month contract and simply cover everyone—then your odds climb further.

Another difference in your reality: you outsourced audience definition to platform filters. That’s like cooking strictly by recipe without looking at the ingredients. There’s meat at $10/lb and meat at $400/lb. You select just “meat,” full stop—no verification (which the platforms can’t truly provide). And the worst part is the learned laziness: you stare only at counts and costs—how many leads, what CPL. That habit has become your norm: automate, optimize, maximize reach; “benchmark the best,” copy competitors, add a dash of house style. The outcome is universally unique sameness. Clients stop noticing differences—or rather, they stop noticing anything—because you’ve built a collective noise machine. It works only because there’s organic demand. After that, luck decides whose page appears when an assistant, lacking prior experience or a trusted voice to call, opens a search bar and types a query. That is where your money goes to die.

In my reality, people spend so that when the query finally arises, the answer is already waiting. It’s deliberate pollination of the entire field of likely buyers—without panning a million tons of sand to find one flake of gold.

Our exchange, sadly, went nowhere, so I have no dazzling twist to report from your side of the mirror. But I’m almost certain: if you’re reading this message-in-a-bottle, you stand with the algorithms—where math is replaced by “variance,” history by story, and common sense by common misconception. It’s hard to spot the red pill when everyone around you lives by the same catechism.

And yet, if some of you haven’t fully severed the line to the older reality—the one where 90% of UHNWIs still live (remember: the average billionaire is 63–65), if you’re tired of paying for leads instead of sales, and simply didn’t know there is a way out—follow the white rabbit.

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