Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and

inside the minds of the top people in tech. We have a great show for you this week.

Andreas Weigand is here. He is the first ever chief scientist of Amazon, so he has lots of

interesting stories to tell and things to say, but first, a detour.

So I spent much of this past week at Dreamforce.

And if you don't know what Dreamforce is, you're in for a treat.

It is this annual conference that is put on by Salesforce.com, the business software giant that is run by Mark Beniof,

who is a San Francisco billionaire, who you may recall just recently paid almost 200 million

bucks for Time magazine. Beniof is a kind of a force of nature, and every, his id is fully realized at Dreamforce, which is not only unlike any

corporate event I've ever experienced, it's not really like any event I've experienced

full stop.

So first off, there's the size of this thing.

More than 170,000 people descend on San Francisco for four days, which just

makes the city a bit of a nightmare. Keep in mind, this is a city where only about 850,000 people

live, so it increases the population by about a fifth. And the whole affair has this really odd vibe about it.

It's a mix of hypercommercialism and spirituality and earnestness,

and we're going to change the world, all wrapped up into one.

But to best explain it, I thought I'd give you a quick whistlestop tour.

And it starts in a clump of potted trees that they call the dream forest. And next to the dream forest, which is actually in the middle of an astro-turf street

in downtown San Francisco, every morning of Dreamforce, a group of Buddhist monks

are there just kind of standing around hanging out on hand to help worn out executives find

peace amid the chaos. And I talked to one. His name was Harmony. Hi. I'm Danny. Brother, Harmony. Harmony. Harmony. Your name's Harmony. Hi. Hi. I'm Danny. Brother, Harmony.

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