Potent spaces let us play with different permissions that snap us awake. They trade in unusual currencies - permission to scream, to be excessive, to be anonymous, to be scared, to shrink or take up space, to be intimate with strangers. The greater the delta, the greater the potency.

What disappeared along the way was not just trust, but also the micro-doses of potency that came from navigating everyday risk. Choosing a restaurant without a thousand reviews, booking a room in an unfamiliar city - these were small but vital leaps of faith. They required us to extend ourselves beyond certainty, and in doing so they injected... See more

The greater the permissions, meaning the further they are from the everyday, the more potent the space.

Potency only happens when the everyday script is suspended and a new set of permissions takes over.

What we’re starving for is intensity, and that’s hard to admit because it means the ease we’re so precious about has also made us numb.

For anyone building brands, communities, or cultural movements, this is both the challenge and the opportunity. You can keep chasing width in activations, collabs, and photo walls, or you can engineer depth by creating spaces that allow rupture from the norm. True rituals, not hollow ones. Risk that transforms. Potency is the only real measure of... See more

What people really want is permission to feel and act in ways that ordinary life doesn't allow, and this is the right time to start pushing your experiences into uncomfortable territory.

Ordinary life has come to give us a narrow set of permissions, usually limited to work and consumption. But potency lives in the delta between what’s normally allowed and what suddenly becomes possible in a special space.

When you can pay someone else to deal with the grocery store rush, when you can buy access to a highway lane without traffic, when you can skip urgent care and book a concierge doctor, you’re probably not going to invest in improving our broken systems. You’ve, “found a way to route around collapse. Life still works, but only in zones that are... See more