Long before formal math, Tapputi of Mesopotamia was already experimenting with scent. Around 1200 BCE, she distilled flowers, adjusted ingredients, and tested how perfumes evolved on skin and made people feel over time. What she understood intuitively is what we now call the three acts of perfume: the first impression, the heart you live in, and the memory that lingers. We still experiment the same way today, through layering and building scent wardrobes for different moods and moments. Perfumery was one of our earliest systems: input ingredients, test combinations, optimize for feeling.

Something fundamental has shifted in how consumers measure value. It's no longer about what you buy, it's about what you feel. Across industries from fragrance to hospitality, from fine dining to beauty retail, I derived that experience value equals emotional impact divided by time spent. Welcome to the Experience Economy 2.0, where brands across sectors are shifting from products and services to holistic sensory experiences that engage emotions, memories, and multiple senses simultaneously.

In my last post, I wrote about how how brands now design for how we spend time with them, not just what we buy. The attention/creator economy has turned time into a sense of its own: something you feel, allocate, and remember. So in this post, I’m introducing the Ode Experience, a way of planning around time as a sense. And I’ll use Japan, a trip I planned with two friends, to show how this plays out. The experiences that stay with us are the ones where time is intentionally shaped & the Ode Experience is simply time well spent.

I’ve been thinking about time as a kind of diagnostic tool, a way to understand the moment we’re living in. If future time = present time + (Δt × signal strength), then the future isn’t somewhere ahead of us. It’s here... but blurry. Lists like Forbes 30 Under 30 are one of those signals. This year’s top cities (NY, SF, LA, Boston, Chicago) map almost perfectly onto the places with the highest AI job density + the strongest builder/creator ecosystems. Even the funding tells its own story: $3.8B distributed across 600 honorees. Time leaves traces of signals to anticipate & I’ll dive deeper into the data.

I’ve always found pairings fascinating and exciting. This year I started experimenting more myself, putting together little food-and-drink menus at home. Somewhere in that process, I’ve been building a mental graph. Set A: foods. Set B: drinks. The “edges” are whatever actually works: harmony, contrast, surprise. I used to think pairing was mostly rules but now it feels like learning which nodes in your taste map want to connect, and why.