The most transformative moments in life are the ones we don't see coming.

Darren Aronofsky wanted to give something back to New York. The city is arguably the biggest character in Caught Stealing — and more specifically the serendipity around every corner here, if you're paying attention. He wanted to give some of that magic back to the people who actually live in it.

What our team built was a citywide open-world experience running two weeks across New York: four obsolete payphones reactivated as narrative portals, routing participants out of their routines and into underground cultural spaces across the boroughs.

As a producer, I talked to hundreds of businesses and some not-so-thrilled landlords, hunting for locations that still held serendipity and old-school New York nostalgia — and for buildings that would let us drill holes in them to install a payphone.

The phones routed people into subcultures that already existed out there, and into ones we made. An underground Idles show. A speakeasy in a Gowanus metal shop. A roving Mars Bar recreation in a box truck. A life-size papier-mâché ice cream truck explosion. It all built toward participants winning tickets to the premiere, where we were, of course, cutting mohawks live.

Experience design and strategy for how an open-world game would actually work on the ground. Then:

400+ people engaged the phones directly over the two weeks, rippling to thousands across the five boroughs. Covered in Gothamist, BKMAG, Secret NYC and Hudson Valley Post, and posted by Austin Butler, Darren Aronofsky and Zoe Kravitz to an audience in the millions.

For a few weeks, the payphones were a thing people in New York were telling each other about, going on quests to find them and the places they routed to. Because the recordings and routes changed every day, it built real curiosity among committed participants to get out and stay open to the unexpected magic of New York City.

A film studio didn't call an events agency. They called N.D. Austin's experience design studio, and the brief that came down the line was: we need somebody who designs for serendipity. That's the reason I was on this project.

An agency produces an event — a night, a room, a run-of-show. This was an arc: two weeks, a whole city, and an emotional shape that participants moved through rather than watched. Nobody was an audience. That distinction is the entire job.

When's the last time you left a happy hour actually… happy?

My co-creator Nasimeh Be and I have both spent years inside institutions and companies as operators, coaches and facilitators, and we kept seeing the same thing: people are disconnected, disengaged and depleted. The usual solutions keep missing something — permission to leave work at the door and engage in real, roving, participatory play.

So what do you get when you cross two highly artistic polymaths with stage presence who love facilitating? More specifically, one an ex-Chief of Staff in venture capital with a Darden MBA, the other a world-class creativity coach, illustrator and poet with a Columbia MA in psychology? You get a strong roasting and energetic remix of the modern happy hour.

A 90-minute facilitated experience built around play, creativity and real connection.

People are tired of the format. There are only so many panels and open bars, and everyone has been to all of them. Underneath that, people are longing for connection.

This idea struck a nerve — so much so that we ended up with a waitlist 3x our capacity. The room filled with HR leaders, community organizers, experience creators and culture shapers when we premiered at Fabrik Tribeca.

What made this one work is that nobody knew what they were walking into — and once they were in, they were building things with their hands, communicating without words, and enjoying themselves before they had time to be self-conscious about it.

When Elliott LaRue, the global MC of Daybreaker, and I met, we knew there was magic to be found. We're both Texans who grew up circling around fires: telling stories, connecting deeper, dancing late into the night. Then we both went out into the world and found that same thing everywhere we traveled. Humans have gathered like this for centuries — we tell stories together, move together, and find collective liberation in the process. It's one of the oldest rituals there is.

Yet it is being forgotten in today's tech-heavy media age. What we notice now in New York culture, in nightlife specifically, is that connection has gotten very cerebral. You go to a dinner party and have a great conversation with your head. And spaces like the club — where connection is in theory more embodied — are increasingly not as dance-forward, and yet leave no room for really connecting deeper. Circle Up is our attempt to bring them back into the same room.

It's a designed, repeatable three-act format with two costume changes. The night begins with an auditory storytelling experience about a difficult, culturally relevant topic, moves into feeling and connecting with other guests through connection-focused formats, and culminates in a full-out dance party to release all the ground we've covered.

An interactive installation and participatory ritual housed inside a transformed U-Haul truck.

Over 350 participants contributed wishes, helped fulfill the wishes of others, and co-created growing vines of interlinked paper chains. Each visitor's gesture formed a collective portrait of transformation, vulnerability and shared humanity.

350+ people came through in just under five hours at Shadow Traffic's Lost Horizons Night Market. Shadow Traffic Grant recipient.

Because a stranger stepped forward first.

If you see someone making something — an installation, a production, a piece of art — the default assumption is that it's happening at you, and that you're on the outside of it. The moment you're handed a role in it instead, something turns over. You're not participating, you're creating. And people who feel that agency start associating the strangers around them with warmth and curiosity rather than caution — which is the thing that makes someone willing to take a risk on what they actually want.

That's what the wishes were. Somebody they'd never met helping them build the thing they hoped for, and them doing it back for someone else.

Three days for 50 people in a converted barn upstate. Guests flew in from across the world and across two decades of my life — childhood friends, co-founders, collaborators, people I'd met since moving to New York — and most of them did not know each other.

The premise: what would adults actually want summer camp to be? Not the scripted group trip where the schedule is mostly drinking and talking. Campfires, s'mores, costumes, games — and then the adult part, which is agency.

Produced and MC'd the full arc: an opening quest to find a secret garden hidden on the property and an initiation ritual into the container, a 9-course dinner, field day, forest bathing, ghost stories, a costume contest, DJs from New York, interactive art, a petting zoo, tents and camping and props and a full run of show.

The design principle was co-creation, not programming. Guests brought what they'd been practicing — a yoga certification became a class, a watercolor habit became an afternoon in the hammocks, a guitar became a firepit jam.

50 people, 3 days, sliding-scale pricing so nobody was excluded. Friendships made there are still going. I get asked when the next one is.

There was a moment I looked out the window and saw a group of adults spinning a huge multicolored parachute between them, someone jumping into the pool fully clothed — and then I looked back inside and saw a couple sitting quietly next to each other, reading. That spectrum, in the same hour, is the whole thing. Play and rest, both fully permitted, neither one scheduled.

That's what an offsite could be. This was fifty people who didn't know each other, brought together across cultures and time zones, with a container built well enough that they could make it theirs. Nothing about that is specific to a barn. What made it work is that people were trusted with their own experience — and something made together will always beat something produced for you.