  The distance conjecture states that for theories with moduli coupled to
gravity a tower of states becomes light exponentially in the geodesic distance
in moduli space. This specifies how effective field theories break down for
large field values. However, phenomenological field theories have no moduli,
but a scalar potential that deforms dynamical trajectories away from geodesic
curves. In this note we speculate on how one should generalise the distance
conjecture to include a scalar potential. We test the generalised distance
conjecture in a few cases, demonstrate a link with pseudo-/fake supersymmetry
and apply it to the ekpyrotic scenario in cosmology. For the latter we observe
that the pre-uplift KKLT potential could provide a stringy embedding of
ekpyrosis away from the asymptotic regimes in field space.
