What do stars, cities, and business events have in common? Each is a fusion reactor of sorts, alternately producing heat and light, or new ideas and connections. That was Greg’s message to the Events Industry Council — the voice of the business events industry on advocacy, research, professional recognition, and standards — in Washington on Global Meetings Industry Day on May 6.

Face-to-face meetings are essential to both business and society, but AI alternately threatens to disrupt (or promises to enhance) it depending on what we value — which more than anything else, is simple connection.

Watch Greg’s keynote

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We need to do a better job at building places we love, otherwise we will just discard them.

Greg joined Dr. Fanni Melles on her long-running podcast (427 episodes and counting!) What Is The Future For Cities? (WTF4C) to discuss climate adaptation and reuse, cities and serendipity, and much, much more, as he always does.

Listen to the podcast

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We’re playing SimCity for real. That was Greg’s message at the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission’s annual State of the Region summit in Columbus to nearly 900 local civic leaders. The game that radicalized a generation of accidental urbanists has been reborn as AI-powered digital twins, generative cities spun up in real time, and AR overlays — the latter of which helped pass Columbus’s 2024 LinkUS transit referendum. But as machine intelligence scales, being together face-to-face becomes even more valuable, not less.

Following the keynote, Greg joined MORPC’s chief strategy officer Joseph Garrity on the Growing Better Together podcast for a wider-ranging conversation on cities and scaling laws, the loneliness epidemic, and what Columbus might learn from Tulsa Remote.

Watch Greg’s keynote
Listen to the podcast

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Greg returned to Austin for the third year running to attend South by Southwest, this time to host “Seeing is Believing” — a main program panel hosted by inCitu at the intersection of XR, urban planning, and climate resilience — and to once again host sessions at the Fast Company Grill and its sister venue, Inc. Founder’s House.

Sessions at the former included the future of travel (pictured) — how can tech help us be present in the presence of others? — and the mainstreaming of crypto. (🧐️) Over at Inc., he hosted a discussion on sustainability certification and tracing in the age of agentic commerce. (Not pictured: a weekend of scooter rides, robotaxi rides, breakfast tacos, and frozen margs.)

Watch “Seeing is Believing”
Read/Watch the future of travel
Read/Watch sustainability certification
Read/Watch the mainstreaming of crypto?

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Greg and his “Unfrozen” podcast co-host Daniel Safarik continued their second century of episodes, including a live report from Dan’s mid-century birthday celebration, along with home-grown cities, the death and life and hoped-for rebirth of gentrification, and Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger on President Trump’s designs on Washington... and beyond.

Listen to episodes:
No. 116 – The Desert of the Real
No. 117 – The Death and Life of Gentrification
No. 119 – Mussolini’s Ballroom

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Like many, Greg has marveled at the Urban Land Insti­tute’s transformation from a real estate indus­try asso­cia­tion into an ins­pi­ring force for change through its inter­disci­pli­nary tech­ni­cal assis­tance and advi­sory pro­grams. So, he jump­ed at the chance to speak to ULI’s Global Gover­ning Trus­tees in Washing­ton about what ULI could become, thanks to CEO Angela Cain’s ambi­tious “Future­scape 2035” cam­paign.

Invi­ted to speak briefly about the trends sha­ping the built envi­ron­­ment over the next decade, Greg settled on two—Big Tech’s over­wee­ning desire to divide and con­quer us, and the shock(s) of cli­mate change. Both chal­len­ges demand new forms of civic- and social infra­struc­ture as well as the phy­si­cal kind, and he hopes ULI mem­bers will have a strong role to play in that as well.

He’ll revisit this theme in his closing keynote at the ULI Florida Sum­mit at the end of February.

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What would you do if con­fron­ted with an AI doppel­gänger? That’s what Greg was up against in January at Think No More, a threat­cast­ing fore­­sight work­shop host­ed at the McCain Insti­tute in Wash­ing­­ton, D.C.

At lunch, futur­ist and prank­ster Harmon Leon drafted Greg into one of his paten­ted AI vs. Human Roast Battles, in which he was forced to lyri­cally con­front an AI of him­self trained on his voice and past talks. It was a vivid exam­­ple of the work­shop’s themes around human agency, insti­tu­tions, and con­trol in an era of agen­tic AI—subjects that will conti­nue to domi­nate the years to come.

Watch Greg battle his AI doppelganger