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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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