“The Metaverse” may be the future, but what is it? While Mark Zuckerberg hopes you’ll never leave your home again, in reality, the next generation of the Internet will beckon us outside, into a world in which information is everywhere — if you can see it.

Welcome to the real-world metaverse, where you can change reality like changing a channel. How will this change our relationship with each other and to the world? How will these reality channels transform where we live, how we shop, and how we move through enchanted worlds? Drawing on his “Metaverse Metropolis” project at Cornell Tech university.

Greg Lindsay offers real advice and lessons from the technologists, designers, and experts building this real-world metaverse.

Nearly half of Americans were victims of a climate disaster last year — whether fire, floods, heat waves or hurricanes — with insurable losses of more than $100 billion.

As people wake up to the realities of climate change — and the growing threat to their homes, livelihoods, and families — many are beginning to ask, “Where should I live someday?” Fortunately, we have answers.

By combining climate science with demographics and using artificial intelligence, we can predict tomorrow’s more resilient regions. Climate change isn’t just a story about mounting catastrophes, but also an opportunity — if we harness the right technologies, policies, and political will to build back better elsewhere. Drawing on his work with the startup Climate Alpha.

Greg Lindsay offers cutting-edge analysis and maps to explain why and where a warming world may still have shelter for us all.

Six years ago, Uber was an obscure app, and autonomous cars were science fiction leftover from The Jetsons. Today, Uber is a $62 billion behemoth, Google and Tesla are leading a breakneck autonomous arms race, and their respective competitors Lyft and General Motors have promised to transform urban mobility by combining.

How are these technologies already transforming the way we see, understand, and get around cities? What effects will they have on where we live, work and play, and what are the opportunities and threats for automakers, technology firms, public transit, employers, and developers? Drawing upon his work with both New York University and the New Cities Foundation, Greg Lindsay offers four futures of connected mobility and how they promise to transform American cities in the coming decades.

Innovation can’t be scheduled but it can be designed. Greg Lindsay tells how innovative organizations such as Google, Facebook, Zappos, and MIT are engineering serendipity, harnessing social networks and new ways of working to cultivate the discovery of new ideas, inspire collaboration and creativity, and to spur employee engagement, learning and innovation.

How, where, and who we work with will never be the same again.

How did China become the “world’s factory?” Why are Americans checking into Bangkok for heart surgery? How did Africa become a breadbasket for the Middle East? And how did Qatar, of all places, win the World Cup in 2022? What all of these things have in common is that they were made possible by the world’s explosive growth in air travel. The combination of the Internet and jet engine is redrawing the world map, creating new winners and losers among countries, cities, companies, and all of us. Greg Lindsay, author of Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, explains the rules, threats, and opportunities of the new highways in the sky.

Humans are an urban species — more than half of us now live in cities. And our numbers will double by 2050 to more than 7 billion people, equal to the number alive on Earth right now. Every challenge we face will by definition become an urban one, whether solving poverty, adapting to climate change, finding homes and opportunities for immigrants, creating jobs and growth, and simply how to get around.

Greg Lindsay speaks frequently about the future of cities, most recently at the Atlantic Council, the Urban Land Institute, and the New America Foundation. He directs the Emergent Cities Project at the World Policy Institute, exploring what lessons struggling cities like Detroit can learn from dynamic ones such as Nairobi. His work with Studio Gang Architects on the future of suburbia was displayed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2012, and he is currently working with OMA/AMO to explore the intersection of the office with the city, the cloud, and :Big Data”. Popular topics include “smart cities;” urban mobility; cities and immigration; making cities more resilient to climate change, and how work is changing in cities.

The future isn’t what it used to be. As the pace of social, technological, and environmental change accelerates, organizations are struggling to make sense of the present, let alone spot threats and opportunities looming over the horizon. The ability to anticipate, understand, plan for, and innovate around uncertainty has become a critical skill for designers, innovators, and strategists everywhere. As the computing pioneer Alan Kay once said, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

Futurist, journalist, author and scholar Greg Lindsay delivers a crash course in exactly that. The practice of creating futures, or “foresight,” offers a toolkit and framework for detecting signals of change, organizing insights, synthesizing possible futures, identifying potential barriers and opportunities, and designing innovative products, services or ideas that satisfy emerging needs. In addition to lecturing on possible futures, Greg is available to lead participants through a fun, fast-paced workshop in which they create futures of their own.

After two years apart, Americans have forgotten how to work together. This is evident in the ongoing tug-of-war over the office. This framing — are we better off alone or in-person? — has dominated debates about our post-pandemic destiny. But neither managers nor workers have stopped to ask what it means to be together, whom we should be together with, and how we can be together. If the overnight adoption of remote work proved many of us could work from virtually anywhere, with anyone, what’s stopping us from taking it a step further and working with, well, everyone? Because solving the challenges that lie ahead of us on the far side of the pandemic requires working together at a scale greater than any one government or company ever has.

In this far-reaching new talk, Greg Lindsay explores new ways of being and working together in a world in which corporate silos have cracked open and frustrated employees have spilled out, desperate to reconnect. Drawing upon his years of experience in working with some of the top companies in the world, Greg helps leaders harness the power of human connection to use the differences between their teams as a tool for innovation. He helps the leaders understand the motivators and drive for the younger generations and keep engagement and synergy to maximize productivity.

Cities are done. The office is dead. Delivery is the future. At least two of these are wrong — but why? COVID-19 will eventually be tamed by a vaccine, but work-from-anywhere is here to stay. That doesn’t mean the end of the office, but whole new ways of working closer to home — with more fluid organizations to match. And that, in turn, means rethinking who and what cities are for — forget downtowns vs. suburbs and imagine a life more local, with everything you need at home or only a few minutes’ walk-, cycle-, or ride away.

A decade ago, self-driving cars were science fiction leftover from The Jetsons. Today, Google and Tesla are leading a breakneck autonomous arms race, as the global auto industry races to build electric vehicles at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars. But a self-driving SUV may prove to be the horseless carriage of autonomy — rapidly eclipsed by new species of self-driving scooters, delivery bots, and buildings with a mind of their own.

Offices are empty. Downtowns are dead. The suburbs are Mithe llennials’ future. At least two of these truisms are wrong, but why? Employees may be grudgingly returning to the office, but work-from-anywhere is here to stay. That doesn’t mean the end of the work week, but new ways and patterns of living and working together closer to home, with more flexible real estate and employment to match. That, in turn, means rethinking who and what cities are for. Forget downtowns versus their suburbs; how can we imagine new uses for old high-rises and new districts to replace dead malls? Because behind the scenes, inflation and technology are quietly turning retail, groceries, and dining inside-out through data, delivery, and automation. And above all looms the threat of climate change and the opportunities of AI and spatial computing to transform the Internet — and the world — as we know it. Drawing on his research and foresight work for Cornell Tech, Climate Alpha, and MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, Greg Lindsay explores the urban and real estate implications of our never-normal landscape and explains why the future will be less remote and more human than you might think.