The Urbanist Future: What’s Next for Cities with Greg Lindsay

What does the future of our cities really look like? In this episode, we’re joined by Greg Lindsay—urbanist, journalist, and leading voice on the intersection of technology, mobility, and city design. Greg explores how emerging trends are reshaping the way we live, work, and move.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Growing Better Together, a new show from the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Convention, where we connect with key leaders and explore the policy, partnerships, and opportunities shaping the future of Central Ohio.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Welcome back to Growing Better Together. I'm Joe Gertie, and I'm really excited today because we have Morpsey's keynote speaker with us. We are just live right after our state of the region with over 900 local government leaders and civic leaders from all across central Ohio. And Greg was generous enough with his time to not just be the keynote of a speaker, but to join me today to talk some questions, maybe get a little bit more in depth. We've been talking uh podcasts here, but Greg's an urbanist, a generalist, a futurist.

SPEAKER_02 1:01

You're reading my SEO copy right now.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

But Greg, thank you for joining the podcast. Thank you for being in Central Ohio. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

SPEAKER_02 1:09

Alright, well, thank you. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. Yeah, no, podcasting is my idea of a good time. I literally host two of them myself, so it's always a pleasure. Um what do I do? I mean, yeah, I'm a journalist at heart. I went to journalism school. I'm actually a Midwesterner myself, grew up in Illinois and in Bourbon A. Uh ironically, I live now in Montreal where uh I can't speak any French because I grew up, my mother grew up pronouncing the town I was born in is Bourbonis. You can see what I'm up against here trying to roll my R's. So um, but yeah, I was a journalist for a long time and uh made the switch to futurism because when you're a futurist, you don't have to quote three experts. You could just say it yourself. But uh slightly more seriously, I've got fellowship positions at like MIT and at Arizona State and the Atlantic Council, and I did a project most recently at Cornell Tech for a couple years called The Augmented City, where I used foresight techniques to uh explore the implications of AI at augmented reality at urban scale. Because like the internet, it's something that happens in the cloud over there. But what happens uh as we saw with Uber and we're gonna see with AVs and robotics, like when the internet starts coming into the physical world? And what happens when you particularly can't even see it? So that was a lot of the stuff there. But yeah, I got lots of hobbies, let's just say that.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

So the definition of an urbanist is interesting because if you're not one, one might think, oh, they just like urban cities, and that that's it. How how do you define it, or what does urbanism mean to you?

SPEAKER_02 2:27

That is actually the way I define it in a way. It's like I like cities. Yeah, it is kind of a meaningless phrase. In the French, I believe like an urbanist is in fact an urban planner. But yeah, urbanist is like that catch-all, and I'm like, you know, there's plenty I like look side-eye against because you know, in its most cliche form, it's like, I like bicycles and microbreweries. And there is a sort of like a lifestyle thing, which is I mean, I love urban lifestyle. I I grew up in the suburbs and moved to cities my whole adult life, but like I'm trying I try to be rigorous and never like make public policy recommendations based on things I like. I think that's where we go astray in a lot of stuff. Um, but yeah, to me, an urbanism is like it is ultimately an advocacy role, I guess. It'd be like maybe activism in that form was like we are activating, yeah, you're activating for a more urban life, and by urban life maybe an urbane life. And in that, I think of like an openness to new experiences, to change, to being with people. Like obviously, so much of American suburbanism was about flight from the city for many reasons, and about ultimately isolation. And yeah, and what I think to wrap this up is is I think what gives me credence as an urbanist or why urbanism is important versus just like let people like things is you know the environmental impacts of living more densely together and the mental health impacts, as I talked a little bit about today, we get into about you know, it's like we've made a world that's just so much easier to spend time alone on our screens, and yeah, we have to like work hard to maintain that muscle, like spiritual and physical.

SPEAKER_01 3:43

We will put a pen in that and get back to it. But uh before that, you started in journalism, right? You're a journalist. So how do you go from journalist to urbanist?

SPEAKER_02 3:52

Or were you an urbanist before you were a journalist, or was it just Yeah, well, I well I the core there was so when I was a journalist back in the day, I was uh yeah, I came out, I graduated university in 99, so I was there in the dot-com bubble boom in New York. Uh I spent time at Women's Wear Daily as their media editor for a year. I got to go to fashion shows, great times. Um but yeah, ultimately I got into it because yeah, cities are really the crux of everything. Like they are they are the site, the literal site for all of our challenges. I literally say it's like where uh when I wrote Eritropolis, it's literally where globalization is made flesh in the form of cities. And so, yeah, so I got interested in cities in that regard because you could tell any kind of story you want through that. It's a technology story, transportation stories, all that sort of stuff. And yeah, and also like particularly it was about that time in the in the mid-aughts, like that was when the UN was putting out reports saying that like that was a humanity that was officially an urban society, we had crossed over in that line. So, yeah, cities were only gonna get more important as more and more people lived in them.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

At Morpsey, we represent over 95 different local governments, cities, counties, villages, and townships. And I've heard you say that cities are the greatest invention ever in the world. And then also in a recent conversation you had on a podcast, you mentioned that the world needs more mayors. Make the case about the cities being the best invention, and why do we need more mayors?

SPEAKER_02 5:09

Well, the cities, the cities where humanity is like greatest creation. When you say invention, some people say technology, and like I don't think it's a technology. What is what is a creation? I mean, there's so there's a couple things. I mean, one, like, you know, I'm I'm not uh I'm not a deeply spiritual person. I was raised Catholic or whatnot, but so you know, I don't look at nature and see like spirituality or see nature. I see vast impersonal geological like processes. Like mountains, they're incredible, but like Mount Donitas. Uh cities, Venice can only exist because humans built it. Like I go to Venice and like I do have like just total reverence that it could even exist and that so many hands, so much time built it. It's humbling because it's something that exists at my actual human life scale. Like, or at least I can imagine the generations of people who did it versus like, you know, the dinosaurs. So I think about that. And then also the core of that goes to like work that Louis Betancourt and Jeffrey West did like 15, 20 years ago around scaling laws, where they show that like cities, unlike uh humans or unlike corporations, uh, appear to be immortal, right? Like, so like we are born, we mature, we plateau in a middle age, we die eventually. Companies do the same thing, one exception, breweries. They're like the oldest companies on the planet, they're all like breweries. Uh but cities, yeah, they they scale, like they get better as they get bigger if you manage to maintain the infrastructural systems, which gets the crux of why we're all here, really. And yeah, and they can basically live forever and sometimes survive nuclear wars and all sorts of things. So they're powerful that way. As for mayors, like, yeah, the mayor, and this is always interesting, right? Like that tension between like, wouldn't you rather just have like one government at the top? Singapore always come, people love Singapore, Urbanist 2, because they're both a city and a federal state, or Washington, D.C., which got a lot of interesting stuff done because, particularly around mobility and bike sharing back in the day, because they had an integrated department of transportation. But like, we need more mayors ultimately for I think the reason like Mayor Mamdani in New York, who I'm a big fan of, got to vote for because of my own tangled electoral board stuff, um, who is just relentlessly deliver relentlessly focused on delivering things to his constituents. It's fun to watch him go back to the old school like so-called sewer socialism, where it's like, what if we get people to believe in government capacity by doing good things for people? And maybe it's a way through like our polarized times. So I think I think more mayors that it's always that trope, right? Like the mayors, they don't, you know, the ideology doesn't matter, you have to take out the trash. Well, you know, I mean, how you choose to value people is important and you have that. But like, but in a way, they're also the people that are closest to the ground, closest to the metal, like more than any other level of governance. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:29

I heard you say grow better as we kind of get bigger there.

SPEAKER_02 7:32

As yeah, as it gets bigger, it gets better. I mean, cities are actually are that level of governance where that happens.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

I mean, I love the, I mean, we're on a podcast called Growing Better Together. So, I mean, this couldn't be any better.

SPEAKER_02 7:41

Absolutely. And like, you know, it's funny, there's no laws. You know, Bet and Court and West tried to find like a science of cities, and other people have tried to like see exactly what happens, but like if you just get enough data sets together, like the trend is there. Like, what's their famous one? Like, you know, when a city doubles in size and population, so keep that in mind when you go out to 2050, like it gains an extra 15%. Like, is there's there's yeah, it's you know, it's like an exponential almost, or at least it's like a logarithmic line, not just a linear growth pattern. So there you are.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

So, in preparation, let's let's go back to the loneliness epidemic a little bit, and what you talked about today in your your keynote in preparation for this podcast, I I listened to a lot of Greg Lindsay. And in doing that, there's this element of uh I live you know near dog park, take my dog to the dog park and put my AirPods in, and I'm listening to an old podcast of yours. And one, it's it's there's a loneliness epidemic component to that, but there's also this I have to be efficient at all times, I can't have leisure while I'm at the dog park with my dog, I have to be doing something, right? Uh now it's important. I mean, I needed Greg Lindsay in my head in preparation for this podcast, but I couldn't help but think, you might be pissed at me for having you in my head, right? And um what I noticed when I was there is there were a couple of people there talking, and I'm the weird guy kind of walking around by myself, maybe not enjoying the moment. Um, can you just maybe dive in a little bit deeper about what you were talking about, how tech, you know, or social media promised us that we were gonna have this connectivity, but what it does is isolate us.

SPEAKER_02 9:25

Yes. Well, oh man, there's so much to unpack there. Like you listening to podcasts while doing a podcast means it's like AI model collapse, but like in podcast form, yeah, we're just feeding it through.

SPEAKER_03 9:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:35

Um there's so much to unpack there. Because I and it's funny, I'm not, I'm not mad at you on this one. It is interesting, like I feel like we forgot like the Walkman existed. Like we've been dealing with that issue of aloneness in social space since like, well, I don't know, 78, 79. It's very interesting in that regard. But um, but also like I mean, the whole point of cities versus village life as a salesperson is is anonymity. Is that anonymity, right? Like, what's the German phrase from the Middle Ages? City air makes men free. Like, it's like you escape the stoltifying social networks of small town life. And so there is that advantage as well. But yeah, it is a question of like where are you actually then? These cases of like this sort of federated governance. And like I do too. I listen to, I have headphones in almost everywhere I go all the time, listening to music or in my own thoughts kind of thing. And um, and in many cases, I want to cultivate that own sort of anonymity in Montreal. I don't know, you want to have you want to have role divisibility. I mean, if there's one problem with social media, number one, it was uh context collapse, right? You had to be everything to everyone at all times. And actually, there's some great arguments arguing that you know President Trump's example of this too, that people uh overweight total coherence of their personality, wherever their personality is, because you don't think they're fraudulent. Like people, people can't deal with code switching and being in other communities. But to your larger point there, I think, you know, yeah, uh yeah, I I don't know, I like having my headphones in, but but I think we have at this larger point where like it's just easier to scroll. And also that was my point. Social media is no longer social. Like they all pivoted into like you know, the TikTok for you page or you know, the Instagram reels algorithm, and it's not even about actually connecting you with the people that you once kept tabs on. It's like that's me and Facebook in like 2007. So there's all that. And then, but I think the larger, also the larger point there too, is just the notion of like, and this is what I really fear about, is like big tech having conquered our online lives is now coming for real life too in various levels. Like you got you know, Tesla's doing robotics, Amazon 2, a little bit, but meta, the meta ray bands, like meta-raybands is a privacy and public destroying technology that wants to capture all of your interactions with people, the of the wearer, and Meta's gonna use that data to build maps of reality and whatever else. It's using facial recognition now, so you'll have no anonymity of that. I think those are all terrible. And um, yeah, and that's sort of that's sort of orthogonal to it, but when you come back to like the loneliness epidemic, like, yeah, people are forgoing, I mean, they're literally forgoing sex to be on their screens. Like, what's that old, what's that old drug? Uh you probably remember that old ad for uh for doing drugs, like there was a cocaine ad of like the monkey just kept pressing the bar to get liquid cocaine, forgot everything else. That I compare that to today. Uh long-winded answer, but stick with me for a moment. This year it was the 30th anniversary of David Foster Wallace's infinite jest. Remember that big doorstop book? None of us read it, but you remember it. The crux of that book was that someone had made a film called like The Entertainment. But it was a film that once you started watching it, you never wanted to stop watching it. You would forego sleep and food and water until you died watching it. And like that's literally what Mark Zuckerberg's like, make that. Like, that's their AI Slop apps or kind of.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

So I have never read Infinite Jess, but I've seen your bookcase in preparation for it. Have you?

SPEAKER_02 12:31

I I have a copy of the paperback. The spine is uncreased, let me tell you. I mean to get back to it. But but yeah, but he's he saw around that. And you know, in reading the meta commentaries and 30th anniversary, David Foster Wallace was very predictive around a lot of the silliness, year of the Depend Adult Undergarment with naming rights and things. And we'll come back to that. But um, but yeah, the but it's the loneliness crisis area where you just see like just this ongoing degradation of so many parts of our society. I was reading a piece, for example, you know, uh, Gen X, um Gen X parents, I think in particular, but just Gen X Americans, are suffering a breakdown in physical and mental health that is not seen in other rich countries. And that's because of our partial or lack of a safety net. And so, you know, just people are like not getting any kind of spiritual nourishment, they're not being around each other, they have no support networks, and yeah, we're like this atomized thing.

SPEAKER_01 13:16

Well, and you know, you and Derek Thompson have wrote or talked about this, is that trade-off we're seeing in Gin Z or younger millennials, they're drinking less, which is good. But what is the what is the cost, what is the trade-off there by that not interacting?

SPEAKER_02 13:33

Yes, well, and then again, and then alcohol is a social technology. Like, you know, humanity's always used that as a way to lower inhibitions to increase social groups. So, yeah, that is an interesting piece there. I was just thinking about this because I think a lot about uh food delivery. I think a lot about food delivery because it's striking because it's the very fast-changing layer at the intersection of like desire and infrastructure and these sorts of things, and you know, and they use public right away on the curve. But like, yeah, DoorDash revenues are up 38%, and someone just did an analysis there where it's at, yeah, it's millennials are spending the most money, and lower income groups generally are. It's like people who earn $30,000 to $50,000 a year spend the most money on those delivery apps. So it's people who are like, yeah, who are working the hardest, who feel like they want to treat. It's that those millennials who are like the sandwich generation now, and like, yeah, I just feel like generally we're failing them. You know, they need less DoorDash and maybe more time, maybe more support. Well, as a geriatric millennial, uh I'm a late Xer myself, which is no longer a badge of pride when I see how my generation's doing.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

So um it's March of 2026, and I always have a little bit of PTSD this time of year, thinking about six years ago when the world was shutting down in response to the uh to the pandemic. And it's hard not to think about how my behavior has changed in those six years. Uh you talked about millennials and DoorDash or Uber Eats or just getting my groceries delivered. I really didn't do any of that pre-pandemic. And then I I notice myself now, especially when I'm tired. Like if it's the end of the week on a Friday, uh I am tired, I'm laying there, I want that dopamine hit, and I get candy delivered to my house. I'm not proud of it?

SPEAKER_02 15:16

Okay. This is where I'm gonna judge you.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

Yes, you should. Yeah, you know. But candy's good. Um, what are these tech conveniences? Uh how are what's the trade-off here? How can I do better, great?

SPEAKER_02 15:28

That's a great question. Well, I mean, ultimately, I think it goes back to like, in in some forms, local business, and the more local, the better. I mean, yeah, the candy's not the problem. I was thinking, like, yeah, I get a weekly food delivery myself, but it's from Lufa Farms, which is this great Montreal platform where they have urban ag on rooftops, and then get in local merchants. So I feel like that's a lot. I mean, fresh produce from producers. To me, yeah, it's this notion. I was just I was just debating gentrification, I was doing an interview, I was doing my own podcast with someone about the death and life of gentrification. And I remember getting into an argument once about this with Andrew Zoli, who founded Pop Tech, about what it is versus demographic change neighborhoods. And to me, after we thought about it for a bit, I realized gentrification is a process in which you take local complexity of small businesses and individual lives, and you basically frack it and you reduce all that complexity and replace it with like a sludge of like value. You get Amazon, or you get, well, I mean, what we're at Walmart back in the day. You know, like I remember when Barnes Noble was the villain in retailing, and now like they're the hero.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

I was just yeah, I was just reading an article in The Atlantic about how they're making a comeback and expanding.

SPEAKER_02 16:25

Barnes and Noble's doing fantastic. Yeah, they've reinvested. And but the the interesting thing about it is again, they've gotten into like almost again local knowledge, they're doing more curation for their communities. They're not this uh you've got mail board thing. Yes, yes. But but I come back to that one. So, yeah, how do you how do we do better? I think it's like we've got to invest in our local businesses and local communities in this regard. I come back to like the fact that like 75% of all restaurant meals in the States last year, according to the National Association of Restaurants, uh, was takeout or delivery. Like that is, those businesses are not set up for that. When we did that during the pandemic, that was a lifeline to keep them alive, but like never frequenting a business and the fact that like people eat alone more and more often. I mean, occasionally a meal by yourself at the bar could be great in a restaurant. But but yeah, we've just become indoctrinated to be alone, indoctrinated to use the most convenient path. And again, it comes back to this. But so my Montreal friend Catherine Jesus Morton, she coined a phrase in her own newsletter, which the FT and others picked up, friction maxing, to use the Gen Z parlance there. That we gotta be friction maxing. We've got to look for occasions and situations to rebuild that muscle mass, because without resistance, you're just like, it's you're wally. I think we're all the time that we're building wally. This is where everyone's gonna like turn the podcast off, but like pickleball to me is a sign of wally. Elderly people playing pickleball, great, like bad choice. Seeing able-bodied people playing pickleball, come on, you can play tennis, you can do that. That's like a wally sign. Like, we're just gonna try a little less hard, it's gonna be a little more convenient. Convenience unto its own end is ultimately destructive at scale, I would argue there. Like, you know, and and but and many people pursue it. But then I think again, they wonder why they're unhappy or they wonder what's missing out of it, or they don't, or they defend it. Yeah. I think, you know, I don't know. I think I was just reading Pete Saunders, who's an urbanist in Chicago, and and you know, we have to do a lot better job of making the case for that density will not decrease anyone's quality of life and ensure doing so. I think people automatically assume that the more people live here, the worse it's gonna get, which is like the core of all NIMBYism. So, yeah, you know, again, how do we how do we get consciously build and refine a better public realm? So we gotta get better at that. We gotta get better of like at this point consciously programming our communities, which kind of kills me, but there we are.

SPEAKER_01 18:22

Yeah. I mean, my parents are baby boomers, they are just all into pickleball. They I think they told me about it like that. Appropriate A's boomers should play pickleballs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I I think played it with them once in our front street. But it's just not it's just not my thing. Not for me. Um let's go back to attention. Yes. Um one thing I've noticed. Sorry, I gotta check my phone. Yeah. I thought you were being serious there.

SPEAKER_02 18:45

I maybe was.

SPEAKER_01 18:46

But one thing I've noticed as I've gotten older, speaking of you know, older activities, uh I used to think I had a lot of agency in my life. Oh, there's that word. Here we go. Yeah. And I think the older I get, to realize the less I have it. And I'm trying to retake some of my attention. A few years ago, I read uh Jinny Odell's book uh about how to do nothing. And it's really enlightening. And I always think about the airport where I'll have a carry-on and I will put my phone in the carry-on, and I will be sitting in the terminal, and I swear to you, I will feel like something vibrating. Yes. And um how, you know, you focused on this today saying that the the phone is the depth of the city. How is it? And how can we do better? Any are there can tech help us get away from tech? Or is this something that we need to resolve separate from it?

SPEAKER_02 19:54

Yes, I don't think you can really use tech to solve tech. I I don't want to be um there's a phrase, I'll use it cavalierly in this case, you know, you can't you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. I mean, obviously, it's got its own unique context there, but that's the same sort of thing. Like you're not gonna, yeah, launching an app to like solve your screen time addiction is I just don't think is viable. Um but then again, at the same time, like, I mean, we also we're faced, like, this is an apex predator for human attention. Like, my phone's on the floor, I'm pointing at it's down there, hopefully safe. Because yeah, the the greatest minds of our generation, what do they do? They wanted to add tech for the stacks, for the for the platforms. And so, yeah, that notion that any individual can like fight back about this, that we can do it through detox or rebuild our serotonin, I just don't think is fair. This is where government regulation just has to come into play, but you know, wow, not no one's coming to save us right now. In fact, our feds are leaning even harder into the AI tools to enable that. So, you know, I don't know. I don't know if it's gonna take a village, I don't know if it's gonna take, you know, I mean, it should take regulators. Uh, you know, I think the EU passing an AI act was a good start, although, you know, I mean, just sort of also a measure of our times with the EU passed that act, and then they're like, so where's our trillion dollar AI company? It's like, guys, like, no, you get to have one or the other here, you know, massive inequality and/or regulation. But um, yeah, I mean, when it comes to the agency, I it's not even when I became a parent, that's when my attention span was fracked to pieces. Because, yeah, to your point there earlier about your headphones and productivity maxing, like it was. It was like nursing a baby in one hand, and then like, what can I see on Twitter then in its heyday in like uh in 20 seconds? What what can I find? I think about shearing layers all the time. There's the famous diagram by Stuart Brand about uh buildings and sites. Frank Duffy did it. And so, yeah, like the notion of like, what can I find in 20 seconds? What can I do in these few minutes there? And and having that time compression did that. I wonder if that makes us in the middle age who have done that more susceptible now, is the the confluence of our parenthood and that time crunch with those devices coming into our lives. But it seems to affect everyone. But um, but yeah, like retaking that is is the most difficult thing. And all I can think to do is again, it's like we have to challenge it with new social structures and new platforms and new forms of belonging. Just an example of this. The most interesting thing I saw in like the last year is I met I met um uh Nick and Dawson Williams, I forget Nick's last. Name, but they were co-working guys who sold out to WeWork, got some WeWork money before it was gone. And now they're launching a millennial country club, as I call it, called Stone Throw in East Dallas. So it's kind of the perfect demographic, right? Here's all these people who moved to the Sunbelt during the pandemic. They're now raising children, they're feeling this missing of belonging. Their kids are on screens, they don't want their kids on screens, but there's this like no public or private structure. And so they're taking like a dead medical office building, you know, they bought it on the cheap, and they're gonna build a pool, they're gonna reopen it. But the core of it, the core offering is unstructured play, supervised unstructured playtime for the children in the club. Like there will be programming directors, and they see that as the most important hire will be the people who like really respond in the moment to what the kids want so the parents can have their own unstructured time there and that families can be together. Like that's like a you know boutique top of the market opening. We need a lot more of that. We need at the public level, we need all these kinds of alternatives. And um, yeah. I I I guess I will say that in closing to this idea of taking agency, that was part of the reason I moved to Montreal. I emigrated Montreal in 2019. And when people ask me why, like the the reason, the instigating reason, the same friend who coined friction maxing had written an essay about you know why parents were a little less stressed there. And the answer was twofold. And one was the social safety net of Quebec. There was state subsidized daycare, which Canada is now, and I think the United States, it's such a no-brainer for the United States. I just simply cannot believe we can't get it past you. It would increase workforce participation and productivity. Like, let's get daycare for families. Um, and then the other one was like the parenting culture is more relaxed. Families hang out in parks and like you can drink in parks and have picnics and creating social structures where people are not so stressed, where they can be together. Like we need a lot more of that.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

Yeah, and we will get back to third places. In central Ohio, it's kind of corny. I always like to say the clay is still wet. We're a growing region, we're still molding ourselves into what we want to be. Uh we had a levy pass for the Central Ohio Transit Authority, Coda. And one example, and you referenced this today, where augmented reality can be advantageous, is Coda used that for residents to see what bus rapid transit could do to these corridors and routes in their community. And it was a helpful tool, and I think people utilized it and said, Oh wow, like we want this, this can help our community. Uh, what are some more examples where maybe tech isn't so bad? Oh, yeah, I got some good, I think I got some good ones.

SPEAKER_02 24:18

I mean, well, I was just I was in Austin for South by Southwest, and the panel I had was the same folks who did that app in situ. There we had planners from uh Tampa and from Kawaii, Hawaii, uh, who are using it to show, for example, climate-related changes in zoning. You know, in the case of Hawaii, it's like, you know, making sure you have enough of a fire break around your house because the destructive wildfire is there, and same sort of thing. Like, oh, here's this man from the government telling me I have to like do expensive changes to my house, but like showing them what it would entail in a way they can disarm it. Um, I think tech can definitely have a role to play in like this notion of like re-establishing baseline reality, which you know America has a problem with. Of course, also a lot of these new techs threaten to shatter us forever into our own individual realities. But yeah, I think that ability to come together, I think, is powerful. I think there's a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of foreclosed possibilities in tech that we could bring back. I mean, just an example, um, this was theoretical, but uh, and and done by an American friend, but in Finland, but they had an idea of, remember Kickstarter, like you know, the notion of like we can crown fund projects. Well, they imagined a thing called Brick Starter, where like you could sort of see the process to get something passed. How do I volunteer to go to a community meeting so I can be there in support of a project and you know and not have it get shouted down? But I can only go to one, so you can tell me the one to go to. And think about like how do we re-engineer democratic participation to go through all this bureaucracy that make sure that there are supporters who may not have enough time because we're raising kids and we're doing things, versus, you know, uh, let's just say retirees might have more time on their hands to oppose something. So I think, yeah, I think there's a lot of coordination technologies that we skipped over because like Meta and others like got there first and thought it easier to keep us isolated. But um, but yeah, we could use tech to connect us together. And and my friends at MIT, my friend Rafi Siegel and Rissa Morignan have thought about this too. Of like, you know, we have communities that are very online and very disaggregated, we have communities that are very close and together in time, and like there's got to be a happy medium somewhere in between where like you know, maybe you are halfway intense with an online thing while you're halfway removed from where you are at home. We can reimagine community in a number of ways.

SPEAKER_01 26:08

So reimagining a community, there's an ambitious goal, there's this new public-private partnership that's been introduced. The William mentioned it in his uh speech earlier today called the Central Ohio Housing Coalition, where the goal is let's build 200,000 new units in the region by 2036. And housing uh is obviously an interesting topic. Uh, but also we talked about third places earlier. I live in a duplex in a neighborhood just south of downtown, and I can have people over and have a like a nice get-together. But if it's, you know, maybe more than 10 people, I have a neighborhood bar one block from my house. And this is a very, you know, there's duplexes, there's single family, it's it's mixed uh neighborhood. And so if it gets over a certain amount, or maybe there's a football or basketball game on, we just go to the bar because it's right across the street. We eat some pizza, we hang out, and it's a why are we not taping this there, man?

SPEAKER_02 27:05

This is the whole way out. Let's go.

SPEAKER_01 27:06

Yeah, we can uh we can drive you around and show you show you my uh my neighborhood later. How can we cultivate more of those bars or restaurants and neighborhoods, but then also those small market stores, so maybe I don't have to order Uber Eats, I can just walk over and get my gummy worms.

SPEAKER_02 27:24

Amen to that. I mean, I do that, I do that in Montreal. Like I live, you know, and tie this back into this large notion of like the 15-minute city, which gets presented as an exotic concept of like, what if I could just like run errands and go to a bar within 15 minutes of my house? Like I strikes me as pretty great. Um, well, I here get like a thicket of answers, you probably know better than me, right? Like there's like zoning and there's bureaucracy and there's costs, and you know, and like yeah, and like you know, these kinds of ideas of corner stores and locals like zoned out of existence. Because, and like this is where we get into like the real talk. I mean, maybe we can come come back to the core of your question, but like I'm I'm fairly convinced I've gotten older, like the root of all evil in North American urbanism is we must protect our housing values at all costs. At all costs. Like everything else is laid to waste. And living in Canada, it's actually you can see it more extreme because smaller economy and they never had the housing crash, like 11% of Canada's GDP is like residential real estate. Brokers' fees are 2% of Canadian GDP, just trading houses around. So, yeah, this overwhelming, overwhelming urge to protect housing and screw everything else. And so, yeah, so you neglect the public realm, you neglect any possible risk to it that might come from having a bar in your neighborhood because I just got we gotta be respectable, we gotta have this sort of stuff. So, yeah, I think, yeah, uh it's it's gonna be have to be like the sort of political will project, like, and and and really the sort of social occasion. Like these are acceptable forms of public infrastructure and not you know, not something that will attract you know elements that may not be fit for the community or whatever excuse we're gonna use that day kind of thing. So, yeah, so that's um so there's that's part of that fits into the part of the larger abundance abundance agenda there of deregulation. I see a lot of that also with housing too, but but yeah, a lot of it just fits back to the notion of like people want people operate from a scarcity mindset and they want to preserve what they have versus enlarging the pie so that more people can move and we can grow that together.

SPEAKER_01 29:03

So it's it's spring break season. I have some friends in Arizona that I'm going to visit. They live in uh Chandler, and actually the central Ohio region studies Chandler a lot because they have fabs there for Intel, and we're currently building two here in the region, but it's a very different environment. It's much more of a suburban environment. A lot of people like to think that Gen Z or Millennials, like just an urban environment. What are some examples of maybe suburban environments that are thriving right now?

SPEAKER_02 29:33

Yeah, well, I mean, I mean, it's interesting you say that. So I I think those generations are separate. I think Gen Z, poor Gen Z at this point, is so absolutely beaten down by the economy and housing and affordability, like they'll move wherever they can get a house if they can get a house. Um, or there's this rising trend of like just total like dropout dumb, like downward social mobility that they're accepting. Uh, kids these days, kids are bad, let's put it that way. Millennials are more interesting to me, and I wrote a project about this for new cities in in 2020, during the during the pandemic crisis, where we saw huge outflows to larger homes and the sunbelts and the ex-urban metros, which I think led to this loneliness crisis. Like you're now in your big house and no one's around, and you have no friends because you moved there a couple years ago, and there's no real way to plug into community. But um, you know, uh, you know, to me, millennials wanted to keep as much of their urban lifestyle as they could. They just didn't have like the housing and the affordability match. I saw this in Denver, for example. Denver has, due to their own uh, I think it's a very local condition, but they have a particularly really stringent construction defect uh litigation culture there. So like any condos that are built in the core of Denver for younger people are rental only. And at that moment that you want to raise a family and buy, you are now flung out to the ex-urban periphery, whether you like it or not. And I think this happens at lesser scales all the time. Which is why I showed images of like what American Housing Corporation is trying to do. Can we like get the starter home back? Can we restart the condo market? Um, Nolan Gray just wrote an essay about this for the Atlantic, about like condo construction collapsed sometime in the early, early aughts, I think. So, yeah, we've like lost all these housing forms. And instead of building ever larger homes, probably because of the pandemic, I think, everyone's like, well, I need to have five bedrooms because I need to be able to do everything in my life inside this house forever. I certainly fell prey to that and bought a two-big house during the pandemic. So, yeah, I think I think that's a key to it there. And so, yeah, the millennials want, but the premise was they wanted to keep aspects of their lives, and and they, but they also wanted more space and they wanted it affordably. And the absence of that product in the market has just led to all these deformations for individuals and families and cities as well, too. And so, yeah, if Columbus can like build affordable infill housing with like a good quality of life that's fairly cheap, you know, I think that would be the dream. I mean, it's interesting, just you know, it's funny you go to Chandler, because like the spiritual cousins of Columbus to me are, you know, it's Midwest Kent of Madison and Minneapolis, which are growing. And then I think of Austin. I haven't just been in Austin and thinking about this trip. It's like, right, here's like, you know, your like posher, you know, flashier Texas cousin, but similar to that, and like that's what the kids moved there for. Like, remember Slacker? Like, keep Austin weird. I mean, that's what it was.

SPEAKER_01 31:57

Well, what led to the Link Us Levy, Morpsey helped incubate a study called Insight 2050 and 2014, 2015. And the regions that we really studied there, Nashville, Austin, Denver. Chandler's more of a recent.

SPEAKER_02 32:11

Well, I bring that up, like literally those three would argue that like those were like the American dream cities until they overgrew, did not expand, and stultified. It was like Denver, Nashville, and Austin in that order. Yeah. And then Austin's actually an interesting case, which I think the electorate and Columbia and you know Middle Higher residents will have to grapple with if we manage to build 200,000 homes by 2036. You know, Austin, total case study, like we're going to build a ton of new housing during the pandemic, and did. And now the narrative is like, oh my God, Austin housing prices are crashing. It's like, no, that's success. Right. You just see the schizoid uh American behavior towards housing all the time in Austin now.

SPEAKER_01 32:45

Aaron Ross Powell So one thing I failed to mention uh in your bio is you are a two-time Jeopardy award winner.

SPEAKER_02 32:51

Trevor Burrus, Jr. It took you this long.

SPEAKER_01 32:52

Yeah, I know, right. You beat Watson. What's a category that Greg Lindsay would not be good at, and who is or what is uh the answer?

SPEAKER_02 33:03

That's a great question. Uh yes. Uh what was what were my bad categories in Jeopardy? Um I don't know. What would what would be a bad Greg Lindsay category? It would be like uh the pleasures of rural living. I'll take that for a thousand, Alex. Uh or yeah, or like um uh yeah, what's your what's your uh uh 2026 vehicles on the market, Greg? Like I don't own a car kind of thing. So it would be like I don't know, the the acutre months of that kind of life, maybe. Um uh what's the most popular shows on Netflix? I I spent a lot of time in front of screens, just not that particular one. But um Jeopardy was interesting though in that regard, uh actually get back to like what I was bad at. Um it's interesting to see the AI discourse play out because when I was in the Watson Sparring program in 2000, like a year before Ken Jennings and Brad Rudder went on. And by the way, uh South by Southwest is the craziest place. Literally, the friend I was there with ran him at a bar that I wasn't told him I was gonna meet him with. He was with a college roommate who was Brad Rudder's girlfriend, so she was present at the Watson tapings and told me about that. So it all connects. All connects. But um, but with Watson, it was interesting is that you know, I realized it to feed it at the time. I was gonna have to steer it into categories. We would have we would have to think about thinking. And at the time in the sparring program, that worked. If I made it think about categories that I was bad at, where I'm like, rhyme time, oh man, rhyme time, terrible at rhyme time on Jeopardy. But um, but yeah, but that bought me time to actually answer. And so it was this question of like, you know, how do you focus on being more human or what humans are good at? The coda there is like I I violated my NDA and immediately emailed my friend Ken Jennings from ID from College Quizpool and told Ken how to beat it, and I watched him try to execute that strategy on television, and no, the machine had gotten too good. Oh, that's one of those things where like frontier models continue to advance, and yeah, I showed a slide today from David Schwartz polling that like 69% of Americans polled think it would be totally harmful if AI intelligence outpaces human intelligence. And I'm not sure they're wrong, I mean, given given what could happen, you know. But that's not a technology question, it's a political economy question. You know, we live in a society.

SPEAKER_01 34:54

Yeah. One question we always ask on the on the podcast is what is one thing that keeps you up at night? And then the counter to that is what gets you excited when you get out of bed in the morning.

SPEAKER_02 35:05

Uh what keeps me up at night is, I mean, all of it. I mean, we we don't discuss climate change much, and I don't know how much that comes up in a conversation here. Obviously, the climate is changing in here, but like, you know, I've written essays make the Great Lakes Great Again. I live, you know, I still consider myself living in Montreal. We're at the headwaters of the largest freshwater lake system on the planet. So one of the reasons I moved there was thinking about like, maybe it's not a climate haven, but like at least the climate models on our side. So, I mean, I guess the biggest thing that keeps me up at night is really like what is the trajectory of the United States, of Canada, of the world under increasing climate stress. You know, before uh the third Gulf War got underway, I mean, Tehran was warning that they were gonna run out of water. I mean, what happens if there's a massive outflow of refugees out of Iran? Syria in 2015 nearly toppled Western governments. What happens then? You know, there's not a lot of good policy responses. And and when when that's coupled with the fact that we don't really want to build, we don't really want to grow as a society. I'll say that as like America and Canada together. We want to keep what we have and watch our houses go up in value. That doesn't set us up well for a lot of other people wanting to come here from other places. It's not a good moment for immigration. So that keeps me up at night. I guess what makes me excited then is yeah, I don't know, it's well, it's the flip side of that one too. It's how it gets reconciled. Is technology is making advances. I'm not an AI evangelist, but like there are crazy capabilities being unlocked, and there's strange things that are happening. And I guess the way to frame this, because I mentioned William Gibson on stage, you know, the uh the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed, it's a famous line. Well, his most his most current set of novels are set in two futures, in the 2030s, and then somewhere in hazelly in the early 22nd century. And in between those, it posits that humanity has gone through the jackpot, a series of disasters, famines, climate change, pandemics, nuclear war. And if you survive, you make it to the far side, you're like post-human, technology's evolved, you do this one. So it's sort of a dark, it's you know, it's utopian, dystopian at the same time. The question that none of us can answer is like which of our children get to make it to the 20% who make it there? And that makes me think all the time like about John Rawls and the veil of ignorance, the notion of like how do we build the best society because we don't know where our children will end up in it, particularly given this. So, how do we do better government, better policy, better places?

SPEAKER_01 37:09

I was at the consumer electronics show for the first time. Never been.

SPEAKER_02 37:12

You poor man. I avoid that like the plague myself. I didn't uh I didn't try on the class. The first COVID super spetter spot, by the way, is the Casu can only imagine. But yes.

SPEAKER_01 37:20

There were very long lines for the smart glasses.

SPEAKER_02 37:23

Hundreds of them. Chinese have them by the dozens.

SPEAKER_01 37:25

The highlight for me though, not sure if you're a Wu Tang clan fan, but I gotta meet RISA. That was pretty amazing.

SPEAKER_02 37:30

That is pretty amazing.

SPEAKER_01 37:31

Yeah, yeah. I mean, for uh a younger Gen X.

SPEAKER_02 37:33

Please tell me RISA was not there like hawking crypto or something there.

SPEAKER_01 37:36

He was there having a conversation about how AI can help with artistry. So it was interesting. Yeah, it was an interesting conversation. So um what are you reading right now? What would you recommend someone to read right now?

SPEAKER_02 37:50

That's a great question. Uh to your point about attention, there's a funny code here. Like again, like unreliable narrator. Yeah. I got I so the Financial Times, which I read for work, uh, you know, I got offered a $99 Canadian dollar annual print subscription, six issues a week. I was like, amazing, I can like read the newspaper again. This would be great to get back into print. I have hundreds of unread issues of it. Which so I need to get back to reading that one because I every time I do it, I discover something that I missed six months ago. I'm like, oh, interesting. But in terms of books, um, what am I reading now? I am most excited to read look by books piled up my shelf. Um see, as you can tell, like I've been barely ever reading fiction. Um I'm excited to go back and read well, I need to find some good sports books, actually, because I have a friend who's a futurist who wants to put write a book on the future of sports. And I've been I did a project on this for the Mountain West. So I don't know, I need to go back and reread. I want to read um uh what is it, Levels of the Game, which is John McPhee's classic about uh Bill Bradley, the senator, who was a player at Princeton. And I think about his uh as a tennis fan. It's funny, I was this out at Indy Wells. Levels of the Game is McPhee's book about Arthur Ash, rereading this one too, and like inhabiting the mind of an athlete and that kind of thing, and that kind of presence and stillness and flow state. So I want to read those. It's funny, it's like new books out. I was like, I was like, I've got stuff ordered. Actually, I'll tell you, the book that's that's I'm waiting for Amazon to deliver is the baseball prospectus 2026 for my younger son, who's a baseball head. I'm like, I want to get him into stats, and maybe this is the year we start a fantasy league. And so yeah, so you know, I I I think I think I didn't take sports as seriously as I did when I was younger. Yeah, wasn't quite a sports ball person that's my girlfriend. But again, I'm willing, I'm at the point in my life and seeing this too, that like anything that creates community connection and points of conversation, like I'm willing to wholeheartedly embrace it. So I've become fans of sports. I never even believed I would be, like cult European football in New York.

SPEAKER_01 39:36

I mean, go buck eyes, but I mean it's hard being a Cleveland Browns fan. That's all. That's true.

SPEAKER_02 39:40

Well, you know, being being in a line-eye there, like you know, mediocrity was what I was born to be comfortable with, so it's hard to move past that.

SPEAKER_01 39:47

So back to future forward, that was the theme of our uh state of the region today. The last question we always like to end on is, and typically we're talking to a community or civic leader here in the region, you know, how do we want to make Central Ohio a better place by 2050? But maybe from an outsider's perspective, you know, where can you challenge us? Like, what do we need to do to have a better region by 2050?

SPEAKER_02 40:13

Well, I think of a lot of stuff we talked about today, I think, you know, I think I think connection. I think it is it is the question of like, you know, what is the the variable to optimize is what is the maximum number of connections that I can make with people and things within the tightest radius possible? Like, that's the 15-minute city. I'm helping a friend write a book, actually, my friend Josh Harris, who's a real estate teacher at Fordham. He argues in favor of the 30-minute city. Like, you know, you might want a wider, drivable thing, but like, but the crux is still to have stuff within reach there. And the places that do are the places that will thrive. And so, yeah, for Columbus, the question is like, yeah, how many, how many walkable, urbane 15-minute cities can you pack inside of its core? How many can you build out on the suburban periphery? Yeah, your point there earlier, I dropped it a bit about, you know, I think there's all sorts of fascinating walkable exurban downtowns, quite the phrase, weds, all sorts of really interesting suburban developments. Like Dublin is in the textbooks of like building some of these walkable districts. I will take it. If you want to drive to walkable urbanism and spend time in public, great, go with God, I'm in favor. So, yeah, so Columbus building more of those pockets where they exist, and then yeah, and then overall it's just a question of like building affordably where you can and basically loosening up all whatever, whatever choke points you find in that to allow that to happen, to welcome people. And yeah, and then my last point is to echo my call to action is I think, in addition to like our housing task force, I think the region needs to have an equivalent of Tulsa Remote. And um, and that's you know, it's a foundation thing. But this notion of building an overall strategy of welcoming people, bringing them in, helping them find housing, helping them find a friend group and doing this is the most powerful thing. And maybe that's born out of personal trauma because yeah, emigrating to Montreal on the eve of the pandemic, dealing with a totally different like tax scheme and languages and those sorts of things was incredibly difficult as a soloist, you might say, as a solo practitioner, even having an org to help me. So, yeah, so I you know, encouraging people to move here to enable that growth, enable the growth of your choice by recruiting people and attracting them, I think is really powerful, more powerful than even attracting you know large companies. So, yeah, win hearts and minds. That's my advice for you.

SPEAKER_01 42:14

Greg Lindsay, thank you so much for not only being our keynote, but also taking time for growing better together today.

SPEAKER_02 42:20

Well, I say to quote Marshall McLuhan, my Canadian adopted patrons say, you don't like my ideas, I have others.

SPEAKER_01 42:26

Thank you again.

SPEAKER_02 42:27

My pleasure.