The Grand Challengers Podcast

Billions in international money poured into Sarajevo after the siege ended. What got built was a city with more shopping malls and less public green space than the one that had been destroyed. Money was never the constraint. Coordination was.
Haris Piplas is Director of Integrated Urban Solutions International at Drees & Sommer and a lecturer at ETH Zürich. He trained as a landscape architect in Sarajevo, an urban designer in Berlin, and took his doctorate in architecture in Zürich. His argument is that the way the built environment carved itself into separate professions last century has left none of them able to do the actual job. Transforming a place means understanding law, media, budgets, referenda and human psychology, and no architecture school teaches any of it.
We get into what urban regeneration should and should not be, why both neighbours in an argument about one parking space have a legitimate case, how the Commit to Green project is bringing blue-green infrastructure back into a contaminated former landfill in Milan and a landslide-prone site on the edge of Barcelona, and why the recovery of Ukrainian cities cannot wait for a perfect moment that may never arrive.
Haris also talks about the two cities that raised him. Sarajevo, which lost almost everything when the Cold War ended, and Berlin, which gained almost everything. He explains why the "smart city" buzzword is more useful than its critics allow, why architectural competitions bin most of the knowledge they generate, and why the single-name genius architect is a marketing fiction worth retiring. Plus central midfield as a theory of project management, moustaches as a theory of fashion cycles, and a childhood memory from a refugee camp that he still describes as beautiful.
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro and The Urban Forum
4:23 Drees & Sommer & a little bit of Zurich history
9:44 The fallacy of 20th century hyperspecialization
14:37 Growing up in Sarajevo shaped Haris' drive
18:48 Urban Regeneration: what it should and shouldn't be
25:56 Geopolitics, stakeholders and scaling up urban regeneration
35:10 Baukultur, Inclusivity and the Blue-Green Infrastructure
43:15 Co-op-e-tition and horizontalizing authorship
49:54 AI and the Smart Cities Movement
54:59 A collage of Haris' project work and "bridges”
1:06:23 Heading in the right direction?
1:08:34 What excites Haris about the future?
1:10:40 Q&A Start
1:10:50 What does innovation mean to you?
1:12:45 Key Moment, Book, Person
1:17:08 Time Management
1:20:52 Favourite childhood memory
1:24:31 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:28:17 Where can people find you?
1:29:54 Final Message
1:31:33 Outro
Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode.
Join the community over at: linkedin.com/company/tgcpodcast and let's connect across the world!

Subscribe and listen to the podcast (and do please leave a review/rating) on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts from.
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Hosted by Peter Marcus Bach (www.petermbach.com), follow me on: 
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Most of us now use AI every day. Very few of us could explain what it is actually doing.
Anastassia Lauterbach thinks that gap is the most dangerous thing about this technology, and she has built a company to close it. She is a linguist, a trained clinical psychologist, a former senior executive at Qualcomm and Deutsche Telekom, a former non-executive director at easyJet, Dun & Bradstreet and Wirecard, and now founder and CEO of AI Edutainment in Basel.
In this episode she draws a line most companies and governments have quietly erased. AI literacy is not AI fluency. Fluency is knowing how to prompt. Literacy is understanding why every large language model hallucinates, where your data goes when you upload it, and when the honest answer is to not use AI at all. Invest only in fluency, she argues, and what you scale is mediocrity.
We work through the four principles of her Responsible AI white paper: changing the architecture itself, radical transparency about failure, literacy as understanding rather than tool training, and the fusion of STEM with the humanities. Along the way we discuss the elevation of AI into a religion complete with its own popes and heretics, why cognitive capital deserves a place next to human capital on the balance sheet, and what an "Ozempic for the brain" would even look like.
There is also a grand piano, absolute pitch, a childhood in Moscow spent hanging oranges on a Christmas tree, the collapse of Wirecard, and a ginger cat who serves as Chief Marketing Officer.
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro, Basel and Piano
15:15 Anastassia's early journey
21:43 The Brain and critique on today's AI and society
35:49 Anastassia's Mission in AI Literacy
42:34 AI Literacy vs. AI Fluency
48:08 The cognitive challenge and appetite for understanding
51:52 Mediocrity and the need to celebrate human effort
55:18 Education reforms and re-exercising our brain
1:09:37 Reaching the four pillars of Responsible AI
1:19:17 Anastassia's Vision
1:24:05 Q&A Start
1:24:32 What does innovation mean to you?
1:27:14 Key moment, event, person
1:28:22 Time Management
1:32:49 Favourite childhood memory
1:35:16 Biggest challenge to date
1:41:34 Advice for young professionals
1:43:38 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:43:52 Where can people find you?
1:46:39 Final Message
1:46:58 Outro
Find Anastassia at https://aiedutainment.ai and https://romyandroby.ai
Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode.
Join the community over at: linkedin.com/company/tgcpodcast and let's connect across the world!

Subscribe and listen to the podcast (and do please leave a review/rating) on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Your subscription/follow will greatly help the show grow and reach a wider audience.

Hosted by Peter Marcus Bach (www.petermbach.com), follow me on: 
X (fomerly Twitter): @petermbach 
Instagram: @petermbach87 
Subscribe to my channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PeterMarcusBach/

What if the kitchen knife you have used your whole life was designed for a fight, not for cooking? Douglas Katz thinks we can do better. "If you designed a knife for a robot, it wouldn't look like the linear knife that we have today," he says, and that single reframe sits at the heart of this episode.
Douglas is a West Point graduate, a disabled US Army veteran and a lifelong inventor who tells his story in three acts. From the leadership lab of the military, through a long and often grim chapter in corporate America, to the workshop where he forged a new kind of blade, his journey is one of reframing what looks fixed until something better becomes possible.
After upper body injuries made an ordinary knife painful to hold, Douglas refused to give up cooking and redesigned the tool instead. The result is NULU, an adaptive kitchen knife inspired by the traditional Inuit ulu and built around a concept his team calls force transfer geometry. From there grew a bigger idea. Ability and disability, he argues, are not a switch you flip. They are task-based and they move along a curve we all travel. We will all age into disability, and designing for that reality makes life better for everyone.
Along the way Peter and Douglas get into Aikido and softness, barrier-free, universal and inclusive design, ADHD as a feature set rather than a bug, and why AI might be the infinite assistant that lets more of us think like Tony Stark. It is honest, funny and quietly profound.
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro & Aikido
9:12 Douglas' Story in Three Acts: The Military
16:29 A precursor to the second Act - Leadership
19:39 The second Act - Corporate America
25:56 The third Act and Doug's current innovation
36:36 Reframing ability and disability and design for it
41:39 A 101 on Disability Design Theories
48:03 The NULU Knife - an example of adaptive design
51:27 Helping incubate adaptive design ideas
53:30 A discussion on "ADHD wiring”
1:02:09 Intelligence, pattern recognition and AI
1:08:20 AI in work and education
1:14:41 Doug's Future Plans
1:18:34 Q&A Start
1:18:53 What does innovation mean to you?
1:19:17 Key Moment, Event, Person
1:21:59 Time Management
1:24:43 Favourite childhood memory
1:27:02 Biggest challenge to date
1:30:41 Advice for young professionals
1:33:55 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:35:31 Where can people find you?
1:37:07 Final Message
1:37:41 Outro
Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode.
Join the community over at: linkedin.com/company/tgcpodcast and let's connect across the world!

Subscribe and listen to the podcast (and do please leave a review/rating) on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Your subscription/follow will greatly help the show grow and reach a wider audience.

Hosted by Peter Marcus Bach (www.petermbach.com), follow me on: 
X (fomerly Twitter): @petermbach 
Instagram: @petermbach87 
Subscribe to my channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PeterMarcusBach/

What if the system you spent four decades building turned out to not be enough?
David Gottfried is the father of the global green building movement. He founded the U.S. Green Building Council and the World Green Building Council, and helped create LEED, the rating system now used across more than 180 countries and tied to a trillion-dollar green economy. And yet he is the first to say it has not bent the curve far enough. Carbon keeps climbing. The ship is still heading for the iceberg, and we are busy bolting solar panels to the deck.
In this wide-ranging conversation, David takes Peter through the whole arc. A quick 101 on what actually makes a building green, from orientation and glazing to greywater and healthy materials. How LEED grew from a white paper into a global standard. And why he now argues we need to move from sustainability to regeneration, from human to humane, and build a new scoreboard he calls HOPE (Health On Planet Earth).
It is also a deeply personal story. A Stanford engineer who read Siddhartha every birthday and came to see himself as the ferryman. A developer who lost a building in the crash and went looking for purpose. A man who took up kung fu in his late fifties, fly fishes alone in cold creeks, and used AI as a thinking partner to turn 2,400 pages of dog-walk voice notes into his fourth book.
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro, Kung Fu & Fly Fishing
9:34 A 101 on Green Buildings…
16:11 ...and a 101 on the LEED System
18:45 Why study engineering?
20:40 Siddartha's Influence on David
26:43 Origins of the Green Building Movement
42:06 Green Buildings aren't enough
50:57 Pushing the needle and finding the correct metrics
1:01:37 A true Human-AI collaboration
1:10:07 David's Hope and Future Vision
1:12:14 Q&A Start
1:12:28 What does innovation mean to you?
1:15:28 Key Event, Book, Person
1:20:13 Time Management
1:24:58 Favourite childhood memory
1:27:57 Greatest Challenge to Date
1:33:04 Advice for young professionals
1:36:16 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:37:01 Where can people find you?
1:38:42 Final Message
1:39:29 Outro
Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode.
Join the community over at: linkedin.com/company/tgcpodcast and let's connect across the world!

Subscribe and listen to the podcast (and do please leave a review/rating) on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Your subscription/follow will greatly help the show grow and reach a wider audience.

Hosted by Peter Marcus Bach (www.petermbach.com), follow me on: 
X (fomerly Twitter): @petermbach 
Instagram: @petermbach87 
Subscribe to my channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PeterMarcusBach/

"Why is our architecture not as diverse as our culture is progressive?" That's the question Toronto-based architect Alexander Josephson keeps asking. On this episode, he doesn't pull punches. 
Alex is the co-founder and creative director of PARTISANS, the studio behind the Grotto Sauna, the masterplan to resurrect Toronto's gargantuan Hearn power plant into a cultural district, and The Orbit, a radial reinvention of the Garden City for a transit-oriented future. He's also founder and CEO of Cumulus, an immersive digital memorialisation platform born from his father's brush with death during COVID. Across two decades, Alex has staked out a position that's part critique, part call to arms: that the condo towers crashing into Toronto's skyline are "spreadsheets in the sky", that greenwashed sustainability mandates have made architects pawns of capital, and that buildings should be "thousand-year worthy". 
In this conversation we trace Alex's nonlinear journey into architecture (the University of Waterloo, Rome with Massimiliano Fuksas, the AA in London which he dropped out of), the founding of PARTISANS in a Toronto storage locker, his master's thesis redesigning Mecca around a singularity, the Grotto Sauna's pre-fabricated arrival by barge, the disco ball that helped ignite the Hearn's cultural revival, and what it takes to design a "complete community" amid Canada's worst real estate downturn in a century. We also wrestle with AI in design ("it's just a tool, like a pencil"), the case for interfaith architecture as a path to peace, and how personal grief gave rise to Cumulus, his "digital tomb" for the family memories trapped on our devices. A spirited, irreverent and sometimes uncomfortable episode for anyone who builds, designs, or simply lives among buildings.
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro, Toronto & Tim Hortons
3:59 "Spreadsheets in the Sky”
9:40 A radical redesign of Mecca
15:01 Interfaith architecture for peace
17:59 Origins of the "Rebel Archtiect”
31:49 PARTISANS - the "Apple" story of Architecture?
37:25 The Grotto Sauna
38:57 Urban Regeneration - The Hearn
50:37 Building on the Garden City - The Orbit
57:15 Receptivity to radical ideas from the client's side
1:01:41 Real issues with 'sustainability' in architecture
1:12:12 Reflecting back on the why of pursuing architecture
1:19:43 The impact of AI in Architecture
1:23:04 The story of Cumulus - digital memorialization
1:43:00 Q&A Start
1:43:22 What does innovation mean to you?
1:44:24 Key event, book, person
1:47:19 Time Management
1:49:55 Favourite childhood memory
1:50:47 Biggest challenge to date
1:53:33 Advice for young professionals
1:55:19 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:57:03 Where can people find you?
1:58:32 Final message
1:58:45 Outro
Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode.
Join the community over at: linkedin.com/company/tgcpodcast and let's connect across the world!

Subscribe and listen to the podcast (and do please leave a review/rating) on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Your subscription/follow will greatly help the show grow and reach a wider audience.

Hosted by Peter Marcus Bach (www.petermbach.com), follow me on: 
X (fomerly Twitter): @petermbach 
Instagram: @petermbach87 
Subscribe to my channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PeterMarcusBach/