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Towards the end of last year, Meta released SAM 3, which stands for the third version of its Segment Anything Model. The way it generally works is that it allows you to detect, edit, and experiment with things in images and videos. For example, if you were looking at a video of a street, you could ask it to find all the scooters (which I did below), count the number of pedestrians wearing black pants, blur all the license plates on the cars, and so on.
This is immediately useful for a company like Meta because it allows for object-level modifications across its content creation platforms. So if you took a video of someone dancing and you desperately wanted to give them a bobblehead, SAM 3, I'm told, would allow you to quickly do that. Other AI models, such as Gemini, can also segment, but supposedly the SAM models are better and more precise at this specific task.
Beyond bobblehead videos, the potential of this model seems enormous for real estate, cities, and, of course, many other things. Using the above image as an example, you can quickly imagine SAM 3 being used to count and track modal splits across a city, and then make planning decisions based on real-time data.
People are also using it for real estate purposes. Pair the model with satellite images, and you can ask it to tell you how many houses have a pool, which houses recently had their roof replaced (and have solar panels), how many cars are parked on a street, how many cars are parked at Canadian Tire, and the average building lot coverage in an area.
You could also use it to swap out finishes in a real estate listing (including in videos), and get material/area takeoffs ahead of a construction project. I don't know for sure, but I would also imagine that this model would make a great building condition inspector. Come to think of it, I'd love a SAM 3 that could walk our construction sites and document every little detail!
Of course, a lot of these use cases are already being tackled. But the models are getting that much better. And that will lead to even more innovation.
Cover photo by Above Horizon on Unsplash
Engaging in physical activity is unequivocally associated with improved health outcomes. But are certain physical activities better than others? And what might the implications be for how we design our cities?
Here is a brand new study that examined the relationship between specific types of physical activity and the risk of death, using two large cohort studies with more than 30 years of self-reported data.
The study included information on walking, jogging, running, cycling (including stationary machines), lap swimming, tennis, climbing flights of stairs, rowing, and weight training.
It's important to note that this is an observational study using self-reported data. There are limitations to this. One question mark is around intensity. When someone reports swimming for an hour, it could be vigorous or casual. And the researchers note that long, low-intensity physical activities could bias the observed associations toward the null.
With this caveat out of the way, here's what they found:
My friend Chris Spoke sent me this article yesterday. It's by Paul Stanton (at Thesis Driven), and it's about "why the next generation of real estate fund managers will be built on video reels and newsletters." As someone who has been writing a personal blog-slash-newsletter for the last 13+ years (though largely focused on real estate and cities), this post really resonated with me. I wish I could say that I was early and that it brought me great riches, but sadly, that is not the case.
Regardless, what all of this is getting at is the value of parasocial relationships:
A parasocial relationship is a one-sided connection where a person feels they know and have a bond with a public figure (celebrity, influencer, fictional character) who is unaware of their existence, often stemming from media exposure like TV, social media, or podcasts.
I wouldn't call myself a public figure, but a daily blog does inherently foster parasocial relationships. Generally, though, the real estate industry has been slow to adopt new media. The prevailing thought has been that social media is good for selling stuff like fashion, but not appropriate for syndicating large and serious real estate deals. I've even heard some people argue that a strong social media presence is probably inversely correlated with actual real estate performance.
This is true of the grifters that Paul talks about in his article. These are the people posing in front of fancy cars or on a private jet, claiming that they can 10x your money using some dead-simple real estate strategy. They cannot. These people are not in the real estate business. But the marketing strategy clearly does work for raising capital, which is why you now have accomplished people who actually know real estate and finance becoming influencers:
Top executives of Wall Street’s largest private equity firms have recently joined the social media influencer ecosystem—perhaps none more so than Jon Gray, President and COO of Blackstone.
Gray has become known for his candid videos filmed in Central Park during morning runs, sharing his views on recent shifts in the capital markets, macro events and even celebrity gossip—all with a sunny and sometimes self-deprecating disposition.
Towards the end of last year, Meta released SAM 3, which stands for the third version of its Segment Anything Model. The way it generally works is that it allows you to detect, edit, and experiment with things in images and videos. For example, if you were looking at a video of a street, you could ask it to find all the scooters (which I did below), count the number of pedestrians wearing black pants, blur all the license plates on the cars, and so on.
This is immediately useful for a company like Meta because it allows for object-level modifications across its content creation platforms. So if you took a video of someone dancing and you desperately wanted to give them a bobblehead, SAM 3, I'm told, would allow you to quickly do that. Other AI models, such as Gemini, can also segment, but supposedly the SAM models are better and more precise at this specific task.
Beyond bobblehead videos, the potential of this model seems enormous for real estate, cities, and, of course, many other things. Using the above image as an example, you can quickly imagine SAM 3 being used to count and track modal splits across a city, and then make planning decisions based on real-time data.
People are also using it for real estate purposes. Pair the model with satellite images, and you can ask it to tell you how many houses have a pool, which houses recently had their roof replaced (and have solar panels), how many cars are parked on a street, how many cars are parked at Canadian Tire, and the average building lot coverage in an area.
You could also use it to swap out finishes in a real estate listing (including in videos), and get material/area takeoffs ahead of a construction project. I don't know for sure, but I would also imagine that this model would make a great building condition inspector. Come to think of it, I'd love a SAM 3 that could walk our construction sites and document every little detail!
Of course, a lot of these use cases are already being tackled. But the models are getting that much better. And that will lead to even more innovation.
Cover photo by Above Horizon on Unsplash
Engaging in physical activity is unequivocally associated with improved health outcomes. But are certain physical activities better than others? And what might the implications be for how we design our cities?
Here is a brand new study that examined the relationship between specific types of physical activity and the risk of death, using two large cohort studies with more than 30 years of self-reported data.
The study included information on walking, jogging, running, cycling (including stationary machines), lap swimming, tennis, climbing flights of stairs, rowing, and weight training.
It's important to note that this is an observational study using self-reported data. There are limitations to this. One question mark is around intensity. When someone reports swimming for an hour, it could be vigorous or casual. And the researchers note that long, low-intensity physical activities could bias the observed associations toward the null.
With this caveat out of the way, here's what they found:
My friend Chris Spoke sent me this article yesterday. It's by Paul Stanton (at Thesis Driven), and it's about "why the next generation of real estate fund managers will be built on video reels and newsletters." As someone who has been writing a personal blog-slash-newsletter for the last 13+ years (though largely focused on real estate and cities), this post really resonated with me. I wish I could say that I was early and that it brought me great riches, but sadly, that is not the case.
Regardless, what all of this is getting at is the value of parasocial relationships:
A parasocial relationship is a one-sided connection where a person feels they know and have a bond with a public figure (celebrity, influencer, fictional character) who is unaware of their existence, often stemming from media exposure like TV, social media, or podcasts.
I wouldn't call myself a public figure, but a daily blog does inherently foster parasocial relationships. Generally, though, the real estate industry has been slow to adopt new media. The prevailing thought has been that social media is good for selling stuff like fashion, but not appropriate for syndicating large and serious real estate deals. I've even heard some people argue that a strong social media presence is probably inversely correlated with actual real estate performance.
This is true of the grifters that Paul talks about in his article. These are the people posing in front of fancy cars or on a private jet, claiming that they can 10x your money using some dead-simple real estate strategy. They cannot. These people are not in the real estate business. But the marketing strategy clearly does work for raising capital, which is why you now have accomplished people who actually know real estate and finance becoming influencers:
Top executives of Wall Street’s largest private equity firms have recently joined the social media influencer ecosystem—perhaps none more so than Jon Gray, President and COO of Blackstone.
Gray has become known for his candid videos filmed in Central Park during morning runs, sharing his views on recent shifts in the capital markets, macro events and even celebrity gossip—all with a sunny and sometimes self-deprecating disposition.
Their two key findings were that (1) most physical activities lower mortality rates in a non-linear way when you do more of them, and (2) mixing different physical activities is associated with lower mortality, independent of total activity levels. Variety is good.
Interestingly enough, the most effective activity at lowering overall mortality is the simplest one: walking. It was found to reduce all-cause mortality by about 17%. This is the difference, or maximum observed benefit, between the highest walking group and a sedentary baseline.
Once again, the data clearly shows that walkable cities can help produce meaningfully better health outcomes. So, if, like me, you subscribe to the philosophy that there's no greater luxury in life than our health, well, then there's perhaps no greater luxury than living in a walkable city.
Cover photo by Alain ROUILLER on Unsplash
I’ve watched many of these videos, and I now know (or, Blackstone has successfully planted in my brain) that Jon is exactly who I’d want running a massive pool of long-term capital: measured, self-aware, allergic to hype. Blackstone no longer feels like a faceless capital machine.
The fact that Jon Gray is doing this should give everyone in our industry the confidence that it's more than okay to be a real estate social media influencer. In fact, it's the name of the game today, even for the most sophisticated companies with long and proven track records, like Blackstone. There's nothing to be shy about. People do not want to follow faceless companies. They want to follow humans. So, be a human.
I was thinking about this very topic over the holidays, and I ultimately landed on it needing to become a bigger part of what I do in 2026. I will obviously continue to write this daily blog, but I want to be better at putting myself out there in other ways, creating more video content, and building up Globizen's overall brand as a city-builder committed to creating better places.
We have started by posting regular (almost daily) content to Instagram (Globizen & Parkview Mountain House), but there's more we want to do. The first obstacle is getting over the fear of what people might think if I take candid videos of myself running in Central Park (people couldn't care less). And the second obstacle is time. It's a lot of work. But building a company and raising capital have always been a lot of work.
Their two key findings were that (1) most physical activities lower mortality rates in a non-linear way when you do more of them, and (2) mixing different physical activities is associated with lower mortality, independent of total activity levels. Variety is good.
Interestingly enough, the most effective activity at lowering overall mortality is the simplest one: walking. It was found to reduce all-cause mortality by about 17%. This is the difference, or maximum observed benefit, between the highest walking group and a sedentary baseline.
Once again, the data clearly shows that walkable cities can help produce meaningfully better health outcomes. So, if, like me, you subscribe to the philosophy that there's no greater luxury in life than our health, well, then there's perhaps no greater luxury than living in a walkable city.
Cover photo by Alain ROUILLER on Unsplash
I’ve watched many of these videos, and I now know (or, Blackstone has successfully planted in my brain) that Jon is exactly who I’d want running a massive pool of long-term capital: measured, self-aware, allergic to hype. Blackstone no longer feels like a faceless capital machine.
The fact that Jon Gray is doing this should give everyone in our industry the confidence that it's more than okay to be a real estate social media influencer. In fact, it's the name of the game today, even for the most sophisticated companies with long and proven track records, like Blackstone. There's nothing to be shy about. People do not want to follow faceless companies. They want to follow humans. So, be a human.
I was thinking about this very topic over the holidays, and I ultimately landed on it needing to become a bigger part of what I do in 2026. I will obviously continue to write this daily blog, but I want to be better at putting myself out there in other ways, creating more video content, and building up Globizen's overall brand as a city-builder committed to creating better places.
We have started by posting regular (almost daily) content to Instagram (Globizen & Parkview Mountain House), but there's more we want to do. The first obstacle is getting over the fear of what people might think if I take candid videos of myself running in Central Park (people couldn't care less). And the second obstacle is time. It's a lot of work. But building a company and raising capital have always been a lot of work.
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