speaking & connecting
chasing lights
Drawing on a childhood under the Northern Lights, thirty years at the intersection of capital and culture, and the hard-won clarity that comes after loss — Gunnar Branson speaks on resilience, place, storytelling, and the desire lines that reveal what we truly want.
At a certain age, it becomes tempting to believe that the light is behind you. But there is always more light ahead.
— Gunnar Branson, Chasing Lights (April 2026)
Keynote Topics
Four talks. One through line: how we find our way.
Each talk is built from lived experience — not abstraction. They can be delivered as standalone keynotes, adapted for workshops, or paired for multi-session events. All run 45–60 minutes with Q&A.
01
Resilience · Personal Reinvention · Leadership
Chasing Lights: What Alaska Taught Me About Starting Over
On a heavy June afternoon in Chicago, as the world sat in quarantine, Gunnar Branson watched a thirty-year marriage end from a backyard alley. The story he tells about what happened next reaches all the way back to childhood — to a boy growing up beneath the Northern Lights in Alaska, where the sky made it impossible to believe you were the most important thing in it.
This talk is about what the wilderness actually teaches: that smallness is not failure, that the light comes back, and that the most important stories begin the moment we think they’ve ended. It speaks to anyone navigating reinvention — after loss, after a career pivot, after a season of life that didn’t go the way they planned.
- 45–60 min + Q&A
- Association conferences
- Leadership retreats
- Wellness & resilience summits
02
Urban Thinking · Organizational Behavior · Strategy
Desire Lines: What People Do When No One Is Watching
Desire lines are the informal paths worn into grass by people who refuse to walk where planners told them to. They appear in every park, every campus, every city — the gap in a hedge, the shortcut across the median. They are a form of honesty: evidence of where human beings actually want to go, as opposed to where institutions expect them to.
This talk applies that lens to organizations, cities, and culture. What do desire lines tell us about the gap between official structure and lived experience? What happens when leaders follow them — or ignore them? A meditation on bottom-up behavior, drawn from urban design and from a career watching how capital, culture, and people actually move through the world.
- 45 min + Q&A
- Real estate & urban policy
- Organizational leadership
- City planning conferences
03
Writing · Memoir · Creativity · Storytelling
The Courage to Cut: On Writing, Memory, and Telling the Truth
Gunnar Branson didn’t set out to write a memoir. He set out to understand what had happened to him — and discovered that writing honestly about your own life is one of the harder things a person can do. Not because the words are hard to find, but because the truth requires you to cut the things you most want to keep.
This talk is about the craft and the cost of honest storytelling. It covers what memory actually is (fragments, not films), why montage is the most powerful form of narrative, and what it means to write a life without softening the parts that don’t reflect well on you. A natural fit for writing conferences, literary festivals, MFA programs, and anyone grappling with how to tell a true story.
- 45 min + Q&A
- Writing conferences
- Literary festivals
- MFA & academic programs
04
Real Estate · Finance · Leadership · Character
Capital and Character: What Three Decades in Real Estate Taught Me About Place
Most people who work in international real estate spend their careers thinking about capital flows. Gunnar Branson spent three decades doing exactly that — and came to believe the more interesting question is what those flows do to the places they touch, and what they reveal about the people directing them.
As CEO of AFIRE (the Association of Foreign Investors in Real Estate), Gunnar has had a front-row seat to the intersection of global capital, urban development, and institutional leadership. This talk connects those professional observations to deeper questions about stewardship, place, and what it means to lead well in industries whose decisions shape how cities live and grow.
- 45–60 min + Q&A
- Real estate & investment conferences
- Association leadership summits
- Finance & institutional events
Event Types
- Keynote addresses
- Conference opening & closing sessions
- Leadership retreats
- Association annual meetings
- Literary festivals & book events
- University & MFA programs
Audiences
- Real estate & investment professionals
- Association leaders & executives
- Writers, journalists & storytellers
- Urban planners & policy makers
- Anyone in a season of transition
- Leadership & organizational teams
What to Expect
- Deeply personal, never generic
- Built for your specific audience
- Story-driven, not slide-driven
- Available for Q&A and breakouts
- Can incorporate book signing
- Virtual formats available
What They Said About the Book — and the Man Behind It
Words from readers who know what they’re talking about.
These testimonials speak to the book, but they also speak to Gunnar’s voice — the quality of his thinking and the sincerity of his perspective.
Dr. Parag Khanna
The vast bounty of Alaska is the grand canvas for this earnest Bildungsroman that deftly shuttles between past and present. Many people chase the light, but few can imbue it with insight the way Gunnar does.
Author, Founder & CEO, AlphaGeo · Author of MOVE
Richard Florida
A fascinating and deeply moving meditation on place, identity, and meaning. Gunnar explores the tension between cities and nature, darkness and light, isolation and belonging — and how where we live shapes who we are and who we can still become.
Author, The Rise of the Creative Class
General Stanley A. McChrystal
Gunnar Branson’s honest self-examination transforms memory into meaning and makes the book resonate long after the final page.
Author, On Character: Choices That Define a Life
Joshua Benaim
Having lived at the edge of wilderness and the heart of the city, Branson brings a special insight into our condition and the choices we make.
Author, Real Estate, a Love Story
Gunnar Branson · Alexandria, Virginia
Available for events worldwide
Gunnar Branson
Author · Speaker · CEO
Gunnar Branson grew up in Alaska — which is not a normal place to grow up. The wilderness shaped the way he thinks: about smallness, about light, about the distance between where you are and where you thought you’d be.
He’s spent his adult life in cities — Chicago, New York, Washington — and built an unlikely career from waiting tables and writing plays to leading one of the premier international real estate associations in the world. He is currently CEO of AFIRE, the Association of Foreign Investors in Real Estate.
His memoir, Chasing Lights, was published in April 2026. He writes about light, belonging, memory, and what happens after the ending.
Book
Chasing Lights (April 2026)
Role
CEO, AFIRE
Based in
Alexandria, Virginia
Podcast
Chasing Lights Conversations (YouTube) and
The AFIRE Podcast (www.AFIRE.org)
Newsletter
Weekly essays on light, place & meaning