In this presentation Jeremy Kirshbaum outlines a decade‑long view of how disruption will reshape leadership, society, and business. He argues that future challenges will be dilemmas—persistent, unsolvable tensions that leaders must learn to navigate—rather than discrete problems that can be engineered away. He distinguishes two opposing forces among the world’s most connected youth: a negative disruptor (homeless, hungry, hopeless, explosively connected) and a positive disruptor (hopeful, explosively connected). Citing an Economist report, he notes that the youngest generation is the healthiest and best‑educated ever, yet faces systemic barriers to employment, housing, and family formation. Kirshbaum marks 2010 as an inflection point when technology morphed into media: immersive social platforms, robust analytics, and vivid gaming interfaces that now dominate learning and engagement. He predicts gaming will become the most powerful pedagogical tool, already used by the military for combat preparation, and will soon be central to business training and consumer interaction. Traditional advertising, he claims, is dying; brands must adopt gameful engagement and personalized augmented‑reality experiences to reach users who can filter out conventional ads. He illustrates this future with Keiichi Matsuda’s AR visualization, showing individuals living in self‑curated digital clouds that intersect only at chosen moments, highlighting both the creative potential and privacy risks of a fully embedded digital medium. The talk concludes that a separate “digital strategy” is obsolete—digital must be woven into every organizational strategy.
Chapters
So, this new future world of disruption is characterized by dilemmas, not just problems that can be solved. So, the difference between a dilemma and a problem is a dilemma is something that won't go away, can't be solved, but you have to learn how to win anyway. And so, leaders, for the most part, will be faced with dilemmas, and people who are working for those leaders will solve problems. If you really are a leader, if you're a senior executive, or you're a CEO, you probably will not solve any more problems for the rest of your career. And so this is part of what we're seeing, the end of kind of like engineering thinking as king in terms of what succeeds in the business environment. Dealing with dilemmas. Learning to thrive in the space between judging too soon, the classic case of the problem solver or engineer, and deciding too late, The classic case of the academic. So who here thinks that you have more of a problem judging too soon? What about deciding too late? Okay, and if you didn't raise your hand, you're by default in the second category. So this is about really nailing— you're never gonna have all the information, and more and more we have too much information. We'll go a little bit into that. later how to deal with that. But, you know, how do you nail having— thinking about it long enough that you still act, but not so long that you miss an opportunity? So biggest negative disruptors, and I realize I'm using the word disruption a lot, and I realize that word's been really diluted in the last few years, but we personally do have a very specific definition to it. Young people who are homeless, hungry, hopeless, and explosively connected. So, homeless, hungry, hopeless, and connected. That's ISIS. This is the biggest negative disruptor. It doesn't matter who you are, rich or poor, in the next 10 years, you're going to be connected. And there's arguments about whether global wealth is increasing in absolute terms, or whether it's just global inequality that's increasing, but it doesn't matter necessarily, because now The poor kids can see the rich kids in high def. And we tend to judge ourselves relatively, and so that creates a lot of frustration. The biggest positive disruptors will be young people who have hope and are explosively connected. They can be homeless, hungry, and hopeful, and explosively connected, and that's a startup. So the key determinant here is hope. How can we inspire hope? to spin this in the positive direction. This is what we'll call a signal. I'll describe in a bit what a signal is for us. This is an article from The Economist. Globally, it's a report that says, globally, the young generation is the healthiest and best educated in history. However, difficulties in finding jobs, building homes, and starting a family make it an uphill fight, and their elders aren't helping much. The Economist report suggests that we need to focus on the disruptive power of the young, Sooner than later. And when we say the young, we mean people who are born into— a little bit later than us. So, people who are 18 years or— I guess, sorry, it would be 19 years or less today. Actually, who here is— is anyone here 18 or younger? Cool. Getting a head start. We need to focus on you. You are powerful and important. But you knew that. OK, so the reason why we think that's important is because we're moving from technology to media. Things that we call technology are no longer really technology. So in 2010, we had early-stage, still very crude social technologies, early-stage, still very crude blended reality via smartphones, and a hint of what it's like to have a supercomputer on your shoulder, and vivid video game interfaces that were already much more advanced than any office system in 2010. And why this is important is because we know from sociology that the media ecology in which you come of age affects you for the rest of your life, and completely frames how you understand the world. So this is what we're talking about when we're talking about digital natives, or Generation Z, or whatever you want to call them, The reason why it's important, the reason why we identify 2010 as an inflection point, is because the media ecology really came of age so that we had a completely immersive medium that we were acting in instead of technologies. So in 2026, what kids will be coming of age in is advanced social media with robust social analytics and community organizing capabilities, a much more graceful network on your shoulder, New potential for vivid video gaming, interfaces for anything, not just gaming, and gaming, which probably won't be called gaming, will become the most powerful learning medium in history. It's a very important learning pedagogy. In fact, if you go on the Army website right now, you will see a video game. If you play that and you get a high score, you get a call from a recruiter. And if you go God forbid, ever are deployed into combat, you'll spend the last period before being deployed in the world's largest video game parlor in the Mojave Desert. It is designed— everyone dies. It's designed to be harder than combat. It uses real tanks, real helicopters, and it is the last stage in your education before deployment. The military is very good at using gaming as a pedagogy, and that's how they're able to take people who have much less education than you do most likely and make them into highly skilled combatants, whereas business is still really catching up in how to utilize this effectively. I have a question.
Yeah. Would you compare, I think I saw something on Uber, I don't know if anybody has seen that recently where they had an hacker challenge. Did anybody see it? Uber and see they have something where it's like a hacking challenge and it looks like a little trivia to kind of see how much coding that you know. And then at the end it's like, by the way, we're offering jobs to engineers at Uber. You'd be perfect for it. So what I got out of the little trivia thinking I'm just waiting for my Uber, I'm doing this trivia, realistically was a job application for engineer or how much coding I knew. Would that be something that you're kind of talking about when it comes down to gaming? Do you understand what I'm saying?
Yeah. I think that fits really closely into what we're looking at in the future of advertising, the end of advertising, looking more towards gameful engagement and how to get to people in a world where you can't really advertise to them because they're overwhelmed with people pushing information at them. Things like that where you're able to engage with them in a creative way is a lot more effective. So, in the next 10 years, technology will truly become a medium. And what we mean is this will be fluid. It will be embedded in everything. We won't think of things anymore as online or offline. We'll be constantly online unless we're offline. The word digital will become unnecessary since digital will be embedded in almost everything. And it's too late to have a digital strategy. Now you need a strategy that includes digital. This is something that's probably a lot more intuitive to you and where you are as a startup. You will notice, though, that in most large companies or organizations, they have separate digital groups. And that's what we're referencing here, is that having a separate digital strategy is no longer really effective. This is a video I wanted to show you. It's from an artist that we work with named Keiichi Matsuda. It's one of my favorite visualizations of the augmented reality world. as technology becomes a medium. So you see this man. He's alone. He's asleep. It appears that he's in some kind of room. He has this augmented reality cloud all around him, constantly working even when he's asleep, monitoring his activity, tracking his work. So he wakes up, and he realizes that he needs to go somewhere. Looks like he's in a restaurant, so using graceful Gestures, he's able to manipulate all of the objects around him that are tailored to what he's looking at. Then he gets up and gets ready to go. And we realize that this is actually just an environment that he built for himself in order to focus better. He closes it up. And as he's going out, he really carefully selects how he wants to appear to other people. So he's monitoring. He wants people to see that he's fair trade. He wants people to see that he's feeling happy. He wants people to view him in a certain way. Meanwhile, someone's coming to meet him, his friend ostensibly, and she's on the train kind of modulating what she wants to look like, what she's representing to people outside. You see she has a different system that's in a different design tailored to her, and she's able to manipulate it, again, probably using those glasses or something.
Yeah.
So this guy's walking down the street. You can't advertise to this person. Here's all the traditional advertisements laying on the ground, and he's just kicking them out of the way. If you want to reach this person, you have to gamefully engage with him. You have to find some way to convince him to let you into his reality, because he can manipulate it any way he wants, even to the extent— and this, I think, is the coolest and scariest part of this for me— is even to the extent that he can manipulate the way that the street looks around him. And so this could be used in a few different ways. It could be used to enhance an environment and bring in more beauty. Or on the flip side, it could be used to hide someone on the street that he doesn't want to look at as he's walking along. So finally they meet. And then we'll notice that they each have their own augmented reality clouds that intersect only at certain points. And both of them meet in person, but both of them are still in some way in their own reality. So this visualization is interesting. It's meant, as a lot of things that we do, to provoke. It's not a prediction of the future, but it puts you into that future-thinking mindset and allows you to envision what the world in the next 10 years might look like.
