Bonus: Faith, AI and the Future of Hope
with Engineer Jeremy Kirshbaum and Futurist Bob Johansen
What does it take to have hope when the future feels increasingly brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible?
In this special bonus episode of How We Future, Lisa continues her conversation with futurist Bob Johansen and welcomes Jeremy Kirshbaum, co-authors of the forthcoming book Disciplines of Hope. Bob previously joined Lisa in Season 4 alongside Bishop Andy Doyle to explore the book’s ideas around faith, hope, and action. This time, Jeremy brings the lens of the intersection of generative AI, meaning-making, and hope.
Jeremy, Bob, and Lisa explore what we might gain and what we might lose when we optimize everything for speed and frictionlessness, and why some forms of useful struggle, reflection, and repetition are essential to building meaning.
In this conversation, you’ll learn:
What it means to live and lead in a BANI future
The value of useful friction in a world increasingly optimized for efficiency
What religious traditions can teach us about hope and collaboration
Why leaders increasingly need to help people find faith in a future worth building
The idea of generativity
Listen to the full episode to explore how we can develop our own disciplines of hope and use them to create futures that are more meaningful, connected, and generative.
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Bob Johansen: If you look at the Gen Z and the people entering workforce, there's just challenges with the whole notion of ambition and can I invest in a future and can I logically anticipate that if I work hard, if I go to school, if I get a degree, that I'll get a job, I'll be happy, I'll have a family, whatever. Those assumptions are just being questioned in some very profound and disturbing ways now. This technology is right in the middle of it. It's right in the middle of it, the medium of Gen AI. We're deeply concerned and interested in that, and that's a big part of how this is going to play out over the next decade.
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Lisa Kay Solomon: I'm Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow starting today.
We just wrapped Season Four, where we explored big ideas that can help us navigate the future. In today's bonus episode, I'm joined by previous How We Future guest Bob Johansen and AI engineer Jeremy Kirshbaum to talk about their new book, Disciplines of Hope: Generating Faith in the Future for an Anxious Age, co-authored with Bishop Andy Doyle. We discuss what it means to practice hope in a future that can feel increasingly anxious and unpredictable.
We also explore a really cool concept of generativity, useful friction, and why AI might be better understood as a medium rather than a tool. Let's get into it with Bob Johansen and Jeremy Kirshbaum.
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I am so excited for this conversation. This is a first in How We Future land. We have not yet had a guest that worked on a topic so important and core to How We Future, which is a series based on conversations of hope, hype, and gratitude. Hope meaning we want to amplify folks that are putting things out in the world that remind us of the agency we have in shaping better futures.
The hype part being focused on the fact that we are humans with energy. Not hype like cheer you on, but hype like let's get excited about what we're doing, and gratitude, which is a humility and appreciation for all that we are doing and all that we are learning from each other. Jeremy Kirshbaum, Bob Johansen, thank you for continuing the conversation about your book that's coming out, Disciplines of Hope. I really hope that this book is read by everybody, by parents, by teachers, by engineers that are in the throes of shaping tomorrow based on the programming and choices that they're made.
This book is a big book for everybody. Last time, Bob, we had a great opportunity to speak with you and Bishop Andy Doyle, and now we get to continue the conversation with Jeremy Kirshbaum, adding a engineer component to it, but not just an engineering component to it as an expert in Gen AI, but really a spiritual component to it as well, informed by some deep texts that we're going to get into. Jeremy, thank you for joining us, and Bob, thanks for returning.
Bob: You're welcome.
Jeremy Kirshbaum: Great to meet you.
Lisa: Jeremy, the last time that we had this conversation, I half-joked with Bob that the book almost tees up like a modern-day joke that a futurist, a bishop, and a Jewish AI engineer poet walk into a bar [chuckles] to talk about the future. Maybe I would just start with you, which was, I'd love to hear your motivation for being a part of this project.
Jeremy: I think these things come together really nicely, and particularly in regards to the technology of generative AI, which is my focus, which for me has always been grounded in meaning-making. I've been working with Bob for a long time, over a decade now, and we've seen lots of different technology waves go by, and none of them really grabbed me in the way that this tech did. We'd done a previous book together, Leaders Make the Future, Third Edition, which focused on the implications of AI for leadership. We were continuing that conversation and talking about what needed to come next.
We realized that there wasn't enough discussion around meaning-making and hope. We knew Andy through a project that we'd done together with him on the future of the Episcopal Church. He's quite a deep thinker and quite tech-forward in his own right. We realized that there was something here at this intersection of technology and meaning, and then how we orient towards a future that is so racked with anxiety. As Bob would say, BANI: brittle, anxious, linear, and incomprehensible, and how to orient towards that. Out of that came the Disciplines of Hope book and the Credible Hope Compass and all of that.
Lisa: I'm excited to talk about all of that, and I'm glad you brought back the core framework that I think is so powerful. Bob, since our last conversation, I've been using that BANI framework a lot, which I know you have been migrating to for a number of years now with a few books. I think it's really worth pointing out about why that's such a descriptive framework and why this book is such an important-- I wouldn't even want to say antidote because the world is the world, but maybe empowering reframe that just names where we are, but doesn't stay there.
I just love this. You say, "To make better futures, we need new disciplines for hope and action that you perform repeatedly together, not hope or faith that you simply have or don't have." The whole book is really an invitation to learn, to discover individually, together, in your personal life, in your professional life. I love, Jeremy, hearing that this book is an extension of Leaders Make the Future, of which I have the original copy, and love that you keep updating it because leadership isn't static, just like our world isn't static.
This book really broadens the audience beyond just leaders, but really anyone that is feeling the effects of BANI. I wonder, Bob, just from your standpoint, would love to hear, collaborating with Jeremy, how that enhanced your long work of really helping leaders not be scared of the future, but to see it as another-- Input feels too small of a word, but another opportunity maybe, to make decisions that reflect the kind of future they want to bring about.
Bob: Yes, definitely. It was interesting, as we were finishing the Leaders Make the Future, Third Edition, about the impact of Gen AI and leadership, I was also working with Jamais Cascio, our colleague who coined the term BANI. I was originally skeptical about the term. I thought we had good enough framing with the term VUCA, which I had been using for years before, the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. There's something different. There's something different about BANI, and the difference makes a dramatic difference.
The difference is, in a BANI future, you can no longer assume that if only you talk to the best experts, if only you gather the right data, you'll be able to understand what's going on. In the BANI future, we no longer assume that. There's just things going on now in a lot of different domains that don't make sense, but yet we have to act anyway, and that's really where the discipline of hope comes in.
Lisa: I think this whole book is really wonderful at naming something I've been thinking about, which is like, most of our education is taught to solve problems, and this book is about managing tensions.
Bob: Exactly.
Lisa: We're not solving anything, but that doesn't mean we're not equipped for it. We solve things in the process, but the tension doesn't go away. Even that first one, moving from brittle to bendable, is such a powerful reframe about what we can all learn and how we can-- As you say again and again, this is not a one-and-done; this is not something you go get at your local community or whatever; this is really an invitation for you to lean in.
As I've reread the book again, preparing for this conversation, it took on new meaning too, particularly when you say, and I love this, "Not a religious book but draws on religion seriously, not a technology book but takes generative AI seriously as a medium to reshape meaning." Jeremy, this is really where I want to bring you back in because there's just-- Yes, this is about Gen AI, but this is almost like a philosophy book. You really think deeply about AI is not just a tool; AI is a medium for meaning. I would love to invite you to talk about that because I know you've been working with this technology for a long time.
Jeremy: I think in this crazy future, this BANI future, it's hard to feel hope. I was also having trouble feeling hope and was curious about how do I make some? How do I get myself feeling hopeful? What do I do? That's much different than this; what do I do in terms of action? How do I change the future? It was this preceding question of how do I be in the future at all? How do I get up and believe that I actually can do something to change the future? There's a lot of different clues and places to draw on about how to do that. One of them is the way that people do that in organized religions.
There's lots of problems with organized religions. Also, they've been around for a long time and have a lot of really deep, specific thought around how to make meaning. If someone doesn't want to subscribe to those-- I'm not part of an organized religion, personally. I'm ethnically Jewish, but didn't grow up observant. There are lots of really, really specific mechanisms for bringing meaning into your life, about how to bring meaning into your food, about how to bring meaning into your family, about how to bring meaning into your future. We thought to look at those.
When you dive in, you find that many of them, although not all, orient around books as a site of meaning-making. The way that they use books informs how the religion works. If you are a Quaker, then you sit around in a circle, and it's much more democratic. You can sit in a circle because there's a codex form of a book to hold. In many synagogues, there's a Torah scroll. The Torah scroll is quite large. You can't really pass it around in a circle. It really informs having someone up front. You can have the same kind of book in a Quaker setting or an Episcopal setting, which is a little bit more structured, or a Catholic setting, which is much more hierarchical.
There's this medium of the book that carries some kind of message. That's part of how people build hope in organized religions, is through books. I see generative AI models, generative models, in the lineage of books more than I see them in the lineage of humans or the lineage of computers. I see them as a text. If we are reading them as a text, we can ask: what would it mean for these texts to be a way that people are making meaning in their life or in their religion, and what would that mean about what we should do? There's some big differences here from how they appear as business products.
One big example is in business products, you almost want everything to be frictionless. You want things to be as easy as possible. We can see a lot of evidence that this is not the case for meaning-making. Many mechanisms for making meaning or parts of faith are deliberately difficult. You don't want a gondola to take you up the mountain to see the guru. Walking up the mountain and it being difficult is a big part of that. I don't want a robot that counts my Hail Marys for me. Me sitting there and it passing through my fingers and getting the blisters and that effort is part of what produces that.
We can ask the question of what would it mean to engage with generative models through useful friction, things like that, and start to inform how we might engage with them critically in a way that doesn't extract our hope from us or our meaning from us, but helps us build towards it.
Lisa: I love that. There's a lot to think about in that reflection. One, as you were talking about, particularly synagogue design versus Quaker design. I actually went to a Quaker high school thinking about it as design affordances. Quakerism is amazing when you really get into it. There's not a priest or a rabbi, it's the community is centered. You are responsible. I had the great gift of returning to my high school just a couple years ago and actually attended Meeting for Worship that was probably the first one I had done since I was in high school. We're talking decades here.
I was just blown away by the technology "of sitting together in silence and allowing anyone who is moved to speak to speak." It could be related to the others. There was no agenda, but the conditions were clear. Bob, here we go. Clarity, not certainty. We will sit together for 45 minutes, and we will be together as a community, and the community is responsible for the community. Particularly returning to it from over two decades in Silicon Valley, I thought, "This is it. This is the future. This needs to be the future." Yet, it's, of course, old "technology" and, to say, a way of engaging in meeting.
You're also reminding me of an earlier How We Future conversation we had with Bob Sutton, who just wrote a book called The Friction Project, where it's not about eliminating all friction. It's about making the bad stuff easier and the good stuff harder. I think, Jeremy, this discipline, and I want to keep using that word that you're saying, that there is good stuff in the struggle that we want to rush to fix or make it faster. There is really important human stuff for us as individuals, for our families, for our societies if we struggle together through the lens of meaning and connection.
I love that distinction about not just making it easier because you can, but really being intentional about it. Bob, I'm curious how this deepened your understanding of how we think about Disciplines of Hope in the BANI context, adding this layer. I know you come to it, of course, with a deep background yourself in studying religions, but it's like the reaching way back in order to inform the future of where we're going.
Bob: Yes, definitely. I've learned so much from Bob Sutton and from his work about friction. As I've been a user now of Gen AI, and I've got my own customized version of ChatGPT that Jeremy designed and customized for me, I've nicknamed it Stretch. It's all about stretching my thinking. That's how I'm using it. The big lesson links so much to the value: the value of friction, the value of discipline, the value of repetition. So much of Gen AI now is sold based on efficiency, is sold based on speed. That's all fine. You can do that. I was moved by Tom Malone's statement; Tom's at MIT and is the guy who directs the Collaborative Futures Lab there.
What he said is the big story of generative AI and of AI is not computers replacing people. It's humans and computers doing things together that have never been done before. That never been done before is what really interests me. It's not like Gen AI is a cheat code that allows you to do things faster. It's not a cheat code, but it could be used that way. What we're trying to teach is what's the discipline of useful friction, of useful discipline to develop that collaborative spirit of hope, not just whether you have it or not, but that discipline of hope.
Lisa: I love that idea and that distinction. I appreciate that throughout the book, you give a lot of examples because these are some big topics that can be hard to really think about in your day-to-day. In particular, you talk about two religious communities or faith-based communities that are really leaning in to this new technology. I was so intrigued with the Roblox Filipino Catholics about enabling Mass in a totally different way.
Also, the organization Sefaria, which is enabling Torah and texts to be enabled in different ways. Jeremy, I would love to invite you to talk about them a little bit, just to really add some tangibility to some of these ideas, and maybe also what you've learned, because I know you've also convened a lot of religious scholars about the various reactions that they're having. Some leaning in and being like, "Oh, I love this," like a stretch, like Bob was talking about, and some that are like, "No," antithetical to everything.
Jeremy: Yes, certainly. Certainly, religions would not be around anymore if they hadn't adapted to technology in the past. This certainly isn't a new thing. You're referencing Sefaria, which is a organization that digitizes Jewish texts and makes them more accessible. They're doing some really interesting work with AI in order to translate ancient texts and creating custom models that understand some older forms of Aramaic and things like that so that people in the present day can engage with these texts more fluently and can actually understand and access what's going on in that in a way that was never before possible.
I was speaking earlier about how the same book can produce many different forms of meaning-making. You take the same book, and you can get Quakers or Episcopals or Catholics or any variation in between. Another example of this was early on, when retrieval-augmented generation was new. This was a few years ago. We created just like a grounded chatbot in an English translation of the Babylonian Talmud. Basically, it could see the Talmud; it would draw on pieces of it, it would search over it as it was talking. Nowadays, this is technically trivial. At the time, it was technically interesting.
What we did was use the prototype to go and talk to a bunch of different rabbis. This is in partnership with an organization called AI and Faith, who Bob and I have both interacted with quite a bit. Talked to a bunch of different rabbis about what it put out for them and, using it, what came up for them. Not really from the perspective of a product, but from the perspective of, would you use this? Why would you use this? Does it work? The reactions were so varied. Some rabbis were dismissive and thought that it wouldn't be useful. Particularly, more Reform rabbis would say, "I don't use Talmud anyway. I use responsa, so I don't really know what this would be for."
Other people were confused about how they would use it because the answers aren't verified. Could someone use this to learn? I'm not really sure. What if it's giving just random responses? The one who was most excited about it was this extremely orthodox rabbi who's the mayor, so to speak, and religious leader of a community in the rural north of Israel. He was so excited about it. He was like, "Look, this is my bread and butter. I'm in Talmud all day. This is my job. Tomorrow we're having a festival. Normally, men dance with the Torah scroll. Everyone wants to know: can women dance with the Torah scroll? I have to figure this out for everyone."
People really live their lives according to the teachings up there. He said, "This is great because it comes up with interpretations that I would never think of. The things that come out of this thing are so interesting. I don't need a search engine for Talmud because I know it backward and forward." For those who don't know, the Talmud is 60 large volumes long. It's thousands and thousands of pages. That's quite a claim that you know it backwards and forwards. He did. What he liked about it was that the answers were creative and out of the box. Because if they were wrong, he felt competent to just know that they weren't the right direction.
He saw it as a creative tool. I think this illustrates both the different ways you can orient towards it and the different ways that we might see people read these models as a way to inform how they live their lives. This happens in a much softer way outside of religious context. It's not that this will only affect religion. It's just that it's easier to observe with religious people because they write down in so much detail what they want to do. When they shift it, it's really observable. You can see in this case that something quite different comes out of him reading it as a dynamic text than a static text.
Lisa: I think it speaks to one of the chapters you talk about in the newer edition of Leaders Make the Future about augmented curiosity. It speaks like you need to be fundamentally curious to have that stance, and really gets at-- I was also struck, getting excited for this conversation, that it's really a bonus of our Season Four about big ideas because it's touching on many themes that we've talked about before. As you're talking and sharing that story, Jeremy, I'm reminded of Brian Solis's focus of mind shift. What is our stance towards this technology? Are we thinking about it with an open spirit and a curiosity, or are we already shutting it off?
Can we just also take some time to even notice that for ourselves, let alone others? This connects to another guest we had, Chris Adkins, who went deep on empathy: that we can be empathetic with ourselves and others, and a technology that might spark all that generative joy also puts fear in others and deep worry. Part of our responsibility is to pay attention to that and the affordances of the invitation. The other thing that strikes me is I've done a lot of work with the Jewish community over the years and increasingly deepening my own understanding of Jewish texts.
I have not yet gone into the Talmud, and that sounds very scary, but actually became a user of Sefaria for the first time because I got asked to give a d'var Torah, which is a reflection on the Torah weekly portion for my synagogue this week. I just loved how they made different resources available. It reminds me of a distinction that I've heard over the years about how we can innovate around these ancient religions without totally feeling like we're disrupting and disturbing everything, which is distinguishing between the OS, the core operating system, the Bible, the Torah, and the UX, how we get access to it. As you rightly point out, this medium allows us a lot more access.
Now, we need to be responsible in how we're framing it. Just really allowing a structure, and Bob, I know you're big on metaphors that invite people to explore new ways of understanding, but this idea of, like, "No, we're not touching the OS," the core operating system that had been around for thousands of years, where we're inviting more people to explore and to think about it. Bob, I want to bring you in here. You have a great quote from Marshall McLuhan where you bring in this idea that he talked about around we shape technology, and the technology shapes us. Then you go on to say, "We generate our sacred text, and they generate us," which is, I think, a little bit of what Jeremy is getting at.
Bob: Yes, it was so interesting. Jeremy actually suggested we use that quote first, so I'm going to yield to him on it. We went back and forth on how to frame it and reframe it. Jeremy, you should start this end of the conversation because you're the one who suggested it originally.
Jeremy: Yes. I think maybe to broaden it for folks, you can observe it really closely with religious communities and religious texts, but this is something that is meant to apply to anyone. Thinking about: what are the places that you source meaning from? What are the kinds of things that guide your life? What are the books that guide you? What are the quotes that guide you? Who are the people that guide you? Try and think about when you're engaging with them, what is useful? What is intentional about the way that you engage with them? What about it is actually just incidental to the way that it's shaped?
As we were talking about earlier, what's easy and what's hard? What are the hard parts that are meaningful, and what are the hard parts that aren't meaningful? Because difficulty for the sake of difficulty isn't important. That's not what we're advocating here. We're not spouting some kind of grind set: you should suffer, and that automatically creates some meaning. We've all been through things that don't feel particularly meaningful or necessary. Where you do get meaning today, those places, for some people, this can be the gym; for some people, this can be a book.
As AI becomes more present in our lives, and that becomes part of the UX, part of the interface, what do you want to try and bring through into that new interface, and what do you think is okay to give up? What parts of the difficulty do you want to make sure that you keep, and what parts are you actually willing to let become easier? Redesign that in a way that keeps the meaning and expands on it, whether that's a religious text or something completely different.
Bob: Yes. We push hard in the book to view, to frame Gen AI as a medium, not just a tool. It's really a medium within which we can work. It's not just a medium. It's a collaborative medium where we have to get involved in conversations with humans and with non-humans. It is largely art, but it's also discipline. It's repetition. It's learning to do over and over again. It takes a lot longer to learn how to have great conversations with Gen AI than it does to learn how to use it as a tool to ask questions of.
Lisa: Such an important point. Bob, I've heard you talk a lot about this: that the AI is not a prompt-and-answer machine, or shouldn't. It can do that, but it shouldn't be thought about that in the way you talk about it, even just naming it Stretch. It's really a conversation tool. As someone that actually wrote a book about conversations that are on messy topics about the future, it is definitely one of the overlooked leadership skills, human skills, citizen skills that we don't really teach. Now you see a reaction to not teaching that, and no shade. I mean appreciation, but let's sit at the purple table, overcoming divides.
Let's argue better. Whatever it is, I think that's a reaction to the fact that we didn't take this skill seriously: the skill to have a conversation, the skill to actually design conditions for that conversation. I think that your framing of this medium as an opportunity to have different conversations is extremely powerful and actually makes me think of another wonderful guest that we've had, Jennifer Dolsky, who is the CEO of a really exciting startup called Rising Team, which is about using AI to prompt better conversations as a leadership development tool, as a way of helping teams come together, as a way of strengthening everyone's ability to do their best work. Again, they're not answers. It's practice tools.
She even has this role-playing. I think we have been seeing a lot of headlines that the future of technology is human, is and, is our collaboration, but actually doing it is hard. It takes a lot of thought and nuance, in part because some of the engineers have made it so easy. It's this interesting debate. I don't think you said this, but it's possible you also had this Marshall McLuhan quote, where the medium is the message. That came up for me a lot. Particular, when you ask important ethical questions throughout this book, who gets to engage with the text directly, and who encounters it only through mediation? This is a process question, and it shapes everything downstream. I just think, yes, every product developer, listen to that. It shapes everything.
Jeremy: Yes. I think the collaborative part is the hardest part right now. When used well, generative models can be such a powerful and useful conversation medium and collaborative medium. A friend of mine has a startup called Headon that uses AI plus synchronous, unrecorded conversations to bridge people on mediated conversations that are really difficult topics, starting with the topic of Israel and Palestine, and brings together people from Palestine and Israel in these settings. Really interesting stuff. We see this done so badly right now in today's world.
We're so adolescent with this technology. We're all at this point accustomed to getting these emails or messages or things like that. It just doesn't smell right. You can just tell that the person didn't write it themselves. Even when you can see that the content is good, when you can tell that AI was used, it just gives you this creepy feeling, like, did this person write it? Do they care about it? Why? It's because the medium is obfuscated. It's being used in a way that doesn't feel related to connection. Some of this is the way that the products are structured right now.
Right now, the initial presumption is that I'm in a chatbot by myself, and that it's a bidirectional conversation between me and the product. Then if it gets shared, that's a second step. It's not the assumption that you can imagine a different world where the presumption is that we always use this as a team. We're always collectively using the same thing. It's more of like, let's say, a Google Doc or something like that. Then if it's going to be private, that takes an extra step to make it private. That is a theological assumption. It's an assumption about the way that we should relate to each other, as well as a way that we relate to the tools.
This is a second thing that you would need to resist in order to use this in full meaning, which is that the products right now are geared towards individualism. If you want them to be collaborative, you'll need to work against their structure in order to do that. The same way that they're geared towards frictionlessness, and if you want friction, you'll need to integrate that into the structure yourself. If you feel that they're sapping your energy, and you feel that they're sapping you, meaning these are places to look.
Lisa: I've been trying to pay some attention to just what is bubbling up with all this access to technology. We saw quiet quitting, for example, a number of years ago when people were just so overwhelmed by the state of the world and work and all the rest. It's been interesting to see more headlines about how all this technology is actually creating rifts where some are like, "This is the greatest thing ever. I'm amplified. I'm plussed. I'm exponentially awesome." Then there's a good group that is like, "I am exhausted. I am burnt out. I am overwhelmed by it all. Can't keep up."
This came up with a conversation with Scott Doorley as well, which is like our nervous system: we're nervous, we're just overwhelmed, we're shutting down. I think your provocation, and I love this quote in the book, you talk about AI as a communal medium, not a private oracle. Can we shift the fundamental way that we're thinking about how more people can benefit without all of that effort to have to make it work towards their ends? That's, I think, a really interesting provocation.
Bob: Right. It certainly is. There's a big generational difference here too. I think that's important to note. Jeremy and I started working together over a decade ago, as he said. For the last 20 years now of my career, I've made it a point to work with people on a daily basis who are at least half my age or younger. I've learned so much just from the generational differences. I think that's a critical aspect of the next decade because we have now the first of the Gen AI natives that are coming into the workforce, and how do they perceive?
How do they embody? How do they engage with this medium? It's going to be different. I grew up with the internet, but I didn't grow up with this. I didn't get introduced to the internet because it wasn't there till I was a PhD student. [laughs] Even though I've been using it for a long time, I didn't have it as I was a child becoming an adult. I think that's so, so, so critical now.
What I'm concerned about, if you look at the current generation of researchers that are looking at the Gen Z and the people entering workforce, people like Jonathan Haidt, for example, beautiful book called The Anxious Generation, if you look at how they're thinking about this and how there's just challenges with the whole notion of ambition and can I invest in a future and can I logically anticipate that if I work hard, if I go to school, if I get a degree, that I'll get a job, I'll be happy, I'll have a family, whatever, those assumptions are just being questioned and in some very profound and disturbing ways now.
This technology is right in the middle of it. It's right in the middle of it, the medium of Gen AI. We're deeply concerned and interested in that. That's a big part of how this is going to play out over the next decade because I'm really optimistic about young people if they have hope. If they have hope. If they don't have hope, they become at risk for depression, for suicide, for buying into simplistic religions or politics. There's lots of risk.
Lisa: I'm so glad that you brought that up, Bob, because you do a wonderful job of taking two very big topics and finding connections between them: this topic of faith, like why we need to have faith, discipline of hope, and the realities of what's happening with technology and why, Jeremy, pulling in what you just said, it's not just for faith leaders, it's for all leaders.
I think that connection you just made like, without faith of some kind, that is a direct contributor to isolation and loneliness. I just love this: you say, "In the BANI future, all leaders, even secular leaders, will need to inspire faith in the future. Not necessarily religious faith, but faith that there is a future worth building towards, that our efforts matter, that meaning can be made even in chaos."
Jeremy: Yes. This is part of why we thought the book would be useful is because we work a lot with business leaders. We noticed that they were starting to struggle with topics and that employees were coming to them for answers on things that normally you would have never associated with a business leader, that they would have gotten elsewhere. Increasingly, people don't get them elsewhere. These answers on how to live their life and how to make meaning. Increasingly, people are asking this of their workplace, too. This is a huge quagmire for a company.
This is so tough to navigate, to do it in a way where people feel appreciated and feel seen and that it doesn't seem like you're advocating for a particular way of life, and yet people want it. Part of the Credible Hope Compass is to give people a way, give leaders a way of thinking about that. When people come to secular leaders for ways to navigate this crazy future that go far beyond just what the company is going to be doing or what that person's role is, ways to bridge that conversation and have it so that it is collaborative and valuable and stays aligned with both what they need as a leader and as a business, and then what those people need, whether they're young or old.
Lisa: Just another signal to pay attention to, Jeremy. Would you say, Bob, who's saying what, in what way, and what frames are they using?
Bob: Yes.
Lisa: I love that you had a specific chapter on Gen AI and generativity. I just think that is also another antidote to this BANI world that feels like it's coming at us, particularly around being anxious and nonlinear. This idea of, like, maybe you can facilitate your own ideas and connectivity. That furthers the faith. That's not breaking the trust. That gives you power and is additive in lots of ways.
I just loved your taxonomy. Given this collaboration, I don't know where that came from, but you talk about faith generators, faith as Genesis, faith across generations, which I just love because I find that that's just a form of resilience. Faith as genius, faith as gene. Bob or Jeremy, I don't know who is the grand creator of this taxonomy, but I'd love to just hear your thoughts on this idea.
Bob: Yes, I guess I got it started. I learned about Erik Erikson; I think it was when I was in divinity school. He was a famous psychoanalyst who most people nowadays don't remember. He's the guy who coined the term generativity. He coined it in 1950. 1950. It's one thing about being a futurist is we realize once we practice it for a while that it isn't just about thinking future back. It's about thinking back to the future, and that is so important.
We think future back at least 10 years ahead for clarity. We think back at least 50 years; when we go 10 years out, at least 50 years to look for patterns. One of the patterns here came from Erikson, and this concept of generativity is the primary task of adulthood is to think beyond ourselves, our isolated selves, to what's the impact on our families, on society, the impact above ourselves.
We then explored all the different variations of this root word, which is so interesting to me, which I think is a synchronicity, not just a coincidence. The root word of generativity is the same as generative AI. It's the same root, and that's not just a coincidence. The concepts, I think, have taken a long time to form. Then I actually used Stretch to develop the first draft of that taxonomy, and then we refined it back and forth with Andy and Jeremy to try to look at variations of generativity and how augmented humans can expand that notion.
Lisa: Said like a great futurist. Let me go back decades in order to make sense of this moment. I think another just recognition that when you create containers that have meaning for people, they have somewhere that pulls them forward in positive ways, like, "Hey, could this really be a way for me to contribute my ideas, my interest with AI, helping me be generative, helping me contribute to generativity versus it happening to me?"
I'm just excited again at the depth and breadth of that taxonomy and for people to find that as a useful place to brainstorm around and think about and pay attention to what's already happening. I feel like, honestly, half my role as a futurist is to shine the spotlight on what's going on that actually has a future's posture or future's lens rather than just like an isolated incident. I love that you close that chapter, really inviting leaders to think of themselves as a gardener of generativity. Think about the abundance that would get unleashed in that way.
Bob: Yes, exactly. To avoid judging too soon in this BANI future, in this dilemma-laced future, there's a real risk of judging too soon. We ran into that so often. When you say you're writing a book about faith in the future and you're touching on AI, you're triggering two negative assumptions for a lot of people. They just don't want to talk about it after that. We're trying to suggest: take a while before you judge. [laughs] That's so important in this world.
Look back and keep the gift but reject the harm. This is really a Bishop Andy term. Andy, as you saw from the last episode, Andy's a very multi-faith version of a bishop. He has his own beliefs, but he's working all the time with people with very different beliefs. The important thing about this is to honor, to listen to the gifts that are there from faith in the past, but reject the harm because the harm is real and we want to get past that.
Lisa: Such a powerful message. I maybe want to close with one final question for you, which is: this book is going to be coming out very soon. Very excited about it. Would love to hear from each of you. What are your hopes for this book? Speaking of hope, let's get meta about hope. Jeremy, maybe I'll start with you. Who do you hope reads it? What kind of impact do you hope it has? Tell me about your future back plan for this book.
Jeremy: I think this is a good book for anyone who is looking for new ways to make meaning or to make their own hope in the future and to reflect on things in a new way. I think that I'd love to see people using it together and talking about it. I'd love to see people extending it, and if they read it and love it, building on it and taking it in their own direction, whether that's with their assistance of their AI products or not.
Lisa: What about you, Bob?
Bob: Right now, I'm really focused on community colleges. The Institute has worked a lot with community colleges, as you might imagine. They're actually very innovative, surprisingly so in many ways, about what they're doing with learning. They're the ones who are encountering young people of varied ages who are at this cusp of work, this cusp of reaching beyond themselves. It's a very tough business marketplace for many of them.
This is where hope can come in. I'm talking beginning next week with a series of my friends that are presidents of community colleges to ask them really how we can use this book with young people, with faculty, with administrators, with board members to engage in them in this conversation about how can we have faith in making a better future and bring that path to light in ways it hasn't been brought before. We're really looking not just to seed hope in ourselves, but to seed hope in others.
Lisa: Oh, I love that. Already, ideas came to mind about taking the Credible Hope Compass, making it available for all the students, having some professors bring it in early. Really thinking about it as a campus-wide ethos. I just think at the end of the day, what are we trying to do with all this education?
Bob: Exactly.
Lisa: We're trying to help young people get in the world and feel confident and capable of making change and pursuing lives of purpose and creating deep connections and investing in their community. Please keep us posted on how that goes. I just think, as you said, community colleges are often an overlooked lever for enormous change. Just extraordinary. I want to end actually with something that I saw on LinkedIn that really got me excited about this conversation and your work and this book. I will make sure I source it in the show notes about who I got it from.
Someone posted in Exchange a response that the author E.B. White had to an incoming fan mail of someone that was feeling so much despair of this moment. As a reminder, E.B. White, of course, the author of Charlotte's Web, a wonderful book about hope and cycles of life, among others. This letter is from March 30th, 1973. This is E.B. White's response. Here it is: "Dear Mr. Nadeau, as long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread, and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us in a bad time. I shall get up on Sunday morning and wind the clock as a contribution to order and steadfastness."
I'll drop down to the bottom. There's another paragraph. Then he goes on to say, "But as a people, we are probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man's curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out. Hang onto your hat, hang onto your hope, and wind the clock for tomorrow is another day."
Bob: Nice.
Lisa: Thank you for giving us more ways to wind the clock and to develop our own disciplines of hope so that we can all feel that even as this BANI world continues, we have responses that are adaptable, that are inventive, that produce generativity. Thank you so much for being with us.
Bob: Thank you.
[music]
Lisa: Thanks for listening to this bonus episode with Bob Johansen and Jeremy Kirshbaum. This conversation brings together so many of the ideas we've explored all season: how we build agency and community, how we create meaning through purpose, how we connect with others through empathy, and how we can courageously and creatively imagine better possibilities and bring them to life. As we wrap the season, I invite you to think about where you could infuse more intentional hope for something good to grow. We'd love to hear your ideas in the comments. We'll be back soon for Season Five, and it's going to be fantastic. I'm Lisa Kay Solomon, and I'll see you next time.
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Links from the episode:
Navigating the Age of Chaos by Bob Johansen, Jamais Cascio, and Angela F. Williams
The Friction Project by Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao
