The way John Schroeter sees it, we can let the future happen to us, make the best of the future as it unfolds, or craft the future for ourselves.

And he contends that we don’t need to be experts to pursue our own vision of the future. In fact, it’s best to approach innovation as a neophyte, limited only by our imagination.

John is the Executive Director of the Abundant World Institute and coauthor of Moonshots: Creating a World of Abundance. He is also the editor of After Shock: The World’s Foremost Futurists Reflect on 50 Years of Future Shock—and Look Ahead to the Next 50, a collection of essays that mark the 50th anniversary of Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s Future Shock.

On this episode of The Wiggin Sessions, John joins me to share his top takeaways from Future Shock, discussing how media consumption influences our optimism for the future and challenging us to consciously create a future of our own design.

John explains how Moonshots evolved beyond the book to become a funding source for new technologies and offers insight on how economic and government policy impacts innovation.

Listen in as John describes his experience working with Richard Branson on Moonshots and find out why naïve, non-experts are usually responsible for the biggest breakthroughs.

Key Takeaways

How After Shock was inspired by the 50-year anniversary of Future Shock

John’s top takeaways from After Shock around radical ideas competing for mindshare and the if-then-else exemplar for crafting the future

How John thinks about After Shock in the context of the pandemic and the election

Why people are more fearful of the future today (when we have more reason to be optimistic) than we were in 1970

How media consumption impacts our optimism and why the models perpetuated in the 24/7 news cycle are faulty

John’s take on the ideas in After Shock re: measuring economic growth via productivity and communicating through zero-cost platforms

John’s argument against the idea that we’re victims of our technology

How social media platforms only have the power we give them as subscribers and why John would rather see market influence than government intervention

John’s experience working with Richard Branson and why non-experts are usually responsible for the biggest breakthroughs

How Moonshots evolved out of John’s interview with Naveen Jaim

John’s insight on how economic and government policy impacts innovation

How John’s favorite project in the Moonshot portfolio couples AI with data science to facilitate a new ‘imagination science’

Connect with John Schroeter

Abundant World Institute

Moonshots: Creating a World of Abundance by Naveen Jain with John Schroeter

After Shock: The World’s Foremost Futurists Reflect on 50 Years of Future Shock—And Look Ahead to the Next 50 edited by John Schroeter

Connect with Addison Wiggin

Consilience Financial

Be sure to follow The Wiggin Sessions on your socials. You can find me on—

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Resources

Future Shock by Alvin and Heidi Toffler

Popular Electronics, Mechanix Illustrated and Popular Astronomy

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay

Gallup Poll on Confidence in Mainstream Media

Richard Branson

Virgin Galactic

Elon Musk

SpaceX

Ranger 3 Moon Mission

Naveen Jain

Moon Express

Juan Enriquez on The Wiggin Sessions EP004

Synthetic Genomics

Joseph Schumpeter

Books by George Gilder

Telecosm: The World After Bandwidth Abundance by George Gilder

NPR Story on Recreational Boating as an Economic Indicator