The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - No More Dystopian Stories: How to See a Future Worth Living In with Rob Hopkins

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

Self-fulfilling prophecies; manifestations; the Oedipus Effect: Humanity has long had an intuition that the stories we tell ourselves the most are often the stories we make come true. Science has found more and more evidence to back this up, through both historical cultural analysis as well as unexpected neurological connections in our brains. If we fully accept this, then what sort of future are we telling with our current cultural narratives, and is there still time to write a new one?  In this episode, Nate welcomes Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Network and author of "How to Fall in Love with the Future,"  for an exploration of what tips people over the edge and into action to build more livable futures, and what role imagination plays in cultural motivation and agency. Rob explains the neuroscience behind envisioning the future, explaining the link between memory and imagination, and how chronic stress and cortisol can shrink our capacity to picture the future. Drawing on research showing that creativity and imagination scores have been declining for decades, he argues that our collective inability to vividly picture a better future may be the deepest barrier to building one. Throughout the conversation, Rob and Nate wrestle with a central tension: how to be honest about the scale of the predicament while still cultivating the kind of longing that moves people to act, and what role grief, limits, and slowing down might play in that process.  In a culture that puts many of us in constant states of anxiety and stress, what happens to our ability to imagine and dream of the future? What would it take for more of us to feel, not just intellectually understand, that a lower-energy, more localized future could also be a more beautiful one, if only we plant the seeds for it to grow? And if the tools for building more local, resilient futures already exist, but the first step is to create a sense of longing for them, then what gap does that open up in each of our communities, today, to start putting these ideas into action? (Conversation recorded on April 21st, 2026)    About Rob Hopkins: Rob Hopkins is the co-founder of Transition Network and of Transition Town Totnes, and author of several books including "The Transition Handbook" and most recently, "How to Fall in Love with the Future: A Time Traveller's Guide to Changing the World." He is an Ashoka Fellow, has spoken at TED Global and at several TEDx events, and appeared in the 2015 French film phenomenon "Demain."  He holds a PhD from the University of Plymouth as well as 2 Honoris Causas, and hosted 100 episodes of his podcast "From What If to What Next." In November 2022 he was made an Honorary Citizen of Liège in Belgium. His collaborative music project with artist Mr Kit, "Field Recordings from the Future" is now available, and is being developed as a live show which will tour in 2026. His website is robhopkins.net.    Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners  

There are many, many different futures, but there are some that result from us doing everything we could possibly have done. And actually, the reality is that all the elements of what that looks like already exists somewhere. Like William Gibson said, the future's already here. It's just not evenly distributed. You can go to Utrecht in Holland and sit by the train station and 40,000 bicycles will cycle past you. It's insane. You go to Leij in Belgium where they're building a food belt in a way that has just transformed the economy of that city. You know, everything that we need to know already exist somewhere,

and there's a lot of research around how when people imagine the world in that way, it increases their sense of agency to create that world. You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Higgins. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers,

we hope to inform and inspire more human beings. to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. Today I'm joined by longtime friend and fellow systems analyst Rob Hopkins for a discussion about how the imagination can help us move from paralysis to action in the face of the complexity of the more than human predicament. Rob Hopkins is a co-founder of Transition Town Totness and Transition Network, a global grassroots movement dedicated to building community resilience, especially to meet ecological energy and food needs. He is the author of many

books, including most recently How to Fall in Love with the Future, a Time Traveler's Guide to Changing the World, and also was the host of the now concluded podcast from what if to what next. And a Shoka fellow and holder of a doctorate from the University of Plymouth, Rob's work has been featured in Ted Global BBC Radio and the French Philkefell. film Demand, which means future. His collaborative music project with artist Mr. Kit, field recordings from the future is being developed as a live touring show. In today's conversation, Rob makes the case that we're facing a crisis of imagination and that our collective inability to vividly envision radically different and better futures might inadvertently lead us down

bleak or unrealistic paths. Drawing on neuroscience storytelling in a lifetime of grassroots work, he explores why creative visions of the future can be a causal force for change. He shares the tools and practices he uses to cultivate what he calls longing at scale, a deep felt sense of what we're building toward,

not just running from. This includes a concept of evidence-based dreaming, where key events happening in the world are grounded within coherent, sensory and emotionally alive pictures, showing us new possibilities. While Rob and I have diverging perspectives in some key areas, we share a commitment to explore the full range of responses to the unfolding more than human predicament. And actually, this might be one of the most important aspects of this episode and this channel more broadly. even among the people that we are highly aligned with in terms of what we value for the future, there will always be pieces we disagree on and listening to each other to find common ground is one of the best ways to build and expand relationships,

which will ultimately form the foundation for any responses to the unfolding predicament around us. With that, please welcome Rob Hopkins. Rob Hopkins, welcome to the program. Nate, so lovely to see you again. Been far too long, my friends. Well, it's at least since 2009, which I have incredible memories. The former head of the CIA came up to me at that conference and shook my hand, and then he gave me a hug. He put his whiskey down and gave me a hug.

I remember your, like all these high-level intelligence and oil people, and then you get on the stage, and you were so soft-spoken, and you could have heard a pin drop. I remember that. That was the first public talk I had ever given, actually. Oh, wow. Yeah. Didn't you have a thing in the middle where you had like a sort of an animated thing that just screamed everybody? Yes.

The Jack Nicholson, like, I scared everyone. Yeah. That was 2009, man. Life goes fast. It does. But then I saw you again in 2013 in a hotel lobby in Milwaukee. We hung out and had a catch up. I'm known to be in hotel.

tell lobbies in Milwaukee. No, but yeah, that's right. So that was 13 years ago. Yeah. Great to see you. As I said, off camera, you haven't aged a day in those years. I wish. You're very kind.

Yeah. So you are probably one of the most active voices in the world of grassroots changemaking, as well as a longtime colleague of mine. but for those who don't yet know your work, you co-founded the Transition Town Movement, now called Transition Network, which began in Totness, England, and has since spread around the world.

So maybe we start with you briefly describing what the transition network concept is and talk about what you're specifically transitioning to. Great question. So, yeah. So the transition movement starts, in the small town that I live in the southwest of England, which you, whose name you pronounced correctly, thank you very much, the town of Totnes. And we are a town of about 9,000 people

in the southwest of England. And in 2005, 2006, a bunch of us came together. I had been living in Ireland before I was a permaculture teacher. I'd set up the first two-year full-time permaculture course in the world, I think, at that point. And I moved to Totnes and I met some people who were interested in similar things, who'd been thinking about, okay, we have a climate emergency, we have an energy security emergency. There are the things that we know we need to do as individuals. There are the things we're waiting for that. We need governments to do. But what's the other bit? What's the bit that we could do if we organized with the people around us? We had a saying, which I still see referenced all over the place that said, if we try and do this on our own,

it'll be too little. If we wait for governments, it'll be too late. But if we get together with the people around us, it might just be enough, and it might just be in time. And initially, it was really something that was an experiment for our town. We had no expectation, no imagining even that it would be of any interest at anywhere else at all. This was early kind of internet days. So then I had a blog called Transition Culture. We had a kind of a wiki page, if anyone can remember wikis, where we were sort of sharing early ideas as they evolved. And it kind of just took off. And we were doing stuff in Tocnez,

but it took off in that there were also, within six months, we had so much interest from people all over the world. It was before there were any books published. We had people from Brazil and New Zealand and the US and wherever writing to us and saying, what is this thing? How do we do it?

And so we had to create Transition Network, which is now called Transition Network International, as the support organization to support network, inspire and train that movement as it grew. And it really became a sort of self-organizing experiment around what's the bit that communities can do. So now it's spread to about 50 different countries. You'll find thousands of transition groups.

And they do all sorts of different things from different local economy kind of projects through to community food staff, community energy projects, community energy companies. Even now in Totnes, after nearly 20 years, we have a project where the community is becoming its own housing developer, meeting the affordable housing gap that nobody else is filling. So coming together as a community to do that. Somebody once called Transition Hope with its sleeves rolled up, which I really, really loved. And one of the best things I ever read about the transition movement was written by a guy called

Luigi Rusi, who came for a year as a student to Schumacher College, which used to be in Totnes until it sadly closed a couple of years ago. And he came for a year and he just got involved with everything. Every meeting you went to, Luigi was there. Every meeting he was there, helping putting out the chairs and then washing up the teacups at the end. He just threw himself into everything. And then he wrote this beautiful little book called Everything Gardens, reflecting on that. And one of the things that really, it's not often that I read things about transition where I'm like, God, that I underline loads of stuff. You know, wow, that's really interesting. And he said that academics always love to look at the transition movement, like a thing

that you can sort of pin to a board and then look at under a microscope. And he said, what's far more interesting is the transition moving, the way that transition moves and absorbs new influences and changes and evolves and adapts over time. And for me, that's always been one of its real strengths, that it's always changing and a doubt. adapting and evolving. When did you found it? 20 years ago, right? Almost. 2006, September 2006

was the official launch. Yeah. So how has it changed? Well, I think it's important to say that I, so the last three or four years, I don't work for Transition Network anymore. I stepped out to focus on this work I'm doing now around imagination and time and different things which we'll come on to talk about.

So for a really, really up-to-date, update on transition, you need to get somebody on from Transition Network. But I would say that it's, what's been fascinating to me was that when we started it, we were very clear that transition was something that communities did. It was a piece of kind of social infrastructure building equipment for people working at the local scale

who wanted to build resilience in the face of what we all saw coming. So when we started it, we were very clear this was a kind of a piece of social design infrastructure tool for communities to take and get on with. And that was the model. So in the transition handbook, the first book on it, it had these 12, what we called the 12 steps of transition, because just basically people said, what are you doing? And we said, well, we're doing this and we're doing some of that. No, there's 12 of them. And we quite liked the kind of metaphor of it being like a 12-step program for breaking our addiction to oil. But then I remember in about 2013, I got a 24, I got approached by a mayor who in the northeast of France, in a little town called Ungersheim, called Jean-Claude Mench.

And Jean-Claude Mensch said, will you come to Ungersheim? We're doing something really interesting and we'd have to see what you think of it. And so I traveled to Ungersheim. And he had seen the film, the film we had made about transition called In Transition 2.0, which listeners can still find on YouTube. and he showed it all of his team in this municipality in that part of France. And he said, let's do that, all of that. And so the municipality created this amazing 21 actions for the 21st century. And they were doing amazing selection of things around energy and food and building.

And it was absolutely blew my mind. But this was, so was this transition or was this not transition? Transition was something that communities did. here was a mayor who would stay. Because in France, if mayors decide they're going to do something really ambitious, they can do really ambitious things, right? So he's like, we're going to do this. And it was the most extraordinary thing to see.

So that's kind of started to shift then how we thought about it. Well, who cares really? I mean, with my work on the Great Simplification, it's changing the initial conditions of the future. And whatever you label it or whatever, I mean, who cares? Well, exactly. And so I think that's then where, so we did a piece of work about four years ago in Transition Network where we tried to kind of map how this stuff is spreading and how this stuff is moving. And that's the interesting bit. So we have, so now when I go to France, there are cities like Grenoble, where they have had an ecological administration now for two terms and they are really enthusiastic about transition. And they're doing transition at the city scale. And the mayor of Grenoble says to me, Rob, We love transition. We're doing transition on the city scale. We don't have any transition groups in Grenoble. How could we start them? And I'm like, well, maybe you don't need them. You know, maybe they'll come if it's right. And then sometimes you just see where the idea has kind of gone to. So, for example, in France, I was watching a video that you made where you were talking about this idea that you had for a film that was about time travel. And you were saying, well, and you were talking about the day after or the horrific.

nuclear war film and you were saying well i don't think we could do this anymore you couldn't make a film now that everybody would sit down and watch in france they they kind of had a film that everybody sat down and watched there was a film that came out in 2015 called demas which means tomorrow which which i was in talking about local currencies and it was and it was an extraordinary film because what it did was it most films about climate change are like you know the inconvenient truth kind of model where it's 98% of how screwed we are and then the little happy chapter on the end that goes, but hey, we could drive slower, by which time everyone's left the cinema in tears, you know, that film flipped it and they did the problem in the first two minutes, and the rest of the

film was, let's go and see solutions, we'll go and see this, we'll go and see this. It was a, it was a phenomena in a way that's impossible to imagine anywhere else, showed in mainstream cinemas for months and months and was full every night. It was shown in boardrooms. It was shown all over the place. It was kind of extraordinary. And I think that film had a huge impact because it wasn't specifically about the transition model, but it was about this idea of the idea of the ecological transition.

And it started with them saying, let's go to Totnes and find out how to do it. And so sometimes these ideas find really interesting roots into a society, I think. Does Totnes look considerably different today than it did in 2006? I think you need to know where to look and I think that there are many, many projects that have come and some of them were kind of short-term things, some of them have left a real sort of legacy. As I said, there are now 39 affordable homes

for people in housing need very energy-efficient homes that are now currently being built. First families will move in in September. We have a community energy company which has many, many members and installed lots of renewable energy. We have an amazing event every year called the Local Entrepreneur Forum

where we've built a culture where people are happy to invest in innovative new ideas. Happens every year, five people pitch their ideas. There's many businesses that exist now because of that. Lots of...

I mean, there's many, many different projects. I always kind of think, you know, that actually, also when you look back since we started the transition movement in those years, 30% of all the COs, two ever released by humanity has been released during that time. So on one hand, you kind of think, well, we absolutely have not succeeded. But then I also think it's really important not to beat

ourselves up about that. I would say, if you've given us the amount of money that oil and gas companies have given disinformation campaigns over that time, it could have been kind of, we could have achieved a hell of a lot more, doing stuff with virtually no resources. I think one of the things about transition is that it is an incredible now body of learning and practices from all around the world in different contexts and settings. Was the impetus primarily a climate one, or was it a post-growth? How do we prepare for the biophysical haircut that's ahead? That's a great term, the biophysical haircut. I don't think I've ever used that term. I just came to mind. I like that. Because subconsciously, I know that I need a haircut, so it's in the back of my mind.

I think when we started, we said that it was underpinned and driven by the twin drivers of climate change and peak oil. We very much were kind of emerging in parallel with the peak oil kind of movement. And, you know, reading the parties over and watching the end of suburbia were kind of a big kicks up the backside for me in terms of starting that. But then as time went on, I think, you know, peak oil kind of fell away as a primary driver. and climate change became a lot more urgent and pressing. I also think now, if we were starting again, one of the focuses would also be on the rise of fascism. There's like the connection with fascism in this work as well.

But it's very much in that kind of, I guess transition is very much rooted in the kind of response to a sort of limits to growth, post-growth kind of approach, yeah. And this is starting to happen, and it wasn't, I guess it started to happen in a dress rehearsal sort of way in 2008 and 2009, the financial crisis. And then again, in COVID. And now the Strait of Hormuz is a lot of the things we've been talking about are unfolding in real time. And I know that transition network is centralized in England and Europe, where there is some economic contractions and energy price increases in recent years. years and recent days. So how have geopolitical events been affecting transition network schools and ability to accomplish change? Does it make people more receptive to hearing this different

narrative about the future or what has been your experience? Granted, you're no longer with transition network, but what do you think? Well, I always remember that every time the oil price went above a certain amount, the phone would start ringing and just, journalists would start ringing up. We were like the kind of people to ring when the oil price went above $100 a barrel. Some journalists would be writing an article. What if there were people out there who'd been thinking about this stuff in advance? What might that look like? Oh, let's ring transition network. So we, you know, there was a lot of that. I always remember, so when we wrote the transition handbook, we were very much making the argument that our dependency on imported fossil fuels,

our dependency on long supply chains for food and other resources represented a key vulnerability and a key fragility and that actually that that lack of resilience, one of the things that inspired us was that in the year 2000, in the UK, all the lorry drivers went on strike and it became very clear that we only had three days worth of food in the supermarkets at any time. And all the previous infrastructure that would have supported us,

sort of local supply chains had largely been dismantled. And so in the transition handbook, we set out all that stuff, you know. And sometimes I get, I still do talks and people say, ah, Rob, you're very naive. And it gets me. Because I always say, do you know, in 2008 we wrote a book, right? And we said that our dependency on fossil fuels was a key vulnerability. Across the European Union, between 2008 and 2022,

the European Union sent Russia 18 billion euros a month, a month for. natural gas. And all that time we were told there was no money to decarbonize. There was no money to build a kind of a renewable economy. There was no money to do the stuff that the transition movement was talking about. And then, oh, what was surprised? Well, we've sent all this money to Russia and then we see what happens with it. And so now we're seeing what's happening in the Strait of Hormuz and it's like, oh, you know, in Ireland recently, they had a load of farmers drove tractors into the centre of Dublin to block the city to protect. about high energy prices.

Unlike, how have you not seen this coming? Really? You had a big dry run in 2008 in 2022, and you're still saying, like, why did nobody tell us about this? That's, well, if you remember my presentation in Cork in 2009, which, of course, you don't. Apart from the screaming bit.

Americans have two modes, complacency and panic. Yeah. And, you know, humans have two modes. complacency and panic. So you mentioned it earlier, but let me ask you explicitly, knowing what you know now and seeing the superorganism

nearly doubling in size in the last 20 years and all the things, is there anything you would have tried to do differently with Transition Network from the start if you were starting again today?

Yeah, I think what I would have done is I would have, and I have no idea how I would have done this, but I would have convened the smartest richest people that I knew into a room and I would have said can you give me the ideas

and some initial investment that means that this movement can be self-supporting and self-funding to the scale of ambition that it needs to be you know maybe you know maybe that they would have put some money in and would have been you know

there are smart people who can do that You know, because we've always been sort of scrabbling around for bits here and bits there and bits here. And I think to be able to have an organisation that can support itself and fund itself in that way would have been pretty transformative. Is it too late to start that now? Never too late. It's never too late. You know, there's the thing that's for us. There's so much money out there. And it's all, I mean, not all of it. And there are some funders who are starting to get this stuff now. and we have a bit of funding for some of them from a project that I'm doing now that I will talk a bit more about later, but it's nowhere near where we need to be.

Well, it's digital claims on biophysical and ecological reality, and this is it. You have to decide how to direct those claims towards life and towards a world where your children and grandchildren. I mean, yeah, you want to keep your status and your convenience, but if everything goes towards the Mordor economy, it's not going to work for anyone, irrespective of how money digits you have in the bank. So, yeah, I agree with you there. Yeah, this is the time. Now is the time. You know, anyone who's been sitting there thinking, well, there might come a day when actually this money is not going to be much use and I'm going to, and I should, this is it. We're there now.

Well, with the exception of AI, we've got to invest and make more money. and then we can donate to the saving ecological civilization. Yeah. Yeah. So a major thread running through your early work and your more recent work is the idea that we are suffering from, yeah, the metacrisis, but parallel to that, a failure of cultural imagination that we as human beings

and as groups of humans struggle to envision radically different and better futures. And I sensed that emanating from you even almost 20 years ago. So can you expand on this idea and explain the link between cultural ideas and actual action? Yeah. So in about early 2018, there was about two months where I found that I read articles by George Mombio, Naomi Klein, Amitav Ghosh, and a couple of other people. And in all of them, the same phrase appeared where they said climate change is a failure of the imagination. And it kind of stayed with me. And then they would move on and be talking about other things.

And I was left there like the kid at the back of the class going, oh, oh, what did you mean? What did you mean by that? And then I read this study that was written by a researcher in the US called Kyeonghi Kim. It was called the Creativity Crisis, where she looked at something called the Torrance Test for Creative Thinking, which is a kind of a measure of diversions.

virgin thinking. The closest thing we have to an imagination test, basically, which has been done with huge data sets of people all the way back till the 1950s. Her conclusion was that imagination and IQ had risen together until the mid-90s, at which point IQ kept rising and imagination started to decline. This, when it was published, it made the front page of Newsweek magazine in 2010, and there was a big, it evoked a whole lot of soul searching. People said, what does this mean for economic growth? And what does this mean for Hollywood? Neither of which I give a shit about really. But actually, then it was, but for me, it was like, okay, well, climate change fundamentally

demands that we reimagine everything. That's the challenge and that's the gift that it brings, right? I'm sorry, I have to interrupt you there because, number one, I'm wondering why that happened. Maybe she knew and you can share it. And number two, I wonder if throttling down one's imagination of negative imagination things like learning about climate change and a three degrees Celsius world where we lose half the species and all the other possible colorful trajectories in our mind that it's almost a self-preservation to shrink that and when we shrink that we shrink the positive imaginations sort of machinery as well

maybe maybe I mean so so in her paper she she attributed it to three things she said it was due to the decline of free unstructured play in the lives of our children. Okay, that makes sense. It was due to the rise of screens in our lives, and it was due to the rise of testing in schools. I then set out to write from what if to what is to what if, and I think there are a number of other things that join that as well. I think we also would say that spending less and less time in the natural world

is a key cause for that. I think also there's a very clear, link for me with stress and trauma and anxiety and the release of cortisol. That when we have more cortisol in our system, the hippocampus, the part of our brain where that comes from, shrinks by up to 20 percent. And when that happens, the future kind of contracts and starts to disappear. Why? Why? The hippocampus is responsible for imagination. It's where the imagination and the memory both fire from. Imagination and memory are largely the same process, right? And the hippocampus is the part of your brain that is especially vulnerable to

cortisol. So people, for example, who have post-traumatic stress disorder, they can sometimes have a hippocampus about 20% smaller than average, and that means that the future, and the future starts to disappear. People get stuck in the present and stuck in the past. And I feel like we've really created a kind of a cortisol economy right now, where so many people feel in a state of precariousness, then actually that's one of the things that shuts down our ability to imagine the future. So is cortisol via the hippocampus steepening our discount rates? Like we only care about the present and the future is too hard to care about? Or is it actually inhibiting our imagination? Because I can just sit outside and look at the birds and the clouds and the trees. And my mind

goes on a journey of imagining different things. And I always have my little recorder with me in case I have an idea for a frankly. And yet I also have a steep discount rate that I'm thinking about the present. Can you unpack the difference between those? Yeah, I mean, I would say, firstly, there's a recognition that you're sitting outside and looking at the birds and the trees and imagining is a real privilege these days. Like so many people never get the time to do that. Like that, that ability to live an imaginative life in that way is not evenly distributed at all. Albert Einstein always said he got his best ideas

when he rode his bicycle in the forest, but people spend less and less and less and less time in the natural world now. I think both of those things are true, actually, that actually we are losing both of those things. I have so many questions on this. So I get that one of your core philosophies now is, and I actually agree with this,

but I also have a parallel construction as well, that if we have all the conversations about the future are all doom and gloom on all the things, we have short-circuited our biggest skill as humans, which is to imagine

and converse and discuss and build something creative to meet our challenges. I fully agree with you on that, and I'm moving more in that direction myself. However, big asterisk, we don't want that imagination to be fairy dust and unicorns from a biophysical perspective. So it has to be grounded in reality. But let me ask you this.

When we're just discussing imagination, the ability of a human mind to be creative and imagine. And when we're talking about the future, there are a lot of scary things about the future that is unfolding, you know, by the day, tell me how, well, I'll just parse it as positive imagination and negative scary imagination. How do you rectify the difference between those two things? I think it's really important to say when we talk about positive imagining, like you say, it's not unicorns and fairy dust. You know, there was a film that came out a few years ago that I'm sure many of your listeners will have seen called 2040,

an Australian film about the future made by Damon Gammo, Gapo. I can't remember where someone was. Damon's been on the program, yeah. Okay. So when he wrote about that film, some of that film I loved, some of that film, not quite so much, but I thought it was a really brave, brilliant thing to do. But I love the way he talked about it.

He said that it was an experiment in evidence-based dreaming. And so for me, I see what I do as being evidence-based dreaming. It's not like, you know, oh, all of a sudden I became really, really rich. Well, it wasn't because a dragon flew past and dropped gold coins down my chimney. It was because I went to the least. I went and bought a lottery ticket, you know what I mean? So for me, what I do is the storytelling. I don't go that far into the future.

I feel like if I ask people to imagine 2090, everybody either goes to like Blade Runner or they go to apocalypse. Yeah, exactly. I take people 10 years forward into the future. because if we look at the Paris Agreement, which is the only thing we have as a roadmap for how we might actually find a way through this in a concerted way, that says that by 2036,

those of us in the global north need to have cut our emissions by like 60% or something, right? But that just stays as a figure. It's a figure. It's in reports. It's boring. No one cares. What does 60% mean?

Well, how do we bring that alive? And actually, the reality is that all the elements of what that looks like already exist somewhere. Like William Gibson said, the future's already here. It's just not evenly distributed. You can go to Utrecht in Holland and sit by the train station and 40,000 bicycles will cycle past you. It's insane.

You can go to Germany, to the car-free neighborhoods in Germany. 3,000 people live in a neighborhood without any cars. You go to Leij in Belgium where they're building a food belt around that city in a way that has just transformed the economy of that city. You know, everything that we need to know already exist somewhere. What I do is I try and pull all of those together into a kind of coherent story. Most people never hear those stories. And I always say when I do that work, there are many, many different futures. One of my great heroes, Rashida Phillips, who does the incredible black quantum futurism project,

whenever she writes the word future, she puts an S in brackets afterwards. There are many, many different futures. We always say a lot of them are horrible. We've been to see them. They're horrible. But there are some that result from us doing everything we could possibly have done. When I do that work that I do, I don't start by setting out all the horrible, negative, futures that we're going to, because people already know them, Nate.

They would, like, on some level, I think. Well, not only that, but you're priming, if you do that, you're, which I do all the time, you're priming the conversation with cortisol. Yeah, and also because what we know is that when people have a negative worldview, that what happens then is that you seek out stories that confirm your worldview. You just pull together all the grimest news you can find and go, to-da, and it's like, yeah, that's just, really. It's like, and then you just put people on a spiral where everywhere you look,

you're finding stories that confirm this thing and we just get on a spiral. It's much harder to get that spiral going the other way, and people feeling like there are more possibilities in the world rather than less. So I want to get to your particular views and work and stories in a second, but tell me a little bit more about what you think the role is of stories, storytelling in developing new cultural ideas. And what sort of future are we creating with our current global or national storytelling? I mean, the current global national storytelling is usually a kind of business as usual storytelling

that doesn't address the challenges that we face that is just that the future will be like it is today just with better phones. and hoverboards, you know, it's that kind of stupid storytelling. I love, so my friend Manda Scott, who does the accidental gods podcast. Yeah, I know Manda. Yeah, so Manda picked up on an idea that Rupert Reed initially came up with, which was that we don't need utopias. Utopias are too far out. We don't need stories that are utopias.

They're usually like three or four hundred years in the future. They're ridiculous. They're not really that useful. And you're never going to live in a utopia. That's just we're human beings. That's not how it is. And we also don't need dystopias. We are awash with dystopias.

We can't move for dystopias. And they're so unhelpful. You turn on Netflix and human beings are wiped out by zombies, aliens, gremlins, viruses, AI, whatever it is. So she talks about the need for Thrutopian stories, which I love, which are the stories that start now with somebody meeting, somebody that led to something and that built, and then that led to something. And that's the kind of story.

telling that kind of excites me is like the stories that are rooted in evidence-based dreaming, that have an audacity and a kind of imagination to them, that have some kind of joy and humor and playfulness in them. And that's kind of what we're working on and trying to create at the moment, but also which tells stories about how we fitted into the world that we needed to create in a way that's not just about facts and figures and sort of long screed that. about it. It's like, what would it smell like? There's a woman in Berlin called Wasima Labich, who does amazing young woman who does work with Muslim women in Berlin. She calls her work Muslim futures. And she uses this term which I love, where she talks about sensual futureing. This needs to be

about sensual featuring. It's not just about imagining mental pictures. What would it smell like? What would it feel like on your skin? What would that world taste like? You know, like the poet Rilke said the future must enter into you a long time before it happens. Good storytelling around this future enables us to do that, I think. I love that quote. I've not heard that quote. And I like Rilke. So what is the science of this? At a deeper level, why do you think storytelling and these visions of the future you're describing get people to engage and become motivated in ways that data and facts and ultimately fear can't? What's going on? Because it allows us to create memories of the future.

And if you are, I mentioned before, that the hippocampus is where the imagination and the memory comes from, right? Because it's the same process. If you ask somebody, when they put people in a scanner thing and they say, remember the past or imagine something from the future, exactly the same neural pathways kick in. It's the same process, right? So like if you'd never been to Italy before, Nate, and I said, Nate, I'm taking you on a holiday. next week to Italy and you'd never been there, then your brain sends a message down to your memory and says, send up the file with Italy written on it. And everything you'd ever heard or seen about Italy, your imagination would assemble into a picture of what it's like, right? So if we're

trying to imagine a post-growth, post-carbon, more localized, more resilient, more abundant, joyful, equal future, and we just watch Fox News all day, that's a real struggle. Because you're going to those cupboards of your memory and there's nothing there. and it's impossible to then piece that together. Whereas if you can create like I try and do in the trainings that I do, an event where people come together with other people, they laugh, they have fun, it's colourful, it's an adventure, they get to imagine in that future in a way that they really,

that cultivates a deep longing for that future, then what they do is they create a memory of the future, then the next time they try and imagine that future, they go to the cupboards of their memory and they've got this sparkly thing that they attach, all these emotions, they laughed, they met new people, it was fun, you know, and that's the bit. You know, we're trying to create a kind of a nostalgia for the future in a sense, which is what becomes really powerful to me. And there's a lot of research around how when people imagine the world in

that way, it increases their sense of agency to create that world. If you just read a kind of tech fantasy book about how we'll all be living on hoverboards and will be going to Mars on holiday, that doesn't actually inspire us to do anything to make that happen because there's nothing we can really do to bring that world around. Whereas the kind of world that we're talking about that emerges through evidence-based dreaming, we're creating these kind of memories of the future that create that longing on a deep, deep level to experience that.

And that's what builds the sense of agency, I think. Agency sounds like it's key in this prognosis. You know, I guess on some level I kind of got bored of reading books, by middle-aged white men about extinction and collapse. I've read a lot of those books, as I'm sure you have. And I actually became really inspired mostly by women of color in the US, Rashida Phillips, Adrian Marie Brown, Waleida in Mauritia, and one of my heroes with that, Ruhar Benjamin,

who are writing about imagination and time travel and in this beautiful way. And there's a woman called Mariam Kaba, who is a prison abolition activist in the US, phenomenal. Shiroat a book called We Do This Till We Free Us, which for me is one of the great works of the kind of radical imagination. And in that book, she says, we must imagine while we build

always both. We must imagine while we build always both. I'm not for a moment saying we all just need to kick back and just dream and imagine. It has to go hand in hand. And what I see is that actually, so my sense of agency, my sense of what's possible

comes from going to see all of these different things happening in different places. It's rooted in the things that I've been involved in, the things that I've changed, the things I've seen other people change. And that's where my kind of sense that this is possible comes from. Is there a risk of going too far in this direction and becoming kind of toxic positivity? And second part question, what if there's someone new that really cares about the world and the natural world and the future in their 20s or 30? or whatever, and they don't know anything about climate or energy or geopolitics or fascism or any of the

things, would it be better for that person to just not know about these things and go right into positive visioning of the future and then backfill on the data? Or what are your thoughts on that? I don't see what I do at all as being around toxic positivity. And I think that, I mean, that's very much a danger. And there is some things that you see that are a little bit like that, times, I would be as worried for the mental health of somebody who was optimistic all the time as for somebody who was pessimistic all the time. You know, neither of them have got much grounds to justify that position. You know, so I feel like what I say to people is, I'm not saying the future will be like this, I'm saying it could be like this. And if we shut down these

possibilities, then that's it, then they're gone. But actually, there's enough places where we can see them to know that they're possible and we're just stitching together a kind of a new tapestry from things that already exist. In terms of young people, I think it's really, really important that people understand the context of what's going on. So the work that you're doing with your podcast and the other people are doing around giving people the information. It is really important. It always struck me when Greta Thunberg kickstarted the Fridays for Future School Strikes, that her demand that schools should teach us about climate change was a really important demand

but if that's all you do you're going to be producing a really burnt out frazzled generation of young people it needs to be accompanied by the fact that you go to school every day in a school that is a model of what that 2036 would look like so your school is like powered by renewables and you grow food around the school and you know these things kind of have to go together for me

I don't think there's nothing to be gained from not knowing and not understanding, then you just make stupid decisions like thinking, well, I'll just fly around the world and sod it. I'm just going to use up all the carbon, you know. In terms of young people, I would say do a permaculture course. You know, for me, I did a permaculture course when I was 22, and it kind of rewired my brain and meant the world,

meant I saw the world in possibilities. And it was a profound thing for me that I've then taken me off in lots of different directions. So you've mentioned time travel a couple times, and I want to dig in deeper to the relationship between our past, our present, and future. So how does our relationship to time, including whether we think negatively or positively, about the past and the future, actually alter how we behave and our decisions in the present? So in about in 2021, during COVID, I saw a photograph.

of a young woman on a Black Lives Matter protest somewhere in the US and she had a t-shirt on that said, I've been to the future, we won. And it was such a goosebumps moment for me. It was like I was at that point, you know, very much around and supportive of extinction rebellion with all its messaging around collapse and extinction. And he was this kind of unapologetically,

sort of positive futurist message. And it was just before I was invited to go up to London by Extinction Rebellion, who were organising a big thing in London called The Big One. They'd ask me to speak. And I thought, OK, sometimes, and I'm sure you've had the same experience, Nate, where you experience something and you said, this wants to change me. And I need to let it change me somehow. I don't quite know how, but I just need to kind of roll with it.

And so they'd asked me to go and speak. So I went to my local hardware store and I bought like a white hazmat suit. and a kind of silly space helmet. And I went and gave this talk as if I'd just come back from 2030, I think it was I talked about then, and I had just part my time machine around the corner. And I didn't have long, because, you know, the traffic wardens are very, very good in London.

And I don't have very long, but I just have to tell you what it was like there because it was amazing. And I said, we saw this, and we saw that. Oh, the bicycle rush hours. Oh, my God, they were amazing. And the urban agriculture and the this and the post growth and da-da-da-da. And then as I got near the end, I said something like,

and having been there and having seen it, the fact that I can stand here and tell you about it makes me feel really, really emotional. And I looked at the people who were closest to me. It was like hundreds of people standing right around and there were tears on people's faces. And I thought, this is interesting. What's happening here?

And the way and so the book How to Fall in Love with the Future is really an exploration of like, what is happening when we do this? and I came to think that there's a really important thing around what I think of as temporal fluidity. Like in activist circles, so much of our work is in the present, right? Whether it's Gaza, whether it's climate change, we're like, there's a threat. It's right in our face. And everything is like, we go into cortisol mode, right?

And so we're like, every demonstration you go on there, what do we want? When do we want it? Now, no one ever says, when do we want it? in about 110 years or 55 weeks ago, it's always now, now, now, now, now. And as I started looking around, I found people like Rashida Phillips with black quantum futurism who were starting to play with time and saying, actually, do you know what, this obsession with linear time, Newtonian time, is just one way of thinking about time. Like before colonialism happened, all around the world, there were incredibly different,

sophisticated understandings of time. There were traditional African understandings of time where time was out. actually running backwards. There was an indigenous Australian time, which was this incredibly deep time approach where we were in this that looked at time over us on a scale that we couldn't even dream of, you know, and that she talked about how linear time was a colonial construct, that if you were a colonial power, you would arrive into those places from Europe or ever with absolutely no curiosity at all about these other sophisticated, amazing understandings of time, you put up a tower with a bell on the top that would ring every hour, and then you

would start to structure people's lives around that different understanding of time. So she talks a lot about taking back time and looking at it in a very different kind of a way. And what would that infer if we did that? So she talks about how, they talk about local time that actually in the early 1800s, if you traveled across America by train, you traveled through something like 200 time zones. And so she plays around with this idea of, well, maybe we need more local kind of understandings of time that are more, almost like, bioregional time in that sense, I guess. So in your time travel exercises that you've been traveling to the future, I understand a lot of the imagery and stories that you pull from are sourced from actual places enacting these ideas today. Could you maybe share a few of your favorite examples of people or communities who are already living the future? in some way.

Yeah, so, I mean, I mentioned Utrecht in Holland. Yeah. If you want to imagine what the future is like, go and sit by the train station at 8 a.m. and 40,000 bicycles will cycle past you. It's insane. And there's a place in the middle, just down the road from there,

where there's a hotel where if you ask them very nicely on reception, they let you go up on the roof and look over the top onto a junction in the middle of Utrecht where it's just trams and bicycles. And it's just like, it's a man. amazing. And in fact, I'm always adding new things. I'm speaking to you today from London. I'm up in London for the day and I've been teaching design students at University of Arts, London all day.

And outside here on the other side of the road, there's a building with a beautiful living wall, a big building with all like plants growing out of the wall. And as I arrived, there was a guy in a cherry picker up there trimming the plants. And so I took a picture of that and I'm going to add that to my collection. I think it's kind of a way of looking. I'm always looking and it's a really useful practice, I think, that listeners might like to adopt if you've got your phone in the pocket like most of us sadly do most of the time. As you walk around, look for things that look to you like what the future would look like. It's a really great practice. It's so funny that you say that. I had a board meeting in California last week and I was doing exactly that.

There was like a hiking trail in the Berkeley Hills that at the bottom of the trail there was a dog bowl and then there were three milk gallons full of water that someone just volunteered to give dogs at the end of it. And I just started taking pictures like that of things that were like pro-social examples of people that don't need to do it, but they're doing it for the greater good out of kindness or whatever. It's a really good idea. Yeah, it's great. And it can be little little details like a sign you see in a shop window or a sticker you see on a lamppost and where it can be a whole townscape, cityscape.

And so basically these days, my presentation is made up of those of pictures that I've seen and taken in all these different places. And yeah, I mean,

there's lots of, there's, so in the book, How to Fall in Love with the Future, there's lots of examples. And I guess one of my favorites is going,

there's a place near where I live where they've reintroduced beavers into the landscape about 10 years ago. And they have completely transformed. In England, yeah. There's a big kind of beaver

revival. They were pretty much, exterminated here. And there's a big kind of rewilding beaver movement going on here now. And so at that place, I take lots of photos to share it with people because it's just, it's like going to a really nice version of Jurassic Park. Like you're in the landscape where you can sense there's a big creature here that I've not seen before. And it's just magical. I don't know if you watched my podcast on Dark Triad Traits and the frankly I did after that, which said humans are better than we think.

Not humanity, because humanity has some small percentage of dark triad types that are pulling the rest of us in this cultural, institutional direction. But the vast majority of humans, whether they're in Russia or Bangladesh or Lebanon or England or China or the United States, we like friendship and dogs and soup and me. music and flowers and nature. And so I think against the grain of the power structures of the existing superorganism to just get people doing these things that are beautiful and helpful. And, I mean, the more that we exercise those muscles, the better we're going to be.

Yeah, I think it's, I read a, I read a great quote the other day where a guy said, if you spend all day pretending to be a dog you don't turn into a dog but if you spend all day pretending to be good and kind then it then you will become good and kind you know and and for me is this is like the the fundamental I think to the transition movement since the beginning was a belief that actually most people want the best for where they live and they want their kids to grow up in a place that's kind of flourishing and thriving and you know one of the things that I I so when I do my talks, I always do my time travel activity at beginning, right? I tell them that I live in Totnes, where we've developed this amazing time travel program, and I show them evidence that that's

the case to overcome any doubts. They might have that, of course, we have created a powerful quantum time travel tool in Totnes, and then I ask them to close their eyes, and I take them on a journey where we travel to the future. I don't lead it. I don't say, oh, it's a future where everyone's riding bicycles. I just say, we're going to travel to the future that turned out as a result of us doing everything that we could have possibly done. And then people, and I've done that activity, I reckon, Nate, probably in the last five or six years with about 15,000 people in different places. No one ever says, Rob, we've got a new IKEA. There's four times bigger than the one we used to have. You know, people talk about it's quieter, it's greener, people are

happier, people are more connected, people are doing more meaningful work. And I read a while ago an article by Elise Bolding, who was a Quaker, who was one of the founders of the idea of peace studies as an academic discipline. She was doing almost exactly the same activity that I've been doing. She does that. She was doing that activity in men's prisons in the US in the early 90s. She wrote a beautiful paper where she documented what they told her exactly the same as what people are telling me now. One of her conclusions was that she thought that if you did that activity at any point back during a human history, you would hear largely the same thing. things. And also she said, I think we have many more co-workers for the work ahead than we might

imagine. You know, when I strip out all the stuff that's like, in order to come and do this with me, you have to sign up to all these things and you have to believe in climate change and you have to be a this and you have to be a that and you have to, you know, it's like, we're just going to do this. And wherever people are politically, I think it kind of resonates. We live in this toxic, polarising world that convinces us all that we hate each other and that we're all so different. And when you really get down to it and you create a kind of a safe space and ask people to really imagine into the world they would most like to see, we have a lot more in common than we might think, I think. Yeah, I agree with that. So to not to push back, but to go on the other side of this, as inspiring as these stories are, many of them are still rooted in and made possible by the same unsustainable economic and industrial substrate that their advocates.

against, whether that be through six continent supply chains or fiat currency and debt or infrastructure. So from your perspective, Rob, how do you consider the increasing instability of our current biophysical system as you look at and take inspiration from these alternative ways of living? Like what would happen to some of these ideas if the system were to suddenly contract? I feel like a lot of what I point to is the things that people are building that point to what comes next. They're prefigurative in that sense. So, for example, in Liege in Belgium, one of the most ambitious things to come out of the transition movement is something called the Liege Food Belt, the Sinture Alimentaire Lijs, which came out of the transition group there in 2014 saying, what if in a generation's time the majority of food eaten in Lijége came. from the land closest to Liesch.

Talk about an idea that's ahead of its time. Really, why is every city not building a food belt around itself right now? We need goals, right? Like, there needs to be like that. That is a stated goal to have the food come from around our... Because if you just leave things in abstractions, it doesn't happen. What's the importance of that, have you discovered? Well, I think, you know, there was that lovely story recently where there was a very good thing I read

recently about how actually Trump may end up being the president who does the most for clean energy and for addressing the climate emergency in terms of that when he introduced his tariffs on China, for example, it meant that they had to basically, they couldn't sell solar panels into the US profitably. And so they dumped a whole load of solar panels into Pakistan. And then citizens organized and over about five or six weeks installed so much solar all across Pakistan, that a huge LNG importation terminal that had been funded by the World Bank, they now don't need to use anymore. You know, they've been building this kind of new energy infrastructure by just getting on with it.

But that's not going to be the long-term climate benefit from Trump. I don't think we're watching it unfold in the Persian Gulf. We're watching that happening, but also at the same time, you know, all across Europe, the impetus around decarbonizing the economy is accelerating hugely now in a way that actually before, like you said, people just sort of are either in panic mode or whatever you said, complacency mode. People were very much in complacency mode again. But decarbonization in that case is going to be coupled with deindustrialization and probably less aggregate throughput, which is inevitable anyways, I think.

So I think Europe is going to be ahead of the curve. in some ways. Well, I think, you know, it's why, you know, the food belt project in Liesje is so fascinating to me, because that was a project that was started by citizens with a question, what if? And then after three years, the local municipality thought they were all mad. And then the municipality came to them and said, this is fantastic. Can you tell us all the blockages to this? And we will get them out of the way. The municipality have now invested three million euros. They produced three and a half thousand and school meals every day, but they're building a new complex ecosystem in that city in a way that is thoroughly replicable.

Is it an island, or are there other places around France that are aware of that and trying to replicate it maybe at a slower pace they're behind? So this is in Belgium, which is just north of France. So this is already spread to six other cities in Belgium and is rapidly, I think, becoming the new normal. In France, there's a town called Montsartou, where they produce 80% of all. the school meals eating in the town on land grown by the municipality. That idea is very much becoming the new normal.

And the thing that's fascinating to me about Montsartou, where 80% of the school meals are low-grown, locally 100% organic, at the same price the French government gives for school meals for everybody. The thing that's most fascinating was they went back to everybody about seven years after they started this and interviewed people who were nothing to do with the school. People had no kids in the school, just the wider population who were around this.

this, and they found that people now at 30% less ultra-processed food, 27% less meat, because when institutions like that move with audacity and purpose, it can lead to all sorts of knock-on benefits that no one could have anticipated. Is there a clearinghouse or a way to find these examples, like you mentioned, Liege and the food? I mean, do you have this organized somewhere that people can see all the progress being made and the pilots and the trials? I mean, a lot of them are in the last two books that I wrote How to Fall in Love with the Future and From What Is to What If? You'd find a lot of the stories on my website as well, actually.

So one of the key points that I've heard you emphasize is the importance of making the future tactically real by giving it a texture that you can feel through our six senses, I guess. So what are some of the techniques, Rob, or practices that you recommend to help people feel the tactile, reality. So I guess there's a couple. One is an amazing activity developed by my friend and colleague Ruth Bentovim, which is called Town Anywhere, which is a beautiful day-long activity that you can do with between 30 and 400 people, where you start by in your imagination time-traveling

to the future. But then the next step is that you literally build that world with cardboard and string and sticky tape as a three-dimensional thing that you then trade in and grieve in and celebrate. And in. It's extraordinary. And she calls, she says that part of the power of it is that it's, it gives people an experience where afterwards they can say to people when I was in the future. But the one that I do a lot on workshops is bringing in the power of smell. Human beings can remember 10,000 smells and we can attach memories and emotions to all of those smells. And so I do an activity that's called making sense of the future, but as an S-C-E-N-T-S. So I give everybody a cup. and 15 minutes, and I say, go outside and making this cup a cocktail of smells that smell like

the future that you imagined when we time travelled. What did it smell like? And so people make, and you have to give it a good name because all good cocktails have good names, right? So everybody goes out and I say, bring your best somelier's nose to this, you know, to really build a complex sort of smell scape, if that's a word, of the future that you imagined. And then they all come back in with these smells that they've made and then I move the chairs around so that it's, I set out a small space

and I say imagine you're at a very exclusive cocktail party in a small apartment so you have to kind of go around saying oh, excuse me, excuse me, and you want to get around the room and smell as many of these as possible. You don't want to just focus on one. You want to work the room.

And so then I put on some music so it feels like people are at a party and it's just beautiful. And people go right, what's this one called? Oh, and it comes back to that that Rilke thing about the future must enter into you a long time before it happens. It starts to get into the future.

That future starts to seep into your bones, and that's the power of it. Give me some examples of the smells, like, for instance. Oh, God. You know, sometimes people pick out very kind of earthy sort of smells. Sometimes people go kind of quite floral. Sometimes people are just trying to make it, like they imagined the world as being really green.

So they try to make their kind of freshest, greenist kind of smells they can find. Sometimes people actually go to the kitchen and they kind of make kind of bread and bring in the foods that they hope are still there in the future. Sometimes people who are addicted to coffee, put coffee in. I'm like, well, we'll see about that. But, you know, it's like actually, so they're all very, very different. And incredibly, often, you know, people are, you go out somewhere, even in the winter, you go outside and it might not look like there's that much there. But when people are really, really wanting to do this. They find very, very different smells that they can tell a story around. So switching from smell to sound, another example I've heard from you is your field

recordings from the future where you and others experiment with these ideas we've been discussing via music. Can you maybe tell us a bit about that project and what you're hoping will become possible through music? So I love ambient electronic music. music. Most kinds of music I can't listen to while I'm working because if there's lyrics or a beat, I'm distracted. Ambient music is this whole beautiful genre of music that I kind of got into about six years ago. And me too. Yeah. And there's an amazing Norwegian artist called Biosphere. Have you come across Biosphere? No. So Biosphere does the most beautiful stuff using field recordings in really interesting ways. He did an album called Substrata, which is kind of his best album, I think. He used

is field recordings in a way that's really evocative. And I also came across a track by this guy, an artist called Mr. Kit called Girl Walking on a Beach, wearing a skirt. And at the end of it, it sounds like a community on a beach watching a fireworks with that kind of wonder and awe and magic that you get watching fireworks. And I love this piece of music so much. It was so kind of evocative. And I thought, what would it be like if the field recordings that you used came from the future. And I found I was visiting places like Utrecht, like landscapes being rewilded by beavers, like Carfrey neighborhoods in Germany, that all that sound like that. And I thought, well, maybe I could make recordings there and then make music with that Mr. Kit guy, but I'll bet he's

impossibly cool and lives in L.A. or Berlin and would never answer our emails. And I looked him up, and he lived in Tadness as well. And so we started this project. And I started going to places and making recordings and then sending them to him. And we made an album which came out last year, which listeners can hear on Band Camp. And it takes people to all these different, a lot of the places that we've talked about today. So what you're effectively doing is creating a bridge for our nervous systems to live in two worlds. And in doing so, activate our nervous systems and our imaginations in a way that meets the future halfway. Beautifully put. Yeah, yeah. And what we're doing now is then we developed,

we made videos for each of the tracks. And last year we did a couple of live shows. And later this year, so we're now reworking that show with new video elements and much more kind of theatrical. And we've been working with Amanda Scott, who does the Accidental Gods podcast. and we got some funding from a foundation in Denmark and later this year we're going to be doing a tour in the UK of five different places including the Globe Theatre in London which is super exciting where we are going to be taking our field recordings from the future time portal on the road

and we will pick people up in 2026, take them to the 2036 that was a result of us doing everything that we could possibly have done in as multi-sensory a way as possible and you were asking well what's the ambition with this you know at any one time in the world there's probably at least 30 of those kind of immersive van goch frieda carlo kind of light show lumiere things touring we want this to be bigger than that we want there to be like field recordings from the future time portals opening up all over the place and for this to become like something that then inspires Netflix series and that everybody has the experience where they are or wherever they are of stepping into the time portal so that nobody can say well i didn't know that that was possible you know we want to take them to to a world where actually it turned out the biggest area of growth in the economy wasn't AI by 2036. It was actually mycelium and research into mycelium and all the extraordinary things that mycelium could unlock that we take people to visit whole shopping malls now where nothing is

new and everything is reclaimed and repurposed and recycled. We take people to regenerative farms. We take people to visit landscapes rewilded by beavers and we walk them around in that world in a way that's deeply, deeply immersive, and it's one of the loveliest things I've ever been part of, actually. Well, I'm not a doctor, Rob, but I can hypothesize that you have a very healthy hippocampus.

So, as you are aware, a core theme of my work is the idea that we're entering a period where the biophysical constraints on our 19, almost 20-terwatt civilization, are going to force a contraction in energy material throughput, and complexity.

So my question to you is, do you think it's possible for humans, some or many, to genuinely love a future that involves less material stuff? And how do we paint that picture in a way that doesn't activate

our loss aversion machinery? Yeah. So in 2024, Jason Hickle and Dylan Sullivan, wrote a paper which people can find online where they said that the world could provide decent living standards for 8.5 billion people while consuming just 30% of current global resources and energy while leaving what they called a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement and other social investments. And in their paper,

they set out how all of that can happen. And so for me, I kind of think, of course we can, of course we can. You know, I go to visit Denmark, right? You go to Denmark where they have high tax and they have this concept of public luxury. You know, the cities are beautiful. Things are, we share things. It's not about like three or four people having amazing estates where they hoard everything. You walk around Copenhagen, it's amazing. You know, so I think it's entirely possible based on the research that he's got in there that we could absolutely do that. But if we're using, but again, it remains stuck. 30% of current global resource and energy use

leaving a substantial surplus. So what would that be like? That's the thing for me. How do we bring that alive for people? The fact that it's possible, I don't debate. The issue is how do we cultivate longing for it? A big word that runs through my work right now is longing, which is this beautiful, powerful word that we have in the English language.

I spend a lot of time doing talks in the French-speaking world, and I always have an interpreter with me because my French is rubbish. And the interpreter, whenever it comes to the word longing, they take the word desire and put loads of superlatives on the front. Desire very, very, very, very profound. But even like, even desire, very, very profound is not the same as longing for me. Longing is like a soul lake, right? How do we cultivate that kind of profound soul lake for what this future could be like?

That's the skill that we need right now. And Don DeLillo, in his book Underworld, he said brilliantly, he said, longing on a large scale is what makes history. So the bit of whether it's possible isn't the bit that troubles me. The bit that troubles me is how do we cultivate longing at scale for that? Because we are up against a kind of desire machine that is phenomenally powerful. Capitalism is astonishingly good at cultivating longing. All the people in our culture who are the most skilled in the dark arts of how you cultivate longing

are on that side driving everything that is going to hell in a hand car. So for me, the question is how do we get some of those people over here? How do we create things like field recordings from the future, like the film kind of ideas that you play around with, that I'm playing around with? We have to get so much better, not just at giving people information about how awful things could be. We need to do that as well,

but we also have to give people things. We have to get better, we have to get so much better at giving people things to run towards rather than just things to run screaming in the opposite direction from. I agree with that. A bookend question, what do you think we would most urgently need to grieve about modernity and the present world in order to effectively leave it behind in the past, psychologically at least, and how might we replace those things with other things to be

excited about in the future? or is me framing it in terms of grief against the grain of the language? No, I think grief is a really important part of this. And I think, you know, organizations like the good grief network and healthy human culture and people and their and Joanna Macy's work on grief are really fundamentally important to this, I think, I think, I guess, I don't know, because I'm not somebody who fixates on modern. and maybe flying, I don't know, maybe this idea that you can be in Bangkok on Thursday and Singapore on Friday and Los Angeles on Saturday and New Zealand on Sunday. Maybe we have to, we have to accept that moving more slowly is a wonderful thing. I gave up flying in 2013. I haven't flown since. I only travel on the train. I have to get the train in June from London to Malmo in Norway. It'll

take me a day and a half and it'll be an absolute joy. I'll get my best work done. I see all those landscapes changing. You know, it's about replacing. There's an ostensible ecological reason for doing that, but have you found that it actually helps the cadence of your life slowing down in that way? Yeah, absolutely. It means that I arrive in places. I've caught up with myself when I arrive. it means I've I've written lots of things it means I arrive well if the trains are on time I arrive calm

if I've gone through German trains which currently are a mess and one train has meant I've missed the next one missed the next one then I arrive a bit frazzled but it's it's a different it's a different quality of experience I think traveling on night sleeper trains is such a joy you meet the most amazing people

on night sleeper trains it's just a shift when Dr. Seuss wrote a cat in the hat. Dr. Seuss wrote a book where he gave himself a palette of 50 words to write a whole book and a whole story with. He always said that was the best exercises imagination ever had. The beautiful thing about limits is that the imagination loves limits. The imagination flourishes with limits. When you study improv and the improv instructor gives you something to do, they don't say, hey guys, make up a story. You know, they'll say, right, you are a bus driver. you're really tired and grumpy, you just want to get home, you've had a long day, you've had enough.

You are getting onto the bus with an enormous musical instrument, go. And then that kind of, the limits allow you to be so much more creative, right? So it's like, when I shut down a certain thing, I'm not going to do that. I haven't eaten meat since I was 13. I stopped eating meat because of punk when I was 13. I've never missed that. I've explored a whole other amazing world of different things and different foods. You know, actually limits make us more curious and more creative and open up more possibilities if we're happy to go with that, I think. So in an upcoming, I had part one out, but I'm planning a eight to ten part series and the frankly called staying human. And it's what I think is ground zero for approaching the more

than human predicament is our internal grounding and agency and awareness to the present moment and removing addictions and finding the others and all those things. Right. Because I think that if we know all the facts and say all the best narratives and have the the biophysical story nailed, if we can't function as a psychologically ecological adult, it's not going to really matter. So my question to you is, do you have a daily practice of connecting to the future, some things you do you do, personally to maintain the sense of longing that you mentioned and imagination for what could be in the future and which viewers could also do at home.

I read books from people like Adrian Marie Brown, like Willie DeMriza, the people that I've been talking about. I have the practice of looking for things I can take photographs of that look like the future. I'd love to say I have a daily meditation practice and I did for many years, but then I had kids and it rather knocked it on the head. I do yoga every morning, which I guess is a kind of a meditation

practice in a sense. I guess I'm also always I'm involved in projects like field recordings from the future like a comic book that I'm working on with an amazing Belgian cartoonist called Thomas Leera, which is about how we built a time machine and used it to

travel to the future. So I'm always in that thinking about, okay, what what do we see there? What's the detail there? The more you do it, the more it sort of comes into focus, you know, we're thinking, okay, what do you see in the shop windows as you walk past? What do you, what are the adverts and the new, what are the newspaper headlines in that future? The more you can populate it with, with detail and the more you do it, the more that it becomes a reality, I think. It's been really lovely with field recordings from the future. So Kit, who I've been doing, Mr. Kit, who I've been doing that project with, he said, you know, when he started that project,

he was very kind of confused about the future and very, and he didn't know any of these stories of these projects that we've been doing, but it's been very profound experience for him actually being part of that. So when we imagine the future, which is the core of your work now, can you tell me the difference between just an average human based on our physiology and evolutionary path to today, which is more motivating, averting a future, that we don't want or longing for futures that we do and why.

Which is most motivating. Yeah, because when I think about the future, a lot of what populates in my mind is oceans with far less life and forests and ecosystems moving not fast enough to track climate change and things like that. And there are things that I want to avoid. Yeah. But I think if I could imagine, which I guess is your work, is painting the future that we do want, that that might be more motivating.

But I just want your professional opinion on that. So, I mean, I think the honest answer is we're all different, right? That actually, for some of us, you know, we can read IPCC reports. We can read horrific things. And they motivate us. I've been motivated by that stuff kind of all my life, you know, like, okay, shit, what are we going to do about this? And so that's, but I think, you know, when we look at, when we look at the climate emergency, that kind of messaging that Extinction Rebellion had about extinction and collapse, it really mobilized maybe 5% of the population. Didn't mobilize everybody else.

A while ago on my podcast from what if to what next, I interviewed a Solitaire Townsend who's an amazing sustainability climate activist person who's, who's, who's, also an expert on Shakespearean theatre. She said in Shakespearean terms, the climate movement has done a brilliant act one. We set out the drama, the tensions, the bad guys, the kind of like what's, what's the thing that's wrong and why, you know, we're brilliant at that. And then we just go round around doing that one over and over again. Act two is then when you set off on a journey and you meet people who the world rises up to help you. You fall in love. You find skills and resources. You never thought we have. We don't do that bit. We just keep doing the act one bit round and round again. So for me, it's like, yes, there are some of us who are really, really motivated by by horrific reports and

data and the kind of things you're talking about. But we would be kidding ourselves if we imagined that that's what's going to mobilize everybody. And I'm not saying that there is one way to do everything at all. There's lots of different things, but it feels to me like that's often the missing piece. If you look back to the civil rights movement, as people in the climate movement love to do, looking back to the 1960s and often that debate gets stuck in, should we be more like Malcolm X or more like Martin Luther King? Because Malcolm X, the kind of equivalent of just stop oil, extinction rebellion, then made the kind of more moderate climate movement seem more kind of mainstream. We get stuck in that debate. What we often miss out on is the fact that also in the civil

rights movement at the time. You had the Black Panthers who were setting up free school meals and free schools and running ambulances into neighbourhoods nobody else would, kind of that mutual aid equivalent of maybe what some transition groups doing. But you also had Sun Ra, Parliament Funkadelic, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delaney, people who are writing what we now think of as Afrofuturist, black utopian writers who were filling that space with stories and futures in which black culture and black people were thriving. I think we need all of those things. We need the people who are pointing at what's coming and going, look, look, look, look.

But also at the same time, we need the equivalent of a kind of Afro-futurist, black utopian, filling that story with, filling that future with what's possible. And then we might find out that if we do that well,

and if we're able to cultivate longing at scale, that that might be the thing that engages more people than just pointing at the, pointing what's coming down the pipes towards us. You and I have been doing this work for 20 years, now. And since I started, I know that I've changed my mind about quite a few things. And I'm

wondering, and what are some of the biggest shift in thinking or things that you've changed your mind about since starting this work 20 odd years ago? I think maybe one thing is the, and for this, I'm deeply, deeply grateful to a few extraordinary women like Sophie Banks and Hillary Prentice who got involved in the transition movement quite early on, who said, this is not just about, this is not just a kind of outward process that's about solar panels and organic carrots, that actually this is as much about how we do things as what we do. And they called, they said, they coined this term in a transition, that actually the groups having the skills to do this in a way that they can have a culture of

supporting each other and a culture where we try to minimize the risk of burnout in our groups. We run meetings, people enjoy. We have ways of managing conflicts, all that kind of stuff. That inner aspect of this is just as important as what we do. I think that's one thing that at the beginning I didn't think of at all until they took me to one side and said, you know, Rob, if this is going to last, it really needs to be that. Also, I think for me, I went to art school when I was 18. I did foundation art. I learned to draw. And then I went off and did other things, and I had a family. And I always then spent 20, 30 years thinking of there's artist Rob over here and activist

Rob over here. And all the stuff I did in transition was all about transition. And occasionally, if I went on holiday with the kids, I might get a few hours to go and draw one day. And that was how it was. Then I did a course with Ruth Bentovim, who I mentioned before, called The Art of Invitation, all about, which was about bringing those things back together again. It made me think, actually, I could look at a lot of what we've done in transition is just as much an art project, the Totnes Pound local currency we had in Totness for 11 years. You could say, yeah, that's a local economic experiment. You could all say, wow, that's an amazing art project. You've got people using notes you'd printed for 11 years in 80 shops in the town. That's phenomenal. So I now increasingly, with field recordings from the future, with these projects that I'm doing, feel like I'm bringing those two sides of myself back together again. And that's been liberating as hell. I fully agree. And somewhere along my journey, I realized that we're going to need the artists and the storytellers to lead the way and then also have the engineers and architects and, you know, that type of stuff. I mean, we're going to need both.

They're the professional cultivators of longing. That's what they do. Street artists, poets, rappers. They cultivate longing at scale in a way that I spoke to a guy who was a climate scientist in the UK. He said, yeah, we're basically like English people on holiday that nobody can understand us. So we just keep saying the same thing over and over louder and louder and wondering why no one understands. It's like, but then you bring in the artist. That's what they do.

Yeah. So what can someone listening to this episode do now today this week or this month? to help address the things discussed in this podcast, or is it mostly up to politicians and leaders? Well, one thing I would say is that this is very much a kind of an ongoing journey of exploration that I'm part of that didn't end when how to fall in love with the future came out. So I do a newsletter every month called the Time Travelers Gazette, which people might like to sign up to.

Just go to my website, Rob Hopkins.net. Put your email address in the email newsletter box and then accompany me on that journey and share, if you find any of these ideas useful and you try them out, share them back with me. This is a kind of an emerging community of practice around these ideas. But I would say, I would say one thing that you could do today is to look at your social media feed and where it comes from. And that often we set up this thing that just kind of pours into our ears through a funnel every day, kind of all these horrific. And it's important that we know about it, right? But it's like we, that's often that's all we give ourselves.

So there are people like Positive News Magazine in the UK. Imagine 5, which is a Dutch magazine about solutions, the transition movement. I try and share as much of that stuff as I can. There's an organization called We Are Possible. There's many people who are posting this stuff. So give your imagination a treat and seek out some of those stories and allow those to have equal kind of equal access to your imagination. So I know you're at UAL in London now doing exercises with students. What general recommendations do you have for young humans in their teens and 20s who become aware of all this economic, environmental constraints to the global economy? I would say there was a guy who last summer who just before how to fall in love with the future came out, he got hold of an early copy. and he designed his whole summer holiday around the book, and he went to visit all the different places they're in the book. He took the train to Utrecht. He went to the Valban in Freiburg.

He went to all the different places, and I met him afterwards. He said, Rob, I went to 2030 on holiday. And I would say maybe give yourself a treat of a trip to the future. When I was 25 and at university, near the end of the sustainability degree that I was doing at the time, they put us all on a bus and took us to have done. to Copenhagen and Erdnse.

And we spent a week and a half there and we went to see offshore wind farms, bicycle lanes, district heating schemes, co-housing projects, ecological architecture, blew our minds. And then they drove us back to the UK and we arrived back going, we've got a lot of work to do here, but we know that it's possible. And so give yourself an experience like that, you know, step, allow yourself to step out of the present and into as many different places that embody the future as possible. Do a permaculture course so you understand what's going on underneath the surface. What's the...

Rewire your brain so that you see possibilities everywhere rather than probabilities. But I would say go and visit some of those places. That's one of the best gifts you could give yourself. What do you care most about in the world, Rob Hopkins? Life. Life and life's ability to create more life. and the astonishing mind-blowing diversity of life

that we have the awesome privilege to live around and to be part of and to live alongside that we hardly even understand at all. Life. If I had to answer the question, I think I would use those exact words. I mean, that's exactly what I care most about.

You may know this question is coming next because I'm still asking it, but if you could wave a magic wand and there was no personal recourse to your decision, what is one thing you would do to improve human and planetary futures? I would collapse all oil and gas companies instantly. It is now blindingly obvious to anybody anywhere in the world that oil and gas companies are now the most wicked, malevolent, antisocial, anti-life institutions anywhere on the planet. They don't even pretend to care anymore. And so I think that the demise of oil and gas companies really can't come soon enough. But that would be the demise of billions of people if that happened overnight or any short-term horizon. Well, maybe they would go and then maybe we'd have to nationalize. We would nationalize them. Well, most of them are national already.

88% are already national. I would put a kind of a thought bomb into the minds of people who run oil. and gas companies so that they set out to design their demise as rapidly as fits with climate targets, but is way more ambitious than they're currently thinking. I would put a worm into those guys' brains that would basically be like, we need to dismantle this as soon as possible. With the least amount of suffering possible, we need to dismantle this in the most ambitious way feasible. But, but But that's really the worm needs to be in the institutions of the world that are based on extraction and more power and more GDP because they're just providing what the world is using. But you said one thing, so I'm just trying to stick to the spirit of your exercise.

So, well, it's, yeah, that's a, that's a conversation that is just so nuanced and complex and important. But thank you for speaking that your truth. Do you have any closing comments for people watching, listening who understand and agree with what you've laid out here today? You're still so eloquent and looking two or three steps ahead at what really needs to happen on these issues. What sort of closing words do you have for our viewers? I think there's a – I spent about two weeks ago I was in the north of France visiting an amazing young woman called Anaig Plaza. who has really embraced this kind of time travel as a tool for activists stuff. And she has started a transition group in her town.

She made a film for French TV where she brings this kind of time travel character to all of this. And last year in France, they had parliamentary elections. In France, the elections go in two rounds. And after the first round, the far right were in the lead. And everybody panicked. well, not everybody, everybody who wasn't far right, panicked. And organized for the first time since the 1930s, the left finally managed to agree about something enough

to group under one banner. They called it the Front Popularer. And then she went to a big demonstration in Nantes in favor of the Front Popular. And she was photographed in one of the French newspapers, holding her, I've been to the future we won sign in French, in her time travel costume. That photograph got in all the French newspapers.

It went viral on French social media. It got on French TV. And I said to her, why do you think that was? She said, because I think when things look really dark and uncertain, to have somebody open the fabric of time and step through from the future and say, it's going to be all right. It's really powerful. And I like to kind of operate in that sense of that there are so many people listening to this

who'll be working so hard doing amazing projects in their neighborhood, in their community, in their city, feeling like they're the only ones who, care like they're exhausted, it's grueling, the world is going in the opposite direction. And I like to have that role of being the person who steps back and through and says, this is amazing, thank you so much. I've just come back from the future and they all want me to come and thank you so much. In the same way that I always imagine, if you could travel back in time and sit next to Rosa Parks, sitting on that bus, scared of what's going to happen, but with a fire in her belly that this is the right thing to be doing. And you could say in 10 years from now,

there's going to be a civil rights act passed in this country that'll be linked attributed back to what you're doing today thank you so much you know it's like i feel like in the work that we're doing we need to feel the kind of small hand of of the future in the small of our back kind of saying yep yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yep yep you're doing the right thing and that's that's what i like to bring i think yeah we are time travelers and we're alive at the the largesse and magic of the carbon pulse and so we We really are. The people watching this show are in many ways actual time travelers. Yeah. What an incredible time to be alive. We get the honor to live at a time when everything hopefully is profoundly reimagined. That only happens once every couple of hundred years and we're

here. Yeah. Rob Hopkins. Thank you so much for your continued work. Rob Hopkins.net and we'll share resources to your other links and such. Good to see you, my friend. Nice to see you. This is an enormous honor to have been invited on, Nate. And thank you so much for all that you do. On behalf of the people in the future, just to say, they all ask me to say, thank you, Nate, so much. Your podcast really was one of the big things that people look back to and celebrate. So thank you. Thanks, Rob. If you'd like to learn more about this episode, please visit the great simplification.com for references and show notes. From there, you can also join our Hilo community and subscribe to our great simplification.com for references and show notes. From there, you can also join our Hilo community and subscribe to our. our substack newsletter. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagen's edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett and Lizzie Siriani. Our production team also includes Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyann, Julia Maxwell, Gabriella Sleman, and Grace Brunfield. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.