Upstream - How to Fall in Love with the Future w/ Rob Hopkins

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

If you look around at the state of the world—and the despair that comes with the reality of climate change, fascism spreading its tentacles around the world, the ethnic cleansing of Gaza—it’s very difficult to feel hope. It begins to feel like the forces of destruction and death have colonized our futures, limiting our dreams and stifling our imaginations.  It’s in these times specifically that it’s essential we remember that the future, our dreams, our imagination—that these things are political. And that exercising our hope for a just and beautiful future is an important, in fact, crucial political act. Not on its own, of course, but imagining and dreaming fuels our actions and gives soul and spirit to our revolutionary movements. And as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, "The future must enter into you long before it happens."  Rob Hopkins is the co-founder of Transition Network and of Transition Town Totnes, and the author of several books including The Transition Handbook, From What is to What if, and most recently, How to Fall in Love with the Future: A Time Traveller's Guide to Changing the World. In this episode, we explore what it’s like to be a time traveler from Rob’s perspective, how dreams and imagination are powerful tools for driving change, and the role that art and music play in the fight for a better future. We explore examples of communities that have made a claim on the future, from the Afro-futurism and Black Utopianism of jazz musician Sun Ra to the occupation of Waterloo Bridge in London and the pop-up community that arose as a result. And finally, we look at how the future is not just an abstract concept, but something that can be felt, touched, heard, seen, and smelled.  Further resources: How to Fall in Love with the Future: A Time Traveller's Guide to Changing the World, by Rob Hopkins Field Recordings from the Future Crowdfunder: Field Recordings From The Future Immersive Show Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City, by William Sites From What If to What Next: 72 - What if we shifted to a not-for-profit economy? Related episodes: Transition Towns with Rob Hopkins Beer: Crafiting a Better Economy (Documentary) Everyday Utopia and Radical Imagination with Kristen Ghodsee Extinction Rebellion with Gail Bradbrook The Work that Reconnects with Joanna Macy A World Without Profit with Jennifer Hinton Doughnut Economics with Kate Raworth Intermission music: "A Car-Free Neighbourhood" by Field Recordings for the Future Artwork: Aga Kubish This episode was produced in collaboration with EcoGather, an experimental educational project focused on heterodox economics, collective action, and belonging in an enlivened world. EcoGather hosts gatherings to bring some Upstream episodes to life—this is one of those episodes. The EcoGathering for this episode will be held on Monday, June 23rd. Find out more at ecogather.ing. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

This episode of Upstream was produced in collaboration with EcoGather, an experimental education project focused on heterodox economics, collective action, and belonging in an enlivened world. EcoGather hosts gatherings to bring some Upstream or by going to www.eco-gather.ing. As EcoGather's active phase comes to a close, its self-paced online courses are being made freely available at eco-gather.ing and its vibrant community is reconvening in a new organization called Otherwise. Find out more at www.otherwise.one. When we are trying to imagine the future or remember the past, it's pretty much exactly the same process that happens in our brain. It's the same networks that fire, because when we're trying to imagine the future, we're compiling that imagining of the future

based on things that we already know about. So when we're asking people to imagine a low carbon, more just, more equal, fair, beautiful future, if they've just watched GB News or Fox News all day, that's really tough because there's nothing they go to the cupboards, the cupboards are bare. It's why I always say to people, and it's what I try and do in one of the chapters of the book, is you need to surround yourself with stories of what's already happening in the world, because you need to fill those cupboards. So if we want to do one thing that boosts our imagination's superpowers in these times, feed it with stories,

stock the cupboards of your memory with stories of possibility. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Robert Brehmand.

And I'm Della Duncan. If you look around at the state of the world and the despair that comes with the reality of climate change or fascism spreading its tentacles around the world or the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, it's very difficult to feel hope. It begins to feel like the forces of destruction and death have colonized our futures, limiting our dreams and stifling our imaginations. It's in these times specifically that it's essential for us to remember that the future, our dreams, our imagination, that these things are political, and that exercising our hope for

a just and beautiful future is an important, in fact, crucial political act. Not on its own, of course, but imagining and dreaming fuels our actions and gives soul and spirit to our revolutionary movements. And as the poet Rainier Maria Rilke once wrote, the future must enter into you long before it happens. Rob Hopkins is the co-founder of Transition Network and of Transition Town taught Ness and the author of several books, including

The Transition Handbook, From What Is to What If, and most recently, How to fall in love with the future, a time traveler's guide to changing the world. In this episode, we explore what it's like to be a time traveler from Rob's perspective, how dreams and imagination are powerful tools for driving change, and the role that art and music play in the fight for a better future. We explore examples of communities that have made a claim on the future, from the Afrofuturism and Black Utopianism of jazz musician Sun Ra to the occupation of Waterloo Bridge in London and the pop-up community that arose as a result. And finally, we look at how the future is not just an abstract concept, but something that can be felt, touched, heard, seen, and even smelled.

And before we get started, Upstream is almost entirely listener-funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways in which you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bi-weekly episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more. Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show, and it will also give you access to our entire back catalogue of Patreon episodes, along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers.

Sign up and find out more at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast. And if Patreon's not really your thing, you can also make a tax-deductible recurring or one-time donation on our website, upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Through your support you'll be helping keep upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now here's Della in conversation with Rob Hopkins. Thank you so much, Rob, for joining me. Oh, my pleasure.

Thank you. Yeah. And we love to start by having our guests introduce themselves. So how would you introduce yourself today for the listeners? Well, hello, everybody. I'm Rob Hopkins. I'm one of the founders of the transition movement. I live in Totnes in South Devon, which is where the first transition town,

transition town, Totnes was, so I was involved with that for quite a long time. But my work for years has been supporting the transition movement as a kind of a storyteller, really looking out for stories across the movement and sharing those. And then in 2019, I wrote a book called From What Is to What If, and that was about the need for massively boosting the power of imagination across society. And after that, then I started a podcast. I did 100 episodes of a podcast called From What If to What Next,

which people can still find. And then more recently, I've done this new book. And so I do a lot of trainings now around imagination. I'm doing some other projects that I'm sure that we will get into. But I'm a father and a printmaker and a gardener. And that will that will probably do for now. Yeah, thank you for that intro. And actually, I would love to hear the kind of journey from one to another, particularly because we've had you on, we had you on long time ago to talk about

Transition Town, what that movement is. And then we also had you on to talk about beer and your project with New Line Brewery. Yeah. Yeah. And so we've had you a few times in different, different forums, different iterations, different topics. So can you share the threads? I feel like they're clear to me, but I would just love to hear them.

And also some folks may not even be familiar with the Transition Town movement, you know, some of the newer listeners. So how did you go from the birth of the Transition Town Movement to, from what is to what if, to now, how to fall in love with the future? Well it's kind of a, it's always an interesting journey because you always, every sort of step along that journey I keep thinking, is this the point at which everybody thinks, well, I was with him up until now, but he's completely lost it. I have no idea why he's writing a book about time travel,

and this is all a bit strange. So the transition movement started in 2006 as a bottom-up response to the climate emergency. What does it look like if we're able to mobilize the people around us, the resources that we have, not waiting for permission, recognizing that there is no cavalry coming riding over the horizon to our rescue, that it's us with what we have and what can we do, and recognizing that yes, of course we need the things that governments do, of course we need the things that business can sometimes do, of course we need to do those things that we need to do as individuals, but there's a big piece in the middle which is what we can do with

the people around us with the resources that we have. And so we started that in our town here in South Devon in 2006 and it very rapidly took off and just started going all over the place. There's now transition groups in about 50 countries around the world, in thousands of places, and their work tends to go from building new local food systems, new local economy stuff, local currencies or different strategies for making local economies more resilient, community energy projects, etc. etc. And so, like I say, for years, that was my work was redefining every now and then what

this was, like listening to, it was very much a self-organizing movement, an impulse that we kind of put out into the world. And every two or three years, we'd go back to all those groups and say, what are you actually doing? And then write that up. And so it was very much an evolving experiment. And then in 2018, I found that I was reading things by people whose work on climate change, I really respect, like George Monbiot and Bill McKibben and Amy Klein and Amitav Ghosh. And the same sentence kept popping up in all of their writings. They'd say climate change is a failure of the imagination. And I was left kind of going, is it?

Why would that be? Like, how would we know? And that set me off on a path of inquiry where I took a like a year and a half sabbatical out from my work with Transition Network to research and write from what is to what if. And I interviewed more than 100 people, most of whom I'd never heard of when I started the process. And that book seemed to kind of catch with a lot of people that there was this sense that just slightly out of our collective view, something really precious, our collective imagination, at a time when our survival

depends on our ability to reimagine everything, was sort of unnoticed, kind of desiccating and shriveling and I wanted to put it right back on the middle in the table of the table and go this this is really important. This is really, really important. If we lose our imagination, we're really, really in trouble. And so after that book, like I say, I did the podcast, I set myself a rule when I started that podcast that I would never do any episodes with two white male guests. And it kind of pushed me into really finding speakers and movements and perspectives that were just fantastic. And in 2022, I think it was, I saw a t-shirt a young woman wore to Black Lives Matter protest that said, I've been to the future, we won. And it gave me goosebumps. And it was just

a few weeks before I was invited to London to Extinction Rebellion's big one. They did this thing called the big one. There's hundred thousand people all surrounding Parliament and They asked me to go up and speak and so I thought right, okay I'm gonna do something different, you know I always like those things the things that feel really awkward and uncomfortable and like oh this could just completely Be a face plant in front of hundreds and hundreds of people are often where the richest learnings are, you know? So I bought myself a white hazmat suit from a hardware shop

and I bought a children's space helmet. And I went up and did this talk as if, thanks to this amazing time machine we've invented, I've just come back from 20th. I'm not gonna tell you what we need to do in the future. I've just been there and it was amazing. And let me tell you about it. And there was this, oh my God, the bicycle rush hours and there was this and there was that. And there was a point halfway through that talk when I looked around the people there. And I said something like, when I tell other people about it, I feel

really emotional telling you about it. It makes really moves me having been there being able to share with you what I saw and I looked around the people and there were tears on people's faces and I thought this is really interesting. I don't think I've ever had that reaction before and what's going on here and so it set me off on this and then I was reading people like Rashida Phillips and Black Quantum Futurism in the US listening to a lot of Sun Ra records. It just set me off on this route of well what happens when we when we do that you know what happens when we help people mentally time travel what happens if we create the space for for playing with time in a more fluid sort of a way.

So that's kind of the journey. And for me, it's like I still feel like I have one foot in the transition movement and then I have one foot out. And I'm trying to explore different ways, some of which we'll come on to talk about, which are about kind of trying to reach to new audiences, to point them back to the transition movement while also as a creative person having the freedom to do some crazy stuff. Thank you for sharing that journey. And yeah, I'd love to share a few quotes around imagination,

because I really love that you've followed this thread and found its importance and spoken with so many people. So just a few quotes around this topic. Kristin Godsey says, sometimes the sheer imagination of something helps to make it real. Love that quote. Another quote from, well, it's attributed to both Frederick Jameson and Zizek.

It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And then the last one from Dom Helder Comera. When we are dreaming alone, it is only a dream. When we are dreaming with others, it's the beginning of reality. So just to uplift that point around, yeah, is climate change a problem of our imagination and has our imagination muscles, have they atrophied or do we need to strengthen them and if so how? And so I do see all of your more recent work really supporting us in

doing that and how. And particularly in relation to this question of from what is to what if, and just asking that question, which I remember you did in that original or in those beginning Transition Town days, those, that question of together what if we, right? Just like inviting that prompt. So tell us about that piece around from what is to what if and that podcast. And I got to be a part of it, which was really fun with Jennifer Hinton. And I just love that idea of having a co-person to speak with and then having something that we were offering as a what if. So I'm curious, what were some of the most

memorable what if questions and what next questions that that you came to in that that period? Well, I think we did one that was about we did what if there were no prisons with Mariam Cabba, who was somebody who I had wanted to have on the podcast from day one and it took 80 episodes to get her on and because for me that question is one of the great what-if questions of our time and the fact the prison abolition movement has kept that question alive for so long and what's so powerful and why it's such a beautiful what-if question is that for me a good what if question is a bit like in Alice

in Wonderland when she's too big to get through the door into the garden but she can see the garden and she really really wants to get in there but she's too big just to figure out how to get into it. A good what if question is like that it kind of evokes our curiosity and our desire to get in there and I love the what if there were no prisons debate opens up. Yeah, but if there were no prisons, we'd have to have a really, really different education system.

Yeah, keep going. And a good what if question does that. The very first one I remember was, what if the bird song was louder than the traffic? And one of the contributors to that is a folk singer in the UK called Sam Lee who does an amazing thing every year called singing with nightingales where they go to a forest in Sussex where there are

nightingales with musicians and the musicians play along with the nightingales and he kind of zoomed in to the recording from this forest in the daytime full of bird songs. So all throughout the whole recording you could hear the bird song. We had what if we lived in a well-being economy, what if cities were redesigned using donor economics, what if Afrofuturism shaped the future was one that was really fascinating. But one of the things that we did a lot, so the format of the podcast, as you'll remember, was that we started every episode by me putting the two guests into my time machine,

taking them forward to 2030, into the future that had been defined by that what if question. So the question that we had been talking about was the future that was just a little ahead of us. And then I asked them to take me on a walk around in that future. And many of those were so beautiful, they really kind of stopped me in my tracks. And we did a few things where we edited all of those together as a sort of a walk through.

And actually there's a bit in the new book which is based on lots of those kind of cut together. And then we also did a bonus episode that was called the Ministry of Imagination where we had this pretend government institution, the Ministry of Imagination, where we invited the guests to stick around after we'd recorded the main episode and I made the ministers at the Ministry of Imagination and I invited them to put forward three policies that we could implement in the morning that would rapidly accelerate our journey towards whatever the future was that we had talked about in the main episode. And after I finished the podcast on a hundred episodes, partly because when I grew up there was a record label that I loved that only released 100 records and then decided that that was enough and that was a perfect art statement in its own.

And I always wanted the opportunity to do that because I really loved them. And so and then I heard that that last year was the year where there were the most elections happening in human history. Forty eight countries, 64 percent of the population or something all going to vote on really deeply unimaginative policies. So I edited together, took ages, all of these 600 plus policies that we had through the podcast and compiled them into the Ministry of Imagination Manifesto, which listeners can hear on my website, can find on robhopkins.net if you go down, it's a free download. And it was such a beautiful thing to donet, if you go down, it's a free download. And it was such a beautiful thing to do because actually when you read it, you start out thinking,

oh, that's ridiculous. What? That's what? You know, some of them you're like, oh, that's amazing. Some of them you're like, oh, what? That's ridiculous. But after a while, you find that your sense of what's possible is being expanded and you think, well, we could do that actually, couldn't we? we you know and that's part of what I'm trying to do

with the imagination when I go into work with companies or different organizations you know there's there's people are just so stuck and everybody's sitting around looking at everybody else using everybody else's inaction to justify their own inaction rather than falling over each other to be at the front of the kind of dash for exciting possibilities. And so to have that manifesto was a really key output of this whole process too. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, and I do, I just love this idea of really thinking big and that, you know, we may not

see it in our lifetimes, but even to just ponder it and then work towards it is a beautiful aspiration. There's this great quote, I don't know who said it, but it's, where we're given a branch, make a bud, where we're given a bud, make a flower, where we're given a flower, make a fruit. So it's like, we may not see prison abolition, but like, how might we strive for that or work towards that? Or, you know, ending capitalism

or moving towards a post-capitalist future or ending profit, right? Which is what Jennifer and I explored. Abolishing policing, again, another one where it's like, what would that actually mean? What would it actually look and feel like to not have police in communities to be a part of that movement?

I also think about like, what if greed was as despicable as racism, right? Like, what if we could call out just like horrendous hoarding of wealth? You know, like, so I do love this prompt. And yeah, those policies are great. Some of the others that you had in there were bankers have to be on the bread line for 30 days.

You have to repair your clothes at least twice before getting rid of them. And also abolishing private schools Yes, just to give people a taste of I love I love the one that was what if people had door knockers in the shape of pretzels To remind us how important bread is There were lots there were lots that were about the role of the arts in the everyday life and education as being something through life. There were lots of different variations on universal basic income

or universal basic services or all of those different kinds of things. And there were lots of different ideas for new government ministries. There was one that was called the Ministry of Joy, Beauty and Delight or something and every policy had to be reviewed by them and if it was one that was called the Ministry of Joy, Beauty and Delight or something, and every policy had to be reviewed by them. And if it was felt that this policy didn't promote joy, beauty and delight, then it should be sent back to the drawing board, which I think we should start there. That would be a great thing. Absolutely. So when I mentioned your most recent book topic to someone recently, they expressed interest because they were saying, wow, I've been feeling less and less in love with the

future every day. And I'm sure this is a sentiment that you hear. So I'm just curious, you know, this idea of encouraging us to fall in love with the future. How has this felt for you to take this on? How is it that you feel in love with the future and how do you hold that love even despite everything that's going on? I'm not, that's a really important question

because I think we're living in a time where the future is being colonized by some deeply unsavory characters and belief systems. And there's that line in 1984 deeply unsavoury characters and belief systems. And there's that line in 1984 about, if you want to imagine the future, think of a boot stamping on a human face forever. And I think whenever I meet with and talk with particularly younger people now,

the future is just like, what? I can't, you know, well, maybe the, or it's very techy. We so easily go into, well, the future is just going to be AI and, you know, better phones and all of this. And unless we are there really passionately and creatively talking about different futures and how they could be, they're never going to happen. And it feels to me like one of the most powerful and important things that we can be doing now. And one of the most radical things to be doing actually is to be talking about the future, bringing the future alive. All the great movements for change in the

past succeeded by being the best storytellers of a different way that the future could be. You know in the 60s we had Martin Luther King, we had Bobby Kennedy, we had politicians who talked about the future in hopeful and positive ways and since then we've just sort of got into this rut of like incremental politicians that everything should happen in little tiny little steps, you know, and that idea that we can be bold and audacious about these ideas seems to be sort of disappearing. And so for me, what I see happening here in the UK, for example, is that even politicians who are supposed to be on the left have just been pulled to the right and all those same narratives today when we're doing this recording, Keir Starmer, after

Nigel Farage's party did well in local elections, has decided that actually he's going to be more outspoken on immigration than Nigel Farage is, rather than going the other way and going, this is all bullshit and actually why are we talking about immigration? It's a tiny little thing. It's not a big deal. We need to be focusing on this and we need to be focusing on this. So there's that beautiful quote by Rilke who said the future must enter into you a long time before it happens. And I feel like right now if the increasingly far right movements are painting terrifying visions of the future

and saying but we're strong we'll protect you from that and then people look to left more progressive movements and they're all saying oh the future is going to be really terrifying aren't you reading the climate science people have nowhere to go you know so there's a bit at the beginning of the book where where i talk to Peter Kalmas, the climate scientist, because climate scientist's job is to be pointing to the worst-case scenarios and saying, look at this, we need to act, this is really, really terrible. Although increasingly the worst-case scenarios are the scenarios. But actually those lines on the graph that are the sort of, well, we could do that.

No one ever really talks about those so much. What would it be like if we followed the best case scenario graphs, you know? And I spoke, when I spoke to him about that, he said, yeah, he said, well, when I talk about that, it means that we go into what I call emergency mode, which means that we need to phase fossil fuels really quickly, and we need to dismantle industrial meat production really, really quickly. And then we could stay under two degrees. And then we start doing all the things that are the quickly and we need to dismantle industrial meat production really, really quickly. And then we could stay under two degrees and then we start doing all the things that are the natural drawdown of carbon things and then we have a chance. And it's like, yes, exactly.

That's really our only option. But emergency mode is a shit name for it. You know, surely we can do a bit better than that. No one's going to say, hey, yeah, let's go into emergency mode. If it was like, you know, wow, like, I don't know, delicious opportunity transition mode or, wow, this is gonna be amazing mode. I don't know, something like that.

You know, so for me, one of the key arguments of the book is that movements for change need to get much, much, much better at cultivating a longing for the future and talking about the future in a way that generates the longing that makes it inevitable that we can actually do that. And one of the realizations I had there is well actually often those of us who are in these movements aren't necessarily very good at that. Climate scientists are terrible at it, they're brilliant and lots of other things, their

role is not cultivating longing. Often climate activists aren't great at it either. The people in our culture who are brilliant at cultivating longing are poets, street artists, and script writers. And partly the book is a kind of a plea to say, we need you, we need you, and we need to set about a kind of unprecedented cultural act of collective longing creation. Absolutely. Yeah. I never thought of the Martin Luther King. I have a dream speech as part of this like future imagining or time traveling.

Yeah, that's what he does. Yeah. That's what he does. And that's why that still gives people goosebumps 60 something years later, but who's done that since? Not many people. Yeah. And I love that you just mentioned

when people think of the future, they turn towards sci-fi and the AI piece. And in your book, you mentioned a 2018 study at the University of Melbourne that found that when people were asked about their idea of utopia, it led to different social change behaviors, depending on which type of utopia they imagined. So can you tell us a little bit more about that,

this kind of difference between a sci-fi utopia and a green utopia and what they found? Yeah, it was a study by someone called Julian Fernando and his colleagues, and they'd already written a paper that showed that people who were asked to imagine their idea of utopia were then subsequently more likely to engage in social change behavior, which in itself is just fascinating to me. Actually, if you sit people down and say, tell me about the future you long for, you

start to create a new North Star in people. You start to create the desire to make that happen, which in itself for me is a profoundly important thing that when we just talk about collapse and extinction, we negate all of that. But then they did another study which was about, well, actually the kind of future that we ask people to imagine really matters. And they did two. One they called a green utopia, which had many of the aspects and elements that your listeners will be very familiar with. And the other one was a sci-fi utopia. So the sci-fi was one that was all very rooted in science, scientific advancement, technology,

all of this stuff and the other. What they found was that actually the type of future that you imagine has a significant bearing on the motivation that it generates. So the green utopia elicited motivation, behavior change, people wanted to actually make that happen as individuals and collectively they could see that they wanted to make it happen and it wouldn't happen without them.

Whereas the sci-fi future felt like something that other people do, people felt they had no sense of agency over it, it led to much lower motivation. And the authors when they were reflecting on that they wrote, the green utopia is likely to be seen as achievable only by active engagement in social change. So what we're seeing happening now in society is this sort of we're being presented, it's all like AI and Elon Musk is going to go to Mars, I wish he'd hurry up and get on with it. And, you know, all of these things that are being presented are out of our hands and they make people feel less participatory. Whereas two weeks ago I was in Paris, 10 years ago you went to Paris, you saw someone riding

a bicycle, you felt really worried for their mental wellbeing. What are you doing? What do you want to take them home for tea and cake and check they were okay. Now because they've been building this infrastructure over the last 10 years, last year was the first time more journeys were taken by bicycle than by car in the center of Paris. They're building the infrastructure and people are using it. And then it gives people more of a sense of stepping in and taking ownership of that. And so, yeah, so I thought that was really interesting. The idea that the way that we talk about the future and the kinds of future we talk about

have a direct bearing on the level of motivation that people have to actually make that happen. Yeah, and you're making me want to listen back. We did an episode on fully automated luxury communism. And I'm curious where that episode it's probably somewhere in the middle. But definitely. And then I did love this idea that you introduce the idea of stories, or like living today examples can be memories of the future, right? Or they can spark something called future nostalgia. And it's this it also relates to prefigurative politics, right?

Like this idea of like, creating spaces that give us a taste of what's possible on larger scales. And so I'd love to hear what are some stories that what you write, stock the cupboard of your, your hopes and visions for the future. Yeah. I mean, the, the idea with that is that I, I, I interviewed some neuroscientists about it and when we are trying to imagine the future or remember the past, it's pretty much exactly the same process that happens in our brain. It's the same networks that fire because when we're trying to imagine the future, we're

compiling that imagining of the future based on things that we already know about. So if I said, Della, I'm going to take you on holiday to Italy next month, and you'd never ever been to Italy. What happens is that you send a little message, your brain sends a message to your memory and says, send up the file with Italy written on it. And everything you've ever heard or seen about Italy gets presented to you in a file. And then your brain assembles a picture of our imagined holiday then based on what was in that folder, right?

So when we're asking people to imagine a low-carbon more just more equal fair beautiful future If they've just watched GB News or Fox News all day That's really tough because there's nothing they go to the cupboards the cupboards a bear It's why I always say to people, and it's what I try and do in one of the chapters of the book, is you need to surround yourself with stories of what's already happening in the world, because you need to fill those cupboards. In 2015 in France, there was a film called Tomorrow, or Demain as it was called in France, which was this was a kind of a cultural phenomena that's really hard to

imagine now, certainly from the UK, which was a film with this couple who go off around the world looking for solutions to the climate problem because she's just had a baby and she's wondering what kind of future is is is in line for my for my kids. That film showed in mainstream cinemas for six months and was full every night and it was an extraordinary Phenomena and what it did was it filled and I still meet the people who were 16 17 18 when they saw that film Who were now in their mid-20s off working doing different things that that film filled their memory banks up with positive Ideas of things that were possible and we set their direction. So in the book I tell Stories of places I would always I tell stories of places,

I always tell the stories of places I've visited because then I can tell it like I've been to see it. So there's a town in France called Montsartoux where in the schools, the school meals are 100% organic and 80% of them are grown in the town themselves on land owned by the municipality in a market garden. And they've also supported lots of new community gardens throughout the town and what's so fascinating about it is that yes it led to a

transformation of the what the food the kids were eating in school for the same price that is paid for school meals by the government across the country because in this new system they produce 75 percent less food waste and eat 50% less meat and that means they can come in at the same price. But it led to all kinds of changes now where in the town people eat less meat, they eat less processed food, they eat more organic food, more local food. It's like that institution taking that bold step led to a bigger shift across society. I talk about going to visit places,

landscapes that are being rewilded by beavers, and how extraordinary that is and what they do and how they're far better hydrological engineers than human beings could ever possibly be. I talk about going to Utrecht to see the bicycle rush hour in Utrecht, where 40,000 bicycles cycling to the centre of Utrecht every morning because they built the infrastructure and people use it. Because the Dutch government's thinking is for every half a billion euros we spend every year building really kick-ass cycling infrastructure across Holland, we know that we are saving

19 billion euros off the National Health Bill. So it's not an expense, it's an investment in wellbeing and in different futures. So I look at all sorts of things like that, you know, that for me, when I think about what are the cities of the future going to be like, they're going to have the super blocks of Barcelona, the food infrastructure of Liège, the car-free neighborhoods of Freiburg, the urban forestry of Barcelona, you know, it's like we're not waiting for someone to invent something. If you want to find those stories, they're there. If you want to get a taste of what the future could be like, go to Utrecht, sit by the train station at eight o'clock in the morning, go to the Waalban in Freiburg in Germany, the

biggest car free neighborhood in Europe, 3000 people, no cars. And it sounds completely acoustically different from anything we're used to because there's no background growl of cars. And it's just incredible. So was it William Gibson, the science fiction writer said the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. So if we want to do one thing that boosts our imaginations, superpowers in these times, feed it with stories, stock the cupboards of your memory with stories of possibility. Yeah.

And as you're inviting us, look for those spaces where we can have this nostalgia for the future, wherever you are in the world. And even if you can't think of any that exists kind of in more a permanent form, I also love the city of like pop-up futurism. There was one example that I think you've shown of a place where people will bring in trees to fill like a block, just to let folks feel for a moment, what a more dense urban forest would look and feel like in their town or even

rendition even a drawing of it can be inspiring. Yeah in fact well I think you might be referring to the story of in 2019, April 2019, the first extinction rebellion where they occupied Waterloo Bridge and for eight days they they held Waterloo, which is normally just thundering traffic, and they turned it into a forest. They brought 49 big trees in pots onto that bridge. And for eight days, people who crossed that bridge every day going backwards and forwards from work, stopped on that bridge full of people and laughter

and children and trees and were able to go, why can't it always be like this? And I tell that story in my talks. And so far I've met five people who said, I had that experience, I lived near there, I stopped on that bridge, I had that experience. And as a result of that experience, I gave up my job and I now work in climate change and sustainability stuff.

Because it gave me that sense of, but why can't it be like that? You know, and I call that, as you said, a pop-up tomorrow. And I think that there's a real power in creating pop-up tomorrow's sort of lived multi-sensory experience of how the future could be. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Rob Hopkins. We'll be right back. Yeah. Cheers. Yeah. Cheers. Yeah. Cheers. Yeah. Cheers.

Yeah. Cheers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So The CCoSp4 3.50 So The The I'm going to go to the I'm sorry. The That was the track, A Car-Free Neighborhood by Mr. Kit and Rob Hopkins, part of the field recordings from the Future Project that we'll talk more about shortly. Now, back to our conversation with Rob Hopkins. You know, going back to that t-shirt that you saw in the Black Lives Matter protest, I've been to the future and we won. One thing I love that you do in the book

is you kind of unpack who is the we and what does it mean to have won? You know, because I, one thing I think about is in the visioning, in the practices of visioning the future, they can feel quite individual. Like I have done this practice of imagining a post-capitalist future. Like what would that look and feel like? What would it taste like? Like what would it, what would I be doing? What would, what would work be like, et cetera. But then when we bring that as Dom Helder Comera said, like to the collective visioning, how do we negotiate, you know, power, privilege,

like differing views, like, what does it mean to have one who is the we? So can you just talk a little bit about that? Like there's the visioning and then there's the collectivity, the solidarity, the horizontal governance as we head towards this actualization of our visions. Yeah, sure. I mean, it's an interesting expression because of course, if we saw Steve Bannon striding down the road towards us with a banner with I've been to the future, we won on it, it would be really profoundly disturbing.

And, you know, I've when I was at a festival where I was speaking and I have this like big banner that says I've been to the future, we won. And I will pass to all these young guys. And one of them said he related it to being a supporter of Aston Villa, which is a football team here, is like, oh, did we win? Oh, yeah, you know, it's like, oh, you've been to the future. What did we win? You know, I think for me, it's like,

the kind of activity that you talk about, where I asked people to close their eyes, and I tell people, we've built a time machine. It's not this. It's amazing. It's really powerful. The kind of theatrical element to it that I bring along this thing, which is my time machine. And, you know, I love the bit in the book that talks about how, before HG Wells wrote the book, The Time Machine, the idea that you could intentionally choose to go backwards and forwards in time to different

places had never occurred to anybody, not to Shakespeare, not to Jules Verne, not to anybody had ever thought of this. And as soon as H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine, everybody just went, oh, yeah, he's got a time machine. And so now in any sort of stories of books, you just say, oh, they've got a time machine and everyone goes, great, where are we going? You know, in the book that they talk about, there's someone who talks about it as being like sprinkling pixie dust. If you say we've got a time machine, it's just like, okay, where are we going? So when I do that activity, and I've done that now with thousands of people,

from one and a half thousand people in the hall in in Belgium to like 10 people in the workshop. What's so fascinating to me is how similar the responses are. You know, no one ever says, oh, we've got a new IKEA that's five times bigger or we've got this amazing AI and everything's run by robots, which is the predominant narrative that Silicon Valley tells us that that's what the future should be. Actually what people say is, it's quieter, I can hear the birdsong, the air smells really nice, the streets are full of children playing, people look much less stressed, people are doing work that's really meaningful to them, there's none of the precariousness, the extremes of rich and poor have gone. And you might say well of course because that's people who

are choosing to go to a Hopkins' talk, right? But actually quite often, people who go to Rob Hopkins' talk bring at least one or two belligerent relatives who think, who is this guy? And recently I was reading a paper by Elise Bolding, who was a peace activist in the 1990s, who wrote some really fascinating papers where she did pretty much exactly the same exercise in prisons in the United States. And she reported pretty much exactly the same thing. And her hypothesis was that at any point you went back to in human history you would get something very similar. And

her reflection on doing that was maybe we have many more allies for the work ahead than we thought we might have. You know, because what for me that activity does is it bypasses a culture that sells us dopamine and pleasure and short-term things and it gets us into a future that is about happiness and contentment. So when I do that exercise for me the we is the fact that we have so much more in common than we thought we did. And we're living in a time where social media just polarizes everybody down. And what I find with that activity is it kind of pulls people back together again.

Oh yeah, that's the stuff that we care about. And it doesn't really matter where you are, you know. So maybe, but if we start there and we start designing movements and policies around how do we get there, then maybe we find a different way. And so for me as well, the term winning is kind of interesting, like in a climate context, because it's not it's not something that we win. It's something that we don't lose. It's like every single fraction of a degree that we don't go down is a victory. The closer we can keep it, the warming to where we are now, and then start to draw it down. So that's what winning looks like, but it's winning over a very long period of time. But in a climate sense, it's about not losing. Yeah. Yeah.

Wow. Time travel as a, as a unifying offering. That's, that's really powerful. And especially cause I can definitely hear that sometimes when I'll talk to people on the quote unquote opposing side, it's really the understanding of why we're in the challenges that we're in. Like what are the root causes or the predicament that we're in that that's, that's the mismatch. But it's not necessarily on the vision or the values, right? Like we all want belonging, community, care, thriving, wellness, happiness,

but it's like, who's to blame or what is causing the challenges that we're in. And of course, that is really polarized and stigmatized. Right? So that's a very interesting point. And so we've been talking about this time traveling, but I'd love for you to dive deeper into the methodologies of this. So in the book, you clearly offer several methodologies

and ways that you've invited this and particularly at the end of the book. But so yeah, why the time span of five to 10 years? You talk about 2030 a lot, so why that particular timeframe? And then, you know, what are the ways that you invite people into time travel? And one of the things you bring in is the senses.

So talk a little bit about that. So just talk about the methodologies and what you gathered and learned and some inspiring ways that you can cultivate this. And if you can, maybe give us a little taste of how we might start down that road of time travel. Well, the reason that I talk about 2030 is not because I'm somehow expecting everything to be done and sorted out by 2030. It's only five years away right? But the best and only hope that we have at this stage for a concerted global push on climate is the Paris Agreement signed in 2015. The Paris Agreement says that by 2030 we need to have cut emissions 48 percent, that we have to get

through that target in order to have any chance of getting to zero by 2050, which is already not an ambitious enough target in terms of climate. So missing those targets of 2030 and that 48% cut is fundamentally important. And every year it ticks on when I started doing the podcast, it was 2021. That seemed like quite a long way away. So the temptation is to go, oh, well, let's just push it out to 2035. Let's just push it out to 2040.

The point is, I'm not here to negotiate or haggle with physics. That is the target that has to remain the target. So the fact that is getting closer really should just be kind of accelerating our focus and our intention. So that's why I keep talking about 2030 because I'm not going to just go, oh, well, never mind, let's find another target. That's the target, right?

So for me, what fascinates me most isn't necessarily what 2050 would be like, and we've achieved a net zero carbon society. What interests me much, much more is what it would be like if we were halfway there. And you could start to see things around us changing. It's not like it's gonna be like Buck Rogers or like Star Trek and everything's gonna be changed. It's gonna look like it looks now,

but there will be some really fundamental changes. You know, there'll be a lot more, our cities will be a lot greener, a lot less hard surfaces, a lot more urban greenery and nature and food production, a lot less cars will be starting to see the improvements in air quality, the knock on benefits in terms of mental health, the economy shifting towards work that's more like the book starts with the introduction is a walk through a day in that world when me and Mr. Kitt, my companion of time traveling arrive into that future. What do we see? How is it? And so that's why I keep focusing on 2030 because it kind of feels non-negotiable to me. mean. And in the book, what I do in the last chapter, you know, there's some people do work like this, and they're very proprietary about their ideas and their intellectual property, right? I kind of feel like, well, I might get run over by a bus tomorrow, and then all that work would go with me. And I'd much rather just get it out and invite people to do it. Because what I

feel like we need to see now is a, like a positive futurist movement around the world and people opening time portals all over the place and bringing time travel as a practice rooted that runs through our activism. And so I share a lot of the tools there. And one of the people I interview in the book is called Wasim Alabich, who is an activist in Berlin who does work around Muslim futures. She has a lot of work with the Muslim community that she's part of in Berlin who are experiencing increasing levels of racism and sort of state rejection and hostility. And she does this work around futures with Muslim people. She wrote an article in which she coined this term

sensual futuring, which is just gorgeous. Like if it's just all about intellectual ideas in our head, it's not so good. If we really want the future to enter into us, to get into our bones, then we need to work with all of our senses. What does that future smell like? What would it taste like?

What does it sound like? So I do a project called Field Recordings from the Future, which I'll talk a little bit more about later, I think, which is where I go to visit places that already sound like the future needs to sound like, and I gather sound recordings there so I can play them to people. This is what I've been to the future.

This is what it sounded like. I do an exercise after I've asked people to close their eyes, come with me in my time machine, travel them to 2030, take a walk around, come back, capture that in some way, draw it, make a model of it, tell a story about it. However, I do an activity called making sense of the future but sense as in S-C-E-N-T-S where I give them a cup and I ask them to go outside they can go to the garden, the forest, wherever they want to go to the kitchen, they go to the shops, wherever they want to go but I want them to make in that cup a cocktail of smells that smells like the future that they long for and it has to have a name because all good cocktails have good names right so then they go off they come back and

in which time I rearrange the room like it's a party in an apartment I put some music on I say you're invited to the most exclusive cocktail party in this in this town and get around and meet as meet as many people don't have a five-minute conversation with one person about their cocktail you want to get around work the room you want to get and run smell as many people, don't have a five minute conversation with one person about their cocktail. You want to get around, work the room. You want to get around and smell as many of these as possible. After about 15 minutes, you've smelled like 30 or 40 different smells of the future. You've heard their name. Something starts to get into your bones, like it starts to get into your DNA somehow. And there's a story I tell in the book about how I was on a podcast with a guy called Michael Datura

who is a head teacher at a school on an island in British Columbia. And we were talking about imagination and I was talking about time travel and building time machines. And a year later, he got in touch and he said, Rob, after that, I went back to my school and I got the oldest year of students in the school. We redesigned their whole year curriculum.

So they did everything from the perspective of we are now in 2040. So it wasn't like, what should this island be like in the future? It was like, right, you're in 2040. What's it like? What are you eating? What do you see?

What do you hear? And then for the last day of term, they took over the biggest hall in the town. They built like a time portal that you walked through to get in to the rest of the hall. And once you were in, they had artwork from the future. They had leaflets they designed for all the organizations that had got them through that transition, which was really interesting. They had food from the future and explaining why what had the transition that had happened in the food kind of world. So this idea that we make it multi-sensory feels like something we're only just starting to scratch the surface

of. You know, how do we really, what I'm trying to do when I run workshops is give people an experience where at the end they can say, when I was in the future with that sort of sense of excitement and longing and I need to tell you about that and the more we can bring in different senses, what does the future feel like? Can we do something like that? You know, because in terms of smell, human beings can remember 10,000 smells and attach memories and emotion to each of those. And so going back to what I was saying before about the need to create memories of the future, if you give people an experience with other people

where they laugh and they cry and they smell amazing things, and then it means that they're creating a memory which they're attaching emotions to, which is attached to all the different senses. So next time they have to imagine the future and they go to their memory, they have this sort of sparkly bright thing that they associate good emotions with. And that's why all those different things are important, I think. Yeah. So an invitation for all of us to contemplate, what would, what is the future that you long for smell like to you and to take that cup and go create that scent and maybe have

it somewhere in your home or just give yourself that memory of the future. And share it with people. Yeah, and share it with people. And I also, I love that there's that diversity, right? That it is this plurality and yet I'm sure that you find a lot of fresh plants and some commonalities, I'm sure. Some coffee. Yes, definitely. So one thing that I'm thinking about right now

is in the US, the Trump administration and US politics is so disruptive. There's so much chaos. And as I was reading your book, one thing that I was thinking about is, is it possible that we can rethink what's happening as, what's happening with the Trump administration is changing our views of what is possible.

Like it's actually inviting us to be more imaginative and more able to do this time traveling. For example, that the US post office could be privatized or that we might not have social security or just like dramatic cuts to people's jobs or even departments overnight. Like just the quickness and the intensity and the severity of things that we may have held to be true forever, right? Or to be guaranteed. Could we also see what's possible to change on the other side, the quote unquote other side? So I'm just curious about what you think about how this time might be

changing the views of what's possible. Well, I think he might also be bringing about a degrowth economy far quicker than any of us who've been working on it for ages could have actually managed. I think, like I said before, we've had this sort of political consensus that change can only happen in little tiny little incremental steps, tweaking a tax code here and changing a policy there. And I think what this has done, kind of in the same way that COVID did really, you know, that there was this idea, well, you know, we can't act quickly on climate change because, you know, it's too expensive and it's too complicated.

Well, then all of a sudden, in COVID, we had scientists sitting down with governments and saying this is an emergency, you need to act really quickly. And the government said, don't worry about the cost, we'll find the cost. And we all of a sudden we were paying people not to go to work, and businesses were completely repurposing what they were doing. And it all happened very, very quickly. And then we went back again to this thing that change can't really happen, you know, like, and when we started the transition movement,

2007, 2006, 2007, when I wrote the transition handbook in 2008, that said, basically, we need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels very quickly and build more local resilient economies. And people said, oh, Rob, that's very naive. Well, it's very naive. We can't afford to do that and so on. What happened then actually was that

the European Union then spent the years between then and now, well between then and about a year and a half ago, two years ago, sending Russia 18 billion euros every month for natural gas, allowing Russia to arm itself to the teeth. And then now when the Trump administration pulls back from its involvement in Ukraine, the European Union is saying, well, we need to get together 800 billion euros to rearm Europe. It's like, well, I thought you didn't have any money. Where's that come from? You know, who's the naive people here all of a sudden? You know, so I think you're right. It's like what Trump shows is that that idea that we can only move slowly was completely just a

thing that people brought into because it made their life easier. And we need to have the political movements on the left to understand this, willing to talk with that same level of ambition, although underpinned by compassion and kindness and inclusion and not belittling and humiliating people and etc etc. Like a good version of that I think is easier to imagine now. Yes, of course, why do we give so much money to that? Why do we, you know, of course, yeah. And so that if there is any upside to the carnage that is being created by the psychotic

monster and all the people around him, It is, yes, of course we could move a lot faster and with a lot more purpose if we decided to. So I know part of what you're working on to help us fall in love with the future is recording field recordings for the future, which we just heard in our intermission track. So tell us a little bit more about that project. Yeah. So field recordings from the future is, is a project that I'm really, really excited about and it's kind of for me, the, the, the kind of culmination of a lot of this work, which is that during the first lockdown, I was listening to

a lot of ambient music because I can listen to it and work if there's a beat or lyrics, my mind goes all over the place. This whole genre of kind of ambient music is really fascinating. And some of them, those people use field recordings. There's a guy in Norway called Biosphere, makes beautiful ambient music using field recordings from within the Arctic Circle. And there was one piece of music by an artist called Mr. Kit that I heard that I just loved, used field recordings to give this sense of community and connection and people watching a fireworks display and awe and it was really beautiful. And I thought, well, I'd love to do a project

one day where we make ambient music, but the field recordings come from the future, the kind of future that we've been talking about in this podcast. But if I did it, I'd love to do it with that Mr. Kit guy, but I'll bet he's like impossibly cool and lives in LA or Berlin and doesn't answer emails. And I reached out to him and he lived in Totnes. He lived in my town. I was like okay this is strange. So we met and had a coffee and I said look I've got this idea and he loved it and so I started going around visiting different places that already sound like the future needs to sound like and making field recordings there as if I was a kind of anthropologist. And I visited regenerative farms, landscapes being rewilded by beavers, bicycle rush hours, car free neighborhoods, underground mushroom farms.

And I made recordings there. And then he built these beautiful pieces of music with these in. And then afterwards I went back to those places and filmed video in each place. And then my son edited these very impressionistic dreamy video things that go with them. So this week as we're recording we've just launched a crowd funder, there's like gonna there's 500 vinyl copies of field recordings from the future which is the most exciting thing in my entire life which are available initially only through the

crowd funder and when they're gone, they're gone. And I'll give you a link, we'll put a link to that in this. But what we've been developing in parallel to that and why the crowd funder is to raise money to help us roll out this live show that we've done, which is a field recording from the Future Time portal, where we build this structure, which is lined with this fabric that you project onto it,

and it just comes alive in this incredible way and we did the first performance of it last month and we take people into the space we take them through time to the future we take them to walk around all these different places and it's just an incredible awesome thing and our dream is that it becomes almost like you know those sort of immersive touring Van Gogh projection shows, but it's like that, but they're all around the world,

people opening time portals and adding their own field recordings from the future to it as it goes along. So there is a website if people want to find out more, which is fieldrecordingsfromthefuture.co.uk, and you'll find stuff on there about that. Yeah, for me it's one of the most exciting things I've been involved with and because you're in a space where it's all around you, you're having to look up and there's something

about looking up. It's why we feel awe in Redwood Forest, it's why we feel awe in cathedrals, It's why we feel awe in redwood forest. It's why we feel awe in cathedrals But I'm I think that's when you look up it triggers some sort of awe hormone or something is released Into our system and uh, yeah, so look out for field recordings from the future It's it's it's one of my favorite things i've ever been part of Wonderful. Thank you. I love the way you weave art and activism. It's very inspiring. Yeah, well, it's something, you know, part of it is because I can't help thinking, you know, I'm 57 this year, and I've been doing this sort of work around permaculture and transition and new economies like for what, 30 years or something and it hasn't worked and like we're slipping backwards very rapidly and so there's a part of me that thinks, well I've managed to get to a position where it's not my full time work because now I go and I do talks and that supports my family and

gives me some free time to be creative in, which hasn't been the case for a while. And so I don't know what's going to work. We know all the things that don't work, but maybe building time machines will work, maybe collecting field recordings from the future. I'm working with an amazing Belgian cartoonist to make a comic book about field recordings from the future, about us traveling, building a time machine, going into the future, gathering these field recordings together. And I think, well, you know, part of the reason why Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have these ludicrous space delusions is because they grew up reading comic books about people going to space.

Well, maybe what we need now is a comic book about beavers and mushroom farms. And, you know, it's all worth trying. I don't know, maybe none of this is going to work and it's all completely mad, but it feels definitely worth trying to me and it feels really enriching as a form of activism. And if anything as well, you just seem really enlivened as you share about it, right? So that lightness of being and that enthusiasm is contagious. So thank you. That's the infectious bit that I think

collapsology doesn't quite communicate. So to come to a close, we always end with closing invitations for our listeners and a few that I read in the book and that I'm also sensing. One of them, I really hear what you said about bringing in people who are good at that imagination space. So the poets, the artists, the musicians,

bringing them in and authors, right? Novels, like that too. So bringing them into the movements, also inviting activists to be time travelers. I really got that too, to actually envision and not just activists in the classic sense, but also organizations, right? Like, what would it be like if our organization won?

Or what would the radical, what's the radical future that we're working towards as a movement space or an organization? Also, this two phrases that stood out to me, one was from impossible to not yet. So instead of saying, no, that's impossible, saying, well, not yet, but to entertain that possibility, even just for a moment. And then I also love improv and you brought up improv in your book. And so that idea of going, yeah, but to yes, and I love that like yes, and, and

then like feeding off of each other's enthusiasm and excitement and imagination. I love that invitation. And then to lead practices of time travel. And I really got that in the methodology section of your book. It really reminded me of Joanna Macy's work and the work that reconnects where she really makes her practices of the moral imagination open source and really invites us to bring them in.

And so thank you for all those ways that you invite us to do that time travel, including the sense of the future or to actually imagine that you're in a time machine and it's taking you to 2030 and it's a future where we've won. And then this other idea that you brought up of not just that we need to be in a time machine and it's taking you to 2030, and it's a future where we've won. And then this other idea that you brought up of not just that we need to be in a state of emergency to quote unquote win or to be in this future, but to imagine a future where we embrace the challenges that the climate crisis presents

with the passion and enthusiasm, right? So it's like the opportunity, so moving from emergency to opportunity. So yeah, how would you close with the closing invitations for our listeners? What invitations do you have as we go forth? I think one thing is there is a posture in the book that I identified with people who do work around time travel who inspire me the most. So whether that's Rashida Phillips, Black Quantum Futurism, Sun Ra, there's a lovely quote by a guy called William Seitz who wrote a biography of Sun Ra who said that

who so Sun Ra for those people who don't know, was this extraordinary jazz artist who in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, who told a story about himself that he wasn't actually a human being, he was actually an angel from Saturn and with his band they traveled through space. Space is the place, space is the place, space is the place, yeah, space is the place. And all of his band wore these, like it wasn't like just something they did to go on stage, they all lived together in a house and they all dressed like that all the time, even if they went down to the corner shop to buy a pint of milk. It's what William Seitz described as being everyday utopians, which I just loved. And there's a quote where he said that Sun Ra did what he did with both unshakable certainty

and deadpan humor. And I love that. And I see that in the work of Black Quantum Futurism. They're like, yeah, of course we can travel through time. Of course we can make time run backwards. And there's a, what I was trying to kind of capture in the book is there's like a, there's like a posture, a time travelers posture. So when I do my things and I tell people, we built a time machine in Totnes, it's incredibly powerful. And I bought my time machine and it means means I can turn this room into a time machine and I'm going to take you forward in time. It's not a joke. It's not like played for

a laugh. It's like entirely serious. I'm going to take you through time and there's something that really I love the kind of the kind of internal logical integrity of that somehow, which you see with Sun Ra, and I love that. And I think the other thing is, yeah, I would say to people, fill your memory up with stories. That's really, really important. And in the afterword or the postscript of the book, I talk about a novel that I loved when I was about 18 by Angela Carter called The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman, which is this extraordinary, mad, psychedelic novel about this man called Dr. Hoffman, who's this evil genius who is at war with this city somewhere in South America. And he's built this ray gun gun which he fires at this city and it's his

desire machine and what it does is it makes everybody's dreams and desires become reality so you're walking down the street and the lamp posts will turn into flowers and then they'll turn into laughing monks and then they'll run away and it's like everything is like the whole city is kind of on acid and everything's just completely crazy and in in the book, the story is that the president of the city sends the hero off to go and find Dr. Hoffman and turn the machine off. But in the last bit of the book, I talk about, well, what if actually his brief was to build a more powerful desire machine? You know, we're living in a time where the Trump administration has

built a very, very powerful desire machine. And every day you don't know what's going on. What's hanging on? Who's there? He's doing a Nazi salute now. What's going on? And what's this? And how come? And everything, we're all just bewildered and at sea and everything's moving so fast. And I think what we need to be getting much, much better at is building other desire machines and focusing in that kind of a way to really bring those dreams alive. Like in the same way that in that book, you walk down the street and something would turn into something else.

If we can start to work with actors, playwrights, designers, artists, we can create these interventions where we create pop-up tomorrows in the streets, where we bring the future through into people's everyday lives, we give people an experience that's kind of magical and theatrical. Fascism isn't very good at coping with that, it's not what it expects of us, it's very good at sort of dealing with if we go and block a street somewhere, taking people off and sticking them in prison for two years, it's not so good at stopping people dressed as time travelers striding around the street giving out holiday

brochures for the holidays of 2030 or something, do you know what I mean? So that's the seed that I want to sow is what does activism look like if it's a positive futurist movement which is about dreams and stories that are rooted in possibility and that we have that deadpan uncertainty humor that Sun Ra had and we can carry it off with that. That's the bit that really I'm intensely curious as this book starts to land in people's laps, how that touches people. You've been listening to an Upstream Conversation with Rob Hopkins, co-founder of Transition Network and of Transition Town taught Ness, and author of several books including the Transition Handbook, From What Is to What If, and most

recently How to Fall in Love with the Future, a Time Traveler's Guide to Changing the World. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Rob Hopkins and Mr. Kitt for the intermission music. The cover art for today's episode is from Rob Hopkins' book and was designed by Linocut master Aga Kubis. Upstream theme music was composed by me, Robbie. Upstream is almost entirely listener funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways in which you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bi-weekly episodes

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