In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods, to the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible, and we know that if we all work together, there is time to lay the foundations for that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your host and your fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And that is exactly what we’re doing this week, journeying forward into the possibility of a different future. Because this week’s guest, Rob Hopkins, is a time traveller. Rob is a friend of the podcast, and really, if you’re in this world, he doesn’t need much of an introduction. He’s the co-founder of the Transition Network and of Transition Town Totnes. He’s host of the amazing podcast From What If to What Next? He stars in the groundbreaking French film Demain Speaks at Tedglobal and TEDx events. And as you’ll hear most recently, he has created a collaborative music project with the artist Mr. Kitt called Field Recordings from the Future, which will be released on the 17th of May 2025, alongside his new book, How to Fall in Love With the Future. Subtitled A Time Traveller’s Guide to Changing the World, this book does what it says on the tin; it offers a radical, moving, deeply inspiring dive into the people and movements throughout history who have used visions of the future to inspire positive change on a large and dramatic scale.

Manda: From the Life and Writings of the musician Sun Ra and the history of the black Utopian movements, to the latest neuroscience on what goes on in our minds and our hearts when we choose to travel through time, Rob brings essential new thinking to anyone who is overwhelmed with dread and anxiety about what the future is offering to us. He asks us to consider what would the world look like if we all got to work imagining and then building a world we were deeply in love with? And so this is our invitation to you now: listen to Rob talking about his book, how he came to it and where it took him. Then go on and read the book, because truly, we only hit the very tip of the iceberg in this. And then explore what a genuinely flourishing future would feel like for you. Then let’s get to work making this happen, because this is urgent now, people. And we can still do this. So here we go. In this bonus podcast coming out for the launch of Rob’s new book, please welcome Rob Hopkins, author of How to Fall in Love with the Future and so much more.

 Manda: Rob Hopkins, very good friend of the podcast; welcome back to Accidental Gods. How are you and where are you this beautiful summer’s day?

 Rob: Well, what a delight to be back here in these hallowed halls. Normally I would say I’m in Totnes in Devon, but I’m actually speaking to you from my son’s flat in Peckham in London, where we’ve come up for a couple of days because we’re going to a gig tonight in London. So yeah, a bit of a change of scene.

 Manda: It’s amazing, isn’t it? A gig tonight in London would be quite close to my idea of unadulterated hell, every single word of that. But you love it, and that’s great. I’m so happy. You have just had a very taxing, I would imagine, but probably quite exciting few weeks. You’ve been, as far as I can tell, to Luxembourg, to the Hay Festival, to Hawkwood, which is for people outside the UK, a really beautiful community that runs quite big courses, where you all get to go and live together for an amount of time. And now you’re in London. So you got a book that is coming out on…

 Rob: 17th of June.

 Manda: 17th of June, which will be a Tuesday, and it’s called everybody on YouTube you can see that this is glorious and I have read it lots. This is a pre-production version, so the production version will look slightly different. It’s called How to Fall in Love with the Future; A Time Traveller’s Guide to Changing the World. And this is exactly what we need. You are imagining different futures, and you are finding all the other people who are also imagining different futures. So with all that you’ve been doing recently, up to the launch of this book, what leaps out what’s most alive for you at the moment, except the gig tonight. I don’t want to talk about that.

 Rob: Well, yeah, it’s always lovely to see a copy of a book that you’ve written that someone has, with all, like, tabs down the side and really well scribbled notes. It’s kind of why I do this stuff, really. I’m kind of that generation that grew up just after punk, where school was so rubbish that we kind of had to educate ourselves. So all of that fanzine culture and every record you’d get to the end of, you had a list of like five books you needed to go off and read. And I still kind of try and embody that culture in the books that I do. So hopefully by the time you get to the end, you’ve got lots of things to read and to check out and explore. So this book has, I guess it’s a few months since I finished it…

 Manda: You were finishing it when we were talking in March, and I’m very impressed with your publisher that you were finishing it, and it came out in June. That’s a very tight publication schedule.

 Rob: Yeah. Well, I mean, for me, a book is always like a process. It’s never quite finished, you know. So even on the last day, I’m still like, oh, I’ve just heard this, can we get this story? And they’re like, no Rob.

 Manda: Yeah. And your editor’s No. That’s the next book. Save it.

 Rob: Okay. Cut off, cut off. Enough now. So that’s a good discipline. So the book is, I guess, just to say a little bit about where it came from. After I’d written ‘From What Is To What If?’, that was about the radical imagination and why climate change demands that we reimagine everything and why we get so stuck; I saw a t shirt a young woman was wearing on a Black Lives Matter protest in Washington, and it said, ‘I’ve been to the future. We won’. And it gave me complete goosebumps. It was like nothing I’d seen for a while. I was like, oh, wow. It was just a real kind of head shift somehow. And it was a couple of weeks before the Extinction Rebellion event that was called the Big One in London. And they asked me to go up and speak. And it got me thinking about, well, I could just go up and do my usual ‘Hello, I’m Rob, I’m from the transition movement and this is what transition towns are doing and we need to be more imaginative. And this is what the future should be like’.

 Manda: You make that sound really boring when actually it’s really exciting. But still, it was what you’d been doing a lot and could probably do without engaging your head. Yes.

 Rob: Exactly. And then I thought, what would it be like if I gave the talk as a time traveller who had just come back from the 2030 that resulted from us doing everything we needed to do, and we have actually made it, it had been a successful transition. And it was incredible. And I was like sort of Marco Polo with some amazing narrative coming back and going, oh my God. So I thought, well, what’s a Time Traveller going to look like? So I went to the local hardware shop and bought like a hazmat suit, and I had this little patch embroidered where you’d normally have the NASA patch on a spacesuit, which is like Ed Hawkins Climate Stripes; but Ed Hawkins Climate Stripes that then just sort of start getting cooler again. And I thought normally you look at the climate stripes and that is not an image that cultivates longing. That’s a culture that cultivates terror. I’m like, how could we turn that into an image that cultivates longing for us doing something about it? So we had that. And then online I ordered a cosplay space helmet and then I headed up to London.

 Rob: And then I stood on this kind of soapbox little platform thing and then I did this talk for about ten minutes, that was like I’ve just come back from the 2030 that resulted from us doing the right things and oh my God, you wait, you’re going to love it! The bicycle rush hours, oh, it’s like this sort of river of bicycles and people told me about the hangovers they still have from the parties that celebrated the collapse of BP and shell in 2028. And there was this and there was that. There was urban agriculture everywhere. And there was this moment about seven minutes into this talk, Manda, where I said something like, you know, just telling you about it, having been there, just telling you about it, I feel really emotional. And I looked round at the people who were around me and there were tears on people’s faces, you know?

 Manda: Wow.

 Rob: And I thought, this is really interesting. Like what’s happening here? Really the spark of this book was like, what’s happening here? And then a couple of days later I was invited to Bristol to Ashton Gate Football stadium, to give a talk for an organisation called the British Association for Sustainability in Sport. So it was people from Premier League football clubs and the British Yachting Association, all sorts of people. And I did the same thing. Oh, I’ve just come back and da da da da. And the first question, this woman put her hand up and she said, Rob, Rob, when you were in 2030, were there lots of repair cafes there?

 Manda: Yes!

 Rob: And I said, well before I answer your question, I just want to say I love that you have suspended disbelief to the point where it’s as if I’ve said, oh, I’ve just been in Paris last week and you said, oh, Rob, can you recommend a good cafe? It’s like there’s something about it. And when I was doing the research about time travel and time machines, one of the things that really was fascinating to me was that until H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine in 1896, or whenever it was, the idea that you could create something that would allow you to intentionally travel backwards and forwards through time, to moments of your choosing had never occurred to anybody.

 Manda: That we know of in our culture.

 Rob: In our culture, yeah, exactly. There were books about people falling asleep and waking up in the future. But as soon as he wrote The Time Machine.

 Manda: It was a thing. Yeah.

 Rob: It’s like, yeah, of course. And so there’s something beautiful about that. And I read a book by James Gleick about time travel where he said, talking about time travel, it’s like you sprinkle pixie dust. You know, if I say this paintbrush is a time machine, you probably aren’t going to go ‘Rob, can you explain the quantum dynamics of exactly how that works?’

 Manda: No. I go, oh yes, and I want to go to.. Yes, yes, past? Forward? Yeah, yeah.

 Rob: Most people go, where are we going? Where are we going? And that’s kind of the magic of it. So one of the questions of the book is what would our activism look like if we acted as if time travel was possible? That’s kind of where I start from.

 Manda: Beautiful. It’s so glorious. And I have to say, Rob, I think a lot of people could have done this and they would not have given it the infectious enthusiasm that you bring. And there is something about your capacity to step into this and make it real that engages the people around you. So I really want to honour that and to honour the clarity of the book, because you talk about memories of the future and you have looked at the cognitive neuroscience, and we are going to talk, people, about exciting memories of the future that Rob has brought back from his time travel. But I want to look at the fact that if we imagine things and we imagine them in 3D and colour and sight and sound, and we can smell the bicycle rush hour and hear the amazing birdsong and see that the insects are back and taste the air that’s not full of diesel fumes and is instead full of other new scents. Our brain does not differentiate fact from fiction. I think this is really important: our brain doesn’t differentiate fact from fiction at all. And so when others of our writing colleagues are busy writing their dystopic survival, small group of plucky humans survives the inevitable apocalypse narratives, and they do it with the best of intentions. They really believe that if they write that, everybody will realise how bad it’s going to be and they will change their behaviour. And first of all, they don’t give people an option of how to change their behaviour, so they can’t. And it locks yet another layer of things are going to be terribly bad into our brains that do not differentiate between fact and fiction. So this is why you and I are working on Thrutopian things that not only create visions of a future, but show us how we can get there in ways that our brains can step through and that feels real. So talk to us a little bit about your explorations into cognitive neuroscience, because you have more depth and granularity than that in the book.

 Rob: Yeah. Thank you. So I spoke to quite a few different neuroscientists as I was doing that. Like, I’m not a neuroscientist, so when I’m doing that research, I’m very much coming at it from the same place that the readers are coming from, I think, you know. And what’s fascinating to me is if we are imagining the future or if we are remembering the past, it’s exactly the same processes that happen in our brain. Because when you’re imagining the future, you’re basically going to the sort of cupboards of your memory and looking through them for useful bits. And then when you assemble them in a kind of new and unique way, that’s the imagination bit. So Manda if you’ve never been to Italy before and I said, Manda, I’m taking you on holiday to Italy next week, what happens is your brain sends a message down to your memory and says, send us up the file with Italy written on it. And everything you’d ever heard or seen about Italy comes up in that file and from that, your brain assembles a picture of gondolas and mopeds and pizza and whatever it is, you know. So if you’re trying to imagine the future and you just watch GB news all day and you’re trying to imagine a low carbon, more socially just, equal, beautiful future, it’s really hard.

 Manda: You don’t have the bits. Your jigsaw is missing a lot of the pieces.

 Rob: The cupboards are empty, there’s nothing there. And I feel like at the moment so many people are going to their cupboards. It’s part of the reason why people get so stuck, because they go to their cupboards and there’s nothing there. Because all the stories that I share in the book, all the stories that I share on all the different things I’ve done for years in previous books and blogs and places I’ve been to visit where this stuff is all already happening and flourishing.

 Manda: Your entire podcast.

 Rob: Exactly. That was what the podcast was about. Yeah, exactly. People just don’t know those stories. And that was why in France there was that film tomorrow that came out in 2015, Cyril Dion’s film, which was like a two hour film of just solutions, right? Food, energy, economics, whatever. There’s a whole generation of young people grew up with that film. They call them now in France Generation Demain, who grew up with that film and it kind of gave them a new North star of where to go. So I see how important it is that people have those stories, because then what happens is that you’re creating memories of the future. So what I try and do when I run workshops, like the one I did at Hawkwood last weekend, is to invite people to imagine the future, that’s one thing. So you’re using your kind of visualising imagination to do that. If you then add in sound and you can play people recordings, like the field recordings from the future project I’ve been doing; Actually, I’ve been to the future, it sounds like this! I’ve brought you back actual recordings from the future. Ah, okay! And then you add in Ouassima Laabich, who is an amazing activist in Berlin who’s created what she calls Muslim futures, and she coined this term sensual futuring. It’s like the more we can make this multisensory. So an exercise I do on my workshops is called Making Sense of the future, where I give everybody a cup and I tell them they have 15 minutes, they can go to the forest, the kitchen, the garden, wherever they want to go. But make in that cup a cocktail of smells that smells to you like that future smelt that you imagined. And then everybody comes together, like 35 people or whatever, and you have a cocktail party! And you have to give it a name because all good cocktails have names, right? And you have to go around and smell all these different things. Rilke, the poet, said the future must enter into you a long time before it happens. And that’s what this work is about. Like, how do we help people create these memories of the future that you attach emotions to. There’s a thing with smell is human beings can remember 10,000 smells, and they can attach memories and emotion to each one of those smells. So if we can harness that. So the next time you’re trying to imagine the low carbon future, and you go to the cupboards of your memory, and in there there’s this bright, sparkly thing that you associate with emotions of fun and connection, because you did it with other people. And you laughed with them and you included your smell and your taste and your feeling. That’s the bit for me that that moves it beyond just you know, ‘imagine your utopia’. Like, who cares about utopias? They’re so far away.

 Manda: And you don’t know how to get there.

 Rob: And you don’t know how to get there. And you normally need to depend on other people to get there. Which is why I always focus on 2030, you know, because people say, oh, Rob, that’s not very far away.And it’s like, well, we have to focus on 2030 because to have any chance of getting to where we need to, climate change wise, by 2050, we have to pass through that point of having cut our emissions by 48% by 2030. Otherwise, everything else just gets pushed out and it’s all too late and what’s the point? So for me then it’s like, well, what would 2030 be like where we’ve cut our emissions by 48%? It’s not going to look that different. We’re not going to have rebuilt everything by 2030. But if that shift, that change was happening, how would it sound different? What would the look in people’s eyes be like? What would it be like, feel like, to live in a world where we could see our our young people’s mental health improving and biodiversity coming back?

 Manda: What would it feel like? I think that’s so important is the felt sense of I wake up in the morning and the world is no longer heading off the edge of the cliff. It’s building and growing, and I am an integral part of feeling that the world is is going to go somewhere that I would be happy to leave to my kids. People will cross oceans in a small boat if they think at the other side is a world that they could give to their kids that would be better. And so how do you get on with people? Because it feels to me that we are at the point now, exactly as you said, we have to have 48% reduction in emissions by 2030. Which starts with no wars. Let’s tell everybody that. You have to stop the wars, because the CO2 output for war is not being calculated because it’s a state secret. As if the Chinese and the Russians might learn something from the CO2 that you calculate from your military that they don’t already know? I don’t think so. But nobody wants us to know because it’s absolutely, catastrophically huge. So leaving that aside, if we can get the felt sense of that, then we can begin to shift.

 Manda: And you’ve just been to Denmark, where it sounds like you talked to loads of people. I want to hear a bit about that. You’ve been to Hay on Wye. It always feels to me that, you may feel different, but I go to Hay and I think there’s a lot of very earnest people talking about the system and not changing it, and I get quite cross with it. But you’re there going, guys, we need a whole new system. This is not about tweaking the existing system. This is about fundamentally changing our relationship with power; our power inside, and our power connections to each other and our connections to the more than human world. And how is this landing with people once they get that felt sense? We need to get to the point where they don’t just do it in a workshop with you, they go back to their family and their friends and their colleagues and their workplace, and they go: ‘Guys, I’ve been to the future. And what we’re doing now is not how we get there. We do something different’. Are you beginning to get feedback that this is happening?

 Rob: Yeah. I mean, just one thing to say that I think is really important; there is so much despair and despondency around at the moment. It’s like the future is being cancelled, the future is being colonised. And a lot of people can’t even see to the end of the week, never mind thinking about what the future might be like. And there’s a guy called Luigi Vitale, who I quote in the book, who talks about how we have to uncancel the future. And he said, imagining the future is not naive, it’s radical. It’s like the only thing that is really going to get there. And the point I always say to people when people say, oh, it’s very naive and idealistic, and I’ve had that, I’ve been called naive since…

 Manda: Since you started the transition movement 30 years ago?

 Rob: Yeah, exactly. And I always say to people, well, I wrote the transition handbook in 2008, right? The book that sort of launched the transition movement. That book said we need to urgently break our relationship with fossil fuels because it’s a huge vulnerability. And we need to break that and we need to be building more resilient local economies. Actually, what happened instead was that the European Union sent Russia €18 billion every month for natural gas, at the same time telling us all that there was no money to do a Green New Deal, there was no money to decarbonise Europe. And then we got to the point where because of us sending Russia €18 billion every month, now Europe is saying we need to raise €800 billion to rearm Europe. It’s like, okay, so now who was the naive one?

 Manda: Yeah, yeah. Yes.

 Rob: Now, who was the naive one? You know? So I’m not saying that we will definitely see in the next ten years a radical and urgent, Profound transition that addresses all the different things.

 Manda: Yes. And frankly, if we don’t, we’re missing a lot of targets that are going to see us straight through to ten degrees C of warming, which is not survivable by the people who think they’re still going to make money out of it.

 Rob: Exactly. Which is not survivable. The French environment Minister published a report recently about how France could adapt to four degrees of warming. I was like, there’s no way in hell. I’ll save you the money and the time writing that report; it’s not going to happen. It’s already at 1.5 degrees and hundreds of towns are running out of water and crop yields are down. And do you know what I mean? It’s like actually. So what I find when I do this work is that it really touches people, I think very deeply. And like you said, there is a kind of a posture to doing this work, which I found a beautiful description of, which I use in the book, which was from a guy who was a biographer of Sun Ra, the amazing jazz artist who I love and who I write about quite a lot in the book, who he described as being an everyday utopian.

 Rob: Like his band, their story was that actually Sun Ra wasn’t a human being, he was an angel from Saturn, and that the band regularly travelled through space. And they use space travel as a different way of framing debates about black liberation. Like, well, if we can’t be who we want to be here, maybe we can be who we want to be elsewhere in space. And I read a review of a gig that they did in the 80s where someone said that Sun Ra’s band looked like a nativity play where everyone had come dressed as the Three Kings. But the thing was that most of them lived in the same house together, And it wasn’t like a stage costume, they dressed like that to pop down the corner shop to buy some milk or to go to the laundrette, you know. And he described them as being everyday utopians, that was kind of who they were. And he described Sun Ra as having an unshakeable certainty and deadpan humour. And so when I started looking around in the book with this idea of, well, who else is using this kind of idea of time travel or temporal fluidity? Two of the people who are, I think, brilliant work they’re doing on this is Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips, who run this project called Black Quantum Futurism in North Philadelphia, where they talk about time travel as a kind of a tool for black liberation. And they pull in quantum physics and science, black liberation, Afro futurist narratives and storytelling. And they talk about time travel, but it’s completely not a joke. It’s not like Boney M sort of we travel through space la la la. It’s like we built a time machine.

 Manda: Absolute certainty.

 Rob: And I’m. And the way I do it is the same. It’s like I come from Totnes. We’ve built the world’s first fully functioning time machine in a secret laboratory underneath Totnes Castle, and I’ve got evidence, look, here are some photos of us. And here’s us doing, you know… Any more questions? Right. Okay, now we move on. Where are we going now?

 Manda: ‘I’m going to tell you what we’ve seen’. Yes, yes.

 Rob: Yeah, exactly. And so there’s a playfulness to that.

 Manda: Absolute certainty and deadpan humour. And you’ve got that!

 Rob: Yeah. So what I’m NOT saying is okay All, everybody doing activism around climate, around social justice, around indigenous rights, everyone needs to throw everything up in the air and start pretending they’re time travellers. But actually what the book is saying is that I think there’s something that we often miss, and that particularly in the climate movement, we jump so naturally actually to narratives of collapse and extinction. And what’s happening right now is the way the far right are rolling, is that they just paint terrifying visions of the future, and then position themselves as the strongmen who will protect you from those terrifying visions of the future. If what’s happening alongside that is that progressive, left leaning people who understand climate science are also painting terrifying visions of the future then people are just caught between two sets of headlights. They don’t really know where to turn. And actually all great movements for change started with people saying what if…? And telling different stories.

 Manda: It’s the telling different stories. And we’re not. If we’re all saying we’re all going to hell, then you may as well try and line up behind the guys with the biggest guns, because you might have a couple of extra days. It’s not a good narrative.

 Rob: It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy really.

 Manda: Yes.

 Rob: I think in How to Fall in Love with the Future, what I’m sharing is kind of a journey where I feel like I’ve got from about A to D and that what the invitation is, is for people to step in and and help me along with that.

 Manda: And finish the alphabet. Right. But you’re stepping, in a way I think you’ve not gone from A to D, you’ve created a new alphabet. And I think this is one of the things that I think you get across really well in the book, and that we need to get across more, is no problem is solved from the mindset that created it. You don’t say that, I’m saying that, but that’s where we’re at. This is not about tweaking the current system. This is about going, guys, we created a whole new system. Look, this is what it looks like and here’s how we got there. And this is what it feels like. And these are the places in the world where this component of this is already happening. And this is what you’re saying. The future is already here, it’s just very unevenly distributed. I can’t remember who said that. You’ll know that.

 Rob: William Gibson.

 Manda: Thank you, William Gibson. And that’s the key, is we’ve got to stop imagining the existing future. When I get hooked into political discussions on the left, they’re all basically tweaking the existing system. If we all voted Lib Dem and Green, we could do this. Guys, I’m sorry, we don’t have time. Because actually, if we don’t have significant change, systemic change by 2030, all the people talking about disaster are going to be right. It’s a very short time frame, and I think this is one of the things that your book gives us. It seems to me that people listening to this podcast must be on board with this by now. It has to become the single most important thing any of us does. It has to become the driving light of our life.

 Manda: And yes, there are people for whom just feeding the kids is a massive problem and their priority. And that’s not an accident. The system is set up, you said way back: predatory capitalism is a disimagination machine. You said that in From What Is to What If. You didn’t call it predatory capitalism, but basically capitalism is a disimagination machine, it is designed to suppress creativity and to keep us scared and to stop us seeing beyond the end of the next week. There was a report in the Guardian last week that over half of Britain is living basically at the point where if they got a bill for £100, their entire financial life would fall over. And meanwhile there are billionaires. This is not a sustainable system. It will fall over. The levels of private personal debt to government debt ratio is way over the one that created the global financial crash in 08/09, when you were setting up Transition Network and writing your original books. The system is going to fall over. And therefore, what we need is what you’ve done, which is, guys, there’s a whole different system. If every single one of us committed to building that whole different system and just walked away and left the old one, the new one would be there. We just need to understand. And we have a tiny window of time, it seems to me, where we can use the the energy, the fossil fuels, the materials that we actually have at the moment and throw them all at the new system. And that isn’t naive. That’s the ‘would you like complex life to continue or would you are you happy with the sixth mass extinction?’.

 Rob: Yes

 Manda: I think one of the things that people forget is mass extinctions before took millions of years, millions of years to get to 75% loss of life, which is basically what’s left are the single cells. There’s a lot of single cells around that continue. And, you know, a few odd, really, really interesting sharks at the bottom of the Marianas Trench and everything else is extinct. And it took millions of years, and we’re doing it in less than a century. And that’s because a whole bunch of people are going, oh, it’s naive to imagine anything else. No, I’m sorry. Or let’s plan for four degrees of warming. No. Have you any idea of the tipping points that will be happening by four degrees of warming? Four degrees? It won’t just stop at four. From four, you get to ten very fast and nobody is surviving ten degrees of warming.

 Rob: Morgan Stanley wrote a report the other day where they said, well, three degrees is inevitable now, but on the upside, it’ll create a 41% increase in demand for air conditioning. Did you see that?

 Manda: Okay, that is functionally insane.

 Rob: Somebody actually sat and wrote that. But I remember in the run up to the election, Wes Streeting wrote an article in The Guardian where he said the only thing worse than no hope is false hope. Really? Are those the options you’re giving us, Wes? How about some hope, mate? How about you give us a bit of hope?

 Manda: Okay, this is the guy who’s selling the NHS to Thiel. So we’re not giving him a lot of credibility.

 Rob: It’s just horrendous. But one of the people I interviewed in the book was Peter Kalmus, who’s a fantastic climate scientist.

 Manda: Yes, in the US.

 Rob: Yeah, in the US. And he’s one of those climate scientists who is not content to just sit around and write papers. He’s been arrested twice. He glued himself to the Chase Bank because they’re still the biggest investor into fossil fuels.

 Manda: And he moved from California to Carolina because he could see what was coming.

 Rob: Yeah because he thought he could see the fires. And then two years later, he sat in his lounge in his new house and watched his old house burn down on national television. Because I was like, okay, I want to just check, is writing a book called How to Fall in Love with the Future hopelessly naive in the face of the climate science? That was my starting place. I thought, I don’t want to publish a book where all the climate scientists are going to go, Rob, you’re living in cloud cuckoo land, mate. What are you talking about? Have you read any of the science? So I had this long conversation with him. I said, okay, as a climate scientist, quite rightly your focus is to point people to the graphs on the chart that do that.

 Manda: And for people who can’t see it, ‘that’ is the upward tick of the hockey stick curve.

Rob: Yes. I’m acting out an upward curve, you know, in terms of, well, this is where we’re going if we don’t do anything. Business as usual scenarios and we need those because that’s where we’re heading, right? But what we never really hear from them is, well, what’s the best, best, best case scenario. Right? Is there a scenario in which we stay under two degrees and we’re able to then bring it back down again. And he said he said yeah there is. In the models that he creates, that is one of the scenarios. And he calls it emergency mode. He said emergency mode is the rapid phase out of fossil fuels, the rapid dismantling of industrial meat system. So for me, the reflection of that is okay, so there is a route, but ’emergency mode’ is a terrible name for it.

Manda: Yes.

Rob: It’s rubbish. Who’s going to go hey, let’s go into emergency mode! But if we called it like, I don’t know, delicious transition mode or something. And if we could tell the stories about what that would be like: imagine we phase out the industrial meat system within ten years and replace it with something phenomenal instead. How do we tell the stories about the people who did that? Like, I remember there was that program on Netflix that was called You Are What You Eat, which was about sets of twins who one of them took an omnivore diet and one of them took a plant based diet, and they measured them over eight weeks. And they put in all these little stories. And one of them I always remember was about this guy who raised chickens in the US for Perdue. And they would send him the chicks. He paid for all the infrastructure, they sent him the food and the chicks, and he raised millions of chickens in these awful sheds.

Manda: In chicken Auschwitz.

Rob: Yeah chicken Auschwitz. And it made him ill. It made the chickens ill. He was miserable. He was getting further and further into debt. And one day he was just like, I’m done with this. And in the program he was like, but I’ve got all these sheds, I’ve built all this infrastructure. And in the program he was converting that whole infrastructure to growing mushrooms to growing oysters. And he was so much happier.

Manda: And not as sick.

Rob: And not as sick. So how we message that is really important. You know, how do we engage storytellers and musicians and poets and songwriters in telling stories about what emergency mode would be? And at the end of the interview, and we didn’t include this in the book because the editor said you can’t include this, because it looks like you’ve basically just rung him up to ask him to blow smoke up your ass. But I said to him I’m writing this book called How to Fall in Love with the future. What do you think? Is that a good idea or is that hopelessly naive? He said, I think it’s ****ing awesome.

Manda: Was this Peter Kalmus said that?

Rob: He swears quite a lot. That was a real moment for me. Yeah. And, you know, why don’t we do that more? And we need those stories. Yeah.

Manda: And we need them. And somehow we need to supplant the other stories. And so I’m still really interested in, tell us a little bit about Denmark. Did you get onto national television, National radio? National anything? Did Denmark notice that you were there? Because Denmark always strikes me as being I don’t know, Scandinavia has that feel of being more progressive and than I discover, it’s actually full of neo-Nazis, just like everywhere else. And and it used to be really progressive, and it’s not nearly as progressive as it was. But there are islands of hugely progressive people. Tell me a bit about Denmark.

Rob: Yeah. So I was there for a few days and I’d been there before. I was there about six months before. So the City Hall is the main public building there in Copenhagen and when I was there before, we did an evening talk where there was 300 people or something, and we turned City Hall into a time machine and took them all to 2030. And it was just a beautiful, magical thing. So I was there. I ran a training with with an organisation there. I did a book launch. We did a public event. And also I spoke at a conference, an international conference of Chefs.

Manda: Smart.

Rob: Which I hadn’t quite clocked when I went, what it was. When I left, my wife said, what are you going to speak at? I said, oh, it’s some chef thing. Actually, it turns out it was tedglobal and 700 people go, but more than 4000 people apply and you have to send like an A4 page saying why you feel you should be there. And I did my full wearing my time travel costume; I’ve been to the future.

Manda: I’ve been to the future and it tastes like this!

Rob: And got them all time travelling and talked about why it was so important, the role that chefs played and the role that the food industry made in making that happen. It didn’t happen by accident, they led this.

Manda: Right.

Rob: And people loved it. And actually, what we’re planning as a result of both of those trips at the end of September, early October, we’re planning a three day festival of the future in Copenhagen City Hall. With us bringing the full field recordings from a future time machine with Ruth Ben-tovim doing Town Anywhere, with Kate Raworth doing doughnut economics, her doughnut economic circus, which she does now. And we need to get you to come and do a Thrutopian storytelling.

Manda: I’d love to. Yes.

Rob: And it’s going to be rather magical. My sense is that people feel really stuck and maybe there’s a different approach which brings people together. You know, part of the call of the book is what we need now is like a positive futurism movement. And you can see bits of it already in different places.

Manda: Yes. And it needs to coalesce.

Rob: It needs to coalesce. And also the thing that’s interesting in Copenhagen is that in November they have city elections and for the first time, it’s been governed by social Democrats for a long time, but there’s a sort of green ecological coalition who are very, very close. And so the question is, if you open a time portal in a major European city two months before an election…

Manda: Right, and show what it looks like.

Rob: And you show what it looks like and you get lots of people through and you engage storytellers and you know, what happens when you open a time portal taking people through a tear in time into 2030, but also maybe there’s things that sort of escape back through that in the time portal and start popping up around the city that nobody quite expected. Do you know what I mean? So I feel like Copenhagen is really  ripe for a lot of this stuff. Copenhagen is one of the few cities now in the world where you can just go swimming in the harbour because they’ve cleaned it up to that extent and the cycling infrastructure there is just incredible. I first went there when I was 25 and at university and we went on a field trip to Denmark, which at that point was way ahead of everybody else in terms of renewables and energy efficiency and all that sort of stuff.

Manda: Yeah, lots of potential.

Rob: It feels like there’s something in the book, what I did was I started looking around and saying, well, what if we had a kind of a revolution that was based on activism that was more playful with time, kind of a temporal fluidity approach to activism. And then the more I started looking around, there were all sorts of really curious, quirky people already doing some amazing stuff. And when you pull them all together, look at all of these!

Manda: That’s what gives the book its punch, is this is already happening. Tell us a little bit about Town Anywhere. It’s on my notes. Tell us about that.

Rob: Town Anywhere is for me one of the great time traveller’s practices developed by my friend and colleague Ruth Ben-Tovim, who lives in Totnes too, who has years and years of work doing community arts practice. She’s a genius at that stuff. And she developed, initially in 2013, it was called Transition Town Anywhere, and it was a big activity that we did in a Transition Network conference at Battersea Arts Centre in 2013 with 350 people. So you start by time travelling to the future and you physically step, you come into a big room and there’s a ribbon which keeps everybody just in the first little bit. So you’re all kind of penned into the first little bit. And she explains that the rest of that room is 2030 or 2035 or wherever it’s set for that event, and Then you count up through the years 2026, 2027, 2028, 2029 and then she lets the ribbon go and you all walk through in silence into that space. And then you go through the series of activities where you meet one person and then you meet more people, and then you organise at street level and then you go through this process of like, so what are you doing in that future? Like what’s your role? What are you making? What your life like? And then you meet other people who share that interest.

Rob: And together you plan something that you’re doing in that future. And the brilliant bit then is that you literally build it with cardboard boxes, big cardboard boxes and bamboo canes and sticky tape and string and pens and newspaper. And you build this three dimensional world that you then inhabit for about three hours, and you trade in it and you celebrate in it, and you grieve in it, and you dance in it, and you go around and you see all the different things that are doing, and you make connections with all those different things. And to be with 100, 200, 300 adults in a play future that you have dreamt together, that you can see and touch and feel, is one of the most extraordinary, magical things. And then at the end, you step back and you count back 2030, 2029, 2028, 2027, 2026 and you go back behind that line again 2025 and you look out into the room and the future, which at the beginning of that exercise had just been empty, that future is now full.

Manda: Of what you’ve built. Right.

Rob: Of stuff and experience and joy and love and structures and things and and it’s a very powerful, emotional, moving thing. And I remember the first time I did it, I ended up with some people where we had created a thing we called the Yeast Collective that was a brewery and a bakery in the same building. I was like, if the future is worth fighting for, it’s definitely got that in it. And I can still tell you the names of the beers that we made and how our training program worked and everything like that. And the next year in my town, then we started a brewery.

Manda: I was going to say, Totnes now has that brewery. You made it happen.

Rob: Well it did, but unfortunately it got killed by Covid and the energy price rises that followed the war in Ukraine. But it ran for about nine years and was a wonderful thing. But the spark of it came from from Town anyway. And I’ve met so many people who the thing that they played that they then went on to create.

Manda: Right.

Rob: Yeah, it’s a magical, magical, amazing thing that she’s brought into the world. And I interviewed her for the book about it, and she said that what she’s trying to do is to give people an experience where afterwards they say, ‘when I was in the future…’

Manda: Yeah, I did.

Rob: You know, that’s what I’m trying to do as well. It’s such a powerful tool for that.

Manda: Yes. And so you’ve got your field recordings from the future, which you’re going to take, sounds like around the world, but definitely around the UK and then Denmark and anywhere else that can have it. Tell us a little bit about that. Because again, this is going to feed into people’s experience of being able to step through that rift in time.

Rob: Yeah. So during the first lockdown, around that kind of time, I found I was listening to lots of ambient electronic music, which is something that was kind of new to me at that time. And I just loved it. Because if there’s beats or lyrics, I can’t concentrate. It demands all of my attention. Ambient music is this whole very wide, amazing genre between kind of electronica and classical and I can listen to it and I can work. And there were some artists who I was listening to who used field recordings in really, really interesting ways. In particular, a guy from Norway called Biosphere and he made one album that was just based on field recordings he made in nuclear power stations in Japan, which is an extraordinary piece of music. His best album is called Substrata. There’s one which is basically one whole track is just a recording of an aeroplane at a high altitude just going over his house. And it’s absolutely beautiful. I don’t know, it’s hard to describe, but he uses field recordings in a way where I find it really, really affecting.

Rob: And it started me thinking, well, what if those field recordings were from the future? What if you found a way to bring those field recordings back? Because one of the big inquiries in how to Fall in love with the future is what if the primary goal of our movement wasn’t giving people enough information, but the primary goal was cultivating longing for a different future. And so well what if you could actually bring back recordings from the future and play them to people? Maybe that would be the thing that would, in the same way that if you go on holiday to Italy and you have an amazing time and you show people your holiday photos, people are like, where is that place? I’m going there next year. And if we could do the same with that. And then there was one particular piece of music that did that so beautifully by an artist called Mr. Kit, which at the end there’s this bit that sounds like you’re on a beach in Thailand or somewhere watching a firework display, and everyone’s going, oh! Talking to each other and the feel of community and awe and celebration, right?

Manda: And you’re there with them.

Rob: Exactly. And I thought, you know, if I did that project, I’d love to do it with that Mr. Kit guy, but I bet he’s impossibly cool and lives in Berlin or LA and doesn’t answer emails. And I looked him up and he lived in Totnes. And he knew one of my kids, they used to DJ together on a rig that one of them had. And so I met up with him for coffee and I said, look, I’ve got this idea. And he said, I love it, let’s do it. And so we’ve done eight pieces of music, and I go to visit places across Europe because I don’t fly. So it’s just within sort of train radius.

Rob: And I always take my zoom recorder with me in my bag and make recordings as I go. And then with Kit, we’ve made eight tracks so far. So there are things like the bicycle rush hour in Utrecht, the car free neighbourhood of the Vauban in Freiburg.

Manda: The underground mushroom farm.

Rob: Underground mushroom farm in Brussels, landscapes, rewilding by beavers, a regenerative farm where you can really hear the biodiversity coming back. A street in London where they’re installing solar all down the street. It’s just such a lovely, lovely thing. So that’s actually coming out as a vinyl.

Manda: Vinyl record still exist? That’s a thing?

Rob: Absolutely they do. Keep up Manda! Analogue is back, baby, with with a vengeance. And everybody’s getting their record players out and buying vinyl again and it’s just fantastic.

Manda: So you can hear it when it jumps and the dog can knock it and okay, fair enough.

Rob: Exactly, exactly. And so we’ve done this beautiful double vinyl fold out sleeve with pictures from the future. And it’s just a gorgeous thing. So we’re doing a crowdfunder; if people search for ‘crowdfunder field recordings from the future’ you can contribute.

Manda: Send me a link. I’ll put it in the show notes.

Rob: And then we made video pieces for each of the things and then working with Tim Dollimore from the Media Workshop, we’ve created this Field Recordings from the Future live immersive show, which you came to the very, very first public unveiling of. It’s like a structure that we build that can hold about 200 people, and you project the films 360 degrees around everybody and put speakers all around the edge and it’s quite a wonderful thing.

Manda: Yeah. And you have stepped forward into time. So my basis is we have to create a movement, it has to be global, it has to cross all of the current cultural boundaries of age and race and gender and identity. And none of those exist on a dead planet. Every single person now has to commit. This has to be how we make it. They have to be inspired. They have to have that yearning. In the book you say there’s people, when you go to the European countries that you can get to by train, and have to translate that word of longing and yearning into the local language, and sometimes they seem not to have that. But there has to be something really bone deep. It has to be in the marrow and the mitochondria of your cells, that you can feel a different way of being as possible, and you yearn for it. And it’s the single most important thing. In the way that advertising gets us to yearn for, I don’t know, a bigger car or a chocolate cake or the holiday in Italy. This future has to be embedded in our DNA. And what you’re doing is creating, you’ve been there. I have been to that future, I have heard it, I have seen it. I think it would be kind of interesting. We could introduce scents in there. But you’ve got that capacity to feel potential that is different. It feels to me that we’re kind of locked in a concrete room that capitalism gives us, and it’s projecting all sorts of bright, shiny things on the walls. So we’re all staying there, and you and I and people like us are going, guys, there’s a world out there that’s much, much, much more fun than the concrete box where you’re spinning on the hamster wheel and you’re basically born to pay bills until you die. Come out and join us in a world where you get to live and build real relationships and have a sense of pride and belonging and being and becoming and all the things that give humanity meaning that isn’t just another box from Amazon.

Rob: Yeah.

Manda: And here’s the door. Come and join us out here. And that longing for ‘yes, I can see the door!’ and yes, I can make it happen in my life now. And yes, it’s hard paying the bills and feeding the kids, but I just need to start having conversations with people. And I have conversations with people and they just need to be different.

Rob: Yeah, the course that I taught at Hawkwood was the first time I’ve really done the material that’s in the new book as a two day immersive course. So it was quite a leap because normally I do iaone day thing. And so the feedback at the end of the second day was so interesting. People were saying ‘I feel like I’ve been sort of rearranged on a kind of a molecular level. It’s like I can see the possibilities now, like you’ve sort of pushed me out of the present and I feel like I can move more fluidly in time’. And, you know, it’s it’s interesting, when you were saying about the world that we can create. When I was in Copenhagen, I went out one evening and I was chatting to this guy who said, oh, I’ve just written a book. I said, oh, I’ve just written a book, too. Book too. So he said, oh, what’s your book about? So I told him and then I said, what’s your book about? So it’s about the internet. And so I said, oh, is it about AI and all of this, that and the other? And he said, no. And so I ran a few attempts like, so is it about…all the different things that concern me about the internet? He said, no, no, no, it’s just about how the internet is so boring.

Manda: A book about how the internet is so boring. Okay.

Rob: He said, yeah, it’s just so boring. He said, when you think what life can be and what human beings are capable of, and how 99% of what’s on, on the internet, apart from Accidental Gods…

Manda: And everything you do.

Rob: Is just so dreary. And I was like, okay, I didn’t see that coming, but that’s fantastic.

Manda: Is it in Danish? Do we have to get a translation of this book?

Rob: Well, I’m not sure. But there was a poll a couple of weeks ago that said that nearly half of young people would prefer to live without the internet. So interesting, because it’s not the narrative we get at all, is it? Oh, they’re on their phones all the time. But actually more than half of half of them would rather just turn it off. Just turn it off.

Manda: Yes. It’s interesting.

Rob: All this stuff and Sam Altman is now in Silicon Valley trying to raise $1 trillion for the next iteration of AI. But there’s no money for climate.

Manda: No. Quite. No.

Rob: And all those same narratives. Well, you know, we have to be at the front of this because it’s a race. We need to be at the front. And time is of the essence. All those same arguments you can make about tackling the climate emergency, but actually tackling the climate emergency actually takes you to a world in which people can flourish. And AI is just a massive nonsense waste of everything. Toxic, pointless nonsense.

Rob: Do you remember when we were in Plymouth and we did the the field recordings from the first performance? There was a group of 4 or 5 teenage girls who were there, and talking to them afterwards was really interesting. They were saying, we love that. Like no one ever talks about the future and we’re all so anxious about the future. And that’s the future that we want.

Manda: Yes. And you were at Boomtown last year, weren’t you? Boomtown Festival, which for people who don’t know, is kind of mainly 18 to 35 and 50,000 people turn up and then 500,000 people access it online. And you went to Boomtown and you transformed somebody’s life.

Rob: Yeah. So every year it has a theme. And so last year the theme was built around my last book From What Is to What If. So they said, Rob, will you come along and speak on the main stage between Damian Marley and Earth, Wind and Fire? Can you imagine? So I was backstage with Earth, Wind and Fire. If when I’m 80 I can put it about like that, they’ve still got it, those guys, they had all the moves, they were very impressive. So I went out on the stage in my full Time Traveller regalia and they said, you’ve got six minutes, Rob. You can’t go over six minutes. You’ve got exactly six minutes. Wow. So I got 5.5 minutes, I practised it, I had it down. I went on, I’m 5.5 minutes in, just building up to my sort of closing crescendo and the stage manager comes on with a piece of paper and puts it in front of me and it says, ‘Earth, wind and fire have disappeared. Keep talking’. Okay!

Manda: So I said, well, normally at this stage I would say, does anyone have any questions? But you’re a bit far away and I’m not sure that’s going to work. So I told a couple of stories and then left, and Earth, Wind and Fire were all there. And I came off to Earth, wind and fire going cool, cool talk, man. Which was very, very nice. But yeah, that was a lovely story. Definitely one of my life memories was that I came off stage and Earth, Wind and Fire started playing and then I changed out of my stuff and walked round the side and into the audience to where all my kids were, because I went there with all my kids and their girlfriends. And then we all danced to Earth, Wind and Fire. It was just one of those really special times.

Manda: And you out of your kit becomes a completely different person. Did anybody recognise you incognito?

Rob: Well, then I was walking through and lots of people were saying, thank you, I loved that.

Manda: But then you got an email after from someone.

Rob: Yeah, somebody saw a thing on Reddit or one of these things where some young lad who had smoked since he was 14 and was about 25 and had been to university and smoked and was vaping, I think instead. Because I always start by saying there are many, many different futures. The future is not fixed. There is not ‘a future’. It’s like Rashida Phillips never writes the word future. She always puts (s) in brackets on the end, you know? And it’s like that. There are many different futures ahead of us, and some of them are horrible. We’ve been there in our time machine, we’ve visited them. Believe me, they’re awful, we don’t want to go there. But some of them are extraordinary and that’s what I’m going to tell you about. And he said the idea that there’s a future ahead of me in which I don’t vape had never occurred to me before. It wasn’t there. And then all of a sudden, when I was seeing this guy who I’d never heard of before talking about the future, the thought occurred to me so strongly that there is a future ahead of me in which I don’t vape, that I threw my vape in the bin.

Manda: And haven’t touched it since.

Rob: And hasn’t touched it since. And I thought, isn’t that interesting? You know that actually, imagine if we can scale that up.

Manda: Yep. Power of future memories being real for us.

Rob: That future wasn’t there for me and now it is.

Manda: And how much that, a future where you wake up in the morning and the world feels okay, is an option.  If we can internalise that in the way that he internalised a future without vaping, then we all get there.

Rob: Yes. One of the stories that I talk about in the book, about Utrecht and about the cycling revolution in the Netherlands, which we go there now and think, well, that’s just how it always was. It was the result of massive, coordinated citizen action there in the 1970s. After one year where 400 children were killed on the roads in the Netherlands. And this movement called Stop the Child Murder started all across the Netherlands, which pushed for that change. But now the Dutch government invest half €1 billion every year in building really exemplary cycling infrastructure, like incredible cycling infrastructure. And people use it, what a surprise, who knew? But their logic is that they spend half €1 billion, because their calculation is that that saves them €19 billion off the national health bill. So it’s not an expense, it’s an investment.

Manda: Right. And it’s not that they’re burning the money. I think we have to remember that when governments spend money, it cycles presumably within their local economy and they get it back as tax. We have got to reframe our use of money.

Rob: Exactly. So the point is okay, we take that thinking, right, I’m going to spend half €1 billion and it’s going to save me €19 billion off the national health bill. You take that thinking and you start to expand it out. So we change our education system in a way that is much more about imagination, we’re going to save a huge amount of money on mental health services because we’re creating something that’s good. A lot of this stuff we could really reframe around mental health, if we decide that we were going to actually prioritise mental wellbeing. That’s not just about access to services and medication, that’s about access to good housing. It’s why in the book I talk about the prison abolition movement in the US, which is so wonderful because they hold that question of, but what if there were no prisons? Yeah, but if there were no prisons, we’d have to have such a different kind of education system. Yeah. Keep going.

Manda: Exactly.

Rob: You know, it opens up all those other conversations. So if we start to think more holistic and more joined up, then bringing the biodiversity back to our cities is better for our mental health, it’ll save on this, it’ll save on that.

Manda: And you have clean air, and you can head towards having clean water, and you can begin to grow food that you can actually eat because it’s not covered with exhaust fumes.

Rob: If you live in a city where people can swim to work. It already happens in Munich and it happens in a couple of other places.

Manda: The rivers are that clean. Wow!

Rob: People commute to work by swimming and they take their laptop and their dry clothes in a bright orange bag that floats along behind them as they swim along the river. And then they arrive, and then they get changed. You know, it’s like, imagine that! These debates get stuck in kind of percentages of CO2 and costs of energy policy.

Manda: Yes, or Julia Hartley-Brewer screaming on GB news that nobody’s going to take her car away from her because it’s her personal right.

Rob: And I want to hear about the guy that swims to work.

Manda: Yes. Or the cargo bike with the kids in, and the kids are all chatting in a silent cargo bike that the parent is peddling. And how much better is that for everybody?

Rob: And the restaurant that cooks using the heat from the sun, and how that changes their relationship with the people around them.

Manda: Yes. And we haven’t said this enough; the book is full of these examples. Of the city that I think it’s got six hectares where they grow all of the food. So local food cities. We’ve talked about the bicycles and the car free zones and the Beavers. We haven’t talked a lot about beavers. Because we talk about beavers quite a lot on the podcast. But you do have a bit about beavers and there are beavers in your soundscape and the portal to the future. We could a little bit. So give us, if you step through your portal to the future, to let’s say Totnes, because that’s where you live. Beautiful little town in Devon. I would give my eye teeth to be living near it, but hey.

Rob: You’re always welcome.

Manda: Yes, we’d have to shift many grandchildren that far. So what does it look like? Give us an audio vision of, let’s say we got to 2040 because it gives you another decade to embed all of the changes. Give us Rob’s version of you’re waking up in Totnes 2040 and we’ve done everything we possibly could.

Rob: I think the first thing that you notice is how much quieter it is. That sort of background growl of the internal combustion engine has has long since gone. So we hear the world in more detail. We hear more richness as we walk around. Like if you walk down the streets, you can hear people having piano lessons in their house. You can hear knives and forks on plates, which you couldn’t do before. The air smells so much cleaner, like if you had the nose of a sommelier, you would be picking out particular herbs, particular trees, particular things. And every step you take opens up new smells. But the thing that strikes you the most, I think, is there’s a kind of a look in people’s eyes. That kind of cynicism, the despondency, the sort of individualism that we saw in people back in 2025 has been replaced by a kind of a shared sense of purpose and a sense of excitement. There’s this sense of, I think we might just do this. And actually, these last 15 years have been absolutely exhilarating. I feel like although in 2025, all the visions of the future that we were given in magazines and from Silicon Valley were all about tech, I think that in that 2040 we’ve seen a real move away from a lot of digital tech.

Rob: Social media, people don’t really use it so much anymore because it just got so boring. And a lot of internet based things people don’t use. So people have really kind of embraced analogue things much more. People meet in person. Most towns and cities have very actively built what they call a food belt around them now. So that connection between the settlements and the land around them, which had largely broken down by the 1950s, has been rebuilt. And a lot of young people now aspire to be involved in kind of intensive market gardening, growing mushrooms, producing really quirky, interesting things for local consumption. You know, in 2025, you could visit cities all around the world and you could drink Heineken and eat at Wagamamas or McDonald’s. And wherever you were in the world, that food tasted exactly the same. Part of the beauty in that 2040 is if you’re in Totnes and you get the bus to Newton Abbot, you’re tasting and drinking things that you can only taste in that place. A bit like when you went to Italy in 2025 and you went to one village who would tell you their olive oil was the best in the world and the stuff in the next village you wouldn’t even wash your car with it. And then you go to that next village and they’re like, oh, you know, ours is…

Rob: And it’s like that kind of culture has started to come back. I think people work less, but they work more meaningfully. And democracy is not just something we do every four years. We’re involved in more cooperatives, we’re involved in more buildings and businesses in our towns that are in community ownership. Also, I think one of the most important things in that 2040 is we’re now 12 years into the establishment of a free Gaza state and the rebuilding of Gaza. And that that was accompanied by a focus by the rest of the world’s powers on the importance of peacemaking as being so much more important and so much more of a skill than starting wars. And the addressing of that issue, which had been such a kind of weeping sore in the world for like 50 years and had just caused so much instability. The fact that the world got people to sit down with that, around the founding of a free Palestine, had such a kind of healing effect that the impacts of that just rippled out in a way that felt totally unimaginable in 2025. Yeah. So it’s a world that feels more peaceful but more grounded, and people feel more connected to where they are.

Rob: And I think one of the main things that we don’t see in that 2040 anywhere like the extremes of wealth and poverty that we saw back in 2025. You know, one of the things that I remember that I loved from during that time, because you can kind of look back and see there were key things that shifted it. And one of them was actually when Cristiano Ronaldo retired as a footballer in 2026. When he retired, sort of wealthier than some small countries from having played football all that time, that he decided to channel a lot of his money into kickstarting the transition, particularly in Portugal, where he was from. And, and he recognised that the government was not installing renewables in the way that it needed to be. And he personally kickstarted the renewable energy revolution across Portugal. And because it was him, it kind of just took off. And so there was a lot of people who had a public profile, who used that public profile to tell a different story because they could see how important these times were. But I still just remember those photographs of Cristiano Ronaldo standing in front of football stadiums covered in solar panels, and how that then started to really kind of spread very, very quickly through the national consciousness.

Manda: Fantastic. Okay. In that case, all we have to do is make it happen.

Rob: Do, please.

Manda: And to do that, everybody needs to go and buy your book at any place that is not the giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity. Although, having bought it somewhere else, you need to go and leave a review on the giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, because still, sadly, our publishers and everybody else goes and looks there to see how many five star reviews there are. So please, everybody go and buy Rob’s book. There will be links in the show notes. But buy it from your local bookstore and or somewhere like Hive Online that then gives money to your local bookstore, please. But then go and give a review on Amazon. You’ve also recorded the audiobook haven’t you?

Rob: I have.

Manda: So if people want to listen to the audiobook that’ll be out as well. And you can listen to that on your podcast provider, I discover.

Rob: You will and you will also hear my very, very impressive Danish pronunciation of some key names and places that I practised for a long time to sound Danish.

Manda: Superly Danish. Fantastic. There’s a lot of other words that I don’t quite know how to pronounce in there. Lots of names of people from all around the world who are doing amazing and exciting things. Yay! What next for you? Besides, we’re going to take Field Recordings From the Future on a tour, and we’re going to set up a Thrutopian convergence, you and me.

Rob: We are doing some amazing things together, which is very exciting.

Manda: It’s so exciting.

Rob: And thank you to the visionary funders who recognised the potential in enabling us to do that.

Manda: In a collaboration.

Rob: Exactly. I think that Field Recordings From the Future is going to be a big part of the next year of my life. Rolling that out in a way that has the most impact possible. I’m also just starting work with an amazing Belgian cartoonist on a comic book, which is the story of how me and Mr. Kit built a time machine and travelled to 2030 and collected all those recordings.

Manda: Tintin for the future.

Rob: Tintin for the future. Because actually, part of the reason why Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are such idiots and all this stupid stuff about we’re going to go and live on Mars, is because of the comic books that they read, when they were kids. So we need comic books now that are full of beavers and mushrooms and bicycles and stuff. So we’re just starting to work on that, that’ll come out next year. And I’ve been working with a guy to build, you know when we were kids and we’d go to the seaside and you’d have those predict your future machines, where you put in a coin. So we’re doing a sort of Field Recordings From a Future version of that, where it’ll print out a future for you.

Manda: Can I tell you something just very briefly, one of the factors that I learned when I was a historical writer? The Romans invented steam power, but because they only had wood to power it, it wasn’t actually as good as having slaves doing all your work. But the thing they used it for was that you would go into the temple of various deities that were supposed to record the future, and you’d put your token that the priests and the priestesses gave you into the machine and it would go clunk, click, and it would spit out a thing that was your future. And that was all they used steam power for.

Rob: Wow, I need to find those.

Manda: That needs to be in there somewhere, doesn’t it.

Rob: Yeah. So basically what I love as well is I have no idea what’s going to happen. And I love that I’m able to have the sort of freedom and flexibility now to..

Manda: To make the future happen.

Rob: To do lots of talks and workshops, but also to have a bit of time and space to kind of plot new, exciting things. In my wildest dreams we would be looking at by the end of next year, the field recordings from the future comic book will be an animated film.

Manda: Yes, a film!

Rob: And that actually we would have all sorts of different interesting artists who would be remixing our Field Recordings From the Future tracks, and people would be out making their own field recordings from the future.

Manda: And it’s a number one on the album charts. Do the album charts even still exist?

Rob: They do, but we’re not putting it on Spotify because Spotify are pretty evil. You can find it on Bandcamp. Yeah.

Manda: Okay. Excellent. Right. And then we’ll invite you back onto the podcast. But in the meantime, Rob Hopkins of Everything Amazing About the Future and with your wonderful new book on Field Recordings from The Future and How to Fall in Love with the future. Thank you for coming onto the podcast.

Rob: Manda thank you so much for inviting me and all the wonderful things you do. And let’s do some amazing things together.

Manda: So there we go. That’s it for another week. Enormous thanks to Rob for taking the time out of what sounds like a really punishing schedule to talk to us. Rob, I have no idea where you get the energy, but I am really glad that you do. And for everybody listening, please go and buy Rob’s book and read it cover to cover. Read it with a marker pen in your hand as I did. It’s okay to dog ear the pages and to highlight every other sentence and whole paragraphs, because this book is worth it. Rob goes into the cognitive neuroscience of how and why offering ourselves visions of a future can embed change at a visceral level. And we need this now, people. I wasn’t joking at the start. This is urgent now. We genuinely have the next five years to turn everything round and we genuinely can do it. But we will only do it if every one of us listening makes it the absolute priority of our lives. If we work out how we can best make change in our lives and the lives of people around us. And that involves doing the Imagineering. Stepping forward to 2030, 2035, 2045, imagining who we are then, how the world looks and feels, and then working back to see how we got there.

Manda: This is what we’re all doing. And Rob’s book is an absolute key, a stepping stone on the way to a future that works. There are links in the show notes. Head off, click the links, read the book. Let’s make this future happen.

Manda: And that’s it for this episode. We will be back at the normal time with another conversation. So in the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot and this week for the production. Thanks to Lou Mayor for the video, to Anne Thomas for the transcripts to Faith Tilleray for the website, for all of the work behind the scenes, and particularly for the conversations that keep us moving forward to a future that we would be proud to leave behind. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who wants to understand how we can have total systemic change, how we can walk away from the catastrophe of the old system and build ourselves something new, then please do send them this link. And please head off to the podcast app of your choice and give us five stars under review. It is definitely making a difference to how we hit the algorithms. And that’s it for this week. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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