No More Dystopian Stories: How to See a Future Worth Living In with Rob Hopkins

**Rob Hopkins** (0:00)
There are many, many different futures, but there are some that result from us doing everything we could possibly have done. And actually, the reality is that all the elements of what that looks like already exist somewhere. Like William Gibson said, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. You can go to Utrecht in Holland and sit by the train station, and 40,000 bicycles will cycle past you. It's insane. You go to Liège in Belgium, where they're building a food belt in a way that has just transformed the economy of that city. Everything that we need to know already exists somewhere, and there's a lot of research around how when people imagine the world in that way, it increases their sense of agency to create that world.

**Nate Hagens** (0:42)
You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagens. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming Great Simplification.
Today, I'm joined by longtime friend and fellow systems analyst Rob Hopkins for a discussion about how the imagination can help us move from paralysis to action in the face of the complexity of the more than human predicament. Rob Hopkins is a co-founder of Transition Town Totnes and Transition Network, a global grassroots movement dedicated to building community resilience, especially to meet ecological energy and food needs. He is the author of many books, including most recently, How to Fall in Love with the Future, A Time Traveler's Guide to Changing the World, and also was the host of the now concluded podcast From What If to What Next.
An Ashoka Fellow and holder of a doctorate from the University of Plymouth, Rob's work has been featured in TED Global, BBC Radio, and the French film Demain, which means future. His collaborative music project with artist Mr. Kit, Field Recordings from the Future is being developed as a live touring show. In today's conversation, Rob makes the case that we're facing a crisis of imagination and that collective inability to vividly envision radically different and better futures might inadvertently lead us down bleak or unrealistic paths. Drawing on neuroscience storytelling in a lifetime of grassroots work, he explores why creative visions of the future can be a causal force for change. He shares the tools and practices he uses to cultivate what he calls longing at scale, a deep felt sense of what we are building toward, not just running from. This includes the concept of evidence-based dreaming, where key events happening in the world are grounded within coherent sensory and emotionally alive pictures, showing us new possibilities. While Rob and I have diverging perspectives in some key areas, we share a commitment to explore the full range of responses to the unfolding more than human predicament. And actually, this might be one of the most important aspects of this episode and this channel more broadly. Even among the people that we are highly aligned with in terms of what we value for the future, there will always be pieces we disagree on, and listening to each other to find common ground is one of the best ways to build and expand relationships, which will ultimately form the foundation for any responses to the unfolding predicament around us. With that, please welcome Rob Hopkins.
Rob Hopkins, welcome to the program.

**Rob Hopkins** (4:01)
Nate, so lovely to see you again. Been far too long, my friend.

**Nate Hagens** (4:04)
Well, it's at least since 2009, which I have incredible memories.
The former head of the CIA came up to me at that conference and shook my hand, and then he gave me a hug. He put his whiskey down and gave me a hug. I remember all these high-level intelligence and oil people, and then you get on the stage and you were so soft-spoken, and you could have heard a pin drop, and I remember that. That was the first public talk I had ever given actually.

**Rob Hopkins** (4:35)
Oh, wow. Didn't you have a thing in the middle where you had an animated thing that just screamed at everybody?

**Nate Hagens** (4:42)
Yes. Jack Nicholson scared everyone.
Yeah. That was 2009 Man, life goes fast.

**Rob Hopkins** (4:52)
It does. But then I saw you again in 2013 in a hotel lobby in Milwaukee. We hung out and had a catch-up.

**Nate Hagens** (4:58)
I'm known to be in hotel lobbies in Milwaukee.
No. But yeah, that's right. So that was 13 years ago.

**Rob Hopkins** (5:06)
Yeah.

**Nate Hagens** (5:08)