Rob Hopkins

The time for imagining that change happens in small, incremental steps is now way behind us. As Naomi Klein says, “there are no non-radical solutions left”. Today we are thinking big. Really big. With big thinkers. While some of our episodes focus on what if questions that are quite specific and focused, in this episode, Episode Twenty-Eight, we are thinking big, so hang on to your hats. Luckily we have two guests for you who are brilliant at thinking big.

We just published Episode 30, so this seems like a good time to share the story of how this podcast series was born, and to shares some of my highlights from the journey so far…

This new episode, one of my favourite so far, comes with a challenge. Can you listen to it and not reimagine your own relationship with flying or, as one of our guests puts it, being “twanged around in an aluminium sausage”?

It was a huge honour recently to be asked to be a speaker at the Jersey Citizens Assembly. I was asked to be their final presenter before they went off to deliberate their decisions. I was asked to give them a boost and a sense of why their deliberations matter so much. Here is the presentation I gave them, firstly the video, and then the transcript. I hope you enjoy it. 

I am delighted to share this video, which seamlessly rolls together the three short videos I have shared with you previously. It is based on pieces of audio from Episodes 1-9 of the ‘From What If to What Next’ podcast, recorded by Ben Addicott and then beautifully animated by Temujen Gunawardena and Badj Whipple of temjam.com.

Am so thrilled to be able to share this with you. It is the last of the three short animations I worked on with the amazing Temujen Gunawardena and Badj Whipple of temjam.com, such incredible artists. It cuts together the voices of Sam Lee, Dr Jane Myat, Marie Godart, Christian Jonet, Ariane Conrad and Dee Woods, and it really rather delightful. These were some of my highlights from Episodes 1-9. I would love to do the same for Episodes 10-19. If you are inspired by these and would like to help fund the making of such a thing, do get in touch. Enjoy…

These days of COVID have shown us that extraordinary profound reimagining of many aspects of society are entirely possible. Might this be the time to forever do away with the idea that the only way to measure our progress, cultural, social, spiritual, economic, is purely by how much bigger our economy is than it was […]

I was recently a guest on the ‘The Future is Beautiful’ podcast, presented by Amisha Ghadiali. You can hear the episode in full here.

Let’s imagine, and this takes quite a leap in Britain in 2021 I’ll grant you, but stay with me, that we had a government who recognised that we are living through a time of imaginative contraction alongside a climate and ecological emergency, a social justice emergency and so much more. Let’s imagine that they were able to recognise this as the crisis it is, that allowing a population’s imagination to contract is profoundly dangerous. 

My story of how the Transition: Bounce Forward What Next Summit unfolded, with videos of the sessions and some reflections.