From What If to What Next

Here at 'From What If to What Next' we don't shy away from the big questions of our times! Today we are diving deep into the question of what we eat.   Rather than debating whether veganism is a good thing or not, today we are stepping, with the help of our guests Tomi Makanjola (aka The Vegan Nigerian) and Dr. Melanie Joy, Founding President of Beyond Carnism, into that world that has already bec...

Welcome to Episode 52, different from the episode we advertised, a bit of a mix up at What If Towers, but it means some of you now know the subject of our next episode. Oh well. But this week's is such a treat.   Meet Dr Rupa Marya and Rhiannon Osborne (many thanks to her, as this episode was her idea), who bring a delightful and fresh inroad into what society could look like if it were to priorit...

We are joined by two amazing guests to discuss a vitally important issue. Ben Hurst of Beyond Equality and Graham Goulden of Cultivating Minds UK join me to explore what a future in which men work with each other to rapidly deescalate male violence in the world would look like and feel like. It's a powerful and vital discussion. My deepest thanks to them both and, as always, to producer Ben Addico...

Episode 50. That's something worth celebrating! And what a beautiful way to celebrate it, by interviewing the person I've wanted on this podcast since it began, adrienne maree brown. One of the great thinkers and imagineers of our time, it was an honour to finally meet her and to record this episode. I hope you love it. It's been hard keeping this a secret for so long.   I'd like to thank everyone...

Today's episode is one of my favourites so far, with two amazing guests. It was inspired by one of our guests, Jon Alexander's new book 'Citizens: why the key to fixing everything is all of us', which is just released and highly recommended.   He is joined by the delightful Baratunde Thurston, author of 'How to be Black' and presenter of one of my favourite TED Talks. You are going to love this ex...

When it comes to building food security, biodiversity, employment, spaces that are good for mental health, and so much more besides, we are missing a huge opportunity. Our cities contain many square kilometres of flat roof spaces, currently visited by a few pigeons and that's about it. But what if they were transformed into vibrant vegetable gardens, public spaces for events, places for communitie...

You're going to enjoy this one. This week we're talking about mental health, and how different the world would be if we were to take a very different approach to it. I'm joined by Jo Hunter from 64 Million Artists, and by Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu of Project LETS. It's one of those episodes that requires a walk afterwards to really digest what you've heard. My thanks to Jo and Stefanie for t...

This week this podcast joins you with printing ink on its hands and under its fingernails . We're talking about printmaking and its potential to unleash social change. I have a vested interest here, I love printmaking. And I love social change! So discussing this gives me the opportunity to bring together two amazing printmakers.   Sarah Gillespie makes the most amazing mezzotint prints of moths,...

Meet Tim Gill and Alice Ferguson of Playing Out, brilliant guests for a vital discussion. Today we're talking about kids, and play and about the places where we live.   Kids have almost entirely vanished from our streets. Retreating indoors in the face of the car's domination of our city spaces, and a perception of the lack of safety, kids are all too often starved of play. 'No ball games here' si...

We start this year with a fantastic episode and a really important question. What if we were to implement every solution that we already know exists in order to tackle the climate crisis with the sense of urgency that an emergency should inspire? After the damp squib of COP26, it's a vitally important question. Can we do it? Is there still time? And most importantly, what would it feel like to liv...

Although not planned as some kind of 'Christmas Special', that's kind of what this episode is, so hopefully it will give you the opportunity to treat your imagination to something very special over the festive season. This episode will introduce you to Flora Collingwood-Norris and to Orsola de Castro, cofounder and Global Creative Director of Fashion Revolution.   Please consider buying Flora's bo...

The IPCC report that came out in mid-2021 said "unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5 degrees, or even 2 degrees, will be beyond reach". "Immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions". Let's imagine we were able to actually do that in the time available to us.   It would mean the complete reimagining of food, trave...

Powerful psychology is used to convince us, often subliminally, that we want and need things we previously never knew even existed. This is especially dangerous at a time when we need to urgently cut consumption of high carbon-generating products and lifestyle choices. It is estimated that in the UK companies spend over £23bn a year on advertising. Research shows that the more advertising we are e...

I'm not going to say much about this episode, other than that it's incredible. We are exploring Afrofuturism, which has been variously described as "speculative fiction from the African diaspora", "a way of imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens" and "an intersection of imagination, technology, the future and liberation". It has so much to teach us about imagination and how to ke...

The world's governments will be coming together for 2 weeks to, hopefully, reach some kind of binding agreement that might give the world at least a fighting chance of preventing runaway climate change. There's one problem though...   On a planet where over half the population is female, the leadership team put together by the UK government, who are hosting these talks, is almost exclusively male....

Everywhere, where you live included, has a patchwork of organisations of different sizes who are doing business and making things happen in a way that is not solely about the generation of profit, but about serving a larger social purpose. They might be called social enterprises, or socially-trading organisations, or all sorts of other things.   Today's episode asks what if they got together and d...

The decline of insect populations around the world has been nothing short of terrifying. Last year I visited a school in an intensive wine-producing region in France, and suggested to the kids that they might build an insect hotel, only to be told by the head teacher "we don't have any insects here". It has stayed with me ever since. So in today's episode, we are exploring how it would feel to liv...

Today we bring together Anthea Lawson, author of the fabulous new book 'The Entangled Activist' and Alastair McIntosh, author of 'Soul and Soil' and 'Riders on the Storm'. I usually try to constrain the conversations we have here to around 45 minutes, but this one was so fascinating that we just kept rolling, and just kept chatting, and so this one actually comes in at an hour and a quarter! But y...

Today's episode of From What If to What Next is about care. Care has been very much on our minds of recent. COVID has highlighted how vitally important care is and yet how undervalued it is. It is so often seen as being the domain of women, and around the world it is often either underpaid, or unpaid work. As the populations of the Global North live longer and longer, and as young people are unabl...

You are in for such a treat. This is one of the most thought-provoking and inspiring episodes of this podcast yet. It was my huge honour to be joined by Yumna Hussen and Lottie Cooke to discuss what a reimagined education system would be like. Honestly, spending an hour in the company of these two remarkable young people, so articulate and well informed, was just a joy.   Lottie and Yumna are part...

Here is the perfect accompaniment to the long summer days. Or the deluge. Or perhaps a bit of both. Today we are talking about travel. As many cities begin to actively take steps away from the dominance of cars, we are asking what might it be like if that had already happened? What might it be like to live in a city in which more travel now takes place on food or on two wheels? And how are electri...

Firstly, sorry I'm late posting this. I was on a clifftop in Cornwall and the sun was shining and so it took me a while to get home! But, I must say that this episode is absolutely worth the wait. One of my favourites so far. This week we are exploring the black imagination, with two amazing guests.   Natasha Marin is an antiracism consultant based in Seattle, specialising in communications, commu...

This is such an incredible episode. One of those ones I had to go off and sit under a tree afterwards to absorb. Today we talk about gender. I grew up in a society that thought in terms of two genders, you were male or you were female. This was accompanied by expectations that men behaved in ways that were 'masculine', and women in ways seen as being 'feminine'. If you were someone who didn't iden...

Episode Thirty. Wow. Whoever thought we'd get this far? Thank you so much for your support in making that possible. We have a delicious episode to mark this moment.   Farzana Khan is a writer, director, cultural producer and award-winning Arts educator. She is the co-founder and Director of Healing Justice London. She has a background in Youth and Community work particularly focused on arts based...

If you had a Time Machine, which year would you set the dial to? This episode is about time travel. More specifically, it is about using imaginary time travel, or futurism, or deep dreaming, or whatever you want to call it, in our activism. Why is it so powerful to invite people to imagine the future? What does it do to us to step into an imaginary future? And what tips of the trade can help us to...