BetterPod

In series one of BetterPod, we’ve challenged poverty and inequality, homelessness, institutional misogyny, and conspiracy theories. We’ve discovered the perils of social media, the forces behind gun violence in America, and the problems with sex education in UK schools.

In this final episode, we take a look back at the best moments from series one, and we finish up by talking through the actions we’ll all be taking today to make tomorrow better. Hopefully you’ll find some tips in there too.

Featuring conversations with Will Poulter, Laura Bates, Darren McGarvey, Sophie Howe, Jonn Elledge, Ariel Hobbs, Brett Staniland, Sophia Smith Galer and Symeon Brown.

BetterPod is brought to you by The Big Issue’s Future Generations team. Through the Future Generations team, we offer a platform for exciting young journalists from underrepresented backgrounds to address the biggest issues facing us today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you’ve been listening to BetterPod over the last few months, it won’t come as a surprise that we think future people matter. So we were very excited when we heard that one of the most important philosophers working today had written a book arguing for longtermism – effectively, why we should and how we can act today for a better tomorrow.

William MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future is only just out but it’s already shaping ethical debates around the world. Stephen Fry called it “a book of great daring, clarity, insight and imagination”, while Joseph Gordon-Levitt said he was moved to tears by its optimism.

William MacAskill wants to change how you think about tomorrow – and how you act today… on this episode of BetterPod he tells us why.

BetterPod is brought to you by The Big Issue’s Future Generations team. Through the Future Generations team, we offer a platform for exciting young journalists from underrepresented backgrounds to address the biggest issues facing us today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We’re in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. It is serious, and real, and frightening. As we cover every week in The Big Issue magazine and every day on bigissue.com, increasing numbers of people cannot cope. And rising numbers of people have had enough.

Hollywood celebrity – and star of the superb Midsommar and The Revenant – Will Poulter is among the latter. Ahead of taking his place in the Marvel universe, as Adam Warlock in Guardians of the Galaxy 3, he’s decided to use his influence to take a stand against rampant unfairness by supporting charity Turn2us.

Turn2us helps people in financial hardship to gain access to welfare benefits, charitable grants and support services. They’ve seen demand for their services rocket in recent years. In the last year, they awarded £3.6 million in grants. They help more than 2 million people a year find out what benefits they’re eligible for.

Through his involvement with Turn2us, Will has made friends with Aneita Lewis. Aneita is a 49-year-old single mother from London, and has experienced financial hardship herself. Her story – which she shares with us on BetterPod – shows just how easily someone can find themselves in that situation, even when working a full time job. She found help from Turn2us and now advises the charity from her own lived experience.

BetterPod is brought to you by The Big Issue’s Future Generations team. Through the Future Generations team, we offer a platform for exciting young journalists from underrepresented backgrounds to address the biggest issues facing us today.

If you are worried about your financial situation, you can find out more about Turn2us at turn2us.org.uk

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Sophia Smith Galer wants us to talk about sex. A multi-award-winning reporter, author and TikTok creator based in London, she’s investigated the misinformation we’re all exposed to about our sexuality.

Her book Losing It: Sex Education for the 21st Century is a mythbusting call-to-arms that champions inclusive and equitable sex. On BetterPod, she tells Laura Kelly and Sophie Dimitrijevic that better sex is not only about pleasure – it’s also an opportunity to be smarter and kinder.

BetterPod is brought to you by The Big Issue’s Future Generations team. Through the Future Generations team, we offer a platform for exciting young journalists from underrepresented backgrounds to address the biggest issues facing us today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What does Silicon Valley get wrong about the future of transportation? Tech giants like Uber and Tesla promise they will fix the problems currently associated with getting from A to B, whether that’s the contribution to climate change, deaths on our roads or the frustration of being stuck in traffic.

But do their solutions live up to the hype?

In this week’s BetterPod, Laura Kelly and Sophie Dimitrijevic are joined by Paris Marx - host of the Tech Won't Save Us podcast. His new book Road To Nowhere exposes the problems with tech's vision of the future. He tells us about the steps we can take to reclaim the future of transport so it serves the many, not just the few.

BetterPod is brought to you by The Big Issue’s Future Generations team. Through the Future Generations team, we offer a platform for exciting young journalists from underrepresented backgrounds to address the biggest issues facing us today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Between the anti-vaxxers, QAnon believers, and Donald Trump, we do seem to be living through a conspiracy theory peak. Jonn Elledge joins Laura Kelly and Katerina Sivitanides on BetterPod to unpick why people fall for seemingly ridiculous ideas – and how you can avoid being one of them.

Jonn Elledge is a journalist – and a Big Issue contributor – and along with his fellow author Tom Phillips, he has written Conspiracy: A History of Boll*cks Theories, and How Not to Fall for Them. It’s a funny and useful guide that uncovers the real life damage these ideas can do.

BetterPod is brought to you by The Big Issue’s Future Generations team. Through the Future Generations team, we offer a platform for exciting young journalists from underrepresented backgrounds to address the biggest issues facing us today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our rights have never been handed to us by kings and queens, they’ve been fought for and won through protest. In their new book Charged: How the Police Try to Suppress Protest, criminal defence lawyer Matt Foot and documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist Morag Livingstone uncover the lengths to which the police in the UK have gone to suppress those protests.

Through eye-witness account and previously unseen documents, they reveal organised police violence against miners at Orgreave, print workers at Warrington, anti–poll tax campaigners, student protesters, and Black Lives Matter activists.

But, they tell Laura Kelly and Sophie Dimitrijevic on this week's BetterPod, protestors will not be silenced. They have useful advice for activists on how to continue making their voices heard, in the face of new restrictions brought in by the 2022 Policing Act.

BetterPod is brought to you by The Big Issue’s Future Generations team. Through the Future Generations team, we offer a platform for exciting young journalists from underrepresented backgrounds to address the biggest issues facing us today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There have already been more than 300 mass shootings this year in the United States. On May 24 this year, the world was shocked by a mass shooting in Uvalde in Texas. It left 19 children and two teachers dead. Since then, there have been over a hundred additional mass shootings.

It is in an “epidemic of gun violence”, according to Texan campaigner Ariel Hobbs. At just 24, Ariel is a veteran organiser. She’s the programme coordinator at March for Our Lives, the grass roots, youth led organisation that has organised mass protest against gun violence across the USA.

She joins us on BetterPod this week to talk about the trauma experienced by her generation – and how they’re fighting back.

BetterPod is brought to you by The Big Issue’s Future Generations team. Through the Future Generations team, we offer a platform for exciting young journalists from underrepresented backgrounds to address the biggest issues facing us today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today, more kids want to be influencers than want to be astronauts. And with the likes of Kylie Jenner and Dwayne Johnson getting paid almost a million pounds for a single post on Instagram, who could blame them?

But is the influencer life as glamorous as it seems?

In his new book Get Rich or Lie Trying, Channel 4 News reporter Symeon Brown lifts the lid on influencer culture. It’s a timely investigation. He meets young women who’ve had plastic surgery to fit the online ideal, and a formerly homeless African migrant who’s been paid to listen to racist abuse from alt right livestream audiences.

But Symeon doesn’t vilify the influencers he met for his book – for many of the people making money by building a following online, it can seem a rational choice when faced with an insecure job market and the cost of living crisis.

In this week's BetterPod he tells Sophie Dimitrijevic and Laura Kelly about the undercurrent of fraud, exploitation, bribery, and dishonesty behind influencer culture.

BetterPod is brought to you by The Big Issue’s Future Generations team. Through the Future Generations team, we offer a platform for exciting young journalists from underrepresented backgrounds to address the biggest issues facing us today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Laura Bates is the founder of the revolutionary Everyday Sexism Project. For the last decade, the website has provided a space for women to speak up about their experiences of sexism.

Bates' latest book, Fix the System, Not the Women exposes the ways that women are blamed for the violence and oppression inflicted upon us.

Why did she walk home alone at night? Why is she not doing enough to secure her place at the table? Why haven’t women overcome all the odds stacked against us?

Bates tells Laura Kelly and Eliza Pitkin that this blame game has distracted us from the real problem: the failings and biases of a society that was just not built for women. In this edition of BetterPod she discusses the solutions that already exist to make the future better for women – if only they’d be enacted.

BetterPod is brought to you by The Big Issue’s Future Generations team. Through the Future Generations team, we offer a platform for exciting young journalists from underrepresented backgrounds to address the biggest issues facing us today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.