In 2017, President Trump made a cryptic remark at a gathering of military officials, describing it as ‘the calm before the storm’-then refused to explain himself to puzzled journalists. But on internet message boards, a mysterious poster called ‘Q Clearance Patriot’ began an elaboration all of their own. In this week's podcast, Mike Rothschild explores his new book, The Storm Is Upon Us . With families torn apart and with the Capitol under attack, he argues that mocking the madness of QAnon will...
Jul 26, 2021•38 min
Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women was a world-wide sensation – forever changing how we think about women and desire. A bestseller in the US and the UK, “Book of the Year” for more than thirty of the most respected media titles, including the FT , Times and Time magazine, an instant classic beloved by cultural icons including Gillian Anderson, Gwyneth Paltrow and Elizabeth Gilbert, Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women is a global phenomenon. Now Lisa’s debut novel Animal is set to do the same for how we think about...
Jul 19, 2021•57 min
The quality of professional judgments have a huge and lasting impact on all of our lives: the decision of an A&E doctor treating a patient, a teacher grading a paper, or a high court judge delivering a sentencing should not be a matter of personal taste. And yet there is huge, unwanted variability across human judgment. Bias has long been the star of the show when it comes to errors in decision making. Now Daniel Kahneman, Cass Sunstein and Olivier Sibony have uncovered a critical and overlo...
Jul 12, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Season 5Ep. 4
Join us for a wild journey through culture, science, philosophy and religion to better understand the mercurial genius William Blake. Taking us on wild detours into unfamiliar territory, John Higgs places the bewildering eccentricities of a most singular artist into context. The journey begins with us trying to understand him, but we will ultimately discover that it is Blake who helps us to understand ourselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices...
Jul 05, 2021•40 min•Season 5Ep. 3
Every day, extraordinary inventions and innovative ideas are side-lined in a world that remains subservient to men. But it doesn’t have to be this way. From the beginning of time, women have been pivotal to our society, offering ingenious solutions to some of our most vexing problems. More recently, it is women who have transformed the way we shop online, revolutionised the lives of disabled people and put the climate crisis at the top of the agenda. For too long we have underestimated the conse...
Jun 28, 2021•55 min•Season 5Ep. 2
Drawing on his first-hand knowledge of life in the White House, global geopolitics and the upper echelons of power, Bill Clinton teamed up with one of the world’s best-known and best-selling authors, James Patterson, to tell the story of the most thrilling, frightening, and plausible tale of an American presidency yet devised. ‘Meticulous in its portrayal of Washington politics, gripping in its pacing, and harrowing in its depiction of the perils of cyberwarfare' (Ron Chernow), The President Is ...
Jun 22, 2021•54 min•Season 5Ep. 1
Sir David Hare is renowned across the English-speaking world as the finest political storyteller alive today. In our age of blockbuster musicals and CGI superheroes, his oeuvre stands as a testament to the power of theatre and cinema to capture and even transform the soul of a nation. A student in that extraordinary year, 1968, Hare quickly emerged as a writer of courage, heart and coruscating satirical talent, fusing human drama with grand political narratives to map the convulsions of the post...
Jun 08, 2021•58 min•Season 4Ep. 20
How do we learn? Why we do sleep, or fall in love? Can we trust our memories? In this week's podcast, neuroscience expert, author and presenter Ginny Smith explores the latest science of the mind and brain to answer the big questions about human behaviour. From adrenaline to dopamine, our lives are shaped by the chemicals that control us. They are the hormones and neurotransmitters that our brains run on, and science writer Ginny Smith is here to explore the role they play in all aspects of our ...
Jun 02, 2021•55 min•Season 4Ep. 19
On a summer's day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home? Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. Neither parent knows that one of the children will not survive the week. The winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020 and a Sunday Times bestseller, Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet is a tender and unforget...
May 24, 2021•58 min•Season 1Ep. 18
Michio Kaku takes Robin Ince on the mind-bending ride through the twists and turns of an epic scientific journey: the quest to find a Theory of Everything. Einstein dedicated his life to seeking this elusive Holy Grail, a single, revolutionary 'god equation' which would tie all the forces in the universe together, yet never found it. Some of the greatest minds in physics took up the search, from Stephen Hawking to Brian Greene. None have yet succeeded. In this conversation with author, comic and...
May 17, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Season 4Ep. 17
Sitting at the intersection of art, science, and history, this week's podcast reveals fresh perspectives and fascinating insights into our material world. Scientific progress has given us a good grasp on the properties of many different materials: But most scientists cannot measure the temperature of steel just by looking at it, or know how it feels to blow up a balloon of glass. Anna Ploszajski is here to change that. A materials scientist and engineer, she has journeyed into the domain of make...
May 10, 2021•55 min•Season 4Ep. 16
What makes great stories work? What can they tell us about our world today? How can they make us better readers and how can we write them ourselves? George Saunders is one of the undisputed masters of American letters; a novelist, storyteller and essayist whose wisdom and insight have been rewarded with the highest accolades in literature. In a rare treat for authors and storytellers of all forms, he shares his insights from teaching some of the best young writers in America. Drawing on the work...
Apr 26, 2021•1 hr 3 min
Political journalist Matthew d'Ancona's issues a call to arms to challenge this age of political extremism, lazy populism and democratic torpor. The old tools of political analysis are obsolete - they have rusted and are no longer fit for purpose. We've grown lazy, wedded to the assumption that, after ruptures such as Brexit, the pandemic, and the rise of the populist Right, things will eventually go 'back to normal'. Award-winning political writer Matthew d'Ancona joins us with an invitation to...
Apr 19, 2021•1 hr
Isabel Allende has been a feminist her whole life. From a young age she rebelled against male authority, after seeing her mother Panchita abandoned by her husband and left to provide for three small children. While growing up in Chile in her grandparents’ house, Isabel realised early on that the women in her family, from matriarch to housemaid, were at a disadvantage compared to the men, treated as subordinates with no voice. As a young woman coming of age in the late 1960s, Isabel rode the firs...
Apr 12, 2021•57 min
The country’s most prolific and celebrated novelist reflects upon a life in literature. Since his rise to literary acclaim almost forty years ago for the dazzlingly grotesque short stories that earned him the moniker “Ian Macabre”, to his present-day voyages into the uncharted territories of climate change and Artificial Intelligence, one thing has remained consistent across Ian McEwan’s astonishing oeuvre: the exacting precision with which he can simultaneously dissect both the mysteries of the...
Mar 29, 2021•1 hr 11 min
If you had a trillion dollars and a year to spend it for the good of the world and the advancement of science, what would you do? It's an unimaginably large sum, yet it's only around one per cent of world GDP, and about the valuation of Google, Microsoft or Amazon. It's a much smaller sum than the world found to bail out its banks in 2008 or deal with Covid-19. In this week’s How To Academy Podcast, New Scientist senior editor and evolutionary biologist Rowan Hooper explores how $1 trillion coul...
Mar 22, 2021•34 min
Since he introduced us to his singular and inimitable brand of psychology, stagecraft and magic in 2000, Derren Brown has played Russian Roulette on live television, convinced middle-managers to commit armed robbery in the street, led the nation in a séance and exposed psychic and faith-healing charlatans. His live shows astonish audiences across the country and have captivated the West End and Broadway. He joined How To Academy to teach a lesson none of us can afford to miss: what we can do to ...
Mar 15, 2021•1 hr 7 min
Research shows that the smarter you are the more you might struggle to update your beliefs, yet some of the most successful people, from entrepreneurs to politicians, all have one thing in common: the ability to think like scientists, continually questioning their beliefs, and to embrace being wrong. As an organisational psychologist, Adam Grant is an expert on opening other people’s minds, and our own. He is one of the world’s most-cited, most prolific, and most influential researchers in busin...
Mar 08, 2021•1 hr 6 min
We all have a voice in our head that we tune into from time to time for guidance, ideas and wisdom. Except sometimes, this voice leads us down a rabbit hole of negative self-talk and endless rumination which undermines our performance at work, interferes with our ability to make good decisions, and negatively influences our relationships. Since we aren’t going to stop talking to ourselves— and, frankly, we don’t want to, since the voices in our heads have valuable things to say—it’s important we...
Mar 01, 2021•1 hr 3 min
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, capitalism was stuck. It had no answer to the different challenges facing the world – from those related to health to digital privacy to the climate crisis. Taking inspiration from President Kennedy’s ‘moonshot’ programmes that successfully co-ordinated public and private sectors to put a man on the moon, Mariana Mazzucato calls for the same level of boldness and experimentation to be applied to the biggest social and political issues of our time. In co...
Feb 22, 2021•59 min
We live during the most important era of human history. In the twentieth century, we developed the means to destroy ourselves – without developing the moral framework to ensure we won't. This is the Precipice, and how we respond to it will be the most crucial decision of our time. In this week's podcast, Oxford moral philosopher Toby Ord explores the risks to humanity's future, from the familiar man-made threats of climate change and nuclear war, to the potentially greater, more unfamiliar threa...
Feb 15, 2021•49 min
How can we best approach one another across our differences? The first and only poet to write a New York Times bestseller, the winner of every significant literary prize in the United States, and recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant”, Jamaican-born Claudia Rankine is an icon of contemporary American letters. In this conversation with Guardian columnist Owen Jones, she explores her own prejudices and those of others, and celebrate vulnerability, openness and the willingness to be wrong. It’s an...
Feb 08, 2021•58 min
A tour de force of neuroscience and philosophy, Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary speaks to everyone searching for happiness, meaning and understanding in the modern world. For millennia humans have speculated upon the differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Why did evolution lead to humans and many other animals developing two cerebral hemispheres, separated by a groove? No neuroscientist would dispute that there are significant differences; but until now, ...
Feb 01, 2021•59 min
From Blink to Outliers, Revisionist History to David and Goliath, no-one challenges our shared assumptions and invites us to rethink human nature like Malcolm Gladwell. Named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people and Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers, his ideas have passed into common currency and made him one of the most recognisable and beloved public intellectuals of our time. He is uncannily tuned into the zeitgeist, able to fuse scholarly insights, human stories and a global...
Jan 25, 2021•41 min
‘First, you have to learn how to be a woman. Then middle age arrives, and you realise you have to become … more than a woman. To those around you, you’re now the Fourth Emergency Service.” – Caitlin Moran Caitlin Moran was home-educated on a Wolverhampton council estate and went onto become the most iconic columnist and critic of her generation. From How to Be a Woman to Moranifesto, How to Build a Girl to Channel 4 sitcom Raised by Wolves, her game-changing take on feminism, the patriarchy and ...
Jan 18, 2021•1 hr
The events of 2020 have upturned the order of the world, and the medical, economic and political crises we face will not fade quietly as the new year begins. Though so much of the present moment feels strange and unprecedented, there is wisdom in heeding to George Santayana’s famous proverb that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. To help ensure that we do not fall foul of the prophecy, Simon Schama joined How To Academy to share his insights into the past and near future...
Jan 11, 2021•1 hr 3 min
“My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans. That's never far from my thoughts, that sense of amazement.” – Richard Dawkins Richard Dawkins has done more than any other scientist to promote and celebrate the origins of life on Earth...
Dec 09, 2020•1 hr 11 min
Whether exposing Britain’s powerful elites in The Establishment or defending the white working class in Chavs, fighting for equality and social justice as a Guardian columnist and broadcaster, Owen Jones may be the most influential and widely respected political journalist of his generation. In conversation with world-renowned economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, he gives an unflinchingly honest, insider’s account of Labour’s electoral defeat in 2019 – and explores where...
Nov 30, 2020•1 hr 3 min
An icon of the last fifty years, Stephen Hawking seems to encapsulate genius. In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, his colleague and collaborator Leonard Mlodinow offers an intimate account of this giant of science in conversation with comic and broadcaster Robin Ince. The two met in 2003, after Stephen asked Leonard if he would consider writing a book with him. As they spent years working on A Briefer History of Time followed by The Grand Design, they forged a deep connection and Leon...
Nov 23, 2020•1 hr 5 min
Our meat and dairy intensive diets are destroying the planet. In this week's podcast, animal welfare environmentalist Philip Lymbery shares the new science of living sustainably and makes a powerful case for changing how we eat. From vegan alternatives to free range pasturised meat, cultured meat to precision fermentation, Philips considers the new dietary habits, technological innovations and political developments that could change the way we farm and eat and make a seismic impact on the clima...
Nov 16, 2020•52 min
