How To Academy Podcast
How To Academy is London's home of big thinking. From Nobel laureates to Pulitzer Prize winners, we invite the world’s most influential voices to share new ideas for changing ourselves, our communities, and the world. Our biweekly podcast is your chance to hear in-depth from the most exciting thinkers in global culture.
Episodes
July 4, 2025 • 79 mins
Former Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt shares a thought-provoking vision of our place in the world in the century ahead.
Is Britain a minor player, marginalised by our departure from the EU and dwarfed by the rise of new economies? Or is there a major role for us to play in a rapidly changing international order?
With the election of President Trump, the answer to that question matters. A world that was already becoming more danger...
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July 1, 2025 • 82 mins
Tracing his journey through his diagnosis with ADHD, Robin Ince explores his own insecurities and discoveries along the way, from the importance of vulnerability, to finding greater meaning and happiness, to the beauty of connecting with others through shared neurodiversity. Illuminating how diagnosis can help individuals find and understand their best selves, Robin also reveals how society—from individuals to wider school systems—...
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June 30, 2025 • 63 mins
Caroline Darian, daughter of Dominique Pelicot, shares with Afua Hirsch a rallying cry for change, and confronts the hidden violence that too many endure in silence.
The Pelicot mass rape trial was unprecedented in scope and nature, captivating France and the world. Dominique’s daughter, Caroline Darian, shares with journalist Afua Hirsch her family’s strength and resilience in the face of Dominique’s horrific crimes and turns the...
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June 27, 2025 • 72 mins
On 5 June 2022, award-winning journalist Dom Phillips was working on a book about the Amazon rainforest, alongside the indigenous expert Bruno Pereira, when they were both shot dead. They are believed to have been assassinated by one of the criminal networks whose ecological exploitation they were working to expose.
A team of expert writers took up his partially completed manuscript, committed to his mission of uncovering the trut...
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June 24, 2025 • 65 mins
Isabel Allende shares the story of Emilia del Valle, her unforgettable new heroine on a treacherous, life-changing journey during the Chilean Civil war of 1891. Past and present merge in this conversation, as Isabel explores how her new heroine—who reminds us of Isabel herself— confronts the tyranny and injustice of her time. As tyranny and injustice bleeds into the present, Isabel shares her convictions on today's oppressions, and...
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June 17, 2025 • 69 mins
We are surrounded by bold claims and quick fixes for ‘boosting’ our immune health. But one thing the science is clear on is that everyone’s immune system is unique – what is good for one person may not work well for another. So how do we separate the bogus claims from the useful advice? Head of Life Sciences and Professor of Immunology at Imperial College, Daniel Davis, helps us sort the facts from the fiction.
From the genetics o...
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June 13, 2025 • 70 mins
The hosts of the blockbuster podcast We Can Do Hard Things share a fresh guide to being alive and answer life's most difficult questions.
Every day, Glennon Doyle spirals around the same questions: Why am I like this? How do I figure out what I want? How do I know what to do? Why can’t I be happy? Am I doing this right?
The harder life gets, the less likely she is to remember the answers she’s spent her life learning.
In a parti...
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June 10, 2025 • 71 mins
A louche slacker and a restless wanderer, an Englishman most at home abroad, a comic genius and a whip smart critic of art and culture: Geoff Dyer is a literary colossus, an original voice whose writings circulate around his favourite themes – sex, death, drugs, spirituality, travel, and boredom – while also being utterly different to one another. Now he joins Fat White Family's Lias Saoudi to reflect on his own coming of age, from...
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June 6, 2025 • 70 mins
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, neoliberalism, with its belief in the virtues of markets and competition, seemed to have triumphed. But in the decades that followed, neoliberalism had a problem: the rise of social movements, from civil rights and feminism to environmentalism, were now proving roadblocks in the road to freedom, nurturing a culture of government dependency, public spending, political correctness and special p...
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June 3, 2025 • 65 mins
How can we live a good life? Perhaps a good life is hard to define, but as bestselling author Rolf Dobelli reveals, we can learn how to cultivate a good life through habits to avoid—from watching too much news to 'winging' your way through the week. Merging stoicism and no-nonsense practicality, Rolf shares how we can live rationally and meaningfully, nurturing healthy relationships and habits with those around us and ourselves.
Le...
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May 30, 2025 • 78 mins
Bestselling author, artist, and the Observer’s agony aunt Philippa Perry joins cartoonist Becky Barnicoat for a conversation about the highs and lows of raising small children. From the unglamorous reality of post-partum to the tumult of baby supplies, from the challenges of bedtime to the comically dishevelled appearance of new parenthood, discover the deeply strange new world of parenting, ruled by a tyrannical tiny leader, gro...
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May 27, 2025 • 29 mins
Today Lorna Tucker is a feted documentary maker whose subjects include Vivienne Westwood and Katherine Hepburn — a life she could not have imagined as a young woman who fled a troubled home to live on the streets. Once a thief, sex worker, and drug addict, estranged from her family and in trouble with gangs and the police, her memoir Bare will make you see a hidden world for the first time and change the way you think about the mos...
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May 23, 2025 • 76 mins
From the far-right violence that broke out in the summer of 2024 to the hatred directed at Muslims in public life during the Gaza conflict, anti-Muslim racism is dangerously out-of-control. Fed by a network of media outlets, think tanks, commentators, and even the entertainment industry, Islamophobia not only passes the dinner table test but is also Britain’s bigotry blind spot. For too many, Muslims don’t matter.
But that's not s...
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May 21, 2025 • 49 mins
While many of us are sleeping, another world awakens in the night hours. Author Dan Richards reveals the thrumming life of the night, from night shifts on postal trains to the art of focaccia, from the rhythm of shipping forecasts to the humanity which society often fails to recognise in homelessness. Dan illuminates the nighttime world, and explores the deeply personal relationship we each have with the night hours.
Learn more abo...
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May 16, 2025 • 69 mins
LSE’s Paul Dolan reveals how we can stop hating the people we disagree with, and how we can foster a more tolerant society.
We like to think that we’re tolerant, but many of us struggle to engage with people whose opinions differ strongly from our own – even if they might have something useful to contribute to the debate. We’re all falling victim to what Professor Paul Dolan defines as beliefism. Now Paul joins us to reveal the im...
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May 13, 2025 • 70 mins
Our greatest living nature writer, Robert Macfarlane shares with Horatio Clare a single, transformative idea: are rivers alive?
Robert Macfarlane is both the author of prize-winning bestsellers including Underland, Landmarks, and The Old Ways, and an artistic polymath whose collaborators include many of the most distinguished artists, musicians, and poets of our time, including Olafur Eliasson, Johnny Flynn, and Jackie Morris.
In...
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May 9, 2025 • 71 mins
Neurologist and Oxford Professor Dr Masud Husain explores the intricacies of the brain, and how much our sense of self can change through brain disorders. From a woman who could not recognise the motions of her own hand, to a driven and outgoing man whose sudden stroke rendered him apathetic to all he used to care about, Dr Husain explores the bounds of the self, the need for a deeply human connection between doctor and patient, an...
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May 6, 2025 • 40 mins
The story of Elizabethan theatre is often told through the artistic genius of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Critic and scholar Daniel Swift has a different story to tell: that of the businessmen who dreamed of the first professional theatre, fought against civil and religious authorities to have it built, and, ultimately, fought each other. How did the Burbage family lay the foundations for a golden age of drama? Find out in ...
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May 2, 2025 • 66 mins
Gina Rippon delves into the emerging science of female autism, asking why it has been systematically ignored and misunderstood for so long. Generations of researchers, convinced autism was a male problem, failed to recognise or study it in women. But new research is shedding light on female autism, revealing how autism is different for women and girls, and that camouflaging – hiding autistic traits to fit in – is far more widesprea...
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April 29, 2025 • 82 mins
Slavoj Žižek, one of the most outrageous and maverick thinkers of our time, joins Robin Ince for deep dive into his life and thought.
From his life and education in the former Yugoslavia under communist rule, where his master’s thesis was denounced by the authorities for being ‘not Marxist enough’ and he fought to democratise Slovenia and defend human rights, to his current position as one of the 21st century’s most renowned publi...
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