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
January 9, 2026 • 64 mins
100 years on from Schrödinger’s equation, we’re on the cusp of the second Quantum revolution. Everything is about to change again – but how? Theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and astrobiologist Paul Davies investigates quantum theory's extraordinary predictive power and the debates that continue to surround the field, diving into the very nature of quantum reality and the beginnings of the universe.
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December 19, 2025 • 73 mins
Bestselling novelist Rebecca F. Kuang returns to How To Academy in conversation with Hannah MacInnes to dive into her new novel, Katabasis, inviting us on a journey to the underworld and back. From the literal and metaphorical meanings of descending to hell, to the question of eternity, to the imaginative expanse of Rebecca's literary vision in an age where freedom of expression is under threat, Rebecca illuminates the art of her c...
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December 16, 2025 • 38 mins
When Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman went into an Alabama state prison to film a revival meeting, they discover that the prisoners wanted to talk to them off-camera and share their stories; after Andrew and Charlotte left, the incarcerated men were able to use contraband mobile phones to reveal the hidden realities of prison life. Their stories included the horrifying death of prisoner Stephen Davis at the hands of guard, and ...
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December 10, 2025 • 61 mins
Do you avoid conflict? Do you tend to take the blame? Do you take care of others at the expense of yourself? Do you live in a state of hypervigilance? Fawning can appear in a plethora of different ways, it can be visible or invisible; it can manifest in our relationships to sex or money, or in the tendency to 'people-please'. But one thing remains constant: it is about finding safety in an unsafe world, often at our own expense.
F...
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December 5, 2025 • 77 mins
Widely heralded as the most provocative Norwegian writer since Ibsen and simply ‘one of the finest writers alive’ by the New York Times, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s five-part autobiographical novel sequence My Struggle sent him into the stratosphere of literary fame, inspiring a wave of imitators that continues to this day and cementing his place as an outspoken giant of contemporary literature.
A long-time resident in London, Karl Ove ...
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December 2, 2025 • 56 mins
A boy scout from smalltown America known for his sincere, folksy charm. A chain-smoking maverick dedicated to the pursuit of the Art Life. A womaniser with a female skewing fanbase. A Hollywood outsider who was also a mainstream celebrity. Who was the real David Lynch, and why did his bizarre, avant garde art films - from Eraserhead to Inland Empire - gain him recognition and love far beyond any of his contemporaries? The cultural ...
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November 25, 2025 • 56 mins
In this episode of the podcast neuroscientist Nicholas Wright reveals how, whether we like it or not, the brain is wired for conflict – in the office or on the battlefield. Blending insights from cutting-edge research with stories from across history, Nicholas joins war correspondent David Patrikarakos to explore the past, present, and future of warfare and reveal the truth about why we fight, lose and win wars.
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November 21, 2025 • 57 mins
The son of Stephen and Tabitha King and brother of Owen King, Joe Hill was raised in a uniquely gifted literary family and has long established a reputation of his own as a first rate storyteller across prose fiction, comics, TV and film. Drawing on influences as diverse as The Secret History, The Hobbit, and his father's dark fantasy classic The Gunslinger, his new novel King Sorrow follows six friends as their Faustian pact with ...
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November 18, 2025 • 90 mins
How do we understand the world and our place in it? Do our lives consist of a small number of dramatic turning points, or is there nothing but a series of gradual changes from infancy to old age? Are political elections genuinely transformational, or merely arbitrary points along a shifting cultural timeline? And in physics, how can the continuities of general relativity coexist with the discontinuities of quantum theory?
In Waves...
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November 14, 2025 • 66 mins
Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall reveal the insights you need to better understand what's on your dinner plate, how it got there, and why you eat it.
Award-winning health journalist Julia Belluz and internationally renowned nutrition and metabolism scientist Dr Kevin Hall will unpack the science behind our diets, metabolism, and the food systems that shape them. Together, they will explore how our food environment is the key influence ...
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November 11, 2025 • 77 mins
Though well-known across Europe by name, the real lives of women such as Joan of Arc and Jadwiga of Poland have been buried under banners of nationalistic agendas that have twisted their stories through the ages. Oxford historian Janina Ramirez joins Sir Tony Robinson to illuminate the truth of these incredible women, and disentangle their real stories from the myths imposed on them through time. From Lady Godiva's real name, Godgi...
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November 7, 2025 • 71 mins
Today, trauma permeates media, from music and television to films and books. While the increasing openness is welcome, Darren has observed that the webs of digital networks surrounding us and which commodify our most vulnerable experiences often harm us more than help us heal. How did we get here? What role does social media play in commodifying our experiences? And are the stories we’re telling ourselves liberating us or keeping u...
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November 4, 2025 • 42 mins
In his four Time Travellers Guides to England, historian Ian Mortimer has taken us from the Medieval period all the way to the Regency, revelling not in the business of courts and princes but the minutae of daily life for ordinary men and women. In this podcast, he shares his insights into how the English people have changed over time - and how they have stayed the same. Touching upon liberty and leadership, xenophobia and violence...
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October 31, 2025 • 84 mins
Two decades ago, Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia and transformed the world’s access to knowledge. Today, people view Wikipedia 11 billion times every month in the English language alone. Yet in an age of ‘alternative facts’, conspiracies and disinformation, the foundations of Wikipedia are increasingly under threat. The concept at the heart of it all extends to the whole of society: trust Like water and electricity, our society can’t...
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October 28, 2025 • 82 mins
Jens Stoltenberg was Prime Minister of Norway from 2005-2013, and when he took office as Secretary General of NATO in 2014, the world was already changing. What followed was a decade marked by war, diplomatic crises, and decisions that helped shape our shared security. Now he joins Adam Boulton to go behind closed doors and offer a rare insight into how the world’s most powerful military alliance handles crises and to share why aft...
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October 24, 2025 • 40 mins
Marie Kondo’s unique approach to organising our lives and our homes has transformed the relationship we have with the objects around us, helping us all to seek out the joy in our daily lives. In the eleven years since The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up made her famous across the globe, journalists, readers and fans have asked her one question more than any other: what role did Japanese philosophy and culture play in shaping her ...
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October 21, 2025 • 31 mins
A pioneering voice in Arab cinema, Annemarie Jacir has written, directed, and produced over sixteen films, with premieres at Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, Rotterdam, and Toronto. In 2007, she made history by shooting the first feature film by a Palestinian female director. All four of her feature films have been chosen as Palestine’s Oscar submissions.
Set in 1936 during the Arab Revolt in British-ruled Palestine, Palestine 36 ...
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October 16, 2025 • 32 mins
Philippa Gregory takes us behind the myths to reveal how Jane Boleyn became a scapegoat of Henry VIII’s tyranny and the historians who defended it. Drawing on the silences of the record and the resilience of women navigating a perilous court, Gregory explores how fiction can reveal the internal lives of historical characters who we think we know so well. In Boleyn Traitor, Jane emerges not as a schemer but as a survivor: navigating...
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October 14, 2025 • 47 mins
Returning to the podcast following episodes around his prize-winning debut The Mountain Under the Sea and his acclaimed novella The Tusks of Extinction, Ray Nayler joins us to explore the rise in authoritarian systems of control and celebrate the power of human agency to drive meaningful social change. These are the themes of his new novel Where the Axe is Buried: a dystopian fable set in a near-future Russia where Artificial Intel...
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October 10, 2025 • 65 mins
Dr Kerry Burnight reveals a transformative new approach to aging—one that goes beyond lifespan and healthspan to embrace joyspan: the ability to experience joy from within. Dr Burnight reveals how joy differs from happiness, the damaging effects of internalised ageism, and the surprising abilities—such as judgment, emotional regulation, and humour—that often improve with age. Dr Burnight also shares the four essential practices nec...
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