StoryCo

Ben Lewis and Arthur Brand on the Louvre heist, the art theft epidemic, and why stolen Renoirs end up as drug collateral. Episode Overview In October 2025, thieves arrived at the Louvre on scooters, erected a furniture lift, and were in and out with 88 million euros in Napoleonic crown jewels in four minutes. They dropped the Empress's tiara on the way out. Within 12 hours, another French museum w...

Andrew Lownie on Prince Andrew, royal secrets, and why the establishment is harder to crack than ever. Episode Overview Andrew Lownie came back to StoryCo because listeners asked for him. Since the first episode, the story hasn't stopped moving. Andrew was seen bruised in the back of a car. Harry lost in court. The sovereign grant was tripled with no parliamentary debate. And Lownie is now wri...

Clare Rewcastle Brown on the 1MDB scandal, vexatious lawsuits, and why one blog brought down a government. Episode Overview Some $7 billion was stolen in the 1MDB scandal. It cost $8 billion to cover it up. Clare Rewcastle Brown uncovered it from a spare room, with a blog and a shortwave radio and no newsroom behind her. When the Malaysian government hired a $15 million PR firm to destroy her repu...

Ben Macintyre on Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and the strangest book he has ever written. Episode Overview In 1943, British intelligence floated a dead body off the coast of Spain with letters from an officer who had never existed. The Germans believed it. In 1941, a professional safe-cracker parachuted into Britain by the Nazis immediately switched sides. In 1979, a senior KGB officer in Te...

Misha Glenny on war zones, McMafia, and why this is the time of monsters. Episode Overview In 1994, Misha Glenny drove across Sarajevo Airport under sniper fire. A bullet entered his car, passed through the drive shaft, and exited the other side. He didn't panic. He traced the bullet's path with the detached curiosity of someone who had been doing this for years. Glenny made his name cover...

Thalia Kent Egan on vertical drama, AI theft, and why filmmaking shouldn't be brutal. Episode Overview Thalia Kent Egan was commissioned to write a 90-page vertical drama script. She was told she would direct it, that the company wanted bold storytelling, real actors, heartbeat moments. Then they went quiet. When she followed up, they replied to say they had already released it as an AI-generated...

Dr. Gab Astorga on microbial genomics, hiding the vegetables, and why science is not finished until it's communicated. Episode Overview Dr. Gab Astorga opens with the story of how tuberculosis invented the cowboy hat, which led to American culture, which led to Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter. It is exactly who he is and exactly what this conversation delivers for the next 40 minutes. Gab grew up...

Matthew Manning on poltergeists, laboratory healing, and why he gave up fame at the height of it. Episode Overview When Matthew Manning was 11, objects began moving around his Cambridge home. His father, an architect, ruled out every logical explanation one by one. The police sergeant he reported it to turned out to have a personal passion for ghost hunting and knew exactly who to call: a professo...

Summary Ros Barber on coercive control, the Shakespeare authorship question, and why writing is a survival mechanism. Episode Overview Ros Barber was six months pregnant when she learned the insurance software her husband had been contracted to deliver didn't exist. She stayed up 36 hours, learned C++ from scratch, delivered the system, went into premature labor, and came home from the hospital to...

Summary Joey D'Urso on dirty money, soft power, and why the shirt on your back says more about the world than you think. Episode Overview A Schalke shirt is thirty years of Germany's addiction to Russian gas. A Colombian yellow kit became a factional political weapon in a single election. Joey D'Urso spent years as a political journalist at the BBC before the editor of The Athletic asked if he lik...

Summary Ben Lewis on the art market, the Salvator Mundi, and why the most beautiful objects are used for the ugliest purposes. Episode Overview In 2005, a painting sold at auction for $1,000. In 2017, the same painting sold to the ruler of Saudi Arabia for $450 million. Christie's marketed it as a Leonardo da Vinci. It probably isn't. Nobody can prove it either way because most of the orig...

Summary Jago Cooper on living art, the Easter Island myth, and why things are better storytellers than people. Episode Overview What if artworks aren't objects but living entities? Jago Cooper, Executive Director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, made headlines when he became the first museum director in the world to change his institution's governance structure so that every artwor...

Summary Dr. Jess Venner on Pompeii, the ordinary people history forgot, and why resilience is a better story than disaster. Jess Venner grew up in Hainault on the end of the Central Line, at a school in special measures, having never heard of classics. She is now a research fellow at Oxford, and her book The Lost Voices of Pompeii reconstructs the final day of seven ordinary Pompeiians: a pub land...

Summary Emma Dabiri on hair, history, and why the Black/white binary is a design choice, not a fact of life. Episode Overview Emma Dabiri wrote a book about hair. Except it wasn't about hair.  Don't Touch My Hair  used braiding as a trapdoor into 6,000 years of African philosophy, pre-colonial constructions of time, and the question of who gets to name things, and what happens to the things that g...

Summary Mike Figgis on  Leaving Las Vegas ,  Timecode , and why the best creative work comes from stripping everything back. Episode Overview Mike Figgis shot  Leaving Las Vegas  in three weeks on Super 16 with a skeleton crew and no permits on the Las Vegas Strip. Nicolas Cage won the Oscar. The film cost almost nothing. That was the point. Figgis has been making this argument for 50 years, from...

Rowan Pelling on the Erotic Review, the death of the tease, and why desire needs saving from pornography. Episode Overview Rowan Pelling founded the Erotic Review on a single bet: that the sexiest organ is the brain. The young are having less sex than any previous generation on record. Pornography is free, instant, and infinite. The tease has disappeared. The accidental workplace romance, the fumb...

Summary Julia Shaw on false memory, green crime, and why AI is both the problem and the solution. Episode Overview Julia Shaw once implanted a false memory of a violent crime in a volunteer's mind using three conversations and a few leading questions. The volunteer described it in vivid detail three weeks later. That was her PhD. Now she says we have built the same machine and put it in everyo...

Summary  Richard Welsh on COPA90, Decent Partners, and why AI is a translation tool, not a threat. Episode Overview  Richard Welsh beat David Beckham's team to a YouTube channel with no rights and no leverage, just a deep understanding of how networks actually work. What followed was 20 years of arriving early to every platform shift: Bebo, MySpace, YouTube Originals, Web3, and now AI. Welsh h...

Summary A cold email, a chest-infection phone call, a buyout, and 951 sold-out shows since 2021. The CEO of Defected Records on what holds the centre. Episode Overview Wez Saunders cold-emailed Simon Dunmore in 2013. Two days after a meeting in which Dunmore said he could sell a pen, Wez was home with a chest infection when Dunmore called. He took the club promotions job. Four years later he ran D...

Ryan Hopkins filmed his first TEDx talk from a toilet cubicle, ran a hundred episodes of Toilet Break Wellbeing on LinkedIn and turned the script into an Amazon No. 1 business book. Three years before any of that he was a former rugby player with a broken leg, an eating disorder, and a Halifax bank clerk who found himself unable to speak across the counter. In an hour with James Kirkham, Ryan draw...

Joe Fattorini sat in a bath of red wine in the Atacama Desert, filmed himself talking to camera and uploaded the clip to YouTube. Years later the producer Mel Jappy found it, four-by-three and badly cropped, and built The Wine Show around him. In an hour with James Kirkham, Joe and Mel walk through how a show ostensibly about wine ended up in 110 countries and in front of hundreds of millions of v...

Kathleen Saxton was repossessed out of her family home at 11. By 40 she was running C-suite headhunting at The Lighthouse Company. She trained as a psychotherapist along the way and now argues boards have governance for cash, finance and risk, and none at all for behaviour. In an hour with James Kirkham she walks through the memoir she wrote on domestic abuse and the lawyer she hired to defend it;...

Will Storr has spent thirty years working out what a story actually is. He sits down with James for the longest, most personal version he has given of how that obsession started — and what it has cost him to get good at it. It starts with six words. A tiger. A hunter. A tiger. Will calls this an ancient Bengali story, and inside ninety seconds it has done more to explain how stories work than most...

"I had an early midlife crisis. I ended up at a work event rearranging the downstairs of a restaurant." Alex Wade is a lawyer, a writer, and a surfer ; in that order of discovery, maybe the reverse order of importance. Fleet Street defamation lawyer. Night lawyer at the Mirror. Head of legal affairs for Richard Desmond. White-collar boxer. Journalist at The Times and The Guardian. Author. Mont Bla...

"Is there a formula for fame?" "Definitely." "Can you tell me?" "No." PR legend Mark Borkowski has spent four decades bending media to his will: from circus stunts to celebrity crisis management, Alcopop scandals to political warfare. Mark opens with the greatest dilemma of his career , chasing the Holy Grail or pitching Bisto gravy granules, before unravelling how spectacle, nerve, and story have...