How To Academy Podcast

A Professor at Harvard Business School specialising in happiness and leadership, Arthur Brooks joins us to share his insights into realising greater happiness, no matter how challenging your circumstances. Drawing upon the ideas in Build the Life You Want, his new book co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, he will offer not unrealistic promises of perfect bliss, but evidence-based tools to meet you wher...

Zeke Faux is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg and the author of Number Goes Up - a wild, first hand account of his journey into the world of crypto currencies and the larger than life he met along the way - including Sam Bankman Fried, the founder of FTX. He joined us for a conversation with Oliver Bullow, the author of Butler to the World and Moneyland. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...

Menopause affects every woman, and yet so many approach it with shame, fear, misinformation or silence. Why is no one talking about this? Who has the correct information? And how can we get it? Davina McCall and Dr Naomi Potter are here to tell you the truth, so you can make informed decisions about your life and your body. By exploring and explaining the science, debunking damaging myths, and sma...

Today we face not one crisis but a cascade: sputtering growth, surging inflation, poor policy responses, an escalating climate emergency, worsening inequality, increasing nationalism and a decline in global co-operation. But though the situation seems dire, it is not yet broken beyond repair. In this episode, we bring together former UK PM Gordon Brown, business leader and former chair of Presiden...

We are on the cusp of a major revolution in psychiatric medicine and neuroscience. After fifty years of prohibition, criminalisation and fear, science is finally showing us that psychedelics are not dangerous or harmful. Instead, when used according to tested, safe and ethical guidelines, they are our most powerful newest treatment of mental health conditions, from depression, PTSD, and OCD to dis...

We commonly misperceive mental health as being all in the mind, and physical pain in the body; but neuroscientist Camilla Nord’s groundbreaking research presents a new view of mental health – one that reframes mental health as an intricate, self-regulating process which is different for all of us. It's the subject of her new book, The Balanced Brain, and of this conversation with Hannah MacInnes....

Michel Faber is one of the most acclaimed contemporary novelists in the English language; a master of the form able to move effortlessly between historical, contemporary, and futuristic settings in pursuit of emotional truth. But music, not literature, is his first love, and in his new book Listen he draws on that passion to investigate why music matters to us and how it works its magic. The owner...

"Don't worry, be happy", "focus on the important things", "smile more". We've all heard these platitudes, and we've all been annoyed by them. But how can we actually live a life filled with more happiness and less distraction? Psychiatric specialist and bestselling author Dr Anders Hansen believes the first step is understanding the wiring of our brains - and how modern society is built to hijack...

John Higgs has joined this podcast to talk about William Blake, James Bond, and the Beatles - and now he's back with another iconic British cultural export: the electronic band sometimes called The KLF. He's just released the 10th Anniversary Edition of his book trying to make sense of why they set fire to a million pounds then vanished from public life. His attempt to figure out the answer takes...

For most of us, the arts are a great source of pleasure. But could making art actually be good for your brain and body? Susan Magsamen is the founder and director of the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she studies how the brain and biology change when we participate in the arts. She's the author of Your Brain on Art, a new book making a powerful...

The author of 58 novels, as well as plays, poetry, non-fiction and short stories, Joyce Carol Oates is famed across the literary world for writing at a speed which leaves her contemporaries trailing in the dust. But the fact of her productivity – and the sheer challenge of keeping up with such a prodigious writer – too often masks the more significant truth: that Joyce Carol Oates may be the most...

Jesse Coomer was an English professor suffering from what he called "The Modern Human Condition" - in other words, he was a mess of stress and anxiety. He learned to combat that with breath training and cold exposure, and now teaches his techniques to athletes, the military, and beyond. He's the author of a new book called The Language of Breath - it's already out in the US and comes out in the UK...

What can we learn from historical attempts to live together and raise children differently? Kristen Ghodsee is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Everyday Utopia, a new guide to experimental communities from the Pythagorians to the present. She talked to the journalist, author, and broadcaster Angela Saini about the past, present, and future of family life. Learn more...

James Kinross is a consultant surgeon at Imperial College and one of the world's leading experts on the science of the microbiome — the complex ecosystem of bacteria, viruses and other microbes inside us. In a livestream from hospital, where he had literally just finished operating, he took Hannah MacInnes on a tour of this amazing inner universe and told us what it means for our overall health an...

Emma Southon is a podcaster and ancient historian. Her new book A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women does exactly what it says on the tin: sidestepping the sidesteps of the long list of battles, consuls and generals that normally passes for the grand narrative of Rome to focus on the lives of women - including Vestal Virgins, sex workers, empresses, poets, and saints. She turns our preconcept...

For years Dr Rahul Jandial, a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist, has transformed the lives of his neurosurgery patients by putting them through ‘brain rehab’, his specially developed boot camp for restoring brain function. In this eye-opening interview with Hannah MacInnes, he uses his expertise to show how healthy people can rewire their brains to work in a higher gear. Learn more about your ad cho...

When you get behind the wheel of a car, throw or catch a ball, change jobs, or move to a new country, you are making a series of predictions about what will happen next in your life and in the world. But what do we really mean when we talk about “the Future”? Is it something that is fixed or open? Can we genuinely know something about the world in twenty-five, fifty, or a hundred years? Are all pr...

The writer Helen Macdonald is best known for the award winning memoir H is For Hawk and other distinguished works exploring our relationship to the natural world; their new novel Prophet is something very different but no less compelling - a speculative novel of ideas that will appeal to fans of literary science fiction and action thrillers as well as fans of Helen's earlier work. Written in colla...

Julia Cameron is the author, poet, and screenwriter whose book The Artist's Way is one of the most influential creativity manuals ever written. Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of many books including most famously, Eat, Pray, Love - a memoir she says would not have been written without the guidance offered by The Artist Way. At the start of the pandemic, we brought Julia and Elizabeth together vir...

Alan Philps is the former foreign editor of the Daily Telegraph and an expert on Russian politics. He's the author of a new book called The Red Hotel, which tells the story of Moscow's Metropol Hotel and the journalists and translators who stayed there in WWII. The book reveals both the scope and sophistication of Stalin's propaganda machine and the heroism of the translators who fought to expose...

Marie Kondo became a global superstar when she introduced the world to the life-changing magic of tidying up. Now Marie joins us to share the art of kurashi – or “way of life.” She elevates her focus from the physical act of tidying to include a more holistic and personal approach to transforming our homes into spaces of calm. As a mother of three young children, Marie not only reveals a personal...

“Mourning a place is even more difficult than mourning a person,” writes Victoria Belim in The Rooster House. Her book is part-memoir, part-detective story as she returns to her birth country of Ukraine in 2014 to uncover the mystery of her missing great-uncle; but it is also a hymn to the beauty of Ukraine and a paean to her lost land. For as seasons pass and Victoria learns more about her family...

Leading psychiatrist Dr Pooja Lakshmin knows first-hand how toxic the wellness industry can be. In search of radical answers to her own personal experience of burnout and depression, she bought into the cult of wellness and faux “self-care” and found an industry rigged against women’s real interests. Now she joins us with an alternative framework for achieving true wellbeing. Using case studies, c...

Revisiting one of our favourite episodes of last year, the Booker Prize winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo shares his idiosyncratic take on the human condition. George Saunders’ first new collection of stories in ten years is a powerful reminder of why he is widely considered to be the greatest short story writer in the English language. In Liberation Day, we meet the disillusioned employees o...

How did the suburb of Palo Alto become the epicentre of a global tech revolution, changing not just American capitalism but the world? Malcolm Harris was raised in Palo Alto, the heartland of Silicon Valley, home of Stanford University, and the birthplace of the digital age. We live in the world created by The Palo Alto System - a set of 19th century ideas for innovation that have subtly shaped th...