How To Academy Podcast

A few weeks before Christmas, Clover Stroud’s sister Nell Gifford, founder of Gifford’s Circus, died of breast cancer, aged forty-six. Just days before, she had been given years to live. Nell’s sudden death split Clover's life apart. Clover charts her fearless passage through the first year after her sister's death. This is the story of what life feels like when death interrupts it, and about bear...

Dr Gabor Maté will return in-person to How To Academy next month. In anticipation, we're sharing our podcast interview recorded on his last visit in 2019. Find out how you can join us at Gabor's next talk at howtoacademy.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

60s Britain produced not only the most biggest band in the history of music, but the most successful movie character of all time. In this episode of the podcast, cultural historian and novelist John Higgs investigates how and why the Beatles and James Bond defined our aspirations and fantasies, and the role they continue to play in shaping British identity. Why did the Beatles really split up? Is...

Backed by the latest scientific research and her own clinical work, Dr Ellen Vora offers a fresh, much needed look at mental health, offering actionable strategies for managing our moods. Dr Vora challenges the conventional view of anxiety as a mental disorder, suggesting instead that much of what we call anxiety begins in the body. Rather than our troubled thoughts creating physical symptoms, she...

The creator of the wildly successful running app Zombies, Run! and a columnist for the prestigious videogame industry magazine EDGE, Adrian Hon makes games that make real world activities more rewarding and fun. He joins the podcast not to celebrate the gamification of real world activities, but warn us against the abuse of these techniques -- from corporations using games to exploit and control t...

One of Britain's most acclaimed visual artists, Cornelia Parker's sculptures challenge our sense of what an artwork can be. Both an eminent theoretical physicist and a bestselling author, Carlo Rovelli has not only advanced humanity's understanding of its place in the cosmos but made the revelations of physics intelligible to the rest of us, in books such as The Fabric of Reality, The Order of Tim...

In conversations about the role of Big Tech in the spread of misinformation and propaganda, YouTube rarely receives the same attention as Facebook, Twitter, and its parent company Google. But alongside the cat videos and video game streamers, counteless extremists have found a found on the platform - and their actions sometimes have real-world, life-and-death consequences. In this episode of the p...

The lives and problems of psychotherapist Charlotte Fox Weber's clients vary, but all are united by a common question: what do I really want? In this episode of the podcast Charlottes brings us behind the closed doors of her practice. She reveals how she gently guides her clients towards a deeper understanding of themselves, she invites them - and us - to find a fuller way of living. Learn more ab...

Relationships are complicated. Yet it's an unfortunate reality that while most of us have to learn complex geometry that we'll probably never use, we don't get a single formal lesson in how to relate to others. In conversation with David Malone, Melanie Joy reveals the common psychological dynamics that underlie all kinds of relationships. Understanding these dynamics can enable you to make all yo...

Lying is probably as old as human language itself – an inevitable consequence of humanity’s greatest superpower. And comedian, Observer columnist and Peep Show star David Mitchell lies quite often (mostly about whether he is free to come to social events). But even he never expected to live in the post-truth age. In conversation with broadcaster and journalist Hannah MacInnes, he joins us to rail...

There is a voice of longing inside each woman. We strive to be good: good partners, daughters, mothers, employees, and friends. We hope all this striving will make us feel alive. Instead, it leaves us feeling weary, stuck, and overwhelmed. We look at our lives and wonder: Wasn’t it all supposed to be more beautiful than this? Glennon Doyle joined the How To Academy to show us that another way is p...

The creator of the word ‘meme’ and of the hugely influential ‘selfish gene’ model of evolution, he is the epitome of the truly public intellectual – a scientist whose ideas have proven extraordinarily influential both within his own discipline and far, far beyond. In this week’s episode of the How To Academy Podcast, Richard shares his reflections on perhaps the most important and puzzling topic i...

Hannah MacInnes meets author, influencer and activist Layla Saad, whose Instagram challenge #MeAndWhiteSupremacy encouraged people to own up and share their racist behaviours. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. He joined How To Academy to teach a lesson none of us can afford to miss: what we can do to...

The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe is America’s most celebrated living reporter. He documented the hunt for the drug lord Chapo Guzman and the tragic personal history of the Harvard educated neurobiologist turned mass shooter Amy Bishop. He wrote a definitive, revelatory account of the Troubles in Say Nothing; investigated the strange convergence of espionage and hair metal in his blockbuster p...

Acclaimed science writer Philip Ball joins us to explore the rich diversity of thinking minds – from human to other mammals, insects, computers and plants. In conversation with filmmaker David Malone, he illuminates how many different ways there are to think and engage with the world. Science has begun to have something to say about the properties of mind. And the more we learn about the minds of...

We live in an age when the pursuit of authenticity – from living our 'best life' to eating artisan food – matters more and more to us, but where the forces of inauthenticity seem to be taking over. Policy expert and author Alice Sherwood joins us to argue that, although our counterfeit culture is shaped by the most powerful forces of evolution, economics, and technology, we can still come together...

Daniel Pink, the New York Times bestselling author of When and Drive and one of the world’s leading thinkers on business, creativity and human behaviour, says it’s time to forget everything we think we know about regrets. He believes that regret is our most misunderstood emotion – and can in fact be the pathway to our best life. It’s a subject he investigates in-depth in his new book The Power of...

In 1953, a group of prisoners of war who had fought against the communist invasion of South Korea were released. They chose - apparently freely - to move to Mao's China. Among those refusing repatriation were twenty-one American GIs. Their decision sparked alarm in the West: why didn't they want to come home? What was going on? Soon, people were saying that the POWs' had been 'brainwashed'. Was th...

For girls and young women these are shifting times: never before have they had so much freedom and choice; but never before have they had so many demands placed upon them - by themselves as well as others. Dr Tara Porter pulls together everything she has learnt to provide accessible explanations and suggestions for teenagers, young women, and their parents on topics including exams, friendship, fa...

In June 1992 Chris Patten went to Hong Kong as the last British governor, to try to prepare it not for independence, but for handing back in 1997 to the Chinese, from whom most of its territory had been leased 99 years previously. He joined Channel 4 Europe Editor Matt Frei live on stage in London to tell the story of what happened as the handover approached, and share his assessment of recent eve...

Every week there are 150 avoidable deaths in England; tragedies that could have been prevented if we were better at learning from mistakes. As the former Secretary of State for Health and current Chair of the Health and Social Care Select Committee, Jeremy Hunt believes it is possible to reduce the number of preventable deaths in the NHS to zero – in the process saving money, reducing backlogs and...

Bonnie Wright and Evanna Lynch rose to fame as Ginny Weasley and Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter series, and now use their public platforms to help change the world for the better. As an ambassador for Greenpeace, Bonnie Wright has dedicated her life to advocating for climate justice – using her influence to draw attention to the most serious environmental issues of our time, from plastic pollut...

Born in Puglia, Italy and now resident in London, Francesco Dimitri is a member of an extremely exclusive club -- authors who write and publish in a language that is not their mother tongue. His latest novel Never the Wind is a magical realist fable about family, belonging and coming of age set his native Puglia and will appeal hugely to fans of Susanna Clarke, Eleanor Ferrente and Neil Gaiman. In...

For millennia, people have asked questions about the nature of matter. In the twentieth century, this curiosity led to an unprecedented outburst of scientific discovery that changed the course of history. In this episode of the podcast, accelerator physicist Suzie Sheehy introduces us to the people who, through a combination of genius, persistence and luck, staged these ground-breaking experiments...