How To Academy Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Brian Greene - How to Find Meaning in an Evolving Universe May 11, 2020

Show notes

The bestselling author of The Elegant Universe joins the How To Academy Podcast to explore humankind’s search for purpose in the vastness of the cosmos. World-renowned for his ground-breaking discoveries in string theory, Brian Greene is also one of our most eloquent and original storytellers in science, able to transport us across the vast reaches of time and space, bringing to life breakthroughs and trials, great discoveries and profound philosophical meditations. He joined Matthew Stadlen on the How To Academy Podcast to explore the quest to understand how life and mind emerged from the initial chaos of the big bang, and how our minds, in coming to understand their own impermanence, seek in different ways to give meaning to experience.

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Julia Samuel - How to Adapt and Survive in a Time of Crisis May 01, 2020

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In this unprecedented moment in global history, psychotherapist Julia Samuel joined the How To Academy Podcast to tell us how to find unknown strengths in times of difficulty and change. As the global coronavirus pandemic causes profound difficulties to our health, work, and family, Julia drew upon more thirty years of experience helping everyday people in times of uncertainty, and taught us the skills we need to adapt and hopefully thrive in this strange new normal.

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How To Make Sense of Consciousness Apr 20, 2020

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How do our brains produce the magic show of conscious experience? The question remains one of the universe's unsolved mysteries -- and this week's podcast guest, Anil Seth, is working on the answer. This week's guest Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex. In his work he seeks to understand the biological basis of consciousness by bringing together research across neuroscience, mathematics, AI, computer science, psychology, philosophy and psychiatry. Matthew Stadlen caught up with him backstage at How To Academy's annual How to Change the World conference to find out more.

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Mervyn King - How to Make Decisions for an Unknowable Future Apr 14, 2020

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Many of the world’s problems stem from the false belief that we can accurately predict the future. Can we make better decisions by acknowledging radical uncertainty? In this week's podcast, Mervyn King and John Kay build a powerful case. Uncertainty pervades the big decisions we all make in our lives. How much should we pay into our pensions each month? Should we take regular exercise? Expand the business? Change our strategy? Enter a trade agreement? Take an expensive holiday? We do not know what the future will hold. But we must make decisions anyway. So we crave certainties which cannot exist and invent knowledge we cannot have. But humans are successful because they have adapted to an environment that they understand only imperfectly. Throughout history we have developed a variety of ways of coping with the radical uncertainty that defines our lives. Mervyn King and John Kay know about the pressures of decision-making in the highest echelons of power. They’ve spent their lives and careers making decisions that reverberate across British society -- and beyond. As Governor of the Bank of England, King was responsible for the financial stability of the nation. And as a company director, FT columnist and Oxford Said Professor in the country, Kay’s decisions and opinions have been felt across the business world and wider economy for decades. In this eye-opening podcast interview with economist Linda Yueh, they highlight the most successful – and the most short-sighted - methods of dealing with an unknowable future. They will show how the prevalent methods of our age fall short, giving us a false understanding of our power to make predictions and leading to many of the problems we experience today.

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BONUS EPISODE - Global GoalsCast Apr 06, 2020

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The How To Academy Podcast presents an episode of one of our favourite shows: the Global GoalsCast. The climate challenge is sprawling and extraordinarily complex. It is too much for any individual to hold all of it in their head. That knowledge void has become a major political obstacle to effective climate action (SDG 13) as we fill it in paralyzing ways, from denial to apocalyptic fear. The best way to learn that we can curb climate change is to do it. So Global GoalsCast co-host Edie Lush sat down with John Sterman, professor of Management at MIT, to solve the climate crisis on his ClimateInteractiv model of the world’s climate and economy. Edie tried everything from energy efficient homes to a steep tax on carbon in a search for solutions that would hold global temperature increases under 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit). How did she do? Listen to this special two-part episode of Global GoalsCast, timed to coincide with the United Nations Climate Summit and the global journalism effort to increase awareness of the climate challenge, #CoveringClimateNow.

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William Gibson – How to Create the Future Mar 30, 2020

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He coined the word ‘Cyberspace’ and envisioned the Internet and Virtual Reality before they ever existed. Now, in this week's How To Academy Podcast, William Gibson turns his prophetic eye to the 21st century. He is the prophet who first envisioned our fluid, hyperconnected, hallucinatory world; the internationally bestselling author whose visions of the near future reveal the strangeness of our contemporary moment as much as they illuminate potential worlds to come. But William Gibson is more than a thinker anticipating possible futures: an inspiration to successive generations of innovators, his searing imagination has not only defined the cyberpunk literary genre but shaped our reality. Advertising agencies inspired by his fictious company Blue Ant now manage global accounts; designer labels produce luxury fashions based on the clothing worn by his characters. U2 based an album on his 6 million selling debut, Neuromancer – and technologists from Tokyo to Silicon Valley are devoted to realising his ideas. Many people claim to understand the age of Trump and Brexit, global pandemics and climate change – but no-one else shares William Gibson’s ability to cut through the noise and synthesise a unique and powerful vision of the present and near future. In this interview, we hear in-depth form one of the most potent analytical minds of our age.

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Elif Shafak – How to Build Bridges in an Age of Division Mar 23, 2020

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Author and activist Elif Shafak is the most widely read female writer in her home nation of Turkey -- but her fight against populism and tribalism is urgent no matter where you live. She joined Matthew Stadlen on the How To Academy Podcast to explore our turbulent present and make an impassioned defence of tolerance and humanitarian values. In an age where the vision of a pluralistic, democratic global village no longer feels like possible, she explores how we can escape our echo chambers and work together to forge a better future. Elif writes in both Turkish and English, and has been published in 48 languages. Her most recent novel, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World was nominated for the Booker Prize. She has been longlisted for the Orange Prize, MAN Asian Prize; the Baileys Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Award, and shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and RSL Ondaatje Prize. She is a TED Global speaker, a member of Weforum Global Agenda Council on Creative Economy in Davos and a founding member of ECFR (European Council on Foreign Relations). She has been awarded the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2010 by the French government.

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Ai Weiwei – Human Rights in the 21st Century Mar 16, 2020

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Ai Weiwei is living proof that creativity can change our world for the better. Raised in a labour camp and later beaten, surveilled and imprisoned on trumped-up charges by the Chinese state, Ai Weiwei has dedicated his life to the struggle against corruption and oppression of all kinds. As a conceptual artist and activist fighting for justice, he has become an icon in his own lifetime, renowned world-wide for his work promoting freedom of thought and expression, compassion, and humanitarian values. For one unmissable night at the How To Academy, Weiwei was joined in conversation by Kenneth Roth, CEO of Human Rights Watch – an NGO investigating and reporting abuses in five continents. From the Syrian Civil War to the Rohingya Crisis, US immigration to the South Sudan Conflict, the lawyers, journalists and country experts of Human Rights Watch help hold abusers to account and bring justice to victims. Weiwei and Kenneth were hosted by Helene Cooper, Pentagon correspondent for The New York Times and herself a refugee to the United States, having fled a military coup in Liberia aged 14.

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Paul Krugman – Politics, Economics and the Fight for a Fairer Future Mar 09, 2020

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For more than forty years Nobel laureate, bestselling economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has fought for a fair, just and liberal future. Widely considered the voice of 21st century liberal thought both in the United States and across the globe, Paul Krugman combines the erudition and insight of a renowned scholar with the immediate relevance, clarity and originality of thought expected of a columnist at the New York Times. A former professor at LSE, Princeton, Yale and MIT, perhaps the world’s leading theorist of international trade relations, and a passionate advocate of a fairer and more democratic world, he joined the How To Academy Podcast to share his insights into the Trump administration and beyond.

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Erling Kagge and Ben Saunders - How to Be a Polar Explorer Feb 24, 2020

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Two of the greatest living adventurers meet Hannah MacInnes to reflect on what motivates their journeys across the polar ice. Bringing together two record-breaking polar explorers –Norwegian Erling Kagge and his British counterpart Ben Saunders – this podcast offers a profound and illuminating meditation on the life of a polar explorer. The first man ever to reach the North and South Poles unsupported and the first to conquer both the Poles and Mt. Everest, a Cambridge educated philosopher, international art dealer, lawyer, politician, publisher and bestselling author, Erling Kagge’s achievements belie his faith in the sacred value of silence and solitude in the modern age. Joining him in the podcast is Ben Saunders, whose accomplishments include skiing solo to both poles and leading The Scott Expedition – the longest human powered journey in human history. 'After having put my shoes on and let my thoughts wander, I am sure of one thing - to put one foot in front of the other is one of the most important things we do.' – Erling Kagge

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