How To Academy Podcast

Frustrated by the limits of an outsider’s perspective, counter-extremism expert Julia Ebner secretly infiltrated five fanatical groups. She joined the How To Academy Podcast to reveal her journey into the darkest recesses of extremist thinking. By day, Julia Ebner works at a counter-extremism think tank, monitoring radical groups from the outside, but two years ago, she began to feel that she was only seeing half the picture. She needed to get inside the groups to truly understand them. So she decided to go undercover in her spare hours – late nights, holidays, weekends – adopting five different identities, and joining a dozen extremist groups from across the ideological spectrum. Her journey would take her from a Generation Identity global strategy meeting in a pub in Mayfair, to a Neo-Nazi Music Festival on the border of Germany and Poland. She would get relationship advice from ‘Trad Wives’ and Jihadi Brides and hacking lessons from ISIS. She was in the channels when the alt-right began planning the lethal Charlottesville rally, and spent time in the networks that would radicalise the Christchurch terrorist. On this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, Julia reveals what she discovered on her terrifying and illuminating journey. She exposes how closely we are surrounded by their fanatical ideology every day, the changing nature and practice of these groups, and what is being done to counter them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fans of Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari ought not to miss this eloquent blueprint for building a brighter future from engineer, John Browne. In conversation with Matthew Stadlen, Lord Browne argues that we need not and must not put the brakes on technological advance. Civilisation is founded on engineering innovation; all progress stems from the human urge to make things and to shape the world around us, resulting in greater freedom, health and wealth for all. Drawing on history, his own experiences and conversations with many of today's great innovators, he uncovers the basis for all progress and its consequences, both good and bad. He argues compellingly that the same spark that triggers each innovation can be used to counter its negative consequences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

'She is no-joke changing the world and, for what it's worth, the way I live my life.' - Anne Hathaway How can white people challenge racism -- whether in the form of their own unconscious biases or the wider systems of white supremacy? In this week's How To Academy Podcast, Hannah MacInnes meets author, influencer and activist Layla Saad, whose Instagram challenge #MeAndWhiteSupremacy encouraged people to own up and share their racist behaviours. She was looking for truth, and she got it. Thousands of people participated in the challenge, and over 90,000 people downloaded her Me and White Supremacy Workbook. Awareness leads to action, and action leads to change. Listen to this week's podcast and find out what you can do to make the world a better place. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices