How To Academy Podcast

In this week's podcast, Melinda Gates makes a timely and necessary call to action for women’s empowerment. For the last twenty years, Melinda Gates has been on a mission to find solutions for people with the most urgent needs, wherever they live. Throughout this journey, one thing has become increasingly clear to her: If you want to lift a society up, you need to stop keeping women down. In this moving and compelling conversation with journalist Hannah MacInnes, Melinda shares lessons she’s learned from the inspiring people she’s met during her work and travels around the world – the people who’ve given focus and urgency to her life. She will help us to see ways in which we can all lift women up – wherever we live. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For the last 33 years, John Humphrys has held politicians to account as the host of our most popular news programme - Radio 4's Today. In this week's How To Academy Podcast, Matthew Stadlen - a man who is himself no stranger to asking tough questions of those in power - sat down with him to explore what John has learned from a lifetime at the forefront of current affairs in the UK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In Episode 9 of the How To Academy podcast, the nation’s most loved science communicator, Oxford mathematician Marcus Du Sautoy, explores the potential of artificial intelligence to think creatively. From driving cars to writing legal contracts, new developments in AI are shaking up the status quo, as we find out how many of the tasks humans engage in can be done equally well, if not better, by machines. But can machines be creative? Will they soon be able to learn from the art that moves us, and understand what distinguishes it from the mundane? What will it mean to be human when an algorithm can paint like Rembrandt, compose like Mozart, and write like Shakespeare? In this podcast, Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy examines the nature of creativity with science filmmaker David Malone. How much of our emotional response to art is a product of our brains reacting to pattern and structure? Exactly what does it mean to be creative in mathematics and art, language and music? Will a computer ever compose a symphony or write a prize-winning novel? And if so, would we be able to tell the difference? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In Episode 8 of the How To Academy Podcast, Matthew Stadlen meets  restaurant critic and raconteur Giles Coren, for a freewheeling and hilarious conversation about truth, love and clean cutlery. Giles Coren is a man of many talents. A restaurant critic, Times columnist, TV presenter, and award-winning novelist, his taste, wit and inability to suffer fools have made him an icon to anyone who values great writing and clever opinions. He is perhaps the ultimate dinner party guest; and though we cannot offer supper with Giles in a world-class restaurant, How Academy proudly presents the next best thing: Giles in conversation with LBC’s Matthew Stadlen, on the subject of supper in world-class restaurants. Giles reflects on the most delicious, ethical and sustainable dining experiences in the UK - alongside a rambunctious and laugh out loud review of his relationships, career and life to date. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Could psychedelic drugs change our worldview? In Episode 7 of the How To Academy podcast, Michael Pollan tells Matthew Stadlen about his journey to the frontiers of the human mind. For twenty years the author and activist Michael Pollan has been writing about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect, including, most famously, in his acclaimed books on the ethics and ecology of food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire. That path recently led him to investigate the role of mind altering drugs in humans culture - from shamans and magic mushroom hunts to the pioneering labs mapping our brains - and to put himself forward as a guinea-pig. In this podcast, LBC presenter Matthew Stadlen asks Michael about his dive into this extraordinary world, taking a tough but open-minded approach to the promises and perils of the new science of psychedelics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From the dive bars of the Lower East Side to the beaches of Bali, the Connecticut Christmas Tree farm where she was raised to the Mumbai ashram where she sought solace after a difficult divorce, Elizabeth Gilbert is a world traveller whose unending search for answers to life’s biggest questions have made her the voice of a generation. Aged 34, she left her home, husband and career to travel alone across the world; her chronicle of that journey became EAT, PRAY, LOVE, an international bestseller so popular TIME magazine declared her one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Since then she has produced one critically acclaimed bestseller after another. From COMMITTED, her memoir about making her peace with the institution of marriage, to BIG MAGIC, a book encapsulating her the joyful spirit she brings to her creative work, her works resonate profoundly with all of us who wish to confront heartbreak, tragedy and desperation with openness, imagination and wisdom. In celebration of the release of her new novel CITY OF GIRLS, she joined the How To Academy to explore her life to date. In this conversation with journalist Hannah MacInnes, she considered her thoughts on genius and creativity, sex and adventure, wonder and fear, leaving no stone unturned in her remarkable story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In Episode Five of the How To Academy Podcast, Matthew Stadlen meets Preet Bharara, the former US district attorney who successfully prosecuted some of the most high-profile crimes in America. Along the way he gained notoriety as the ‘Sheriff of Wall Street’, was banned from Russia by Vladimir Putin and earned the distinction of being one of the first federal employees fired by Trump. In this wide-ranging conversation Preet takes us into the gritty, tactically complex, often sensational world of America’s criminal justice system – and gives us his inside take on the Mueller Report and President Trump. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Once a generation an environmentalist dares to speak truth to power with such force that they cannot be silenced. In Episode 4 of the How To Academy Podcast, Matthew Stadlen meets David Wallace-Wells, whose terrifying vision of unfolding climate catastrophe may just be the wake-up call we need to save the future. Climate change is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't happening at all, and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. In this podcast, David presents a sober, scientific but utterly terrifying vision of the unfolding 21st century. What will it be like to live on a pummelled planet? What will it do to our politics, our economy, our culture and sense of history? And what action can we all take, today, to minimise the damage? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this week's podcast, two giants of cognitive science - neuroscientist Gina Rippon and psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen - go head-to-head to debate one of the most contested and controversial ideas in the history of science: do men and women have essentially different brains? Setting this debate has potentially far-reaching consequences for the future of medicine and mental health treatment, the workplace and society as a whole. But do studies claiming to show differences between the brains of men and women actually uncover an inconvenient truth? Or are they merely attempts to justify the sexist status quo? It’s time to accept that brains should not be ‘sexed’, says Gina Rippon. It’s misleading to attribute any differences in behaviour, abilities, achievements, or personality to the possession of either a female brain or a male brain. And she argues that new techniques can prove it. After centuries of ingrained neurosexism, neuroscience’s cutting-edge breakthroughs should at last liberate us from outdated misunderstandings of what our brains can and cannot do. Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen takes a different perspective. Whilst he agrees that individuals’ brains should not and cannot be ‘sexed’, he reminds us that group studies of males and females do reveal differences on average: Men on average are better at analysing systems and women on average are better at empathising with people. And he marshals evidence from studies of prenatal hormones and genetics that these traits have both biological and cultural roots. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this podcast, the bestselling author of Nudge, Professor Cass Sunstein, presents a ground-breaking guide for anyone who wishes to fuel – or block – transformative social change. Sometimes all it takes to change society is for one person to decide they will no longer remain silent. A child announces that the emperor has no clothes. A woman tweets, #MeToo. Suddenly, a taboo collapses for the better – or for the worse. Once white nationalism was kept out of the mainstream media and politics; now it is in the White House. Social movements can begin when rage is released – or quietly, with millions of people nudged into making different decisions until, without noticing, we live with a new status quo. Bringing together behavioural economics, psychology, politics and law, Cass Sunstein and LBC Presenter Matthew Stadlen explore Cass’s career new science of social movements. What can we as individuals do to harness the power of social movements to make change happen? What kinds of interventions make a difference, and what kind lead to bans and mandates? How can we overcome social division, cause transformative cascades, and employ political parties as a force for good? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices