How To Academy Podcast

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

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

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

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

How can we escape our age of discontent? In this week's podcast, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz challenges us to throw off the free market fundamentalists and reclaim our democratic power. We all the sense that something has gone wrong with the American economy – with consequences that continue to reverberate across the globe. But just how did a few corporations come to dominate entire sectors, leading to skyrocketing inequality and sluggish growth? How did the financial industry write its own regulations, the tech companies accumulate reams of personal data without oversight, and the government negotiate international trade deals against the interests of workers? Joseph Stiglitz is America’s preeminent economic thinker. A Nobel laureate, bestselling author, advisor to Clinton and former chairman of the World Bank, he joins the How To Academy Academy Podcast to answer the question of why the economy is rigged in favour of elites - and rally us around a new vision of capitalism that puts people ahead of profits. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nearly a decade in the making, Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women is a global phenomenon. Hailed instantly as a feminist classic, this staggering work of nonfiction is the result of thousands of hours spent in the company of its subjects – three women whose lives reveal profound and previously unspoken truths about life and love, womanhood and desire. Lisa joins the How To Academy Podcast to tell the Guardian's Hadley Freeman how Three Women came to be. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Never make a New Year’s Resolution again after hearing this podcast from the world’s most renowned expert in forming new habits –Stanford behavioural scientist, BJ Fogg. There are entire worlds of advice on how to lose weight, how to sleep better, how to perform better on the job, how to have better sex, and every other aspect of human behaviour you might wish to change in the New Year. But we all know from bitter experience that none of these new habits last beyond February. The week's How To Academy Podcast will help you finally keep the promises you have made to yourself. BJ Fogg is the legendary Stanford researcher whose class inspired the founder of Instagram and whose ideas are cited by almost every guru of habit formation and behavioural change – from Tim Ferris to Robert Sutton. He joined Matthew Stadlen to introduce a simple method empirically proven to create results for all behavioural issues – from weight loss and better sleep to quitting smoking and exercising more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices