Guests so far include The Psychopath Test writer Jon Ronson, Cognitive Neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott, British-Zimbabwean social media star Munya Chawawa, novelist Robert Harris, and impersonator extraordinaire Armando Iannucci.

From the man who took a 25% gender pay cut, reportedly yelled ‘Fuck the Tories’ at Glastonbury and apparently was tempted to shoot dictator Idi Amin himself, is there anyone else you would rather get your political and social commentary from? Jon kindly took time out from learning how to podcast and launching his new book, The State of Us, to answer a few of our questions.

How would you like listeners to react to the podcast?

I want people to learn something new but I also want them to enjoy themselves while listening. I want a podcast to be worth the investment, the time you’re going to give to it. I want it to be a joy to learn something that you never knew before.

Why podcasting? What is it about the format that appeals to you vs. television?

It’s just you. No director in your ear. When I was working in the news it was: “Three minutes Jon, that’s all you’ve got time for…Ten, nine, eight, seven…”  I want to go on talking…and now you can! I didn’t know podcasting could be so much fun: no clutter, no grumbling. I just want to wallow in the conversation. We get it all and we enjoy it. It’s sensational. And you get to meet people you never thought you would.

Will you be freer to be even more vocal now that you have, in your own words, ‘fewer rules’? What will you be able to say that you perhaps couldn’t previously?

I’m off the leash! No more prying and querying what I’m doing. “Have you seen the lawyer yet? Have you run this by them?”

Before, I spoke to a lawyer every single day. They were always sweeties but there were always things that legally I couldn’t say. Not any more. The great thing about podcasting is that you can say what you like, within reason. And I’d hope that I’m permanently within reason.

Do you have a dream guest for the podcast?

I’d love to interview the King. I hope that, around the Coronation, he’ll do a few interviews. And I’d love to be one of them. That would be wonderful.

Expectations are high for this podcast. What’s that pressure like?

I felt the pressure of learning a new format that I never dreamed of doing before. But I’m really enjoying it.

Have you got any other projects in the pipeline?

My new book has just come out, The State Of Us. Snowcast and the book are keeping me busy right now.

Finally, just how many ties do you have exactly?

I may have over 100 but I’m past counting. And I must start whittling them down.

Listen to Snowcast now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other popular podcast apps >>

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When did you get involved in Great Mysteries of Physics and what drew you to this project?

At university I studied philosophy, hoping to glean answers to the big questions. But I soon discovered that the types of explanations I was looking for existed more in the realm of physics. After reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, I was hooked and eventually ended up embarking on a PhD in physics. While working in a lab wasn’t for me in the end, I still held a deep fascination with the more fundamental aspects of physics, which often intersect with philosophy. Having noticed that many of The Conversation’s readers also seem keen on this topic, I created the idea for this podcast last year. I am lucky to have very bright and supportive colleagues at The Conversation, with far superior podcasting skills to me, who are helping me make it happen.

Why is podcasting the right medium for this project?

Each mystery in the series is very broad and fluid, with lots of competing ideas. It can be hard to convert that into a specific article with a strict word count. I thought it would work better in conversational form, with some sound effects to help steer the mind when grappling with abstract concepts.

What was the first podcast you ever listened to?

I came to podcasts quite late – I think it was Hidden Brain. It’s brilliantly fun and accessible.

Which podcasts do you take inspiration from?

One of my favourite podcasts is called Flashback Forever, it is Swedish. It involves three female comedians going through threads of the forum Flashback, essentially the Swedish version of Reddit. The curious, friendly and non-judgmental atmosphere they create is something I think all podcast hosts should aspire to. I also like Sean Carrol’s Mindscape. These days, specialisation is at the heart of pretty much everything so I find the broadness and boldness of this show refreshing and rare – it certainly doesn’t shy away from complex topics.

Can you give us an interesting snippet of science you’ve learnt from making Great Mysteries in Physics?

That we shouldn’t write off an idea as completely unscientific just because we don’t yet have any evidence for it. The theory of atoms is ancient, but it took millenia before we actually had evidence for it. Oh, and that studying bubble formation at ultra-cold temperatures might teach us something about how universes form in a multiverse.

Where can readers find out more about you?

I recently wrote a book with Matt Warren about thinking, which has lots of information about me. It’s called Are You Thinking Clearly? 29 reasons you aren’t and what to do about it and was published by Hodder Studio last year. It looks at various factors that affect how you think, from genetics and culture to the bacteria in your gut and the signals from your body. I’m also on Twitter as @miriamfrankel.

Listen to The Great Mysteries of Physics on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other popular podcast apps >>

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The format is simple. Each week a topic from culture, science, history or religion – the evolution of teeth, the Chinese philosophy of Daoism, Thucydides – is explained by three academics, wrangled by Bragg. No idea is too big, and no pocket of time too small.

At the centre of it all is Bragg, cutting through any over-ornate explanations with an ever so slightly terse tone and chivvying his charges along towards clarity and specificity. His tight handle on the tempo of proceedings is part of what makes In Our Time work so fluently.

With nearly 1000 episodes of Radio 4’s flagship intellectual roundtable broadcast since its debut in 1998 – a half-hour discussion of war in the 20th century – there’s a lot to rifle through. You could, in all honesty, pick one out at random and find yourself feeling immeasurably enlightened 45 minutes later. But here are three to get you going.

Zero

This is one of those In Our Time episodes which makes you stare into space for a couple of seconds in slack-jawed incomprehension even before you’ve started listening. Obviously, when you think about it, the idea of a graphical representation of nothing had to be invented at some point. But as with the best In Our Time episodes, this is probably the first time you’ve spent much time thinking about it. We go back to Ancient Egypt and Greece to hear about how the idea of nothingness was tussled over before Islamic mathematicians popularised the zero. Listen now >>

The Evolution of Teeth

Another one from the ‘wow, never even considered that’ stable, it turns out that half a billion years ago we were all just armoured fish, scuttling around in the seas and rivers, sucking up bits of food in our jawless, toothless mouths. Then at some point the scales started shifting around, and we could get to nibbling something more substantial. There are clues to the past in the fossil record of sharks, and sharks also point to a possible future where humans might manage to replace their own teeth. Madness. Listen now >>

The Gin Craze

Back in the late 17th century, as William of Orange took up the English throne, the country got a taste for a novel new Dutch import. A slightly mysterious new spirit flavoured with juniper became a national passion which curdled into a full-blown public health crisis, and was considered such a threat to the social fabric of the nation that Parliament legislated five times to bring its sale and consumption under control. The wild details about what life was like in a perma-sozzled England are great. Listen now >>

You can listen to In Our Time on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other popular podcast players. Already a fan? Tell us your favourite episode over on Twitter!

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With the new series starting today, we caught up with the three Spoken Nerds to ask them for the nitty-gritty on their podcast journey.

Who are you and what’s your podcast about?

MATT: We are three comedians, two physicists and a mathematician, who do two of those things each under the name Festival of the Spoken Nerd.

HELEN: Every episode we pick a topic and each bring something sciencey or mathsy that we think gets better and better the more details you go into.

What was the first podcast you ever listened to?

STEVE: The first podcast I ever listened to was Professor Blastoff. I was looking for science podcasts. Professor Blastoff isn’t a science podcast, so false advertising there, but it is brilliant. They don’t make it anymore

Why did you decide to start podcasting in the first place?

MATT: We do a lot of live comedy shows where we talk about interesting bits of science and technology in unnecessary levels of detail. But sometimes it’s nice to have an audience who can’t talk back: so we decided to take the idea to podcast form! Plus making a podcast gives us a chance to dive into even deeper levels of detail. Partly because the format lends itself to deeper and more involved explorations than you can usually achieve when you’re standing on a stage in a comedy club, and partly because (and I cannot stress this enough) the audience can’t talk back.

HELEN: Also I currently have two kids under 5 in the tail end of a pandemic, so I am all about working from home rather than spending most of my weeks and weekends driving up and down various UK motorways in a tour van. For now, anyway…

Image credit: credit Rosemary Rance / Adam Robinson

Which podcasts do you take inspiration from?

MATT: We’re long time friends with the No Such Thing As A Fish folks and we think there should be no such thing as a monopoly on nerds banging on about stuff. So we’ve decided to out-detail them.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt so far as a podcaster?

HELEN: That it’s not radio! We’ve made a few series of “Domestic Science” for BBC Radio 4 and it’s a very different style of audio. For radio, everything has to be much more scripted, faster paced and we recorded everything for those shows in front of a live audience.

MATT: Who, sometimes, try to talk back.

HELEN: Whereas making a podcast is more relaxed and conversational.

MATT: Obviously we still script it word for word, but we script it to sound relaxed and conversational.

Which episode would you say is the perfect introduction to your podcast?

HELEN: In the Series 2 episode “To Infinity And Beyond” Matt gives a very comprehensive history of the HP 9100A desktop scientific calculator. That’s a fairly typical level of detail to expect.

MATT: Yes, it was the first scientific calculator ever made and birthed the phrase “personal computer”. When an early model was shown to the engineers at NASA they literally gave it a standing ovation and that calculator went on to directly impact the exploration of our solar system. Later in the episode Helen and Steve also go on about some space stuff but it doesn’t involve any calculators.

Where can the Pod Bible readers find out more about you?

HELEN: If you want the best possible introduction, we have some live shows coming up at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London on the 7 and 8 of April called “An Evening of Unnecessary Detail”.

STEVE: There’s our first series still knocking around on whatever podcast app or platform you listen on, so that’s there if you can’t wait for Series 2 to start.

MATT: If you can’t successfully google either of those things or find our website, that’s probably for the best as it’s unlikely they’re going to be your bag after all.

Main image credit: Idil Sukan/Draw HQ .
Inline image credit: credit Rosemary Rance / Adam Robinson

You can listen to the new series of A Podcast of Unnecessary Detail on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other podcast providers. Find out more about Festival of the Spoken Nerd on their website festivalofthespokennerd.com/podcast.

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