Reading Ahead: A new podcast looking into the skills needed to thrive in the century ahead

I've spent most of my working life asking one question, in one form or another: what do people need in order to thrive? 

I asked it building Ella's Kitchen from my kitchen table. I asked it chairing London's Child Obesity Taskforce. I asked it writing Raising the Nation. And for the last few years, I've been asking it as Chancellor of the University of Reading — an institution that, this year, turns 100. 

A hundred years is long enough that almost everything has changed, but short enough that it's still just three or four generations — grandparent to parent to graduate. When I stand up at our graduation ceremonies and look out at students who are, for the most part, the same age I was when I first tried to make sense of the world, I'm always struck by the same thought: they are about to spend their working lives inside a century we can barely predict. 

That thought is where this podcast came from. 

I’ve called it Reading Ahead — a small pun on the University's name, and an honest description of what we're trying to do. Each episode, I sit down with people who are conducting research on, and finding solutions to, the challenges of the century ahead: how AI reshapes not just jobs but judgement, how we educate for a climate that won't behave like the one we grew up with, how work, wellbeing and community hold together when so much of the old scaffolding is being dismantled.  

There's a line from Robert Kennedy that I return to often, about how GDP measures everything "except that which makes life worthwhile" — it counts the napalm and the ambulances, he said, but not the health of our children or the strength of our marriages or the intelligence of our public debate. I think about that line every time I think about what a university's real value is, and what a podcast like this should actually measure itself against. Not downloads, though I hope there are plenty. Whether it helps someone think a little more clearly about the century they're walking into. 

The first episode of Reading Ahead was out earlier this month, and the second is out today. If you've ever wondered what a 100-year-old institution has to say about the next hundred years, I'd love you to give them a listen — and tell me what I've got wrong, or what we should be asking next. Here is a link to our trialer - to give a little flavour of what is it os all about: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2Eqp0MyuVWVsP8xahpQd0N?si=LqJcNyUvTIKZmDDGJoYQbg&nd=1&dlsi=7678baec03c84cba&flow_ctx=513a892d-1312-4a3d-b8e8-21051b66f867%3A1790607826