StoryCo
StoryCo, hosted by James Kirkham, explores the power of storytelling as mankind's oldest technology and how it is being enhanced by modern thinkers. The podcast examines story as a business tool, self-help strategy, political map, and guide to humanity. Each episode features conversations with theorists, producers, writers, and stars from various sectors. New episodes are released every Thursday.
Episodes
Lessons from the World's Most Famous Political Campaigns
Why does "Make America Great Again" beat "Stronger Together"? John Yorke, Mark Borkowski and Misha Glenny on why political slogans work, and why the best ones are really stories.Three StoryCo guests look at political communication through the lens of narrative. They argue that a good slogan tells a complete story in a handful of words, with a clear protagonist, antagonist and g
The Royal Family’s Darkest Secret: Why They Are Above The Law
Why can't Britain investigate its own monarchy? Andrew Lownie has spent a decade trying to find out, and what he has uncovered explains why so much stays hidden.Lownie sets out the position of the royal family as he sees it: exempt from freedom of information laws, beyond parliamentary scrutiny, with opaque finances, sealed wills and no register of their business activities. He argues that a c
Why We Get AI Completely Wrong According To Experts
Four experts, four different reasons not to panic about AI. Dr Julia Shaw argues that the risks we focus on, like "AI psychosis", are vanishingly rare, and that free access to a listening ear at 3am has probably saved more lives than it's harmed. Psychotherapist Kathleen Saxton agrees AI has a role in mental health, but only as a guide toward proper, qualified human help. Film direct
The 5 Most Powerful Stories We’ve Ever Heard
Every season of this show begins with a simple request: tell me a story. We have gathered five accounts that have stayed with us long after the cameras stopped rolling. From author Will Storr recounting a haunting ancient Bengali tale about a tiger and a hunter, to John Yorke exploring the weight of words in politics and history, this episode examines why narrative craft is the fundamental buildin
Uncovering The ART World's Craziest HEISTS | Ben Lewis and Art Detective Arthur Brand
Ben Lewis and Arthur Brand on the Louvre heist, the art theft epidemic, and why stolen Renoirs end up as drug collateral.Episode OverviewIn October 2025, thieves arrived at the Louvre on scooters, erected a furniture lift, and were in and out with 88 million euros in Napoleonic crown jewels in four minutes. They dropped the Empress's tiara on the way out. Within 12 hours, another French museum was
The Royal Secrets They're Actively Destroying Before You Can Read Them | Andrew Lownie Returns
Andrew Lownie on Prince Andrew, royal secrets, and why the establishment is harder to crack than ever.Episode OverviewAndrew Lownie came back to StoryCo because listeners asked for him. Since the first episode, the story hasn't stopped moving. Andrew was seen bruised in the back of a car. Harry lost in court. The sovereign grant was tripled with no parliamentary debate. And Lownie is now writi
How One Journalist Exposed a $7 Billion Theft & Jailed a Prime Minister | Clare Rewcastle Brown
Clare Rewcastle Brown on the 1MDB scandal, vexatious lawsuits, and why one blog brought down a government.Episode OverviewSome $7 billion was stolen in the 1MDB scandal. It cost $8 billion to cover it up. Clare Rewcastle Brown uncovered it from a spare room, with a blog and a shortwave radio and no newsroom behind her. When the Malaysian government hired a $15 million PR firm to destroy her reputa
Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and The Spy Nobody Knows Yet | Ben Macintyre
Ben Macintyre on Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and the strangest book he has ever written.Episode OverviewIn 1943, British intelligence floated a dead body off the coast of Spain with letters from an officer who had never existed. The Germans believed it. In 1941, a professional safe-cracker parachuted into Britain by the Nazis immediately switched sides. In 1979, a senior KGB officer in Tehr
The War Zone Journalist Who Exposed The Global Mafia | Misha Glenny
Misha Glenny on war zones, McMafia, and why this is the time of monsters.Episode OverviewIn 1994, Misha Glenny drove across Sarajevo Airport under sniper fire. A bullet entered his car, passed through the drive shaft, and exited the other side. He didn't panic. He traced the bullet's path with the detached curiosity of someone who had been doing this for years.Glenny made his name covering
Vertical Drama's Dirty Secrets | Thalia Kent Egan
Thalia Kent Egan on vertical drama, AI theft, and why filmmaking shouldn't be brutal.Episode OverviewThalia Kent Egan was commissioned to write a 90-page vertical drama script. She was told she would direct it, that the company wanted bold storytelling, real actors, heartbeat moments. Then they went quiet. When she followed up, they replied to say they had already released it as an AI-generated pr
No Such Thing as Bad Bacteria? A Microbiologist Explains | Dr Gab Astorga
Dr. Gab Astorga on microbial genomics, hiding the vegetables, and why science is not finished until it's communicated.Episode OverviewDr. Gab Astorga opens with the story of how tuberculosis invented the cowboy hat, which led to American culture, which led to Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter. It is exactly who he is and exactly what this conversation delivers for the next 40 minutes.Gab grew up in
Why The 1970s Paranormal Star Gave It All Up To Become A Healer | Matthew Manning
Matthew Manning on poltergeists, laboratory healing, and why he gave up fame at the height of it.Episode OverviewWhen Matthew Manning was 11, objects began moving around his Cambridge home. His father, an architect, ruled out every logical explanation one by one. The police sergeant he reported it to turned out to have a personal passion for ghost hunting and knew exactly who to call: a professor
She Endured Eight Years of Coercive Control. Here's How She Wrote Her Way Out | Ros Barber
SummaryRos Barber on coercive control, the Shakespeare authorship question, and why writing is a survival mechanism.Episode OverviewRos Barber was six months pregnant when she learned the insurance software her husband had been contracted to deliver didn't exist. She stayed up 36 hours, learned C++ from scratch, delivered the system, went into premature labor, and came home from the hospital to ma
The Football Shirt Is The Most Political Object In The World | Joey D'Urso
SummaryJoey D'Urso on dirty money, soft power, and why the shirt on your back says more about the world than you think.Episode OverviewA Schalke shirt is thirty years of Germany's addiction to Russian gas. A Colombian yellow kit became a factional political weapon in a single election. Joey D'Urso spent years as a political journalist at the BBC before the editor of The Athletic asked if he liked
The $450 Million Lie: How the Art Market Manufactures Value | Ben Lewis
SummaryBen Lewis on the art market, the Salvator Mundi, and why the most beautiful objects are used for the ugliest purposes.Episode OverviewIn 2005, a painting sold at auction for $1,000. In 2017, the same painting sold to the ruler of Saudi Arabia for $450 million. Christie's marketed it as a Leonardo da Vinci. It probably isn't. Nobody can prove it either way because most of the origina
This Museum Boss Took a Francis Bacon to the Pub | Jago Cooper
SummaryJago Cooper on living art, the Easter Island myth, and why things are better storytellers than people.Episode OverviewWhat if artworks aren't objects but living entities? Jago Cooper, Executive Director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, made headlines when he became the first museum director in the world to change his institution's governance structure so that every artwork i
Pompeii Wasn't Just a Disaster - It Was a City Full of Life | Dr Jess Venner
SummaryDr. Jess Venner on Pompeii, the ordinary people history forgot, and why resilience is a better story than disaster.Jess Venner grew up in Hainault on the end of the Central Line, at a school in special measures, having never heard of classics. She is now a research fellow at Oxford, and her book The Lost Voices of Pompeii reconstructs the final day of seven ordinary Pompeiians: a pub landlo
One Photograph Unravels Ireland's Forgotten Story | Emma Dabiri
SummaryEmma Dabiri on hair, history, and why the Black/white binary is a design choice, not a fact of life.Episode OverviewEmma Dabiri wrote a book about hair. Except it wasn't about hair. Don't Touch My Hair used braiding as a trapdoor into 6,000 years of African philosophy, pre-colonial constructions of time, and the question of who gets to name things, and what happens to the things that get na
Why Hollywood is broken | Leaving Las Vegas Director Mike Figgis
SummaryMike Figgis on Leaving Las Vegas, Timecode, and why the best creative work comes from stripping everything back.Episode OverviewMike Figgis shot Leaving Las Vegas in three weeks on Super 16 with a skeleton crew and no permits on the Las Vegas Strip. Nicolas Cage won the Oscar. The film cost almost nothing. That was the point.Figgis has been making this argument for 50 years, from trumpet in
Have We Lost The Art of Desire? | Rowan Pelling, The Erotic Review
Rowan Pelling on the Erotic Review, the death of the tease, and why desire needs saving from pornography.Episode OverviewRowan Pelling founded the Erotic Review on a single bet: that the sexiest organ is the brain.The young are having less sex than any previous generation on record. Pornography is free, instant, and infinite. The tease has disappeared. The accidental workplace romance, the fumbled
She Can Make You Confess to Murder | Julia Shaw
SummaryJulia Shaw on false memory, green crime, and why AI is both the problem and the solution.Episode OverviewJulia Shaw once implanted a false memory of a violent crime in a volunteer's mind using three conversations and a few leading questions. The volunteer described it in vivid detail three weeks later. That was her PhD. Now she says we have built the same machine and put it in everyone&
Who gets paid when a story travels? | Richard Welsh
Summary Richard Welsh on COPA90, Decent Partners, and why AI is a translation tool, not a threat.Episode Overview Richard Welsh beat David Beckham's team to a YouTube channel with no rights and no leverage, just a deep understanding of how networks actually work.What followed was 20 years of arriving early to every platform shift: Bebo, MySpace, YouTube Originals, Web3, and now AI. Welsh has c
Community is the Whole Business Model | Wez Saunders, Defected Records
Summary A cold email, a chest-infection phone call, a buyout, and 951 sold-out shows since 2021. The CEO of Defected Records on what holds the centre.Episode OverviewWez Saunders cold-emailed Simon Dunmore in 2013. Two days after a meeting in which Dunmore said he could sell a pen, Wez was home with a chest infection when Dunmore called. He took the club promotions job. Four years later he ran Def
Ted Talk From The Toilet | Ryan Hopkins
Ryan Hopkins filmed his first TEDx talk from a toilet cubicle, ran a hundred episodes of Toilet Break Wellbeing on LinkedIn and turned the script into an Amazon No. 1 business book. Three years before any of that he was a former rugby player with a broken leg, an eating disorder, and a Halifax bank clerk who found himself unable to speak across the counter.In an hour with James Kirkham, Ryan draws
The Bald Yorkshireman in the Bath | Joe Fattorini & Mel Jappy | StoryCo
Joe Fattorini sat in a bath of red wine in the Atacama Desert, filmed himself talking to camera and uploaded the clip to YouTube. Years later the producer Mel Jappy found it, four-by-three and badly cropped, and built The Wine Show around him.In an hour with James Kirkham, Joe and Mel walk through how a show ostensibly about wine ended up in 110 countries and in front of hundreds of millions of vi
The Headhunter Turned Therapist | Kathleen Saxton
Kathleen Saxton was repossessed out of her family home at 11. By 40 she was running C-suite headhunting at The Lighthouse Company. She trained as a psychotherapist along the way and now argues boards have governance for cash, finance and risk, and none at all for behaviour.In an hour with James Kirkham she walks through the memoir she wrote on domestic abuse and the lawyer she hired to defend it;
The Science Behind Every Story Ever Told | Will Storr | StoryCo Ep6
Will Storr has spent thirty years working out what a story actually is. He sits down with James for the longest, most personal version he has given of how that obsession started — and what it has cost him to get good at it.It starts with six words. A tiger. A hunter. A tiger. Will calls this an ancient Bengali story, and inside ninety seconds it has done more to explain how stories work than most
What Surfing Taught Me About Truth | Alex Wade
"I had an early midlife crisis. I ended up at a work event rearranging the downstairs of a restaurant."Alex Wade is a lawyer, a writer, and a surfer ; in that order of discovery, maybe the reverse order of importance. Fleet Street defamation lawyer. Night lawyer at the Mirror. Head of legal affairs for Richard Desmond. White-collar boxer. Journalist at The Times and The Guardian. Author. Mont Blan
Mark Borkowski | 40 Years Engineering Fame
"Is there a formula for fame?" "Definitely." "Can you tell me?" "No." PR legend Mark Borkowski has spent four decades bending media to his will: from circus stunts to celebrity crisis management, Alcopop scandals to political warfare.Mark opens with the greatest dilemma of his career , chasing the Holy Grail or pitching Bisto gravy granules, before unravelling how spectacle, nerve, and story have
The Biographer They Tried to Silence | Andrew Lownie
Andrew Lownie spent thirty years as one of Britain's leading literary agents — establishment, discreet, well-connected. Then he started digging into the royal family, and he kept going. His new biography of the former Prince Andrew, Entitled, was called "among the most lurid ever published about a senior royal." Simon & Schuster's US imprint dropped it weeks before publicatio
Given 24 Hours to Live, She Had Other Plans | Charlie Webster
Charlie Webster was in a coma on life support for two weeks. She had malaria and multiple organ failure. Doctors gave her 24 hours. She survived, and the story of what came before and after is unlike anything you have heard. Charlie tells James Kirkham how a TV executive told her the boxing world was not ready for women. Two years later she became the first woman in the world to host a heavyweight
The Man Who Cracked the Code of Story: John Yorke
A five-year-old in the back of a car repeats a phrase he heard at school without understanding what it means. His father explodes with a fury he has never shown before. The incident is never mentioned again — until John Yorke is 22 years old and finally asks. What his father tells him on that Christmas Day walk reshapes everything John later writes about the power of story, and why that power carr
What If Story Is the Only Thing AI Can't Replace? | StoryCo with James Kirkham
Story has never mattered more. We're drowning in noise, falsehoods, and feeds that never end and say nothing. Right in the middle of that chaos, truth is at a premium — and the people who can tell it are the ones who cut through.StoryCo is the podcast about the business of storytelling, across every discipline, every industry, every culture there is. Hosted by James Kirkham — entrepreneur, brand s
