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Burnt out? Award-winning podcast ‘The Long Time Academy’ created w/ Headspace explores how long time thinking could be the answer…

• Winner: ARIAS 2022: Best Independent Podcast
• Nominee: British Podcast Awards 2022: The Climate Award & Rising Star Award- Ella Saltmarshe

As we hurtle through 2022 many of us are stressed out and exhausted by the daily uncertainties of a post pandemic world and by huge challenges like climate change, systemic racism and inequality. Award winning podcast series The Long Time Academy steps into this space with one clear message: changing the way we choose to engage with time can be life-changing, both when it comes to the problems we’re facing day-to-day, and the huge threats we’re facing as a species.

Hosted by Ella Saltmarshe, co-founder of The Long Time Project and created in collaboration with the excellent Headspace Studios, the six-episode series will take you on an emotional, spiritual and intellectual journey through this new normal via interviews, immersive sound design, deeply personal anecdotes, playful time-travel, history and the latest academic research.

“We are pioneering The Long Time Movement”, says Ella. “All over our society people are coming together to challenge the short-termism that’s destroying our planet and society. Lawyers, politicians, economists, scientists, and young people are building this movement from the ground-up.  You can meet them in the Long Time Academy. Our hope is to transform how listeners feel about the time they have on earth, offering an emotional and practical toolkit for now that will help them develop their capacity to be good ancestors.”

Throughout the episodes, Ella explores our relationships with time, speaking to Brian Eno, George the Poet, adrienne maree brown (writer and activist), Ahmed Best (Afrofuturist & Jar Jar Binks, Star Wars) Alua Arthur (death doula), Celeste Headlee (author & journalist), Kate Raworth (economist & co-founder of Doughnut Economics Action Lab) to name a few, all part of a 40 strong guest faculty who have come together to teach one of the most important classes of the year.

Each episode is accompanied by a ‘Long Time Practice’ to allow listeners to not just understand the ideas in the podcast, but to actually feel them. These include a deep time practice that takes listeners back through the 4.6-billion-year evolution of the Earth, a death meditation, a meditation to decolonise your imagination created and read by Ahmed Best, and a rarely heard thanksgiving meditation by Mama Bear, Bear Clan Mother for the Mohawk Nation Council.

“The Long Time Academy succeeds in being both a truly transformative and entertaining podcast series, as well as a powerful antidote to the chronic overwhelm we all feel in the face of climate change, racial and economic inequality, the pandemic, and more”, says Ash Jones, Executive Producer at Headspace Studios. “Inviting us to reconsider how we think about time helps solve threats to our existence as a species and improves our own day-to-day lives.”

The Long Time Academy recently won Gold for Best Independent podcast at the ARIAS (the Oscars of UK radio & audio). Judges commented, “A wonderful philosophy about the transformational power of listening wrapped up in a wonderful podcast that challenges the nature of time. Immersive, thought-provoking and purposeful, it’s a brilliant use of the medium combining gorgeous production, entrancing stories and life-enhancing ideas. The Long Time Academy intentionally slows you down through sound; evocative, original and full of intriguing connections between the past, present and future."

On social media, listeners have called the show ‘genuinely incredible’, ‘a masterpiece’, ‘profoundly moving’, ‘a landmark in human transformation’, ‘one of the most inspiring, moving and well-considered interventions when it comes to climate change and caring about future generations’, ‘beautifully bridging the intimately personal with systemic political questions.’ One listener commented, “This podcast series is so frickin’ good. If these ideas could be beamed directly into the minds of the world’s most powerful, I'd have a lot more hope for the future.” 

Ella has also curated a Long Time Play List to accompany your journey across space and time, starting with the oldest song in the world, The Hymn of Ugarit, through to vocal artist and creative technologist Reeps One with his otherworldly, genre-transcending sounds and rhythms, exploring the past, present and future of vocal expression. In between fly through the airport with Brian Eno, listen under the moon with Sam Lee, and take a walk in Berkeley Square and hear a nightingale sing.

The Long Time Academy is a partnership between Headspace Studios and The Long Time Project and is produced by Scenery Studios. It is available for free on all podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and more.