PODCAST · society
Thinking Class
by John Gillam
Thinking Class is a weekly long-form interview podcast and documentary series exploring the cultural, historical, and civilisational forces shaping Britain, the Anglosphere, and the wider West. Over 15,000 subscribers and 1.4 million plays across all platforms. Hosted by John Gillam, founder of the Albion Institute (Lord Nigel Biggar CBE serves as Advisory Board Chair) and creator of The Call of England and the forthcoming Call of America documentary series. Each episode brings together historians, philosophers, theologians, economists, and public intellectuals for conversations that go beyond the news cycle. Guests have included David Starkey, Lord Jonathan Sumption, Lord Nigel Biggar, Iain McGilchrist, Peter Hitchens, R.R. Reno, Auron MacIntyre, Patrick Deneen, Lionel Shriver, David Goodhart, Carl Trueman, Eric Kaufmann, Carrie Gress, Katharine Birbalsingh, Kathleen Stock, Frank Furedi, Rob Henderson, Robert Tombs, and many more.<
Episodes
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#144 - Ben Jones - Britain Has Become An Island Of Strangers. And You’re Not Allowed To Say So.
Dr Ben Jones is the Director of Case Management at the Free Speech Union and author of Island of Strangers: Diversity, Decline & Free Speech In Crisis In this conversation, we think out loud about: When saying “it’s a free country” died in Britain and what replaced it 6,000 people punished for...
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#143 - Auron MacIntyre - The West Has Already Become A Total State And Most People Inside It Have No Idea
Auron MacIntyre is the host of The Auron MacIntyre Show on Blaze TV and the author of The Total State. Auron previously taught high school before leaving education to build his media platform, writes the Substack The Total State, and appears across conservative and heterodox media. In this...
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#142 - Nathan Pinkoski - France Sacrificed Free Speech To Keep The Peace, Britain Did The Same And Now Neither Has Either
Nathan Pinkoski is a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, the translator of Eric Zemmour’s The Suicide of France, and author of the forthcoming Silent Revolution: The End of the Liberal West. He writes for First Things and Compact and publishes the Substack Lament for the Nations. In this...
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#141 - R.R. Reno - What Happens When The West’s Strong Gods Return And Find Nobody Home
R.R. Reno is the editor of First Things, the most important journal of religion and public life in America. He is the author of Return of the Strong Gods, In the Ruins of the Church, and a forthcoming rock climbing memoir. He has taught theology at Creighton University and has written for the…
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#140 - Stephen Blackwood - The Universities Forgot What Education Is For So This Man Built One From Scratch & Here Is What He Learned
Stephen Blackwood is President and Founder of Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia. The Chancellor is Dr Iain McGilchrist. He is on the advisory board for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). This episode is supported by Aquinas Tuition, which provides bespoke academic tutoring for...
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#139 - Tom Ough & Calum Drysdale - How Britain Forgot How To Build And Why The Consequences Are Coming
Tom Ough is Senior Editor at UnHerd and author of The Anti-Catastrophe League. Calum Drysdale is an engineer and writer. Together they host Anglofuturism — a podcast exploring ambitious, outlandish, and remarkably achievable ideas to revitalise Britain from their thatched space station. Robert...
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#138 - Ricardo Duchesne - The Greatness And Ruin Of Western Civilisation
Ricardo Duchesne is a Puerto Rican-born Canadian historical sociologist. He studied history at McGill University, received his PhD in Social and Political Thought from York University (awarded the Doctoral Prize for best dissertation of the year), and served as professor of sociology at the...
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#137 - Clement Knox - Why The American Revolution Was Not A Revolution But Englishmen Defending English Rights Against An English King
Clement Knox is a writer and historian. He is the author of The Scramble for America: How the United States Conquered a Continent (William Collins, 2026), and writes at Past Notes on Substack. Two hundred and fifty years ago, the United States was thirteen coastal colonies clinging to the…
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#136 - Katharine Birbalsingh - Why Britain Stopped Believing Children Need Discipline
Katharine Birbalsingh is the headmistress and founder of Michaela Community School in Wembley, and a former UK Social Mobility Commissioner. She built the most successful school in Britain from nothing — in one of London's poorest boroughs — by insisting on the things the educational…
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#135 - Pierre d'Alancaisez - 'I Helped Build The Cult Of Contemporary Art And Then I Walked Away'
Pierre d’Alancaisez is a writer, curator, and researcher working with the multiple politics of the arts. He is the resident art critic for the English magazine The Critic, and his writing has appeared in outlets such as ArtReview, The Spectator, and Compact. *NOTE: If you downloaded this before...
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#134 - Frank Furedi - The West Is Crushing Democracy In The Name Of Defending It
Frank is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent and the author of twenty-eight books on the cultural forces shaping Western societies, including his most recent, In Defence of Populism. Frank is also a Senior Fellow at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Brussels. In this...
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#133 - Max Klinger - The British Establishment Re-Racialised Britain And Now It Can't Control What It Created
Max Klinger is a lawyer and political analyst. He writes at Max Klinger's Newsletter on Substack and his work has appeared in The Spectator. Britain's progressive establishment spent a decade re-racialising public life. It racialised Brexit, policing, and every institution in the name of...
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#132 - Andrew Hussey - France Is Fracturing Along Ethnic And Religious Lines
Professor Andrew Hussey OBE is Dean of the University of London Institute in Paris and Director of the Centre for Post-Colonial Studies at the University of London's School of Advanced Study. Born in Liverpool, educated at the University of Manchester and Jean Moulin University Lyon 3, he is the...
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#131 - Gregory Clark - Why Everything The West Believes About Social Mobility Is Wrong
Professor Gregory Clark is a British-born economic historian at the University of California, Davis and holds a DNRF Chair at the Danish National Research Foundation and a professor at the Historical Economics and Development Group (HEDG) at the Department of Economics, SDU. Furthermore, he is a...
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#130 - Iain McGilchrist - The Industrialisation Of Man, The Loss Of Faith, And What The Western Mind Has Done To Itself
Dr Iain McGilchrist is a former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Consultant Emeritus of the Bethlem and Maudsley Hospital, London, a former research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns…
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#129 - William Clouston & Firas Modad - The Iran War Is Breaking The Global Economy And Britain Has No Plan
William Clouston is the leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the United Kingdom and a member of the advisory board for Restore Britain. Firas Modad is an analyst and political economist focused on the Middle East and global geopolitics. He runs his own consultancy, Modad Geopolitics,...
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#128 - Lord Tony Sewell - Life At The Bottom In Broken Britain - The White Working Class, The Road Man Culture, And The Collapse Of England
Lord Tony Sewell CBE is a British educational consultant, author, and life peer. Born in Brixton to Jamaican parents, he trained as a teacher and worked in some of London's most challenging schools, during which time he completed his PhD on black masculinities and schooling at the University of...
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#127 - Jonathan Rose - Literacy Is At Record Lows But It Wasn't Always. What The British Working Class Built And How It Was Destroyed
Jonathan Rose is William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University in New Jersey. He edits the journal Book History and was founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing. He is the author of several books including The Literary Churchill and The...
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#126 - Gary Gerstle - The Iran War Is Ending The Global Economy As We Know It & What Comes Next
Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and the author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order — one of the most clarifying accounts written of how a set of economic assumptions came to dominate Western politics, and how they are now...
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#125 - Theodore Dalrymple & Rob Henderson - The Ideas That Claimed To Help Britain & America's Poor And Made Everything Worse
Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of Dr. Anthony Daniels — physician, psychiatrist, and social diagnostician. He spent years working in the hospitals and prisons of Birmingham before his essays for City Journal established him as the foremost chronicler of what he called the culture of the…
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#124 - Michael Lind - Why Britain And America Keep Betraying Their Working Class
Michael Lind is a political theorist, historian, and one of America's most rigorous independent analysts of class, democracy, and political economy. He is a Professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, a co-founder of the New America think…
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#123 - Carl Trueman - The West Killed God. Then It Killed Man. Now Something Darker Is Coming.
Dr. Carl R. Trueman is Professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania and currently a visiting Professor at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. His most recent books are The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Expressive Individualism, Cultural...
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#122 - Richard IV - C.S. Lewis Said If You Don't Give Boys Knights And Warriors They Will Worship Pimps And Prostitutes & He Was Right
Richard IV is a writer, cultural commentator and men's mentor whose work has helped thousands of men in Britain and across the West understand what has gone wrong and what can still be recovered. In this episode of Thinking Class, John Gillam speaks with Richard about the invisible order that…
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#121 - Kathleen Stock - The West Is Offering Death As A Solution — Do Not Go Gentle
Kathleen Stock is a Contributing Editor to UnHerd, a philosopher, author of Material Girls and Do Not Go Gentle, and one of the most forensically precise thinkers in British public life. A bill is moving through the British Parliament right now that would allow doctors to help their patients die....
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#120 - Lord Nigel Biggar & Tirthankar Roy: Britain's Empire Was Not What You Were Taught — An Indian Historian Has The Evidence
For decades, the British Empire in India has been reduced to a simple moral claim: that it was an extractive, exploitative system which left only damage behind. But is that really the full story? In this episode of Thinking Class, John Gillam is joined by Lord Nigel Biggar and Professor…
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#119 - John Waters - Ireland's Moral Revolution And The Crisis Of Authority
John Waters is an Irish journalist, author, and columnist known for his work with Hot Press, The Irish Times, and The Irish Independent. He has written on social and political issues, specialising in father's rights and cultural critiques. Ireland changed faster than almost any country in the…
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#118 - Michael Reiners - The Laws That Quietly Abolished England: Blair's Constitutional Settlement And What Can Be Done About It
Michael Reiners is a writer, lawyer, and architectural historian. Michael is the founder of the Reiners Project, which publishes essays, draft legislation and commentary on English constitutional law and the art and architectural landscape. Britain’s constitutional settlement has changed more in...
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#117 - Lord Nigel Biggar - The New Dark Age: How Britain's Institutions Became Afraid Of The Truth
Lord Nigel Biggar is an Anglican priest, theologian, and moral philosopher, a member of the House of Lords, and Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford. His most recent books are The New Dark Age: Why Liberals Must Win The Culture War, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning…
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#116 - Lionel Shriver - A Better Life? Immigration, Demography, and Belonging In The West
Lionel Shriver is a novelist and columnist at The Spectator, and the author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, Mania, and A Better Life among many other books. Lionel Shriver returns to Thinking Class to discuss mass immigration in the West—not as an abstract moral debate, but as a lived experience...
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#115 - Lord Jonathan Sumption - Can Democracy Survive the Britain We’re Becoming?
Lord Jonathan Sumption is a British judge and historian, who served as a Supreme Court Justice from 2012 – 2018. He is the author of The Challenges of Democracy And The Rule Of Law, the Sunday Times bestseller Trials of the State, Law in a Time of Crisis, and Divided Houses, which won the 2009...
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#114 - Dr Carrie Gress - How Feminism Became the West’s New Moral Authority
Dr Carrie Gress has a doctorate in philosophy from the Catholic University of America and is the editor at the online women’s magazine Theology of Home. Carrie’s work has appeared in numerous publications, including National Review, Daily Caller, Daily Wire, First Things, Newsweek, The American...
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#113 - Bijan Omrani & Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert - Britain’s Cultural Inheritance Is Being Squandered And We’re Living With the Consequences
Dr. Bijan Omrani is a classicist, historian, and Oxford-educated barrister. His research explores questions of religious history and cultural identity, spanning from ancient Roman Greece to Afghanistan and the Silk Road. He has taught Classics at Eton College and Westminster School, is a former...
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#112 - Firas Modad - Britain Is Losing Control At Home and Abroad: Demographics, Sovereignty, And Power
Firas Modad is an analyst and political economist focused on the Middle East and global geopolitics. He runs his own consultancy, Modad Geopolitics, helping companies and investors understand the commercial impact of political, economic, and security risks they face. Firas Modad is a host on...
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#111 - Prof. Azar Gat - Why Ethnicity Is Inescapably Political And Nationalism Endures: Lessons For Britain & The West
Professor Azar Gat, one of the world’s leading scholars of nationalism, war, and political identity. Professor Gat is Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University and the author of several major works on conflict and political order, including War in Human Civilization and, most notably for this...
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#110 - Renaud Camus - “The Disaster”: The Great Replacement, Elite Failure, And The Crisis Of The West
Renaud Camus, writer, painter, photographer, was born in 1946. He is now the author of more than one hundred and sixty works. His works are marked by the question of meaning and the fight against the industrialisation of man and the massacre of landscapes. In this episode of Thinking Class, John...
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#109 - William Clouston - Why British Politics Is A Case Study In Governing Against The National Interest
William Clouston is the leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the United Kingdom and a member of the advisory board for Restore Britain. In this conversation, William Clouston and I think out loud about the current state of British politics, focusing on the disconnect between government...
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#108 - Prof. Eric Kaufmann & Dr Paul Morland - Demographic Timebomb 2060: The English & British Are Headed For Minority Status & Why It Matters
Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at The University of Buckingham and Director of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science. He directs Buckingham’s new MA in the Politics of Cultural Conflict and PhD in Cultural Politics as well as its open online course on Woke: the Origins, Dynamics and...
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#107 - Stephen Balogh - Democracy In The West Feels Like Theatre Because It Is. The Voters Know It & The Politicians Don't Care."
Stephen Balogh is the Chairperson for the Social Democratic Party. Stephen is also active in non-profit and public policy organisations that promote the flourishing of society through the thoughtful application of socially responsible, small-c conservative politics. Following a 30-year business...
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#106 - Driss Ghali - France’s Identity Crisis: Violence, Islamism & The Risk Of Social Fracture
Driss Ghali is a political author and speaker. Driss was born in Morocco and educated in Europe. He graduated from prestigious French universities and spent a lot of time in a corporate career focused on high-tech companies. Driss is an intellectual and observer of human nature as it is: ugly and...
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#105 - Neema Parvini - Why Politics Is Like Pro-Wrestling And Democracy Is An Illusion
Neema Parvini is the author of nine books including Applied Elite Theory, The Prophets of Doom, The Populist Delusion, The Defenders of Liberty, Shakespeare's Moral Compass. He has also written dozens of chapters and articles in scholarly publications and the media. Neema is the Director of...
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#104 - Alexander Chula - An African Dictator Understood Western Civilisation Better Than The West Does
Alexander Chula is a medical doctor and writer working in London. His first book, Goodbye. Dr Banda was published 2023. In this episode, Alexander and I think out loud about what an African dictator can teach the West about itself, how multiculturalism impacts conceptions of personal and national...
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#103 - Martin Sellner - Remigration & European Identity
Martin Sellner is an Austrian activist, author and political organiser and his "goal is to save the identity and soul of [his] nation & Europe". He is author of several books in the German language, one of which, "Regime Change From The Right", is now published in English, while another,...
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#102 - David Betz - Tribes At War: The Sectarian Battle For Britain's Future & Its Grim Reality
David Betz is Professor of War in the Department of War Studies at King's College London where he heads the MA War Studies programme. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Prof. Betz's most recent book, The Guarded Age: Fortification in the 21st Century, is…
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#101 - Nina Power - Beyond Deportations: The Restoration Of Britain's Soul
Nina Power is a philosopher, writer, and author of books including What Do Men Want?: Masculinity and Its Discontents. Nina runs philosophy courses with Verdurin and is also the author of the Substack Nina Power and the host of the podcast The Lack. In this episode, Nina and I think out loud…
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#100 - Philip Cunliffe - Britain After Globalism: Demographics, Identity And The National Interest
Philip Cunliffe is Associate Professor of International Relations at the UCL, where he researches and teaches on the topics of international order, multinational military intervention, and conflict management. He has 20 years of academic experience, having previously worked as a Senior Lecturer…
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#099 - Paul Embery - Why Diversity Is Britain's Greatest Challenge
Paul Embery is a firefighter, trade union activist, writer and broadcaster. Paul has been a member of the Labour party since 1994 and active in the wider labour movement for most of his adult life. He has served on the executive council of the Fire Brigades Union and as the national organiser of...
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#98 - Lord Nigel Biggar - The Case Against Britain Paying Reparations For Its Role In The Transatlantic Slave Trade
Lord Nigel Biggar is Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Pusey House, Oxford. He holds a B.A. in Modern History from Oxford and a PhD in Christian Theology and Ethics from the University of Chicago. In 2021, he was...
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#97 - Andreas Svanlund - Why The 'Energy Transition' Is Dead
Andreas Svanlund is Chief Commercial Officer at Safe Clean, a Norwegian hydrocarbons company. Formerly an officer in the Norwegian Armed Forces, Andreas later joined the defence industry as a business developer with a focus on NATO and Europol special forces. He has also supplied combat uniforms...
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#096 - Dominic Frisby - Gold, Power, And The State: What Honest Money Reveals About Civilisation
Dominic Frisby is a financial writer, broadcaster, and comedian. He is the author of Life After the State, Bitcoin: The Future of Money, and Daylight Robbery: How Tax Shaped Our Past and Will Change Our Future. He writes regularly for MoneyWeek and has performed stand-up comedy in the UK and...
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#095 - David Shipley - Why Britain’s Justice System Has Lost Its Moral Compass
David Shipley is a writer, campaigner, has worked as a consultant prison inspector, and is the author of the Substack Shipley Writes. David's work has appeared in The Spectator, The Sunday Times and The Telegraph. In this conversation, we think out loud about the moral and institutional collapse…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Thinking Class is a weekly long-form interview podcast and documentary series exploring the cultural, historical, and civilisational forces shaping Britain, the Anglosphere, and the wider West. Over 15,000 subscribers and 1.4 million plays across all platforms.
Hosted by John Gillam, founder of the Albion Institute (Lord Nigel Biggar CBE serves as Advisory Board Chair) and creator of The Call of England and the forthcoming Call of America documentary series.
Each episode brings together historians, philosophers, theologians, economists, and public intellectuals for conversations that go beyond the news cycle.
Guests have included David Starkey, Lord Jonathan Sumption, Lord Nigel Biggar, Iain McGilchrist, Peter Hitchens, R.R. Reno, Auron MacIntyre, Patrick Deneen, Lionel Shriver, David Goodhart, Carl Trueman, Eric Kaufmann, Carrie Gress, Katharine Birbalsingh, Kathleen Stock, Frank Furedi, Rob Henderson, Robert Tombs, and many more.<
HOSTED BY
John Gillam
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Thinking Class have?
Thinking Class currently has 146 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Thinking Class about?
Thinking Class is a weekly long-form interview podcast and documentary series exploring the cultural, historical, and civilisational forces shaping Britain, the Anglosphere, and the wider West. Over 15,000 subscribers and 1.4 million plays across all platforms. Hosted by John Gillam, founder of the...
How often does Thinking Class release new episodes?
Thinking Class publishes regularly with 146 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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You can listen to Thinking Class on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Thinking Class?
Thinking Class is created and hosted by John Gillam.
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