Where To Next? By Dan Kieran

In early Spring this year I headed down to the edges of Dartmoor near Ashburton to meet Emily and Charlie who run The Old Way. A series of experiences that teach you not just the skills required to live entirely on the land, but also what they have learned about the way hunter gatherers would have lived in their landscape.

We talk about what it really means to connect with nature. How relying on the land for food changes your sense of gratitude and gives you insights that change the way you see your life and the world itself.

As regular listeners to the show will know, I am searching for different ways of being and knowing to help me make sense of my own life. In this episode I discover so many it actually runs into two shows. Emily and Charlie were the healthiest looking people I have ever met and welcomed me into their home with real joy and hospitality. They had lots of the wild food they eat prepared to share with me including a cake. I explained awkwardly that I was gluten free and Emily replied, ‘oh don’t worry. It’s completely gluten free. It’s made from acorns’. Eating acorns was a first for me and it tasted delicious.

Look out for the rest of the conversation next week!

Much love,

Dan

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dankieran.substack.com/subscribe

David Cleevely is a genuine legend. A multi exited entrepreneur, serially successful investor (I was once at an event where he was celebrated for getting a ‘one hundred X’ on an investment. As in he got one hundred times more money back than he put in), a connector and co founder of so many organisations in Cambridge it makes my head hurt but, most memorably the Cambridge Angels and the Cambridge Network. And he has also advised multiple Governments and also found time to be a restauranteur (he owns Bocca di Lupo and Gelupo) in London.

Not content with all that he has now written a book called Serendipity - It doesn’t happen by accident and this was what led me to ask for an interview. Now you might think ‘serendipity’ is a bit fluffy for an engineer and tech guru like David, but in his excellent book he explains how you can create the conditions to make it more likely to occur.

David was one of my investors at Unbound, which is how I met him and this is a fascinating and wide ranging conversation around the realities of entrepreneurship, what bees can tell us about how we organise organisations and we also touch on one of David’s major bugbears - the habit in the UK of over celebrating inventors rather than engineers and the failure of so many UK companies to achieve what Americans seem to manage so reliably. Scale.

I strongly recommend David’s book. You can grab a copy here and find more about David here.

I hope you enjoy the episode!

Much love,

Dan

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dankieran.substack.com/subscribe

A few weeks ago I was checking in with Mike Warwick about the show and planning when my new episodes will appear when I began telling him about the project I was working on in Salisbury (where I am trying to deploy the behaviour of entrepreneurship without the motivation of self interest). Towards the end of my explanation I told him about a quote I had recently discovered from Harry Truman I was using as the guiding principle for the project; “It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you do not care who gets the credit.” At this point Mike assumed an expression I can only describe as dumbstruck. His eyes opened so wide I thought they might fall out of his head and he began holding onto the table and rocking in his chair as though he was having a seizure. “That quote!” He managed to blurt out. “That quote!”

In what has been a regular occurrence in the show so far, coincidence and serendipity had struck again. It turned out this quote was the guiding principle for Mike and Shuna Dickson too – a couple Mike W had just agreed an interview with for Where To Next? We agreed the universe had decided I was supposed to do the interview with him and so, a week later, we both arrived at a picture postcard house on the Portobello Road in West London before a genial man and his wife opened the door and ushered us in offering tea.

Mike and Shuna are known as the Kindness Couple and Mike’s new book How To Be A Better Human is a warming radiator of good vibes that explains how to bring more kindness into your life. They are the co-founders of Whizz Kidz, a charity that provides mobility equipment for over 26,000 disabled children (over £150 million has been raised so far) and the book is a memoir / kindness manual that takes you through their journey to realising being kind changes your life just as much as the person who benefits from your kindness. And this is no mere platitude. They have taken this principle further than you can imagine by acting behind the scenes for decades to connect philanthropists with what they call ‘Pied Pipers’ - individuals who are performing miracles in local communities to make their part of the world a better place. We could tell Mike wasn’t entirely comfortable about the microphone finally being focussed on him, but he was generous and, with a bit of coaxing from Shuna, opened up about how they came to learn that kindness is the ultimate superpower.

In the show so far Mike and I have been trying to figure out how, in Martin Shaw’s words, to be ‘real human beings’. In this interview you will hear from two people who have figured out how to do just that. It was incredibly inspiring and life affirming to be in their company.

For more information about Mike, Shuna and their work visit their website and please do check out the book.

Much love,

Dan

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dankieran.substack.com/subscribe

This is a bit of a ramble about my conversation earlier this week at Blackwells in Oxford with the wonderful author and brilliant man, Charles Foster who generously gave me a tour of Exeter College where he is a fellow. I didn’t realise until I asked him but this makes him a ‘Don’.

I also interviewed Charles for Where To Next? and that episode will be coming up at some point over the summer along with my conversations with David Cleevely (the entrepreneur and author), Charlie and Emily from The Old Way Immersion, Jay Griffiths (author), Jude Currivan (author, archeologist, physicist and cosmologist) and many more to be recorded at this year’s Realisation Festival in June. Bruce Parry (author, filmmaker and explorer) has also said yes to an interview in the autumn and no doubt lots of other magical people will start to emerge as the flow of serendipity begins when the shows start escaping out into (and onto) the air.

Much love, Dan

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dankieran.substack.com/subscribe

This was an unexpected joy. Mike Warwick, who has taken over presenting duties on Where To Next? while I record my second series, asked if I would like to co-interview Tom Blue Wolf, a storyteller, indigenous elder and earthkeeper. Appropriately enough, Tom’s book The Great Remembering is a beautiful reminder of the wisdom that humans seem to understand intuitively in all cultures where their ancestral link is unbroken. Tom lives in a place his ancestors have called home for thirty thousand years. This is the first of two episodes, and I will add the second next week.

You can listen to all of Mike’s episodes of the show in the archive section of the Do Lectures Radio app that you can download here.

Mike and I are enjoying what my wife affectionately refers to as a ‘bro-mance’ so expect more shows from us together in the future. We are beginning to think about doing some live with an audience as well. And we are planning a Where To Next? Workshop (currently titled How To Become a Real Human Being) that will take place in London in May. More details on that soon I hope.

Till next week!

Much love,

Dan

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dankieran.substack.com/subscribe

It took four episodes and an exploration of 11,000 years of the continuous habitation of these islands since the end of the last ice-age, but in this recording John Grigsby and I finally reach 430 AD and the arrival of the English.

I love all the conversations I have had with John so far but there are so many wonderful things in this episode. We discuss how language may have created the separation from nature that has left the English so lost in their own land. Tolkien’s determination to create a mythology for these islands after the invasion of William the Conqueror led to the eradication of ours and the hints from Chaucer about what that lost mythology might have been.

If you are enjoying the show, please consider becoming a paid supporter. If you can’t afford that, please leave a review on the page for the show on Apple Podcasts instead. That will really help!

I’m making great progress so far with series two. I will share more updates on that soon.

Much love,

Dan

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dankieran.substack.com/subscribe

The hunter gatherer paradise that was Mesolithic in Britain comes to an end as two waves of farmers arrive from 4,000 BC, bringing with them a new technology and way of life.

This is the sixteenth episode of my Do Lectures Radio Series Where To Next? A new episode is released every Monday. The week after each episode is aired I put it up here on my Substack to create a series archive for those who discover it in the future and want to go back to the start, and for those who want to re-listen to the wisdom of my guests that does seems to bloom on a second and third listening. That has been the case for me, anyway. This episode was first broadcast on Do Radio on December 22nd.

As always, please share it with anyone you think might find it illuminating.

Much love,

Dan

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dankieran.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode we talk about how the ending of the last ice age may have informed mythologies our ancient ancestors used to make sense of themselves and the world as it changed around them. John explains how he can locate myths in time using the movement of stars over millennia. We also talk about how our mesolithic ancestors lived according to the lunar monthly calendar rather than an annual, solar one that became dominant after the emergence of agriculture and how this coincided with the shift away from a more egalitarian way of life to a more patriarchal one.

This is the fifteenth episode of my Do Lectures Radio Series Where To Next? A new episode is released every Monday. The week after each episode is aired I put it up here on my Substack to create a series archive for those who discover it in the future and want to go back to the start, and for those who want to re-listen to the wisdom of my guests that does seems to bloom on a second and third listening. That has been the case for me, anyway. This episode was first broadcast on Do Radio on December 15th.

As always, please share it with anyone you think might find it illuminating.

Much love,

Dan

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dankieran.substack.com/subscribe

While I’m taking a break from travelling around the country to record my interview episodes, John Grigsby and I got together to have a series of conversations about what it means to be English and to belong in the nation known as Britain. In these sessions we track when people first arrived here after the last ice age nearly twelve thousands years ago, and from when these islands have been continuously populated ever since. We journey through our Hunter gatherer ancestors of the mesolithic to the beginnings of the neolithic when Britain was still connected to Europe by a bridge of land known as Doggerland. Using a mix of archeology, anthropology, myth and our own imaginations we try to make sense of where we, the English, originally came from.

This is the fourteenth episode of my Do Lectures Radio Series Where To Next? A new episode is released every Monday. The week after each episode is aired I put it up here on my Substack to create a series archive for those who discover it in the future and want to go back to the start, and for those who want to re-listen to the wisdom of my guests that does seems to bloom on a second and third listening. That has been the case for me, anyway. This episode was first broadcast on Do Radio on December 8th.

As always, please share it with anyone you think might find it illuminating.

Much love,

Dan

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dankieran.substack.com/subscribe

There have been moments in my life when I felt as though I had strayed from my authentic path and there have been other times when I felt certain I was on the correct one after all. This series has given me as much creative fulfilment as any other creative project I have ever embarked on and, in many ways, driving to the distant corner of the Isle of Skye to visit Iain felt like the culmination of that process.

I wonder if there is a name for these kinds of moments? Those times in life when we stop and take our bearings from some inner compass and feel the catharsis of knowing we are on track after all. As to where that track might eventually lead, as you will hear in the episode, I get a steer on that as well.

I was negotiating the end of a head cold on the journey, which is why my voice sounds strange in the intro but has recovered by the time I’m actually with Iain. It was an honour to be in his company and share a conversation with him. And it gave me the best answer to the meaning of life I have ever encountered and one that has given me much solace ever since. I hope you enjoy it. As I explain in the episode, there are many places you can go to enjoy Iain’s work. He has an illuminating substack and a comprehensive archive on his website, both of which I strongly recommend. And here is the link to the conversation with Iain and Bernardo Kastrup on Youtube I mentioned in the episode where they discuss the meaning of life.

A note on the recording, this is the combined episodes 1 and 2 from my Do Lectures Radio show that were spread across two weeks when they were originally aired.

I am now taking a break from traveling the country to interview people, but John Grigsby and I will take the show to Christmas discussing what it means to belong in England and beyond. See you for that next week.

This is the twelfth and thirteenth episode of my Do Lectures Radio Series Where To Next? A new episode is released every Monday. The week after each episode is aired I put it up here on my Substack to create a series archive for those who discover it in the future and want to go back to the start, and for those who want to re-listen to the wisdom of my guests that does seems to bloom on a second and third listening. That has been the case for me, anyway. Episode 1 of my conversation with Iain was first broadcast on Do Radio on November 24th 2025 and Episode 2 was first broadcast on December 1st. As always, please share it with anyone you think might find it illuminating.

Much love,

Dan

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dankieran.substack.com/subscribe