Where To Next? By Dan Kieran

Mike Warwick, my co-presenter on the show, has been recording episodes when I’m taking a break and then he hands back to me and so on and on we go. We also do some episodes together like the one I will share next week. Today I’m thrilled to share Mike’s conversation with the Founder of Soul Biographies Nic Askew. Nic Askew is a filmmaker, educator and explorer whose work asks what becomes possible...

There are certain things I am wary of talking about and psychedelics are one of them. I had a negative experience using magic mushrooms when I was eighteen (although I’m in the process of reframing that experience thanks to a guest I will be speaking to soon) and I don’t want to do anything that could be seen to be promoting them. Psychedelics are astonishingly powerful and not to be messed around...

As you will know if you have been following the series, ‘caves’ keep coming up in different ways. My journey began with a pilgrimage to a cave on the island of Raasay off the coast of Skye in Scotland, where evidence of our mesolithic ancestors has been found (if you’re curious, you can find the details of exactly where I went here ). That trip led me into deeper enquiries around our indigenous an...

The title of the conference was “The Good, the Beautiful and the True”. There were many wonderful speakers, not least the awesome man himself. Martin Shaw also spoke and brought his impish magic with him and then there was Jude. I had not heard of her before booking my ticket but as soon as she stood on the stage the atmosphere in the room changed. At first I thought it was just her smile, which w...

At the Realisation Festival last year (2025) I had the pleasure of speaking to Jonathan Rowson , the chess grandmaster, philosopher and CEO of Perspectiva ( Episode 5 if you’re curious). In that conversation he urged me to seek out Indra so, when I didn’t manage to speak to her before I left that day, I made a point of seeking her out at the festival this year. My experiences at the RF have been l...

When I arrived at the Realisation Festival this year I had that slight sense of trepidation as I walked down the drive to the festival site. I knew I would be made welcome but the festival is designed to be a journey for speakers and participants over a long weekend so arriving mid way through makes you feel as though you are intruding a little. No-one made me feel that way, I was just worried I w...

Last year I visited the Realisation Festival (imagine a Do Lectures about philosophy held at a Downton Abbey style stately home) at St Giles House where I interviewed Jonathan Rowson, Ed Haddon, Roc Sandford, Sarah Wilson, Nick Ashley - Cooper and Pippa Evans (see episodes four to six in the archive). I also attended a workshop hosted by Benedict Pollard that I recounted at the end of those episod...

There are lots of things I see differently in my life because of Jay. I see her as one of the guides I have been fortunate to know a little bit in my life. Well enough to go and see and chat to, anyway. The longer I go on this journey to try and make sense of what it means to live before I die (the computer keeps autocorrecting ‘live’ to ‘love’ there, which is oddly beautiful), the weirder it beco...

Where do you start with Charles Foster? Perhaps my route to meeting him? Back at the end of last year when I went to visit Iain McGilchrist in Skye, we were discussing indigenous knowledge and what we have lost in the way we see ourselves in the modern world. At this point Iain proclaimed, ‘have you come across Charles Foster’s work?’ I did have Charles’s then most recent book Being a Human back a...

This is a continuation of my interview with modern day hunter gatherers Emily and Charlie. In this part of the conversation we get deeper into the implications of living closer to nature. I am such a fan of their work and way of life. I hope you take as much away from the example they set as I have. This episode also features the launch of a new project I am doing with Ric Stockfis called One Room...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 anc...

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...

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...

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, so...

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 continu...

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...

This is the second episode of the series so far where it is just me and no guest. I hope this will not come across as self indulgent, but in this episode I wanted to pull together some of the things we have learned from my guests in the series so far, and also to tee-up, as it were, next week’s episode with Iain McGilchrist . Iain is one of my intellectual heroes and rather than ask him to repeat...

In this, the second episode of my conversation with the astro-archeologist Dr. John Grigsby, we sit down and chat in more detail about the subjects we share an interest in. The movement of our ancestors from equatorial Africa across the world, the ‘lunarchy’ they lived in (time being based on a monthly rather than annual cycle) which tantalisingly perhaps explains why they existed in matrilineal g...

Those who have been following my journey in this series so far will know that while researching a new book a few years ago, I set myself the challenge of finding out when we, as a species, began to separate ourselves from nature. It seems reasonably well accepted that for the vast majority of our existence as a species, homo sapiens were nomadic, lived in matrilineal clans and had no hierarchies o...

At the end of the Summer 2025, I headed North to the Cumbria / North Yorkshire borders to meet Dr Sharon Blackie. I had read her wonderful book If Women Rose Rooted while on holiday and then devoured much of her substack when I got home. As you will know if you have been joining me on this series in search of meaning, one of the recurrent themes I keep encountering is the denial of the feminine. I...

This week’s episode is a bit different as there is no guest. I recorded it when I was camping in the Summer and the Observer newspaper ran an article - effectively the obituary - of Unbound, the business I co-founded and ran between 2011 and 2022. The idea of sharing this episode makes me uncomfortable for lots of reasons, but I ended up going ahead because the producers at Do Radio said it was th...