Saying YES to the unknown

I’ve always loved live radio for the same reason I love live music: you have to be there.

But the downside of you have to be there is that sometimes, you aren’t.

When we launched the Do Radio app, last week, I mostly thought of it as an easier way to listen to our live Radio shows. But what I’ve discovered is that it’s actually a treasure trove of wisdom. You see, it has all of our “old” shows on it too. So last week, I went back to Week 2, because I’d missed most of those episodes live.

And honestly, I was floored.

Listening back, I realised how special it is to revisit those conversations. They’re this huge library of real, honest, deeply human stories. The app turns Do Radio from a live stream into something more lasting: a collection you can return to whenever you need it.

What surprised me most about Week 2 is that, without anyone planning it, every show seemed to circle around the same quiet idea: saying yes to the unknown.

The Pattern Beneath the Week

On It’s Not About Trees, Steve Jennings talks through a life that kept reinventing itself, from cyclist to banker to entrepreneur. He didn’t have a plan, he just kept saying yes to what came next. Each chapter began as a small, uncertain step.

In Being Well, Sue Deagle finds herself suddenly widowed in her forties. Her “yes” wasn’t a dramatic leap, it was just the act of staying open. To grief. To her children. To quiet walks in the woods that slowly helped her piece her life back together.

In I Am Not Creative, Blanche Ellis and Eloise Gillow talk about moving to Barcelona “for a few months” and never leaving. Their yes was an artist’s kind: noticing a bit of birdsong, painting a mural they weren’t sure they could finish, trusting that meaning might emerge mid-brushstroke.

On Making Stuff Up, Dr. Neil Rhandawa, an anaesthetist, tells the story of telling his colleagues he was going “mountain biking”, when he was actually heading to the Do Lectures. It made no sense on paper. But he followed that curiosity anyway and found himself in the kind of conversation that quietly reroutes a life.

In Tomorrow’s World, Joe Brettler spends more than he can really afford on a Do Lectures workshop, not knowing it’ll end up reshaping his entire career. His yes looked small at the time: a click, a ticket, a risk.

And in Where To Next?, Dan Kieran and Mark Vernon talk about imagination as a way of navigating uncertainty. Dan walks barefoot now, literally and metaphorically, following Blake into the kind of unknown you can’t rationalise, but that somehow makes you feel more alive.

Listening back, I realised all these stories shared the same rhythm. None of these people knew what they were stepping into. They just recognised the feeling: that quiet inner nudge that says this matters, even if I can’t explain why.

Hearing It Anew

There’s something different about listening to these stories on our app.

Live radio has that lovely immediacy. The sense of something unfolding in real time. But the app brings another kind of richness. You can binge a week’s worth of shows and start noticing patterns. The shared language of risk, curiosity, loss, and reinvention that threads quietly between them.

It’s a bit like hearing a song for the second time and finally catching the lyrics. When you’re not trying to keep up, you notice more. The silences. The shifts in tone. The hesitation just after someone says something true and doesn’t quite know what to say next.

That’s what happened with Week 2. I’d been there for some of those recordings, but I hadn’t really heard them. This time, I did. And what I heard was people finding the next chapter through small, imperfect acts of trust.

Why the App Matters

Revisiting old shows isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about seeing things in a new light.

Live, you’re in the flow of it. And I love the live shows. They’re my first stop, always. But listen back to the archive, and you start to see how these stories speak to each other, and to you.

Now, sitting here with the app open, it feels like a full-circle moment. The ability to go back and listen isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s meaningful. It lets us hear the through-lines we couldn’t see at the time.

So if you’ve missed a few shows, or even a few weeks, I can’t recommend it enough: go back. Start with Week 2. Take your time.

You’ll hear the courage of a small “yes”. You’ll hear lives being rearranged mid-sentence. You’ll hear people stepping into uncertainty, and finding meaning where they didn’t expect it.

And maybe, somewhere in all of that, you’ll hear your own life echoing back. That quiet part of you that already knows what’s next.

Because the truth is, you don’t have to catch it live to feel it.

Sometimes the best moments are the ones you find later and they’re waiting for you in the archive.