Career stories with heart, grit, and joy.
Seize the Yay follows Sarah Davidson into generous conversations with guests across vivid career paths. The show favors origin stories, emotional turning points, and the practical lessons guests learned while building lives that feel worth choosing.
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Seize the Yay is a warm, biography-led interview show about the many ways a person can build a life that feels alive. It is interested in work, but not only work. Sarah Davidson steers guests toward the parts of ambition that do not always fit neatly into a resume: fear, timing, exhaustion, family, grief, motherhood, self-doubt, luck, and the small moments that make someone keep going. The conversations are polished at the start, then loosen into a friendly rhythm. Guests are often introduced with genuine admiration before the episode settles into the details of how their path actually unfolded. A prima ballerina talks through ballet as a career of timing, resilience, physical strain, strange clothing rituals, contracts, injury, and daily discipline. The duo behind Nakedvice describe self-teaching, early office space, first hires, children, growth, and the pressure that arrives once a business becomes serious. Bindi Irwin brings the show into deeper emotional territory, reflecting on grief, parenthood, family closeness, wildlife care, and choosing joy after loss. Episodes can also shift toward sharper material, including cold-case journalism around Christopher Wilder and the impact of new leads. That range is part of the appeal. One week may explore food, creativity, and family-friendly cooking with Sarah Pound; another may sit with Shiza Shahid on injustice, resilience, motherhood, and showing up. The show repeatedly returns to origin stories. It wants the first spark, the awkward middle, the crisis point, and the lesson that only became clear later. Its entrepreneurship angle is broad, stretching beyond startups into personal brands, creative careers, social projects, public lives, and highly unusual professions. The emotional register stays encouraging. Even when the subject matter is grave, the show looks for perspective rather than shock. It is especially good at humanizing people whose public work may seem glamorous, intimidating, or remote. The result is a discovery show for listeners who like success stories with softness, backstory, and practical honesty. It celebrates people doing remarkable things, but its real subject is how they learned to live inside the life they built.
Made for: For listeners who like intimate interviews about creative careers, founder life, reinvention, motherhood, resilience, and purpose. It suits anyone drawn to polished but personal conversations with high-achieving guests.
What sets it apart: The show blends entrepreneurship with emotional biography, treating career success as a whole-life story rather than a highlight reel. Its range runs from ballet and food to wildlife, cold-case journalism, fashion, social impact, gems, and intelligence work.
A lawyer turned funtrepreneur's investigation into how some of the world's most inspiring people find their "yay", whether it's through work, rest or play and any other pearls of wisdom they have along the way.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Seize the Yay turns career stories into practical conversations about ambition, setbacks and the choices behind a satisfying working life.
Sarah Davidson builds Seize the Yay around generous, detailed interviews about how people shape their working lives, absorb setbacks and revise their ideas of success.
Sarah Davidson gets prima ballerinas and spies talking past the polished bio, so you hear the life underneath.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A tender conversation about grief, parenthood and the daily practice of finding light.
Bindi Irwin's reflections on grief make happiness feel less like a mood than a choice made day by day. In conversation with Sarah Davidson, she remembers how her family began naming the best part of each day after losing her dad, even when the answer was as small as a warm…
Kerry recalls being the only woman among 24 intelligence chiefs and learning to use doubt as energy.
Five or six days into leading Australia's international spy network, Kerry walked into a room of 24 foreign intelligence chiefs and found she was the only woman there. She tells Sarah Davidson she wondered how she had got there.
Women working in intelligence talk training, self-awareness and the people skills behind their work.
Sarah Davidson opens her conversation with women working in intelligence with a playful nod to the pop-culture spy. The guests soon bring it back to training: self-defence, personal security and tradecraft all matter, but they spend the most time on how officers deal with…
A candid Seize the Yay conversation about balance, startup work, and learning by moving before everything feels certain.
Sarah Davidson opens this four-way Seize the Yay episode by pushing back on the neat promise of balance. Rather than treating it as a state to master, the conversation frames it as another pressure point: friends, family, exercise, work, and ordinary life all needing to look…
A plainspoken case for acting before other people's opinions become the plan.
The episode turns a public-facing business choice into a tight study of momentum. The guest talks about putting herself on social media even when it felt cringe, then gives the criticism a simple test: if the work is making money and bringing success, the noise matters less.
Rob Walling on bootstrapped SaaS growth, plateaus, and exits — with founders who lived them.
Abbey Ashley's playbook for turning your job skills into a virtual assistant business.
SaaS operators on scaling, pricing and AI, metrics included.
Alex Blumberg interviews guests like Megan Phelps-Roper and Shane McAnally about failure and reinvention.
Natassia Nicolao's idea for a waterless beauty brand struck her while reading the 'aqua' label on a shower product during lockdown.
Leah Georgantis reveals she listened to Seize the Yay while studying law, before she ever seized her own yay.
Sarah Davidson interviews Catherine Eisman, founder of High Heel Jungle and author of How to Tell a Man by His Shoes and How to Tell a Woman by Her Handbag.
Sarah Davidson speaks with Benedicte Bemet, a principal artist with the Australian Ballet, about growing up in ballet, moving from the Gold Coast to Hong Kong, and training in Melbourne at 15.
Sarah Davidson speaks with Sarah Miller and Jesse Gargan about how Nakedvice grew from a sushi conversation in August to a launch the following April, with the first stock coming from a Bali leather-factory trip and about 10 products.
Bindi Irwin says Steve Irwin’s death taught her that time is “very fleeting,” which is why she wants people to tell loved ones now and choose joy on purpose.
Journalists Andy Byrne and Mark Llewellyn discuss their investigative podcast Catching Evil, which is uncovering new leads in the cold cases of serial killer Christopher Wilder.
Sarah Davidson interviews Sarah Pound, a popular foodie and nutritionist, about her journey from catering to becoming a bestselling cookbook author and social media influencer.
Shiza Shahid discusses her work with the Malala Fund, the importance of mealtime, and her experiences with motherhood.
Sarah Davidson introduces the Seize the Yay podcast and shares her personal reflections on the restorative power of staying home during the holidays and finding balance in 2026.
Sarah Davidson’s ASIS visit in Seize the Yay moves from the top secret training facility to two officers, Jess and Tara, who have each spent almost 20 years in the service.
Kerry Hartland describes ASIS as Australia's "international foreign network of spies," and compares her counterparts to the heads of MI6 and the CIA.
Sarah Davidson and Bim catch up on their quarterly 'Yays of Our Lives' segment, discussing their time scale and podcast scheduling.
Jessie Stephens discusses her career journey from editorial assistant to executive editor at Mamamia, balancing motherhood and success, and the importance of feeling happiness rather than seeking envy.
Sarah Davidson introduces the Seize the Bébé segment and shares twenty tips for traveling with babies.