Phoenix & Friends Podcast is an inspiring experience

The Phoenix & Friends Podcast is seeking to connect people and inspire them with positivity. And the Canary spoke to Phoenix to find out more.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Phoenix stressed the importance of nurturing curiosity – of breaking away from the short-form doom-scroll overload of social media today and delving into issues more deeply and meaningfully instead. He also described his personal connection to Africa and interest in boosting the past and present stories of the continent in a Western corporate media environment that too often ignores them. And he noted that, while protests have their benefits, campaigners today need to develop new tactics to really foster and bring about change.

With his podcast, he hopes to help motivate people with constructive conversations that can have a positive impact on them and the communities around them.

Phoenix & Friends Podcast: about the power of human passion and potential

Phoenix has interviewed a diverse group of people so far since starting his podcast earlier this year. These include an Olympian, community-project organisers, a mayor, and “creatives from different fields”. What they aren’t, he asserted, is “some unattainable celebrity that was born into status and wealth”. The main message that comes across is one of:

Persistence and patience with yourself, and faith in yourself, and finding something that you want to do, regardless of what that is, and just starting and keeping going and seeing that, when you really follow that passion, that is such an important thing

He wants the podcast to help people see that:

there is something that you can do that you’re passionate about that can make a positive change in the world, and pay your bills and put food on the table, and you can find a way to do that

As he insisted:

human potential is amazing

We need a different approach

Growing up and participating in protests, the tactics of the state’s apparatus convinced Phoenix that the protests of the past aren’t going to cut it anymore. One barrier to their success, he said, is the bias of the mainstream media. Because today’s media landscape:

allows states to… shape the picture of what’s happening at protests, and allows them to tell the story how they want it to be told, and more often than not puts the protesters in places of aggression.

In one protest he attended, for example:

we got run down by a bunch of horses, and I went back home, and I watched the BBC footage, and they played everything backwards… [and] out of order to make it look as if the crowd were the aggressors in the situation.

Insisting he’s “tired of just chanting the same things over and over”, he argued that:

We’ve got to actually speak beyond just chants and slogans, because… that doesn’t say much or do much for anyone.

This realisation informed his decision to:

transition into doing something more with media and with arts, and finding a way… [to] get into the homes of people who we can’t reach by being out on the streets.

He added that “states and police forces overall are too well-practised and rehearsed now” to allow protests to be really effective. While such events are good for venting frustration and recharging hope via the energy of many like-minded people, he said, “we have to kind of come up with new methods to create that change” we want to see. “It needs to evolve.”

“Connecting with people in person”

Having travelled around the country with a group of musicians in support of Black Lives Matter, Phoenix said people came up to them – having been drawn in by a song, dance, or poem – to find out more. Creating opportunities to talk and connect with other people, he insisted, is so important. And it “definitely means being there in person, as opposed to being behind a keyboard or reading a comment” because:

Communication is 2% the words we use, which is basically online communication, and 98% is our tone of voice, our body language, everything else, and that is all taken out when we’re speaking online, unless we’re watching a video, and even then… our attention spans are so short. There’s so many people talking at us. It’s just not comparable with connecting with people in person.

Online engagement does matter, though. Because it creates connections with people who “don’t necessarily go out, don’t take part in community”, or are suffering from the “massive loneliness crisis”. And on that topic, he pointed out the dangers of short posts on social media (see Watching short form content damages the brain five times worse than alcohol). He suggested that it’s normal for kids to have short attention spans because “everything is still new and interesting and fascinating”, but that when adulthood starts to hit there’s more space to encourage deep-dives into specific topics. At the same time, he noted that schools in Britain seem to have dulled the spark of curiosity for too many kids.

“The education system has really gone down the drain,” he said, adding:

I grew up between here and Africa, and one of the… I left just after I did my GCSEs and spent a year in Africa. And even then, in 2005-6, it struck me, because I came from an environment where everyone was like, ugh, school, I don’t want to go, I don’t want to do this, I’m not interested in learning, to a place where everyone’s like: ‘all I want to do is go to school. I wish I could go to school and learn.’ … We’ve made… expanding our minds, for so many people, an unattractive thing.

He wants us to nurture that natural human interest in learning – not just about the world, but about each other:

I will listen to anyone, even the people that I disagree with, … to understand where you’re coming from, at least.

And he stressed that we can almost always find some common ground, even if “sometimes it takes time to discover that”. So much polarisation, he asserted, comes from the fact that many people have never had meaningful interactions with people who have different experiences, backgrounds, or opinions. On top of that, the:

atmosphere of fear that the media has created, and of alienation, leads people to jump to these wild assumptions, and not have the curiosity to look into it

He hopes to challenge that with his podcast.

Phoenix & Friends Podcast: take the time to listen

Phoenix argued that:

In so many ways, I think things like long-form YouTube videos or podcasts have replaced the radio for a generation

When he’s cleaning or doing other tasks around the house, he said:

I will actively look for a video that’s as long as possible

So he’s been creating something that can be positive for others with similar habits.

Despite delving into some “really massive, huge, difficult topics… from genocide and ecocide to mental health difficulties”, he always seeks to leave “something that people can take away that is also positive or constructive”. With that in mind, he specifically asks podcast guests to only discuss challenges they’ve faced if they also have a:

form of solution or thing that people have used to overcome that, or deal with that along the way if they can’t overcome it

One problem we discussed was rising fascism. And as Phoenix stressed, fascists are using the longstanding “fear playbook of ‘identify something different that isn’t present, but you can make it a looming threat, and then scare everyone about it”. But he strongly believes “the only way to resolve that is through conversation”.

We could hardly agree more with Phoenix. Because we absolutely need to be doom-scrolling less and interacting with others more. And when we can’t do that, we can allow inspiring and positive podcasts like Phoenix & Friends to nurture our mind and soul.

Featured image via the Canary