Living The Principles Podcast

Living The Principles Podcast is built on one habit: take a principle of Kwanzaa and test it against something real. Latricia Smith and Phyllis G. Williams host, greeting listeners as Difference Makers and signing off with a charge to expand minds and impact communities. The range is wide. Grief, fitness, a television reboot, Juneteenth and racial violence in North Carolina history all sit side by side. In 'Never Say Goodbye', faith and collective work and responsibility are the stated lenses, and the second is approached through grief. One host recalls losing a sister a week before going back to school, facing a first birthday without her, and then losing a sister-in-love months later. That year, the host says, is mostly a cloud. The host credits having a community, and the principle stops being abstract. 'All About Fitness' ties self-determination and purpose to guests Dwayne Webb, a soon-to-be-retired U.S. Army Major, and Christy Thornton. Their total fitness model reaches past exercise into webinars, workshops and fit talks, where a credentialed speaker gets fifteen minutes at the workout; one was a local bank employee explaining LLCs and incorporation. Ms. Opal Lee, the oldest living board member of the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation, talks about her campaign and petition to make Juneteenth a national holiday. Her point runs past a single date: people taught to hate can be taught to love, and each person should become a committee of one. She also recalls meeting President Obama more than once. Christopher Everett, introduced as a creative director, producer, archivist and curator, says he made his film less as a history lesson than as a way to learn how white supremacy evolves and to spot its signs today. The conversation reaches North Carolina's official 2006 state report on 1898. Culture gets read the same way. Comparing Fresh Prince with the 2022 Bel Air, the hosts offer two explanations for the new show's heavier drama: shorter attention spans and the pressure to sell, and the real-life issues of the present that the series puts on screen. An episode reviewing the documentary Uncle Tom begins with definitions, arguing that the character in the original story was a hero, not a sellout. The pace is measured, and the conversation is allowed to wander when the wandering says something about family, faith or purpose. Conversations land on a soul snack, a proverb most often handed to Latricia: 'grapes are eaten one by one', or 'life can be understood backwards, but we live it forward'.