Feeling crushed by the avalanche of awful news emanating from your radio, TV or phone? You’re not alone. Research has shown that exposure to bad news has a profound effect on our mental health. But there is an alternative. Airzen Radio, set up in France in 2021, is a radio station whose output is 100% positive. Christophe Duhamel is its director of digital operations.
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Killian Flagey
impact.info director
Published on 10 September 2026
Photo credit — Head of Digital Operations at AirZen Radio
Transcript Audio in English· AI-generated transcript
0:00 Hello and welcome to the podcast that showcases entrepreneurs who are changing the world for 0:10 the better. Feeling crushed by the avalanche of awful news emanating from your radio, TV 0:16 or phone, you're not alone. Research has shown that exposure to bad news has a profound effect 0:23 on our mental health. But there is an alternative. Airzen Radio, set up in France in 2021, 0:30 is a radio station whose output is 100% positive. Christophe Duhamel is its Director of Digital 0:37 Operations. I'm Christophe Duhamel. I'm a former computer engineer, but I moved to the dark side 0:45 quite quickly because I was more interested in understanding what people have in their minds, 0:50 which is always some kind of excitement for me. It's a huge passion for me to understand what 0:55 people think and what people want. So presumably this passion is what led you to be one of the 1:01 founders of Airzen Radio. Please could you tell me what it does, what its mission is? 1:06 Actually, I was not one of the founders. I just arrived after they founded the company, but I 1:11 arrived as an expert in all digital things. The three founders were people with a huge experience 1:19 in radio and in marketing. So they decided to create a project which was pretty much original, 1:26 which was the first positive radio, which means when you listen to the radio today, what you got 1:32 is you got lots of quite dark things, dark information, and you feel drained by all these 1:40 negativities. So they wanted to do something more positive and they wanted to bring some kind of 1:47 fresh air to people. That's what they tried to do by creating Airzen Radio. 1:53 So essentially it filled a gap that nobody else was really filling. 1:57 Exactly. 1:59 So can you explain about its social impact? Because generally we're talking here about 2:05 companies and organizations that are improving the society in some way. 2:09 The point is that there have been quite a lot of studies right now about the impact of what we hear 2:15 on the radio, what we watch on the TV. Now many studies do tell us that when you listen to 2:21 something negative, it's not very good for your health. It's pretty bad for your health and you 2:26 get some anxiety. It can improve some depression or some mental health conditions. 2:35 So what we're trying to do with Airzen Radio is trying to improve the mental health of people who 2:43 listen to us. Which means when you're tired of listening to negative things, you're going to 2:48 listen to Airzen Radio and then you get that breath of fresh air and you get something which 2:54 makes you a little bit happier, a little bit better than before. And that's this kind of 3:01 mental health bubble, positive bubble, that we want to create for people. And a very positive 3:06 point is the feedback we got from many, many listeners who tell us that we have somehow 3:12 changed their lives by allowing them to get this parenthesis, this bubble of fresh air in their days. 3:18 And that's why when people start listening to us, they usually keep on listening for a long time 3:24 because they keep coming back because they like it. 3:27 How many listeners do you have and how do they access Airzen? 3:32 That's a pretty complicated question because the radio was created when the DAB Plus was created 3:38 in France, which means we got the last touch of digital broadcasting. So we got people listening 3:43 to us through DAB Plus. We got people listening to us through web radio, through Spotify, through 3:51 Radioing, which is in the cars. So we got lots and lots of different sources for listening to us, 3:57 even people with Alexa or Google Home, you know. So we got hundreds of thousands of listeners, but 4:03 today it's impossible to tell precisely how many different people listen to us. But 4:08 we got several hundreds of thousands, which is not too bad. 4:11 You've told me that the content is positive. Can you go into any more detail about the type 4:16 of content or the type of subjects that you favour? 4:19 We're still doing some research on trying new stuff because, you know, the perception of something 4:24 being positive is quite different according to the people who listen. But what we try to do is 4:30 always try to see the glass half full, which means we can talk about things which could be 4:37 negative, but we try to always see them from the positive angle. If we're talking about a problem, 4:43 we are bringing the solution. We always try to think positively, but we also talk about 4:48 nice stories. For example, somebody who ran for three months for a cause or somebody who 4:55 discovered a treasure in their garden. We try to find positivity either in big stories of normal 5:03 people or in small stories from everyday. For example, a small shop who's offering some things 5:10 to people who don't have the money. We're trying to find examples of things that work well. Positive 5:17 stories to show people that, of course, there are bad things happening, but there are many more 5:23 positive things that happen and they can happen nearby your place or everywhere in the country, 5:29 everywhere in the world. So we're trying to find those so that we give people hope and give them a 5:36 better, more positive vision of the world they live in. 5:39 It's not very easy at the moment with what's going on internationally, 5:44 with all the wars and conflicts that we seem to have popping up. 5:47 How do you show them anything positive around that? 5:51 It's always a big debate. Do we talk about all those big problems happening everywhere in the world? 5:57 Or do we keep talking about small things, closer things, things that work? We're trying to find the 6:04 right balance between all that because we cannot avoid talking about what's happening in the world. 6:08 It's not possible because otherwise we will be completely disconnected from the world and it's 6:12 not... I'm not sure that's what people want, but people want to have hope, hope for them, hope for 6:18 their children and they want to have at least a positive vision. Of course there are wars, there 6:24 are a shortage of food in some places, there are weather problems, but there are possible potential 6:31 solutions and there are people implementing those solutions already in some places. So that's what 6:37 we're trying to put forward in order to not to have depressed and desperate people. 6:43 Tell me, how are you funded? Where does your funding come from? 6:48 The funding comes mainly from the founders, which means it was a personal investment from them. 6:53 They created and sold quite a lot of companies, media companies, and most of the funding comes 6:59 from simply from themselves. For them it was important to put their money in a very meaningful 7:04 project. That's why they created this project and that's why they're very, very invested every day, 7:11 even at weekends in that project. We often have discussions about that because they really wanted 7:19 to work and we all in the team wanted to work because we all think that it's very, very important 7:24 today to have this positive approach to life and to the world and to the society because giving 7:31 people a positive vision of things helps people not being afraid of talking to other people. And 7:36 we think that positive perception is what will give people a positive vision and this positive 7:42 vision pushes people to create links with other people. And we do think that it's this link 7:48 between people, this sense of community, this sense of being a society, which will be a big 7:53 part of the solution, which means many problems won't be problems anymore if we find a solution 7:58 together. So that's why they're so much invested in this project. 8:03 What are your plans for the future with Airzone? Where are you heading next? 8:07 The idea is to continue growing, which means, you know, I was talking about the 8:12 facility of hearing listeners. Most of the people who discover us on radio keep on listening to us, 8:19 so that means that the recipe is good. But what we have to work on is awareness, which means 8:26 we have to make more and more people aware that not only there is a positive radio, but that 8:32 listening to positive information, positive things is useful for them, is useful for their 8:37 own mental health, and is useful for society in a global approach. So we're trying to develop this 8:44 awareness through the web, because the web today is a huge tool for notoriety, for awareness on 8:51 social networks, even though social networks are pretty much difficult to use today, because if you 8:57 don't put a lot of cash in social networks, it's very difficult to be visible today, and it's more 9:03 and more difficult. But word of mouth is helping us a lot, because we think that the best way to 9:09 be promoted is through word of mouth, and people like us, and people want to recommend us to their 9:16 friends, to their family, and we're trying to leverage that, because it's our positiveness, 9:22 it's a strength that we want to leverage a lot, because that's our main asset. 9:32 Casting your mind back to when you were, say, 16, when you were a teenager, 9:36 did you imagine that you'd be doing something like this, or did you have different dreams 9:40 altogether? I didn't know at all what I wanted to do, but I did love to write, I did love to 9:50 communicate, so I was very early, I did some writing, I also was involved a lot into a theater 9:57 place, writing theater place, so when working in medias, it's something that was quite attractive 10:04 for me. So 26 years ago, we created the main food website in France, which is Marmiton, which 10:12 was a good success, because today it has 20 million unique users in France every month, 10:17 but it was about service, it was giving people access to recipes, and helping people understand 10:23 that it was easy to cook, and I really wanted to help people have a better life, and as a radio is 10:29 exactly the same approach, I like to do useful things for people, so somehow it was part of my 10:36 dream. That was Impact.info, doing things differently. Embed this interview on your site
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