Let’s Talk About Love Stories from Everywhere

Stories from Everywhere is a weekly, unscripted journey into the lives, ideas, and adventures of people from all walks of life. Hosted by award-winning author and journalist Jill L. Ferguson, each episode features candid, heart-centered conversations with guests from around the globe—artists, authors, entrepreneurs, students, elders, innovators, and dreamers—sharing the stories that shaped them. Produced by Let’s Talk About Love SPC, the show celebrates the universal threads that connect us, while honoring the unique voices that make our world endlessly fascinating. Come for the stories, stay for the connection.

Let’s Talk About Love Stories from Everywhere is a society podcast hosted by Let’s Talk About Love SPC, with 96 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Let’s Talk About Love SPC hosts Let’s Talk About Love Stories from Everywhere, a society show with 96 episodes published.

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  Episode #73

  Ep. 73: When a Place Changes You: Michael Hassett & Chiara Colette on Friendship, Service, and the People of Tonga

  Sep 28, 202650 min

  What happens when a place you never expected to call home changes the direction of your life? For Michael Hassett and Chiara Colette, that place was Tonga. Michael and Chiara arrived in the South Pacific as Peace Corps volunteers, neither having originally planned on Tonga as their destination. What they found was a culture rooted in community, generosity, and a deeply communal understanding of what it means to care for one another. Years later, when a devastating cyclone struck the islands and they struggled to find an effective way to help the communities they had come to love, they decided to create one. In Episode 73 of Stories from Everywhere, Jill L. Ferguson talks with Michael and Chiara about the remarkable story behind Friends of Tonga, the nonprofit they helped build from a conversation among former Peace Corps volunteers into an organization supporting disaster relief, education, literacy, environmental stewardship, and climate resilience throughout Tonga. They share what it was really like to serve in Tonga—from language barriers and illness to vegetarian survival on an island where root vegetables and meat dominated the menu—and how those experiences shaped their understanding of service. But this is also a conversation about a very different model of helping. Friends of Tonga operates on a simple principle: communities lead; they support. Rather than arriving with assumptions about what people need, the organization listens to Tongan communities and helps provide the resources to make locally driven solutions possible. That philosophy has guided everything from scholarships and literacy programs to rebuilding a cyclone- and earthquake-resistant kindergarten and responding to the devastating volcanic eruption and tsunami that struck Tonga. In the aftermath of that disaster, Friends of Tonga raised $300,000 in just two months and helped fund critical efforts including food distribution, water-tank cleaning, and other emergency needs. Today, the organization is receiving international recognition as a finalist for a .ORG Impact Award in Environmental Stewardship—one of just 35 organizations selected from thousands of submissions around the world. Michael and Chiara also talk about an issue that extends far beyond Tonga: what climate change and rising seas mean for Pacific Island nations whose people face the possibility of eventually losing not simply property, but their homeland. And perhaps most inspiring of all, Friends of Tonga remains an all-volunteer organization. Its board members have careers, families, and responsibilities scattered across multiple countries and time zones. They simply decided that caring about something wasn't enough; they wanted to do something about it. It's a conversation about service, resilience, community, climate, friendship, and what can happen when a small group of people decides that a problem is worth showing up for. Sometimes changing the world doesn't begin with a grand plan. Sometimes it begins because somewhere thousands of miles away became a place and a people you couldn't stop caring about.

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  Let’s Talk About Love Stories from Everywhere

  When a Place Changes You: Michael Hassett & Chiara Colette on Friendship, Service, and Tonga

  Sep 24, 202650 min

  What happens when a place you never expected to call home changes the direction of your life? For Michael Hassett and Chiara Colette, that place was Tonga. Michael and Chiara arrived in the South Pacific as Peace Corps volunteers, neither having originally planned on Tonga as their destination. What they found was a culture rooted in community, generosity, and a deeply communal understanding of what it means to care for one another. Years later, when a devastating cyclone struck the islands and they struggled to find an effective way to help the communities they had come to love, they decided to create one. In Episode 73 of Stories from Everywhere, Jill L. Ferguson talks with Michael and Chiara about the remarkable story behind Friends of Tonga, the nonprofit they helped build from a conversation among former Peace Corps volunteers into an organization supporting disaster relief, education, literacy, environmental stewardship, and climate resilience throughout Tonga. They share what it was really like to serve in Tonga—from language barriers and illness to vegetarian survival on an island where root vegetables and meat dominated the menu—and how those experiences shaped their understanding of service. But this is also a conversation about a very different model of helping. Friends of Tonga operates on a simple principle: communities lead; they support. Rather than arriving with assumptions about what people need, the organization listens to Tongan communities and helps provide the resources to make locally driven solutions possible. That philosophy has guided everything from scholarships and literacy programs to rebuilding a cyclone- and earthquake-resistant kindergarten and responding to the devastating volcanic eruption and tsunami that struck Tonga. In the aftermath of that disaster, Friends of Tonga raised $300,000 in just two months and helped fund critical efforts including food distribution, water-tank cleaning, and other emergency needs. Today, the organization is receiving international recognition as a finalist for a .ORG Impact Award in Environmental Stewardship—one of just 35 organizations selected from thousands of submissions around the world. Michael and Chiara also talk about an issue that extends far beyond Tonga: what climate change and rising seas mean for Pacific Island nations whose people face the possibility of eventually losing not simply property, but their homeland. And perhaps most inspiring of all, Friends of Tonga remains an all-volunteer organization. Its board members have careers, families, and responsibilities scattered across multiple countries and time zones. They simply decided that caring about something wasn't enough; they wanted to do something about it. It's a conversation about service, resilience, community, climate, friendship, and what can happen when a small group of people decides that a problem is worth showing up for. Sometimes changing the world doesn't begin with a grand plan. Sometimes it begins because somewhere thousands of miles away became a place and a people you couldn't stop caring about.

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  Let’s Talk About Love Stories from Everywhere

  Episode 72: One Last Hit: Addiction, Authenticity, and the Courage to Believe You’re Already Enough

  Sep 22, 202642 min

  ListenShow Notes
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  Episode #72

  Ep. 72: One Last Hit: Addiction, Authenticity, and the Courage to Believe You’re Already Enough

  Sep 21, 202642 min

  What happens when you lose everything you thought made you who you were and discover that maybe none of those things were your identity in the first place? Austin Rampt’s story sounds almost impossible: addiction beginning at a young age, multiple arrests and overdoses, eight trips to rehab, nine years of sobriety followed by relapse, fleeing the United States for Mexico, living among people connected to the Sinaloa Cartel, and eventually finding himself homeless in Mexico City. He returned to the United States having lost nearly everything, but still alive. Today, Austin is an entrepreneur, husband, father of five, recovery advocate, host of the One Last Hit podcast, and author of One Last Hit: The Remarkable True Story of an Addict’s Journey to Find Himself. His memoir chronicles the chaos of addiction and the difficult, imperfect path toward recovery, purpose, and connection. But this conversation on Stories from Everywhere goes beyond the dramatic details of Austin’s past. Austin and Jill talk about what was underneath the addiction in the first place: childhood anxiety and shame, the desire to quiet the noise inside his head, and a deeply rooted belief that love and acceptance had to be earned through achievement. Austin describes the moment in treatment when a therapist challenged that belief with one simple question: What does a baby have to do to deserve love? His answer ultimately forced him to reconsider something he had believed for most of his life—that his worth depended upon what he could accomplish or provide. They also explore relapse without romanticizing recovery. Austin explains why sobriety, for him, isn't simply about abstaining from drugs and alcohol; it requires continued connection, spirituality, honesty, service, and the willingness to keep doing the work even when life appears to be going well. The conversation moves into fatherhood and the lessons Austin has learned while rebuilding relationships with his children. He talks candidly about learning the difference between simply parenting and truly being a father and why being emotionally present may matter more than almost anything else he accomplishes. Austin and Jill also dig into intuition, identity, social media, self-judgment, and the labels we collect throughout our lives. What happens when we compare our internal struggles with everyone else's carefully presented exterior? And what becomes possible when we stop believing we have to achieve something extraordinary before we deserve love? Austin's story may be extreme, but the questions underneath it are universal: Who are you when the things you use to define yourself disappear? Can you learn to trust yourself again after repeatedly betraying your own instincts? And what if your value as a human being was never something you had to earn? This is a raw, surprisingly funny, deeply vulnerable conversation about addiction, fatherhood, faith, authenticity, connection, second chances and finding yourself after almost everything else has been stripped away. Learn more about Austin Rampt, One Last Hit, and the One Last Hit podcast at his official website.

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  Episode #71

  The Cost of Indifference: Irina Petrik on Ukraine, Grief, Music, and the Courage to Keep Caring

  Sep 14, 202644 min

  What happens when the world stops paying attention, but the bombs keep falling? In Episode 71 of Stories from Everywhere, Jill L. Ferguson sits down with Ukrainian American opera singer, educator, and cultural advocate Irina Petrik for a deeply personal conversation about Ukraine, identity, grief, resilience, and what it means to keep caring long after a cause has disappeared from the headlines. Born and raised in Kyiv, Irina immigrated to the United States at 21, but Ukraine remains woven into the foundation of who she is. Since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, she has watched from America as streets filled with childhood memories have been attacked, while friends, colleagues, and family—including her sister—continue living and working amid war. That experience led Irina to ask a haunting question: What is the cost of indifference? Because indifference can look deceptively harmless. We get tired. Our attention moves elsewhere. The hashtags disappear. The flags come down. Life gets busy. But for the people living through war, there is no logging off. Irina has chosen to fight on what she calls the “cultural front lines.” She founded the Ukrainian Classical Voice Project to preserve, restore, perform, and introduce audiences to Ukraine's centuries-old vocal tradition, music that has too often been suppressed, censored, altered, or absorbed into Russian cultural narratives. Today, the organization provides Ukrainian diction coaching, IPA transcription resources, hard-to-find scores, workshops, concerts, and educational programs designed to bring underrepresented Ukrainian composers to singers and audiences around the world. Irina also shares another story of profound loss: the death of her husband and fellow opera singer, Kevin Kees. After an initial misdiagnosis, Kevin was found to have stage-four prostate cancer, and the couple had only ten months after his diagnosis. Irina speaks movingly about continuing to love someone who is no longer here and the truth that grief is inseparable from having loved deeply. Yet this isn't an episode about despair. It's about what survives. Music survives. Culture survives. Love survives. Memory survives. And people can choose to stand for something even when standing becomes inconvenient. Irina and Jill explore the unconquerable Ukrainian spirit, the extraordinary resilience of artists who continue teaching and performing during wartime, the danger of cultural erasure, the difference between public displays of support and genuine conviction, and why protecting a nation's music can itself become an act of resistance. At its heart, this episode asks something much bigger than what we believe about Ukraine: When the world grows tired of caring, who do we choose to be? Because eventually our values aren't measured by the things we supported when everyone was watching. They're measured by what we were still willing to stand for after everyone else looked away. Learn more about the Ukrainian Classical Voice Project and Irina Petrik's work .

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