102: Celebrating 5 Years of Making Love

Speaker 1: How to make love. Now, is that from recipe or from scratch?

Speaker 2: This is how to make love. Wow.

Speaker 3: Oh gosh.

Speaker 2: Oh my God. A little to the left and faster. A show that tests the edges of what love is, worthiness, empathy, beauty, sex, positive, the borders. It can cross how we do integrity in all of our relationships, and its hidden costs and shadows.

Speaker 3: In a world where we other people, where we build walls, we just tear down walls,

Speaker 2: Fuck finding it or falling into it. Our future depends on making it.

laura: Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of How to Make Love After a long winter hibernation. This is a place where we do the work of growing bigger love, justice, and courage muscles. Thank you so much for hanging with me over a few months off. When I first shut down for the winter, I was thinking it would be a brief break to catch my breath, but the winter turned out to be a pretty difficult one. In my little unconventional family unit, we had two big difficult deaths and losses. Just a few weeks after that last episode aired as former guest and my personal epic, epic, epic crush. Dr. BJ Miller said on his episode here from a while back, he said, grief is going to have its way with you one way or another. And so it did my friends, and so it did and kind of still is in different ways and twists and turns, but here I am, I reemerging, and I'll be honest, I'm just getting my year started in August and that's just going to have to be okay.
Now, having said all that, I'm back and the podcast is back and today, the 26th of August is actually the fifth year anniversary of the How to Make Love Podcast. It both feels like a really long time ago and also kind of a short while ago that I launched this podcast. I remember having the idea and taking courses and buying the first microphone and choosing the music and learning how to edit and all the things that came along with getting it up and running. I remember the excitement and the nervousness about it and the group of friends on Facebook back when I was on Facebook who gave feedback and voiceovers and listened to the first episodes and helped me get it off the ground. And thank you again to those people. You all are amazing. It was a little bit like falling in love, to be honest.
Nerves, gittiness worry. It's been a really special journey and I wanted to talk a bit about it today and talk about what's to come, but mostly to celebrate and to acknowledge the work that went into it and to acknowledge you all because you've made it what it is. When I first had the idea of this podcast, I didn't aspire to build a big podcast or a big following. I just aspire to have some provocative, stimulating, healing conversations with people I really admire about how to make the shit that we value, namely love, namely just love, fierce, just love. And as I look back on the last five years and sort of take stock with where I'm at now, I'll be honest, not much has really changed. I still want to talk about how to make the things we value rather than simply valuing them. What has shifted a bit since its inception, I guess, is maybe the focus on muscle building.
It's possible that that shift came because yours truly is officially all up in some perimenopausal business and knows that my bone density is going to reduce by literally a third in the next five-ish years. And so I have to lift weights and build muscle mess now. And also I think it's really important in the work of love and justice because here's what I know for sure. Number one, valuing something is not the same as being able to make it. Number two, the things that we value, whether it's love or liberation or joy or ease or decolonization or reciprocity or whatever it is, those things deserve to be made, must be made. In fact, if we want to continue to exist, I literally think our capacity to do that is going to save the world. And three, anything that gets made in the world, the ability to make it requires skill, attention, and application.
And I don't think it's different here with the content that we talk about on this podcast. So I guess that's the evolved thesis in five years. It's not just about valuing something, it's about making something. That's where we began and we need the skills and the capacities and we got to hone the skills and the capacities to be able to make those things. So we're going to talk about what's in store in just a bit. But before we do that, I want to take a bit more stack of where I've been. I am super, super, super proud of this little podcast project and what my friends have helped it become. So here are some factoids. Number one, we have had over 92,000 downloads of episodes, almost a hundred Gs. While that's some small potatoes for big ass podcasts, it's a huge number for an independent podcast.
Number two, we are in the top 25% of podcasts as far as how many folks download in the first week. An episode drops again for a little podunk podcast that talks about love and has a shit ton of profanity that is hot booze, and you all do that, not me. Bam. Number three, this one is wild. Get this. We've had listeners in 29 countries. I have to read this list to you because it just blows my mind. Here are just 10 of the countries, China, Peru, Nigeria, Egypt, Ukraine, Mozambique, Armenia, Belgium, Romania, Singapore, Germany, Switzerland. Now I feel fairly confident that we have a lot of listeners who accidentally find us because they're searching for podcast porn or tips on sexual mojo and find UST by accident. Nevertheless, we have downloads and listens and listeners from 29 countries and that is incredible. More facts and things to be proud of.
We are five years old with some breaks, I will admit, but the average lifespan of an independent podcast is 174 days, six months, and 90% of podcasts created don't make it past three episodes. So I am celebrating five years. Next, we have had amazing guests, guests with over 17 million views of their TED Talks. Those folks have joined us on this podcast, guests with Pulitzer Prizes, guests with extraordinary fucking guts of steel who have told you deeply personal stories from their lives and done it on a public microphone so that we can all learn from their lived experiences. I am celebrating the people who choose to come on this platform and share their stories with us. Some of those folks have been on giant podcasts like on being, and we can do hard things and they still want to come here. Ask my friends. We've done it all free with no ads, with just the community support you all offer with just the organic shares that you all generate by sending it to friends or teams or organizations.
I left Facebook years and years ago. I'm an introvert. I really value my privacy. I am less and less on any kind of social media and don't use social media to push this podcast or the episodes we release. So it is really incredible that without paid ads and without social media, and only with you all listening and wanting to share it with your people, that we have grown and been really, really successful. I am super proud that this content and space is free and that in spite of that, we keep on growing. I'm pretty proud of a lot of what's happened in the last five years, and it's not so much about the stats that I wanted to create, a podcast that I wanted to listen to that supported and challenged me as I tried and tried to be a better lover and a better practitioner of justice and liberation and kindness and courage.
And as I went back to listen to old episodes and preparation for this win, I think that aim has definitely been accomplished. The conversations we've had here, the reflections, the questions we've explored, they have absolutely enhanced my skills and wills and capacities in the past five years to make more love and courage and liberation and to do it more skillfully. And the truth is, I go back to these old episodes a lot and I re-listen to them, and I relearn all the time, even the first few episodes, I listened again in preparation for this and I'm super proud that that content and those conversations have been pretty damn good since day one. I love that I still learn from this podcast. I love that I still learn from five years ago, Laura, or two years ago Laura, or five years ago, guests and one year ago guest.
I come here for refuge, I come here for inspiration. I come here for wisdom and I fucking love that. So many of you do that with me. I get text and messages all the time from folks saying, episode 39 is still kicking my ass, or things have been rough and I'm re-listening to episode so-and-So, and it's really getting me through. I'm super proud of that. So whether you're a new listener or you're an old ass weirdo who's been tuning in for five old years, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. You all drive the success here, not me. And I am so grateful that you've put me in your pocket and you've taken me on your car rides and you've played me for your teams and you've listened with your best friends and also that you've accidentally tried to find podcast porn but stuck around. Anyway, thank you.
I originally wanted to celebrate five years by playing some clips from my favorite episodes or conversations from years past. And then it all quickly too much I couldn't choose from Arie Marie Brown telling me about her magic Fingers to Dr. BJ Miller, sharing some of the most profound wisdom about life and death that I've ever heard to Yolanda Coles Jones breaking into song to express her emotion to Paula Stone Williams sharing about her experience as a trans woman pastor and doing that right beside her son to some of the solo pods that I created for you all that went viral. I love the space, I love the conversations made here, and I love knowing that there are a lot of us using our lives as the training grounds for figuring out how to make more love and justice in this world. It's really fucking cool. So now what?
Well, let's first talk about the future. During the past little while that I've been quiet and that the podcast took a break, I took some time to really consider do I want to keep this thing going? And my answer was yes. Yes, I do. This podcast takes a lot of work and love and time, and it's a body of work that's going to outlive me that I'm really proud of, and that I hope is going to continue to befriend people at various points in their lives over the course of many years, many decades to come. So how to make love is sticking around. I am committed to at least one more year of regular episodes, and each year I'll keep checking in with myself and seeing what's what. But for now, here we go into the future together for another year, I'm going to continue with ad free content release once a month with the same through line conversations that push us to think about making the things we value and developing the skills to do that, the wills to do that, the mindsets to do that, the capacities to live this stuff out loud, to remove the blocks that get in our way.
However, for fun, I'm going to play with interviews this year as surprise bonus drops about once a month. They won't be the monthly episode. There'll be like little pop-up love bombs of other guests in your feed sprinkled amidst your monthly episodes with me. So that's where we're going. But this podcast is about skills and wills doing the work of love on the daily. So naturally, you've got some homework and some invitations. Before we meet again in a month from now, first things first five years, I encourage all of us to take a little time to reflect on the last five years of our lives, what have you survived, endured built, loved, grown in. As I celebrate five years of this podcast, what are you celebrating? Most of us skip over the celebration part, so use me as an excuse to kind of take stock what is worth capturing and celebrating and feeling really proud about.
Take some time to think about what you've learned, what you've tried, where you've been. I really deeply honor the five years ago me and my hope is that you can spend some time honoring the five years ago you and all the bitty use in between. What do you want to capture, honor, review, and celebrate for yourself. Next, whether you've listened for a day or for five years, I want you to update your definition of love. We cannot make something that we haven't defined for ourselves. And you hear every single guest do this at the end of each episode. How do you define love today in this moment of your life? If you're going to spend time making love, what is it? Alright, y'all last and I really want you to make time to do this homework. We are on this journey together. What are the skills, wills and mindsets that you to build and hone this next year in this community and beyond?
How do you want to stretch your love and justice and courage muscles on purpose? I would love to hear your answers. If you want to share, who knows, maybe I can build some episodes to help support you. So you can speak pike me or email me the links or in the show notes. But whether you share with me or not, remember, it's not enough to simply value something like liberation, that's fine. But valuing something won't change the reality of it for you or for anyone else. So if we want to change the world, if we want to change our lives, we have to grow our skills and capacities to make the things we value, and we've got to do that on purpose. So where do you want to grow and how do you want to evolve?

laura: Alright.

laura: All right, boos. That's it my friends. Cheers to five years. Cheers to another year and all that's to come. Thank you so much for being on this journey. I will see you all here next month. Bye for now.