No Small Thing

Fall is just around the corner and it brings up a lot of nostalgia for this season where many of us where heading back to school. It seems like a good time to share some memories, talk about the symbolism or metaphor of returning to school or learning, and talk about some life updates regarding your No Small Thing pals!

222: Friendship with Reuven and Pat by No Small Thing Podcast

We're back y'all! This week we discuss an anime that is the headwaters for so many other pop-culture creations we love! Most significantly- Steven Universe! Revolutionary Girl Utena was way ahead of its time when first aired in the mid 90's! Its a fabulously queer surrealist story that invites curiosity and a psychoanalytic engagement. Its dreamy, disturbing, empowering, beautiful, and HILARIOUS. If you already know Utena we hope this is a cathartic conversation for you and if you're new to the show we hope it encourages you to give it a try! you won't regret it!

In our ongoing series on defense mechanisms we have yet to cover SUBLIMATION. Sublimation is one of our more positive defenses where we can avoid certain thoughts and feelings that make us uncomfortable and sublimate them with something more positive or "productive". Of course sublimating can still be used to avoid or displace particular situations that might be needing our attention, but generally its worth considering how it can be worked with in our lives. In this episode Scott and Mace are joined by their smart and funny friends Reuven and Daniel for some informal and quirky ponderings on this niche subject!

Christmas can be one of the strangest seasons of the year because we are supposed to be happy and full of cheer, but often Christmas afternoon is the most depressing day of the year. In this episode we talk with one of our favorite thinkers- Todd McGowan! We use Christmas and desire as a spring board for an hour of curious conversation!

Thinking about poetry and dreams and the way it relates to our mind and the ways we interact with the world can be a extremely effective way to get curious about ourselves and others.

On this episode we invite our friend Katy Richardson to join us for a super playful and insightful conversation about the ways that we think about the free, seemingly nonsensical, paradoxical nature of poetry. Poetry and free association and the ways that words link up and sometimes misfire can help us enter into conversations about meaning and motives.

Katy is a licensed therapist and went to grad school with Mace is a fan of Lacanian psychoanalysis! We hope you have as much fun listening to this conversations as we did having it!

We've been hosting No Small Thing for over 5 years now and we thought it would be helpful to address the challenges we face when it comes to practicing what we preach. Being curious can be one of the most challenging things any of us can do! You'll CERTAINLY be able to relate to the ways that we have felt like sometimes we just don't have capacity for curiosity and that's okay. We definitely want to encourage you all to live a less certain more curious life, but we want to encourage you if you ever feel like its too tall of an order.

This week we take a break from our regularly scheduled program to talk about a BIG thing with our friend Pat Hodges (which ironically is No Small Thing!)- a DYSON SPHERE! It could possibly the biggest conceivable human created thing we could talk about! Intrigued!? Listen into this funny curious informative convo to learn more!

Its that time of the pod cycle where we talk about the enneagram! If you're new to the show welcome to a new type of conversation about the enneagram where we try to explore different teachers, histories, modalities, and practices! In our discoveries we often come to find that previous understandings of the enneagram weren't so solid! For the OG homies! You know the story! We're still figuring it out! We hope that rambly curious conversation with our in house "expert" Daniel Keyes will get your curiosity juices flowing!

Its time to get curious about a potential new hobby! Recently we've been playing a ton of pinball with our friends and we wanted to let you in on the new target of our curiosity. Why is pinball fun? What is the history of pinball? (it was illegal for 30 years!), what are the metaphors of pinball and where can you find your local machine, league, or arcade? We're excited to invite you into this fun new dimension!