The Small Bow Podcast

Please Note: This video discusses heavy themes, including suicide and mental health struggles. If you are experiencing distress, please utilize the free, confidential resources below.

From a rehab that burned down to a fall from a second story window, Nick Thune has escaped death many times. He’s found a way to tell his story that makes space for the terror he felt in the depths of addiction and the compassion he now feels for the person he used to be. Nick spins a good yarn, and there’s a lot of those in this episode— featuring broken limbs, petting babies, gang leaders, and much more. Plus, we talk about how to raise a child who lives without fear (in a good way).

Rainn Wilson is best-known for his role as Dwight Schrute on The Office and his Soul Boom Podcast. He’s a serious, thoughtful guy who had the strange experience of becoming an international celebrity almost overnight. We talk about how the experience of sudden fame dovetailed with his addiction and how AA and a return to his Bahai faith have helped him to find his footing again. Plus, we discuss his recent OCD diagnosis, why he’s grateful for the worst box office bomb of his career and the strangest gift he’s received from a fan.

Please Note: This episode discusses heavy themes, including suicide and mental health struggles. If you are experiencing distress, please utilize the free, confidential resources below.

Have you ever jumped when the phone rings? Yassir Lester does it every time. The writer and comedian (Girls, Black Monday, The Carmichael Show) stops by for a conversation about anxiety, success, growing up poor and how to deal with the fear of surprise. Plus, we talk about why quitting drinking made him a better comedian and the fuzzy line between being courageous and being reckless. I could talk to Yassir for hours, this is a fun one.

Carey O’Donnell celebrated 10 years of continuous sobriety on the same day Perez Hilton bloodied himself on TikTok Live. Perfect time to come on this show and talk about anniversaries, celebrities and the gnarlier side of addiction. Carey and I both experienced our darkest moments in New York and this episode is full of those memories: 42 minute train delays, yelling your opinion at book club and hoping no one notices, the shame of taking folded laundry back to the laundromat… Plus, hamburger costumes, peeing in elevators and spending hours at the DSW in Union Square. There’s a lot of gross stuff in this episode and also a lot of laughter.

This is an episode about parenting and recovery. How do I talk to my kids about my own story? How do I protect them from repeating my mistakes? How do I give them the feeling of safety that I didn’t have when I was young? What do I do if I recognize patterns of behavior in them, that I’ve tried to fix in myself? Erin Khar is a writer and advocate. She’s the author of the memoir Strung Out and the advice column Ask Erin. She’s thought a lot about these questions and I think she’s got a lot of smart things to say. We talk about the problem with “tough love,” the difficulty of not projecting onto your kids and how to model communication, not perfection. Oh, and accidentally becoming addicted to baseball cards.

Sometimes I think I either want to join a cult or start a cult. Tommy Rosen definitely has cult leader charisma, but if you peel back that air of authority, you realize he’s just a guy that’s been seriously kicked around by life and arrived at a place where he wants to help as many people as possible. Tommy is the founder of Recovery 2.0, an organization that hosts Yoga-informed Recovery workshops and retreats all over the world. He’s helped me in private conversation and this episode is really practical — we talk about meditation techniques, prayers that work, what to do when your mom moves in with you and how to ease your 1 AM craving for Captain Crunch. Recovery 2.0 has programming every day during Recovery Month (which is September in case you didn’t know.) Check out their website for more info: https://r20.com/.

This week, Kathryn Jezer-Morton joins the show to talk about emotional sobriety and the internet. Kathryn writes about digital culture and parenting for many publications, including her fantastic biweekly column for The Cut called “Brooding.” Her new book on social media is called The Story of Your Life. Emotional sobriety is this term that gets used to describe how we manage and regulate difficult emotions without our substance-of-choice. For me, the internet (and social media in particular) challenges my emotional sobriety on a regular basis. Luckily, I’ve got Kathryn to help me manage the temptations and pitfalls of being alive, online. Join us as we talk portals, friction-maxxing and meditation and try our best to go viral, without losing our way.

00:00:00 Self-promotion realities and writing for dad
00:02:18 Defining emotional sobriety in the digital age
00:04:03 Storytelling vs. social media in the story of your life
00:05:30 Navigating self-promotion without getting lost
00:10:15 Writing about social media vs. storytelling
00:11:39 How photo sharing changed in the carousel era
00:31:26 Entering uncomfortable rooms in recovery and writing
00:35:55 Checking launch day book sales in the publisher portal
00:37:00 Unlearning academic training and handling critiques
00:38:53 Zooming in on personal history and commune childhoods
00:50:30 The brand trap of crafting a public persona
00:57:57 Writing without a master plan
#KathrynJezerMorton #TheStoryOfYourLife #EmotionalSobriety #BroodingColumn #DigitalDetox #SocialMediaCulture #ScreenTimeBoundaries #ActiveGrieving #ParentingInTheDigitalAge #AuthorInterview #Sociology #Mindfulness

Topics:
Emotional sobriety in the digital age
Managing your ego's inner bureaucrat
The sickness of author self-promotion
Why social media is like a drug
Book launch reality and sales portals
How grief enhances sensory noticing
Escaping the New York media bubble
Parenting rules for phone meditation
Rejecting the redemption narrative
Writing memoirs vs academic sociology
New episodes release every Wednesday.

Anna Holmes could walk into any newsroom and immediately run the show. She created and ran Jezebel while I was at Gawker and her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker and The New York Times, where she formerly wrote the weekly “Work Friend” column for the Sunday Business Section. But as we discuss in this interview, she still struggles with feelings of inadequacy. In this conversation, we discuss Anna’s foray into dating apps and the ways that later-in-life sexual exploration helped her grieve both the death of her ex-husband and the loss of her mother, including the bizarre moment her Apple Watch recorded the moment of her mother’s death. Plus, rage bacon, corpse makeup and learning lessons from other peoples’ kids. Anna’s new book The Power of No is out September 15.

New episodes release every Wednesday.