No Small Thing

todd mcgowan christmas 2025 - 1_11_26, 3.17 PM by No Small Thing Podcast

So much of our conversations regarding the enneagram, psychoanalysis, and curiosity in general circle around the concept of archetypes, but we've never actually spent an episode focusing on this particular concept! In this episode we have a fun, playful, curious, silly conversation about our emerging understanding of what archetypes ARE and how they impact our minds, relationships, and so much mor...

228: Freud by No Small Thing Podcast

It's no small thing with hoodies. Join us as we wander through all the associations that come about when we sit down to talk about hoodies. Utility, style, color, fit, culture, art, liberation, and just LOVE for the hoodie are all parts of this conversation.

Our second hopefully annual conversation with Professor Todd McGowan about Christmas movies and Psychoanalysis! What a better way to process the comedown of the holidays by thinking about what makes Christmas so fun yet so depressing. We talk about the movie Carol and lesbian/ queer Christmas as well as a host of other rambly curiosities. Todd is one of our favorite guests and conversation partner...

225: 2024 Music Wrap Up! by No Small Thing Podcast

It's been a while since we talked about The Enneagram! We're feeling a little rusty so we partnered up with one of our favorite enneagram druids- Ben Campbell. In this episode, Ben takes us through some super helpful, creative, light, inviting ideas regarding how integrate The Enneagram into your daily life. One big takeaway is that we're not just meant to be sitting an intellectualizing about The...

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....

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 generall...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Narcissism is a hot topic in a lot of circles these days- well at least from our perspective. Its a helpful concept, but also something we may be talking about too flippantly? Or maybe its something we think we understand better than we actually do! The thing is- people are still discovering all sorts of new things about narcissism and trying to figure out what it actually IS happens to be much mo...

Being frustrated is a natural part of life that we often don't seem to have very creative ways of engaging with. Is frustration necessarily bad or necessarily something to be avoided? How can we work with frustration instead of just numbing it quieting it? What is trying to communicate to us and can we even learn to enjoy it a sign of life and passion? Frustration is no small thing and we are here...

Our quest for tools for cultivating curiosity continues! This week we talk about what it would mean to find out new things about ourselves and each other by experimenting with new things as we get older. It sounds like a simple idea, but it seems that too often we narrow our season of experimentation to our teens and early twenties. Might there be more things for us to enjoy or become absorbed in?...

9,6,3 attachment types on the Enneagram! We finally have a conversation with all three of us: Scott, Mace, AND Daniel- together at last! In this episode we talk about the similarities and differences between these types and everything in between PLUS how we experience it as these types!

We love tools and conversations that help us get more curious about ourselves. Multiplicity and The Other Within have been helpful conversations for understanding and welcoming all the different elements that make us US. Daniel has a unique way of talking to these different part selves that they call the INNER COUNciL. Its a bunch of different Daniels that Daniel intentionally makes space for and...

Its time to get curious about fashion on a budget! In this episode we share our emerging living experiment where we buy one outfit per quarter and wear it almost everyday! Also we talk about the color of the year and famous people that were born today....AND we share the music we've been liking lately!

What is the difference between Fantasy and Phantasy? And what roles do they play in our lives? How do our fantasies and our assumptions about the world, ourselves, and the future impact our daily decisions and the ways that we approach our relationships? And how does our unconscious influence our desires and actions! We address this and so much more including our new SEGMENTS where we spin the col...

Join us as we dive into the concept of OVERinterpreting...this may seem like a strange word but it is an invitation towards multiple interpretations allowing for the self to consider what they may be missing by under-interpreting (sticking to minimal narratives). In this episode we also talk about Adam Philips, a psychoanalyst who has been a recent inspiration for the two of us. NST is also starti...