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After two seasons of adulting, Pete and Tommy are ready for something new, and they asked the people who keep this show running to help pick it. Members sent in their votes and comments, and this week the hosts read them out loud for the first time.It does not go smoothly. Pete can name two of the three options he's choosing between, and one of the votes comes from a country he can't place on the first try. Tommy, meanwhile, works very hard to avoid committing to anything. A decision gets made anyway, and you'll have to listen to hear it.Want a vote next time? Join the Feeling Friends at allthefeelings.fun, the only club where our shared hobby is not knowing what we're doing. --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. Visit allthefeelings.fum/join to learn more!

Something a little different! This week, here's what we're thinking about doing next season... and we need your vote! Head to allthefeelings.fun and submit your feedback today! --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. Visit allthefeelings.fum/join to learn more!

There was a time, not so long ago, when a Goldfish was a Goldfish. One fish. Cheddar. A simple contract between snack and human. Then, somewhere between then and now, the aisle went insane — and Pete Wright and Tommy Metz III, with fellow bewildered adult and pod snacker Mandy Kaplan, walked straight into it.Want to hear the whole delicious episode? Head over to https://allthefeelings.fun and become a member today. You'll get to subscribe to your very own podcast feed with all the full-length member episodes, trailers, and more! --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. Visit allthefeelings.fum/join to learn more!

Season 11 may be on hiatus, but Pete and Tommy have the audacity to show up anyway — because something happened at Denver International Airport that absolutely cannot wait until fall. Tommy arrived in New York City with everything he needed for a great trip, and then he didn't. The story involves a maintenance worker with a unique communication style, a rubber glove, and a level of IP water resistance certification that turns out to be more relevant to everyday life than one might expect. It's a tale of panic, improvisation, and the humiliation of writing someone's address on the back of a band-aid.Pete, meanwhile, has been quietly assembling a life on the outside of his house while the inside remains a work in progress. There are composite deck planks. There is outdoor furniture. There is a sectional. And somewhere out there, a cabinet renderer is looking at a completely different kitchen. Plus: Pete's been writing at a pace that suggests either something has clicked or something has broken, and either way, there are books coming.Before they let you go, Pete and Tommy have locked in the agenda for at least one of the remaining hiatus check-ins — starting with a blind tasting event that will require both significant financial investment and a willingness to find out what Pikachu tastes like. Everything is fine. Everything is coming up Feeling Friends.Of course, if you're listening to this episode in this public feed, you won't hear most of that. But if you visit allthefeelings.fun, and sign up to become a Feeling Friend, you get the works! --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. Visit allthefeelings.fum/join to learn more!

Season 11 closes with what Pete and Tommy insist is a whimper, which is how you know it is absolutely not a whimper. They handed each other their worst possible topics — trash and recycling for Tommy, seasonal stuff for Pete — and accidentally made an episode about deception, ancient biology, and a rhinoceros named Cacareco who won a 1959 São Paulo city council seat in a landslide.Tommy did, in his own words, "too much research" on recycling, which he now says as a warning. The chasing-arrows symbol is not what you think it is, the plastics industry has known since the eighties that none of this was going to work, and your Starbucks cup is currently booking a one-way flight to Senegal. Pete's seasonal-stuff segment begins with mums — the flower, not your mother — and lands somewhere near the claim that 84 genes in your body are in active dispute with late-stage capitalism about what time of year it is.Thanks for listening to Season 11. We'll be back. --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. Visit allthefeelings.fum/join to learn more!

Tommy opens with a conversation that didn't start as a therapy pitch — and became exactly that. Someone in his life has been white-knuckling a worsening anxiety spiral, armed with nothing but the very adult conviction that they should probably just handle it. Sound familiar? Tommy walks through what he told them: the case for therapy, the case for medication, and the analogy that reframes everything about why you take something "to feel better." He also surfaces the most important and least-discussed reason people avoid getting help — and it has nothing to do with stigma.Pete, meanwhile, has a confession. He is possibly inappropriately enthusiastic about surgery. Not in a Cronenberg way. In the way of a man who went to sleep with a gallbladder and woke up without one and has been genuinely awed about it ever since. This episode is his love letter to the laparoscopic revolution — six hundred thousand procedures a year, four tiny holes, and the medical equivalent of a hey-while-you're-in-there moment that changed the entire field within five years. He also has some thoughts on telesurgery, ultrasound beams that dissolve kidney stones without touching you, and what it says about adult trust that we will hand ourselves to strangers with robot arms and simply say: do your worst.Together, these segments make an argument the show has been circling all season: that adulthood is mostly accepting help you didn't know you needed, from systems you don't entirely understand, built by people who failed spectacularly for centuries before they got it right. Whether you're staring down a panic attack or a surgical consent form, the move is the same — stop trying to fix it with dirt, and let someone who practiced on a cadaver take a look.Pete also has feelings about pig kidneys. Big feelings. Feeling Friends feelings. --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. Visit allthefeelings.fum/join to learn more!

If you have ever stood in a store paralyzed over whether the candle is enough, whether the wine communicates something terrible about how little you care, whether showing up without something is worse than showing up with the wrong thing: there is a name for that. Tommy found it. Dr. Melissa Colt calls it trauma-based giving, which is the clinical way of saying you are not choosing a gift so much as you are paying a ransom.Pete's dentist, when Pete was a kid, gave him more metal fillings than any child with freshly grown adult teeth could possibly need. Every visit, something new to fill. It was, as Pete now recognizes, a textbook case of dental overtreatment. He responded the way anyone would: he avoided dentists entirely for the next seventeen years. --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. Visit allthefeelings.fum/join to learn more!

Pete was a true believer. ICQ. AIM. Friendster. MySpace. A Twitter ID below four thousand. He didn't just use the early social web — he helped build it, one weird forum and one enthusiastic post at a time. And then, somewhere between the algorithmic timeline and the fourteenth terms-of-service update, something got taken. Cory Doctorow has a word for what happened. Pete has feelings about it. This is that conversation.The thing about pet influencers is that they shouldn't work. The $24 billion pet influencer industry — a phrase that should not exist — is built entirely on content created by creatures who cannot consent, cannot read the comments, and are legally classified as property in most jurisdictions. And yet. Science has thoughts on why this is, and Pete has thoughts on what it says about everything we built on the internet and watched get taken apart. The dog, it turns out, never updated the terms of service.Tommy is here to make the affirmative case: pets are genuinely, measurably, peer-reviewedly good for you. He also has an origin story for his dog Foster that involves July 4th, a rescue organization, three rules he broke immediately, and what the scientific community refers to as a "foster failure." Pete's dog Gambit has a headcanon that is both extremely funny and, per Pete, incredibly derogatory. Both dogs are excellent. --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. Visit allthefeelings.fum/join to learn more!

Here is something that should make you briefly furious: the reason so many adults stop trying new things — stop picking up instruments and languages and crafts, stop putting themselves in positions of gorgeous, humbling incompetence — is not laziness, and it is not age. It is a scientific consensus that was overturned decades ago and somehow never sent you notice.Pete brings some brain stuff. Tommy brings some hobbies. And together they make a case that two of the most underrated things an adult can do are: willingly be terrible at something new, and stop apologizing for what you do in your free time.Pete's side will change the way you talk to yourself about your own brain. Tommy's side will make you want to immediately go do something completely unnecessary and slightly obsessive. The Feeling Friends segment involves lemon juice, a Polaroid camera, and the birth of an entire field of psychology.Press play. You've got time. --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. Visit allthefeelings.fum/join to learn more!

At some point in your adult life — somewhere between your first real prescription and the moment you quietly acquired a weekly pill organizer — you became a person with opinions about pharmacies. Strong ones. Opinions forged in the specific purgatory of an insurance pre-authorization, a fax machine that exists for reasons no one can explain, and a pharmacist who is simultaneously the most important person in your life and the person you are least willing to actually speak to. Pete is currently living inside this system, and he has questions.This week, Pete digs into why so many people with chronic conditions don't take the medications they've been prescribed — and the answer involves your body actively deceiving you, the emotional weight of swallowing a pill that means admitting something is wrong, and a healthcare system that was never actually designed with you in mind. Tommy, meanwhile, takes the other side of the problem: what happens when medicine overcorrects, when the pills start piling up, and when someone finally asks whether you actually need all of them. He arrives at this topic via some formative pharmaceutical history that spans elementary school, a diagnosis at thirty that his dermatologist called "the nuclear option," and a period of his life during which he was, technically, an international drug smuggler.Two segments. One topic. A combined lifetime of pharmaceutical anxiety that might, finally, make you feel a little less alone about yours. --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. Visit allthefeelings.fum/join to learn more!

Nobody told you that your job title was quietly becoming your personality. Or that the moment you started thinking about leaving, you weren't just weighing pros and cons — you were grieving.This week, Pete and Tommy tackle the twin anxieties of work-life balance and quitting your job: two topics that sound like HR seminar titles but turn out to be about identity, mortality, and the specific pain of realizing you've been earning SMILES program letters instead of a raise.Tommy revisits his brief, glorious, and deeply instructive tenure at MOOVies — a cow-themed children's video store that pivoted to softcore pornography and never updated the signage — as a case study in what happens when you try to reclaim your life by taking a step sideways into something worse. Pete unpacks what psychologists James Marcia and Erik Erikson called "identity foreclosure": the unsettling discovery that leaving a job means evicting a self you didn't realize you'd moved in. And yes, there are five types of quitting. You already know which one you are.Plus: the Great Resignation by the numbers, a taxonomy of modern exits from the quiet fade to the loyalty trap, and the story of JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater — a man who grabbed two beers and became, briefly, America's most relatable employee. --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. Visit allthefeelings.fum/join to learn more!

Here's something nobody puts in the adulting manual: lending money to a friend and writing them a thank you note are the same problem wearing different pants. Both require something real from you. Both get catastrophically weird the longer you wait. And both have been quietly torching relationships since before your grandparents were born. Tommy has a story about a cousin, a con as old as the 19th century, and the one rule that makes all of this survivable. It's simpler than you'd think, and more expensive.Pete, meanwhile, owns a box of thank you note cards that have never been opened. This is not a character flaw. It is, it turns out, a documented psychological phenomenon — which means enough people do this that researchers felt compelled to study it. The Victorians, bless them, made everything worse. They always do. The good news: the rules have genuinely evolved, and there is a rubric. The bad news: you've probably been getting at least one of these wrong for decades, and a myth you've been confidently repeating has almost certainly damaged a relationship you care about. Pete and Tommy work through all of it — including a vibe-coded quiz, the etymology of the word "thank," and a kitchen renovation that ends somewhere neither of them expected. --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. Visit allthefeelings.fum/join to learn more!

Here's something nobody tells you about adulthood: at some point, you will be expected to both host people in your home and maintain meaningful friendships with those people over decades, with no training, no manual, and no one checking in to see how it's going. This is, it turns out, a lot to ask. Pete and Tommy are asking it anyway.This week the guys dig into the deeply relatable anxiety of being a good house guest and a good host — the unwritten rules, the creature comfort confessions, and the one historical cautionary tale about a famous author whose name you absolutely know that will make you feel significantly better about your own guest behavior. You're welcome.From there, the conversation turns to friendship itself — specifically, why maintaining it feels so much harder than it used to, what the research actually says about why that is, and what embarrassingly simple things turn out to make the biggest difference. Spoiler: it's not a grand gesture. It never is.Want more? Check out The Friendship Issue: We Just Met. I Miss You Already. from Season 10, and The Regrets Issue: Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Pizza for when the guilt spiral hits. --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. Visit allthefeelings.fum/join to learn more!

Pete has replaced three toilets, ripped out three sinks, and installed a deadbolt — and he still approaches every new project like a man who has never held a wrench. This is the competence paradox at its most domestic, and it lives underneath your bathroom floor in something called a wax ring that you absolutely did not know existed until right now.Then Tommy takes Pete on a world tour of tipping culture — from Japan (embarrassing) to Egypt (hold out your hand) to Iran (bring jeans) — before landing on the one that hits closest to home: why is the airport kiosk asking how much you appreciate it? The history is darker than you'd expect. The math hack Tommy's dad taught him is genuinely useful.Nobody walks away with answers. Somebody walks away with five podcast dollars. It's a good episode.Next week: maintaining friendships in middle age, and the surprisingly fraught question of how to be a good guest — or a good host.Here are a few related episodes!The Money Issue: Magically Adjusted Gross Incompetence The Season 10 deep dive into homeownership, financial dread, and the myth that being an adult means knowing what you're doing. Spoiler: it does not.Guilty Giving: A Tale of Charity Pete and Tommy on the anxiety of giving — when to do it, how much, and why the whole thing somehow ends up feeling like your fault. Sound familiar? --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. Visit allthefeelings.fum/join to learn more!

There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from having never, not once, understood how a car works. Tommy Metz III has that confidence in spades. In this episode, he reveals that his first car — a used Jeep Cherokee he lovingly named "Peace" (short for "piece of," well, you can fill in the rest) — featured a steering wheel so structurally compromised that he'd been casually jamming it back into the dashboard for months, under the assumption that this was simply how cars sometimes worked.It was not.The steering wheel eventually came off entirely at a stoplight. Which truly sets the tone for this week’s episode about two adults who have been winging the maintenance of their lives with varying degrees of success.From there, the episode splits into dual adulting topics: car maintenance and laundry — two pillars of what Pete calls "maintenance rituals," the invisible, unglamorous labor of keeping your life from quietly falling apart. Tommy confesses to a lifetime of automotive ignorance and makes a surprisingly persuasive case for dealership loyalty. Pete delivers a laundry crash course, dismantling myths about fabric softener (it's coating your clothes in wax), detergent dosing (the cap is lying to you), and dry cleaning (it's not dry, and please stop smelling it).Competence in adulthood isn't about mastering everything, it's about finding the one or two maintenance rituals you're willing to own and doing them with quiet, slightly irrational pride. For Pete, that's a drawer full of Marie Kondo-folded t-shirts. For Tommy, it's the peace of mind that comes from letting a dealership send him a video before they touch anything. Neither of them knows what a fan belt is. --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. Visit allthefeelings.fum/join to learn more!