All The Feelings • Still Adulting

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.
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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!
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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!
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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