We’re not coming down on either side of the meat debate, but we do have a study that confirms if you’re not eating it, you might want to get on board with the high-protein train. We bring you: Meat and mental health: A meta-analysis of meat consumption, depression, and anxiety.

Tommy brings the soft stuff this week with a discussion of what it means to be vulnerable as a man, and we relive that sweet sweet experience of the first time our dads cried in front of us. … Hi, dads!

Pete brings tales of sorrow and break-up… in our favorite bands. Wait, hear us out: turns out fandom can bring out the same chemical goodies that tie us to our significant others, family, and dear friends. How we handle those break-ups mirrors how we move through the grief of losing the target of our cultural appreciation, too.

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Hey! Guess what, everybody? Following up on a prior week’s episode in which we discovered that drone dog snipers exist at the whims of their human handlers, turns out that airborne drones need no such things as human handlers to do their business. A United Nations report says just that about a March 2020 attack in Libya. Great job, robots… taking another human job.

Tom brings a personal anxiety that, as it turns out, crushes both of us: Networking. The Muse has some tips on getting through the muck and maybe learning to love it. Spoiler, we don’t, yet, but we’re open to trying. Mostly Pete just goes into boss mode and eats business cards.

Our beloved listener submission comes from an email address that reads, “Iworry@mymomlistens.tothis.” That should give you something of an idea of the nature of the story to tell. Wait… as I’m writing this… no, no it won’t. It’s about scars, or oulinophobia, fear of scars, specifically. But it turns out there’s a lot more at work under the surface.

It’s OK everyone, robots are here to support you and care for you and make your life better. Also, robot dogs can shoot you and those dogs are made by a company called SWORD and none of that is a joke except for the part about robots taking care of you. Sorry. There are apparently rules for such a thing.

In other news, a listener writes in to talk about online dating. That isn’t a whole lot easier than the whole gun dog robot. But we’re here to help so Tom does the noble research to clear up the confusion and anxiety that can stem from building online relationships... and all the ghosting that goes with it sometimes, too.

We all hope he does a good job with it because today’s the day for Tom’s performance review and Pete’s up for the job. We just hope he has some good ideas for performance improvement without caring just too much.

First, let’s get this out of the way: Panic attacks are no fun, and dangerous behind the wheel. So, if anything we say to ANYone is particularly triggering in the moment, while we hope you don’t have to turn the show off, we encourage you to do just that and make sure you’re in a safe place to ride it out. Our general rule of thumb: It’s only fun to laugh about it when you’re not actively going through it. We get it, trust us, we get it.

All that said, have you seen the world today? Yeah, it can be easy to feel the overwhelm of division and conflict. That’s today’s listener submission, and if ever there was one that we relate to, it’s this one.

Glass House? We’d like you to meet First Stone!

This gives us the opportunity to introduce judgementalism, which it still a bit of a loose concept we’re adapting to our own purposes. Think of it this way: if social anxiety is the fear of being judged by others, judgmentalism would be the fear of our inability to live without judging others. And in times such as these, when we’re overwhelmed by the grief of division, it’s sure easy to close the door and pretend those whose positions don’t align with ours don’t actually exist. But, if we don’t find a way to engage, how do we find our way to understanding?

Get down, and stay down: Anesthephobia and You

Tommy just had a procedure and got to thinking about anesthesia. So, he dug into a bit of the history of anesthesia and learned some interesting things. Beyond some charming old timey language, it turns out people are far more fearful of going under than the data suggests they should be. But what fun is an anxiety if it’s rational? No fun. No fun at all.

As ever, thanks for hanging out with us this week on the show. We’re getting closer to the end of our member season — just three more main season episodes left! If you haven’t had a chance to visit [whatsthatsmell.net][site] and pledge your support, just know that we love you for listening, and also that this is in part how we pay for our shoes, so to speak, so every bit of support from listeners like you is a massive help in keeping things humming along. Thank you.

This week's tune is Ain’t Looking Back by Richard Farrell. It's already in the playlist in Apple Music and Spotify.

We have glimpsed the future of saucy-sauce and it is drinky-drink. This episode marks the beginning of our exploration of alternative packaging and compositions of alcohol and while we are only able to offer a tease this week, we will absolutely return to this.

This is another one of those personal episodes for Pete, having just sent his oldest off to college. It’s a process millions and millions of families go through every year, and yet the grief that accompanies the experience, and the fear and anxiety that comes with realizing all your efforts to teach are done, well that’s worth talking about a little bit. So, we do that today. Oh, and we also take on eel fishing a little bit.

We take a tour down the cholera-stress streets of London in the mid-1850s, which is a super-fun classic What’s That Smell? Guided Meditation!

Finally, Tom explores the micro-universe with a listener submission asking us about lice anxiety. If you’ve had kids, you’ve probably been faced with a lice scare. Pete doesn’t handle it well and may shave and wax his entire body on this episode. He does have a book recommendation, though: I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong. If you’re interested in pushing on your assumptions of what makes you you, check out this book.

This week's tune is I Think I Like It by Basic featuring Black GryphOn. It's already in the playlist in Apple Music and Spotify.

We’ve never had guests on the show. It always seemed risky… like they might call us out on how dumb we look or… sound… or… are. So we held off. But in some backchannel somewhere, we got to talk about the persistent anxiety that comes with putting on this podcast — and all the other podcasts we do, along with the assorted general creative work our so-called friends put out into the world. How crazy could we possibly be? Have we LOOKED outside? What are we thinking!!

So, we pitched our friends Mandy Kaplan, and Mandy Fabian. They are, together, The Mandys, and they share their own podcast: MandCave. They have been performers all their lives and somehow were never talked out of it by their own inner lizard voices. Mandy Kaplan co-wrote and starred in the movie 30 Nights, (yes, the same 30 Nights that our own Tommy directed), and Mandy Fabian is just wrapping up her own feature, Jess Plus None, and is in pre-production of her next film. Both women are incredibly talented comedians, writers, musicians, and all-around performers and they bring us lessons of overcoming performance anxiety they’ve learned in their work that we believe you can apply specifically to your work… if you are a bank teller. This episode will likely not resonate with those working in any other field.

After you listen to this episode, we hope you’ll support these two by immediately subscribing to their hilarious podcast, watching their movies, washing their cars, you know… whatever needs doing. Thanks all!

We don’t love making this a gendered conversation but sometimes we just can’t help it. It turns out that women might just be able to smell fear. We don’t love it, that we might keep doing stupid stuff because we can’t smell the danger in it, and so we’ve decided that we all need to hang around more women in our lives. Sorry ladies. We promise we’ll be quiet. We just need your nasal insights. Gross. Sorry.

Dem Bones

This whole show is really about bones. We didn’t plan it that way… just happened. We start with Pete’s hips. Oh, did you hear that? That little voice in your head? Listen carefully… it just said, “This podcast was inspired by Pete’s hips…”

You’ll never hear THAT again.

In any case, Pete dug into research that connects stress and anxiety to joint pain. It turns out, when your body is under constant emotional stress, it’s also under chemical stress. And THAT’s bad for your bones. Learn more from in Association of Stress-Related Disorders With Subsequent Autoimmune Disease. You can learn more from the kind specialists at University of Maryland Spine Center as they blog eloquently in: Why Does Stress and Anxiety Cause Joint Pain?

We pivot from joint stress on the bones to what happens when Tommy tries to eat them. The bones, that is. He’s a real meat-hound, but as it turns out, sucking the meat off of bones gives him real trouble, and he’s not alone. The word is cartilogenophobia and rest assured, he’s going to really bite into this one.

Coober Pedy

Coober Pedy is a small town that sits in the middle of South Australia, about an hour north of Adelaide. It's hot there — it can hit the 120s in the summer — and with climate change, it's only getting hotter. And still, 1,800 people consisting of over 50 nationalities call this slice of the Outback home. And of all the homes in Coober Pedy, more than 60% of them are underground.

Here are a few fantastic vids and resources to check out:

• This is the town where people live underground - Coober Pedy
• Life against the odds in Australia's underground town
• Welcome to Coober Pedy, the world's strangest town • The Telegraph

Ok, look. We can't control what our parents called us when we were kids. We can't control the fact that those things are so deeply ingrained in our families that they still call us those things to this very day. We absolutely CAN control whether or not we talk about them on a sometimes-funny podcast for everyone to hear, but we lack the self control to stop ourselves from doing it. Please be gentle.

Heavy show. Very heavy.

Pete's helping a listener with a sort of existential dread this week that might have you noodling about it yourselves. Let's say you're sitting in a chair. Take away the chair and what happens? You fall. What if there was no floor to stop you? No ground? No crust on this planet of ours? You just keep falling. It's the fear of gravity on the show this week, and it's a doozy.

No, DATphagia.

So, it was an easy joke. Tommy's dealing with some very real swallowing issues and hot on the heels of that big nickname reveal, he's decided to process in real time on the show. So, it's Dysphagia day, everybody!

Along the way, we visit a little fashion cafe in New York that marks one of the great business failures in food. Oh, I spoiled the surprise there. See, this was a terrific idea that paired super models and fine dining! Terrific, we tell you... Positively GANGbusters. How'd it turn out? You'll have to listen in to learn!