What's That Smell?

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.ß

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, w

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 an

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-arou

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 BonesThis 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

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, ever

If you were a member last season, this may come as old news to you, so hang on while I get a little housekeeping out of the way. See, we stumbled on these sauces from the REDACTED Company and while Tommy was busy talking about how they gave him anxiety, Pete discovered that this was not in fact a simple SauceAccident, it was just a single representative of a whole line of condiments that represent the whole of SauceTrocity suffered upon us, the consumers. It became a running gag, albeit a dumb one, and we fell in love with it. The gag. Not the Sauces. The Sauces? How could we know if we would fall in love with them? We'd never tasted them. We sat on our podcast bouncy balls and made jokes at their expense, but never had the SaucePerience to back those jokes up. So, in a member-only episode from last summer, we held a taste test of the sauces from REDACTED Company and their line of REDACTEDSauce condiments. Our experience is what you'll be listening to this week. But why a rebroadcast, you ask, especially of a

It's another big week here at what's that smell? HQ. First and foremost, AND by popular demand, we've finally created bespoke playlists of the music of this show. The Music of What's That Smell?You might (but you'd be forgiven if you didn't) know that we source all our music from the fine artists and catalog at Artlist. But that's a subscription service for creators and not terribly convenient if you just want to jam out a bit. Thankfully, the artists we have selected for our show also have released their music in Spotify and Apple Music. We built the playlist of as many of the tracks as we could (60+!) and will keep it up as we go. Just follow the playlist on your platform of choice and shuffle away!SpotifyApple MusicDo you have the Sugies?It's true: if we had our way, we'd all be referring to hypoglycemia as the "Sugies". But we don't have our way so we'll just have to adapt to words. This week, Pete takes a closer look at the connection between hypoglycemia and mental health. Wait, what? Pete, surely you'r

Hey, you... how's your crypto? A real roller coaster, huh? Prolly want a guy like Mr. White Hat on your side. Also, maybe, don't use crypto if you want to fight the anxiety.Tom did a little traveling a few weeks back and the trip was fine. Oh, wait. No it wasn't. The friends were nice but the trip itself was a damned nightmare of travel anxiety. This week, he shares some good times in the Austin airport, an epic exercise in friendliness and frustration, and the real reason he was anxious: reports of unruly passengers. You don't have to look too far for details. Caitlin Gibson wrote a backgrounder on it back in 2016 for the WaPo: Passengers behaving badly: The real reason we freak out on planes. 2016 Since then, things have only gotten worse, with nearly 4,000 reports and 600 under active investigation by the FAA this year so far.Thankfully, the Federal Aviation Administration has finally come out of hiding and released... a PSA: You Don't Want Your Pilots Distracted: Unruly Behavior Doesn't Fly (YouTube). You

The Nose Knows AnxietyGet ready, because VistaGen Therapeutics (a pharma company straight out of a Michael Crichton book), is on the verge of helping you out of your social anxiety with the same tech used to fight your pollen allergy. Right now it's called PH94B, so we're not talking about one of those sexy-sexy Sunday morning TV ad names quite yet, but it's coming... and we're here for it.Beware the things we're handing downPete's getting itchy about passing his anxiety on to his kids. Oh, wait, wrong tense. Pete has gotten itchy BECAUSE he passed his anxiety on to his kids? Well, that might be debatable, but the fear of it is very much present so we're talking all about this very special kind of inheritance this week. Thankfully, the Child Mind Institute has some thoughts, which is great because apparently this fear is causing some people to avoid actually having children. Oh, and if you do have kids, read this about two very special words: Be Careful.SupportA history of compression sockinettes won't keep y

How do you funny? We welcome this first episode back of season six with a journey to HuRL, University of Colorado's Humor Research Laboratory. We're both graduates of University of Colorado and, just so we're clear, no one ever introduced us to the Humor Research Laboratory, or this show might be funnier. How funny? Check out this passage from the team's website:The Humor Research Lab (aka HuRL) at the University of Colorado Boulder is dedicated to the scientific study of humor, its antecedents, and its consequences. The lab’s theoretical and methodological base is in the interdisciplinary fields of emotion and judgment and decision making, with an emphasis in social and cognitive psychology.BWAHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHAaaaa... We're ROLLING over here. That just SCREAMS that these people know how to funny, and they funny hard.We walk through the Humor Styles Questionnaire created by University of Western Ontario psychology researcher Rod Martin which proposes to help us figure out how Tom funnys, and while we're at it

AI lookin’ out for us. Pete helps a listener feel free in the chair while Tommy is on the hunt for Dr. Puff-n-stuff. Links & NotesThis weeks tune: Belong to You by Denitia

Clean your glasses. Watch out for the ghouls under your bed. Stay out of the metropolitan water delivery businessLinks & NotesThis weeks tune: The No Show Blues by Ben BostickI Didn't Clean My Glasses for a Week and then I Put them Under a Microscope — Vlogbrothers

Kickstart your back-ups, Sheriff Woody is loose. Tommy’s terrified of Little Tommy 2 while Pete should just give up and stop wearing pants to meetings.Links & NotesThis weeks tune: Flutes Will Chill by Kicktracks‘Breaking News’ — Radiolab

Don’t drive while listening to this episode. Also, Tommy helps a listener get back … at everyone … at once. And Pete just hopes this will never, ever, ever end. Links & NotesThis week’s tune: It Blows My Mind by Assaf Ayalon

Introducing Shocktato. Also, Tommy struggles with tube time overload and Pete finds solace in escape.Links & NotesThis week’s tune: Zombie Funk by Steve Poloni

Pete uses his big brain to think again... and again and again while Tommy fights for the right to recline.Links & NotesThis week’s tune: Mini Me by WEARETHEGOOD

Pete helps a listener find a friend in time while Tommy is generally sorry.Links & NotesThis week’s tune: Keepin’ Up by ikoliksBecome a Registered What’s That Smell? Panic Pal and support the production of season 5 today!