Performance anxiety for all! This week, hosts of the MandCave podcast on TruStory FM, Mandy Kaplan and Mandy Fabian, join us to talk about nerves, shakes, and gastrointestinal distress that comes with being a professional performer.
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!
All the Feelings, Season 10: Adulting—A Life-Long Course in Feeling Unprepared
You know that moment when you look around and realize, Oh no… I’m the adult in this room? Maybe it’s when you pretend to understand tax brackets. Or when your back starts to hurt because you "slept." Or when you stand in the grocery store, staring at asparagus, wondering if you should be investing in heavy greens futures.
Welcome to All the Feelings Season 10, where your able hosts, Tommy Metz III and Pete Wright, are going to tackle the unspoken truth of adulthood: nobody actually knows what they’re doing most of the time. This season, we’re diving into the emotional chaos of adulting—all the things that, by now, we should have mastered but somehow still make us feel like confused 12-year-olds wearing oversized suits.
We’ll explore the existential panic of estate planning (Wills: Now Featuring Your Inevitable Mortality!), the sheer absurdity of socializing as a grown-up (Why Is Making Friends Harder Than Filing Taxes?), and the shame spiral of arguing (Yes, You Can Still Lose a Fight in Your 40s!). We’ll unpack civic duty, grief, apologizing, and the delicate balance of managing time without feeling like you’re constantly failing an invisible test.
And of course, we’ll get real about the things that make adulthood straight-up weird: why is sleep suddenly a competitive sport? Why does gift-giving induce a full-blown identity crisis? And why does every conversation about homeownership involve so much sighing?
This season, Pete and Tommy are back to do what they do best: explore the emotional absurdity of being human. Because if adulthood is just a long series of pop quizzes, we might as well laugh about it together.