That Wasn't The Plan

Send us Fan Mail In 1280, a prince rode to a royal palace in Central Asia with a thousand horses and a plan to win a wife. He was handsome, wealthy, and by every measure of his time, a very good match. Her parents quietly begged her to let him win. She threw him on the palace pavement. This week Emily goes solo with the story of Khutulun — great-great-granddaughter of Genghis Khan, undefeated wres...

Send us Fan Mail On October 24th, 1901 — her sixty-third birthday — a retired schoolteacher named Annie Edson Taylor climbed into an oak barrel the size of a pickle cask, had the lid screwed down, had air pumped in with a bicycle pump, and was pushed into the current above Niagara Falls. Nobody had ever survived going over those falls. Annie knew that. She didn’t care. She had a plan. This week Em...

Send us Fan Mail In July 1917, a nine-year-old girl named Frances kept falling into a stream in Yorkshire and coming home with wet shoes. When the grown-ups asked why she kept going down there, she said she went to see the fairies. Her sixteen-year-old cousin Elsie — an art student who happened to live in a house with a darkroom under the stairs — said: fine, we’ll prove it. What happened next foo...

Emily's on the road this week, so we're pulling one of our favorite early episodes out of the vault — originally released as Episode 6 back in Season 1, when Dr. Dini Miller became our very first-ever TWTP guest. We're re-releasing it for all of you who found the show in Season 2 and haven't dug back yet. If you've ever found a weird bug in your sheets and spiraled on the...

Welcome to Sunday Brunch — a new TWTP format where Emily and Courtney invite a friend to the table to talk about the thing that's eating all of us at the same time. For our first one, we called in Becky Smith. Becky is Emily's longtime close friend, a healthcare provider, and — most importantly for today — a woman who, within the span of about four months, dropped her only son off at col...

No guest this week — just Emily and Courtney, a rainy day, some research, and an hour of the purest content this podcast has ever produced: animals doing extraordinary things for humans, for each other, and sometimes just because. This one started with the 9/11 anniversary, a story about rescue dogs, and a myth about beavers keeping a little boy warm. It ended with a dolphin in New Zealand talking...

Everything you think you know about human trafficking is probably wrong. Dena Smiley is Chairman of the Board at Blazing Hope Ranch — a Tennessee-based Christian residential ministry that provides free two-year aftercare, equine-assisted healing, job training, and (for every graduate) a donated car and support finding a home, all for women over 30 who have survived sex trafficking. In 2025, Blazin...

(We open with a spirited debate about sweet potatoes and mayonnaise. Courtney flashes the camera. Miracle Whip is described as the devil's sauce. And then somehow we pivot to one of the most remarkable guests we've ever had on this show. This is That Wasn't The Plan.) This week Emily and Courtney sit down with Kurt Kemple — and we need you to hold two things in your head at once. In...

Do I Smell Almonds? No guest this week — just Emily and Courtney, one gorilla-glued tooth, and a three a.m. Google spiral that took a hard turn into poisons. What starts as Courtney describing the ongoing chemistry experiment happening in her mouth turns into a tour of everything that can kill you and a lot of things that probably won't. We're talking the top three most poisonous poisons...

What happens when the story you've been telling yourself for ten years unravels over a single glass of wine on the other side of the world? Annie Elmendorf is a mother of two, a cyclist, an athlete, and a sister. She's also — as she'll tell you herself — someone who has spent most of her life trying to feel at home in her own body. This is a solo episode with Emily; Courtney couldn&...

"Send me all the genitals"  ft. Dr. Patty Brennan What do you do when the wildest sentence of your career is "I was sure it was a worm" ? Dr. Patty Brennan is a Colombian-born, Cornell-trained evolutionary biologist, a full Professor of Biological Sciences at Mount Holyoke College, and the world's leading expert on vertebrate genital coevolution. She's been featured i...

What happens when the paperwork for your son's college applications cracks open something you thought you'd buried 35 years ago? Lucas Smith is a Colorado-native-turned-Seattleite, a software engineer of 15+ years working at the intersection of AI and tech, a multi-instrumentalist, an avid cyclist, a master of the smoker (the grill kind), and the host of the Not Retired Yet podcast. And...

This week Emily and Courtney sit down with Daisy Fulgham — wardrobe stylist turned sex and relationship coach, devoted wife of 34 years, mother of two, and the woman who, at 54, Googled "sex coaching programs," sat down with her husband, and signed up before she could talk herself out of it. After the first weekend she was completely hooked. After this episode, you will be too. Daisy is...

Turns out That Wasn't The Plan is basically a Canadian podcast at this point. Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton — you all showed up before anyone south of the border figured out what was happening. So Emily and Courtney decided to do the only reasonable thing: dedicate an entire episode to the Great White North. Courtney, for the record, is a dual citizen. Born in Newfoundland o...

Welcome back. Season 2. We opened with a tiger shark. Seemed right. That Wasn't The Plan is back for Season 2 — and we are not easing anyone in gently. Our first guest is Kinga Philipps : journalist, explorer, Shark Week host, Explorers Club Fellow, and one of the coolest humans on the planet. If you don't know Kinga yet, you're about to. We start where you'd expect — with a fl...

Happy 25th episode, everybody — and welcome to the Season One Finale of That Wasn't The Plan. Emily and Courtney sit down to close out Season 1 the only way they know how: completely unscripted, slightly unhinged, and somehow still kind of profound. Courtney opens with a literal cliffhanger, lands the plane on a calm, clear decision about her own health at 46, and then the two of them spend t...

This week's guest , Jonathan Fitzgerald, showed up with a life story that none of us were fully prepared for. Jonathan grew up the middle child of ten in Sarasota, Florida, in a family that could only be described as a force of nature. His parents — both only children, for the record — moved to Virginia to help found a Bible college and wound up with 48 grandchildren. His father delivered sev...

(We open with Courtney's puppy accidentally getting marijuana poisoning. This is relevant because it sets the tone perfectly for an episode about a man whose life has taken approximately seventeen unexpected turns.) This week's guest is Richard Ault — and his coworkers call him the most interesting person in the world. After about ten minutes, Emily and Courtney stopped arguing with that...

No guest. No agenda. No plan. Just Emily and Courtney showing up, catching each other up on their weeks, and somehow covering: shoplifting ethics, a stolen Power Ranger backpack, a suspicious kid at Target, toad venom, recovery, sitting with your feelings, and a stroller left alone in a parking lot that may or may not have had a baby in it. This is one of those episodes that was never supposed to...

(Courtney's back, everyone. Let the drinks flow. Also — Courtney's tooth made a brief unscheduled disappearance. We kept it in. You're welcome.) This week, Emily and Courtney sit down with someone doing some of the most quietly essential work in grief support: Lindsay Brockman , licensed veterinary nurse, certified pet loss grief specialist, and founder of EverKin Pet Loss Support o...

(Fair warning: Emily's mouth was fully uncensored this episode — blame the tech gremlins. Also, our earrings nearly derailed the whole thing. You'll hear it. We kept it in.) This week, Emily's co-host Courtney Holland is out due to an emergency — but honestly, today's guest doesn't need a wingman. Hilary Morris Pawlik has been Emily's ride-or-die since the eighth grad...

Most of us learned to look at our bodies and immediately catalog what's wrong with them. Too big. Too small. Too much. Not enough. Wasting away. Filling out. The wrong shape for the wrong season for the wrong man's opinion. This week, we're trying something else. Two world-class athletes — ice mermaid and U.S. record holder Melissa Kegler and former NCAA swimmer Sarah Beth Wood — si...

Carrie Edwards bought a lottery ticket online (against her Army buddy's advice), let ChatGPT pick her numbers (also against his advice), forgot she'd opted into a second draw, and won $150,000. Then she gave every cent of it away. And $42,000 more out of her own pocket to cover the taxes. The story went viral worldwide — Tamron Hall, Inside Edition, Fox News, Korean headlines at her nail...

Last week, Melissa Kegler said she was going to get her record back. This week, the universe said, we’ll see about that. What follows is five months of waiting for water that is somehow both too warm and too frozen, a logistical nightmare involving flights, storms, dams, and one very specific 24-hour window where everything finally (and briefly) aligns.  It is, by all accounts, the worst swim of h...

There are people who set goals.  And then there’s Melissa Kegler—who hears a mildly unhinged suggestion and thinks, yes, that seems reasonable. In Part 1, we trace the origin story: from pool swimmer to open water wanderer, to casually knocking out the Triple Crown (Catalina, the English Channel, Manhattan… as one does). Along the way: crocodile-adjacent panic, questionable water conditions, dolph...