That Wasn't The Plan Human stories for those struggling to be human. A podcast for anyone whose life took a left turn when you were peacefully asleep.
Life doesn't come with a script—thank god, because ours would've been returned for rewrites.
Warning: May cause unexpected feelings, snort-laughing, and the overwhelming urge to text us your own "that wasn't the plan" story.
Join co-hosts Emily White and Courtney Holland as they navigate the beautiful disasters, plot twists, and "well, that happened" moments that nobody warned you about. From bed bugs, winning the lottery, breaking your neck, and finding a furry lump on the side of the road that turns out to be your best friend.
We're here to talk about the stuff that wasn't in your life plan: Getting sober. Couch-surfing at 35. Teaching Jazzercise in a thong leotard at 5 AM (Courtney looks great, by the way). Death showing up uninvited. Your career ghosting you.
Each episode brings you real stories, terrible advice, excellent commiseration, and the reminder that if your life feels like a dumpster fire, at least you're in good company.
New episodes drop weekly. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts, because we all need witnesses to this beautiful mess.
Remember: Just because it wasn't the plan doesn't mean it wasn't supposed to happen.
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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 fooled newspapers, photography experts, theosophists, and the man who invented the most famous detective mind in the world. It also cost two little girls a secret they carried for sixty-six years.
This week Emily goes solo with a story that is part hoax, part history, part grief, and entirely human: The Cottingley Fairies.
“They wanted to be taken in.” — Frances Griffiths
Watch the video or look up Fairies and Their Sunbath. What do you see?
💌 Have a story, a question, or something you’ve been carrying? Email us at thatwasnttheplanpod@gmail.com or visit thatwasnttheplan.com
📲 Find us on Instagram | TikTok | YouTube — search @thatwasnttheplan
🎧 If this one surprised you — subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who loves a story that doesn’t end where you think it will.
That wasn’t the plan, and we will talk to you next week. K bye. 🧚
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 internet for three hours, this one's for you.
Dr. Dini Miller is a professor at Virginia Tech, an internationally recognized expert in urban pest management, a PhD in urban entomology, and an inductee into the Pest Management Association Hall of Fame. She advises housing authorities, hotels, shelters, and schools. She published early research on insecticide-resistant bed bugs. She's won basically every award in her field. And she is also — according to Courtney — a total babe who once marched down Constitution Avenue dancing to Beyoncé at the 2017 Women's March.
Today she's at Virginia Tech, pushing the entire industry to switch from IPM (integrated pest management) to APM (assessment-based pest management) — the radical idea that we should actually measure whether pest treatments work before and after, instead of just spraying 55-year-old chemicals and calling it done. She's trying to get U.S. HUD to pay for pest control rather than pesticide application, because apparently those are not the same thing. Spoiler: the current administration has eliminated most of the people who could help her do it.
What you'll actually learn: how to identify a bed bug (size of an apple seed; babies are the size of a comma in a paperback book); why they poop a lot and what the little black marks mean; why lint rollers are your best friend; why hotels aren't actually the problem but apartments are (92% of professional bed bug treatments); who's most at risk right now (the elderly, nursing homes, dialysis centers); the medical shame that keeps people isolated; why the Food Quality Protection Act limits what we can use indoors; what fumigation can and can't do; traumatic insemination (yes, that's a thing male bed bugs do, and it's exactly what it sounds like); and why the only thing that is 100% guaranteed to work is tenting your whole house.
Also: how a female bed bug lays 25% more eggs if she can get away from the dudes, why cockroaches smell distinctly enough that an entomologist can identify them in a restaurant glass, what delusory parasitosis is, the man who put raw hamburger mixed with gasoline on his bald head to sleep (his house burned down), Dini's seven rescue cats and her dog Carol who adopted her against her will, and the single best piece of life advice from a woman who built an entire international career on cockroach crap: you just have no idea where life is going to take you. Keep saying yes.
Is Anything Okay? Sunday Brunch Vol 1 - ft. Becky Smith
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 college, watched her feisty 82-year-old mother fall twice (once at Becky's own house, once days after college drop-off), and became the sole long-distance caregiver for a mother who's also the primary caregiver for Becky's sister. In other words: Becky is the sandwich generation, and she's doing it mostly solo.
Emily's mom Jan took a bad fall six years ago and never fully bounced back. Dad is the primary caregiver. Emily lives in Seattle, siblings are in Colorado, and the weight of the "set up systems that don't stick" cycle is real. Courtney and her husband Jonathan recently moved his dad in with them — Lewis Body dementia, Parkinson's — and discovered that purpose and panic can live in the same house, sometimes at 6 a.m. in the front yard in their underwear.
What this conversation actually is: three women telling the truth about caring for the people who raised us. The grief before the loss. The specific rage of setting up a care team that your mom then fires in a week. The gift of being able to show up in person vs. the exhaustion of long-distance coordination. The reminder, delivered quietly and perfectly by Emily partway through: this is their first and only time on this planet too — and they are lucky to have gotten this far.
A gentle reminder to grieve the role change out loud, to let yourself cry when it happens instead of filing it away for later, and to approach your parent as the human they are, not the problem to be managed. We don't solve it. We just come to the table.
If you're in it right now, some things to look into:
Support groups for caregivers — there's one for whatever you're facing, and most now meet on Zoom. Try the Family Caregiver Alliance (caregiver.org), AARP's caregiver resources (aarp.org/caregiving), or search "[your parent's condition] caregiver support group" to find one specific to what you're walking through.
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 two stranded whales home to open ocean. In between: lions in Ethiopia, a sea lion off the Golden Gate Bridge, a gorilla named Binti Jua, a parrot named Willie, a pot-bellied pig named Lulu, a 22-pound rabbit named Dory, an elephant named Ning Yang, and Courtney's late Chihuahuas Rooster and Dwayne Taylor Brown, who woke her up before an earthquake in LA and remain legendary.
A merch announcement: Emily is compiling 35 episodes of best lines and you get to vote. WWBJD bracelets are already on the list
"Do it for Binti." — Emily White, 2025
📎 Documentaries mentioned:
🐋 Fathom — whale communication documentary, highly recommended
🌉 The Bridge — documentary about the Golden Gate Bridge. Heavy. Interesting. Not for everyone.
🔒 STANDARD CLOSING
💌 Have an animal story that blew your mind? We want it. Email us at thatwasnttheplanpod@gmail.com or visit thatwasnttheplan.com
📲 Find us on Instagram | TikTok | YouTube — search @thatwasnttheplan
🎧 If this one made your day — subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs a reason to smile today.
That wasn't the plan, and we will talk to you next week. K bye. 🐾
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, Blazing Hope became the first gold-standard-certified safe house in the state of Tennessee.
Dena didn't plan any of this. She grew up in suburban Southern California, went to UC San Diego, got a master's in social work from the University of Denver, and spent 15+ years as a clinical social worker. In 1994, she smuggled Bibles by bicycle across the border from Hong Kong into mainland China. In 2019 she started going to Nicaragua on medical mission trips into the brothels of the third-poorest country in the southern hemisphere. In 2021 she moved her family to Tennessee (yes, she Googled "most conservative states"), turned 50, and showed up sight unseen with her three kids to volunteer at a horse camp for kids at risk of being trafficked. By that fall she was on the board. By last summer she was running it.
This is the education episode you didn't know you needed. Dena, Emily, and Courtney walk through: the recruitment tactic that isn't a white van (it's an "affluent straight-A student" and a guy behind her at a basketball game offering to introduce her to his tattoo-artist buddy); the "Blossom the Butterfly" curriculum from the Philippines that Blazing Hope uses to teach 8-to-13-year-olds about grooming without scaring them; why traffickers spike around the Super Bowl; why familial trafficking and intimate-partner recruitment are the dominant patterns (not kidnapping); the five biggest myths about who gets trafficked and where; and the warning signs to actually watch for in your community.
Also: horses as emotional mirrors, why every Blazing Hope graduate gets a car, and the kindest thing anyone has ever done for Dena (it involves a haircut).
(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 2004, Kurt walked into a bank, slid a note across to the teller, and left with $2,000. He has absolutely no memory of doing this. He was in a Xanax blackout. He woke up the next morning in a jail cell, turned himself in, waited an entire year to be sentenced, and then sat in a courtroom and heard a judge say five to seven years.
And in that moment, he made a decision: not a single minute wasted.
Today Kurt is the Senior Director of Developer Relations for the Slack platform at Salesforce. He has written a book. He has published a piece on Medium called "I'm an Imposter" that still gets shared years later. He has taught himself theoretical physics using AI — with no background, no training, and no degree — and published two peer-reviewed papers in Physics Letters B, the second of which introduces a new theory about black holes that nobody had proposed before.
He did all of this from a GED.
"Fascinating. Tell me more." — Kurt Kemple's favorite phrase, and honestly now ours too.
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 (spoiler: fentanyl is #1, and Buddhism has its own list). Women who spent centuries poisoning husbands because divorce wasn't a thing. The Colorado dentist who was lacing his wife's protein shakes with cyanide in 2023. Trini and Carmen's Mexican restaurant in Michigan and the largest US botulism outbreak in history (spoiler: don't home-can your jalapeños wrong).
There's a full segment on the world's most poisonous plant (rosary pea), most poisonous land animal (golden dart frog — don't touch), most venomous snake (inland taipan, shy but capable of killing a hundred adults per drop), and most venomous sea creature (Emily nails it on the first guess). Plus: how a cougar's jaw can crush a human skull, why mama deer are dropping their babies off in Courtney's neighbors' yards like it's a doggie daycare, and why "make it weird" is the most underrated self-defense strategy for women.
Also: Chef Boyardee slander. The egg float test. The moment Courtney's brother almost let her die on a road trip from Virginia to San Francisco because of one bad oyster in Yuma. And an emerging fantasy about being David Hasselhoff-level big in Copenhagen.
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't make it. And the story Annie tells is one Annie has never told publicly before.
It starts on a Tuesday morning in March, on a Wi-Fi scale that has sixteen years of her data on it, in the middle of a separation, at the end of a couple of dark months. Fifteen pounds gone. All muscle. And a voice on NPR that morning talking about becoming a bodybuilder — Elizabeth Smart, of all people.
To understand how Annie got to that scale, we have to go back. Way back. To a childhood spent gaining and losing more than two hundred pounds. To a gastric bypass in 2010 that changed her life, and then — a year later — introduced her to the specific way alcohol hits a body that no longer has a stomach. "It's like shooting alcohol into your vein," she says. Most people hate that feeling. Annie loved it.
We walk through ten years of sobriety built on fear. The MS bike ride. The triathlons. The Iron Mans. The 200-mile weeks. The Rafa 500. And a single glass of Rioja at a paella dinner in the Canary Islands where — as Annie put it — nobody there knew her. Two weeks later, on a movie theater bathroom floor with her fifteen-year-old son in the theater, her intestine twisted. Three weeks after that, a piece of her small intestine died inside her body. Two weeks in the hospital. And four months later, on blood thinners, she rode across the Pyrenees. On the flight to Barcelona, she ordered a glass of white wine.
Her mother died in June 2023. Annie went to the grocery store that day and bought a twelve-pack of ranch water. What followed was a year and a half of nightly drinking, "controlled" in the way addicts mean when they say the word. Then, in December 2023, a morning she can only describe as divine intervention. Thirty days of treatment in January 2024. Ninety meetings in ninety days. Now — three to five meetings a week, a bodybuilding coach in California, and the possibility of competing in the over-fifty division next fall.
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 in The New York Times, National Geographic, Scientific American, The Guardian, Slate, and NPR — and she's a featured scientist in the upcoming documentary Second Nature, narrated by Elliot Page. Before all of that, she was one of five sisters in Bogotá who became a biologist because she figured out she could scare her sisters off with bugs.
Patty wrote us a line before we ever spoke that could be the tagline of this entire podcast: "The title of your podcast could be the byline for my scientific career." And she wasn't kidding.
This episode is the whole arc — the girl who talked her way onto a research ketch in the Galapagos to scuba dive around the world (and got no further than the Galapagos, and married the American man she was never going to marry, thirty years ago). The moment she and her crew photographed the first live sighting of a whale that had only ever been known from a skull. The pivot to Cornell for marine mammals, the switch to birds, and the day in the Costa Rican rainforest when she thought she'd found a parasite and instead discovered a career. In 2013, Fox News, Sean Hannity, and Sarah Palin came for her NSF-funded research. She hid under her desk for a week — and then wrote back. What happened next was not the plan.
Also: why females across the animal kingdom have weapons nobody was looking at, why 3% of birds have penises and the rest don't, why the full three-dimensional structure of the human clitoris wasn't mapped until the mid-1990s, dolphins as sexual harassers, Elliot Page's production company, and the Harlequin duck — the one duck that is not, in Patty's words, a "rapist duck."
Watch or request a screening of : 🎬 secondnaturedocumentary.com
Gen X, Empty Nesters, and A Very Quiet Drive Home ft. Lucas Smith
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 in about a month, he and his wife are driving their only son six hours south and dropping him off at college.
What was supposed to be college paperwork became something else entirely. Somewhere between forms and financial aid, Lucas started losing sleep, getting angry at nothing, and couldn't figure out why. Until he traced it back to being 18 himself — the year his parents split, the family disintegrated, and a version of him was left to raise himself on his friend Dave's floor. This is an episode about handing your kid every single thing you never got. About Gen X and the eye of the hurricane between launching kids and aging parents. About unreliable memory, the sandwich generation, marriages that survive the empty nest (and the ones that don't), and Lucas's very honest admission that it was never part of the plan to live this long.
Also: a 1984 drum machine, why our brains don't remember the diapers, and what a "pack horse" does when he finally has to plan.
Follow Lucas & check out his podcast: 🎧 Not Retired Yet — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/not-retired-yet/id1823048074
If today's episode moved you, made you laugh, or made you text a Gen X friend — please rate, review, and share. It's the single biggest thing that helps us grow.
Reach Dr. Dini Miller directly: 📧 dinim@vt.edu 📄 Google "VDACS bed bug" (Virginia Dept. of Agriculture & Consumer Services) for her free fact sheets on bed bugs in apartments, social service orgs, heat treatment, chemical and non-chemical methods, and identification. All free, all accurate, all written by Dini.
If you work in or know anyone at an elder care facility, assisted living, dialysis center, or social service org that needs bed bug training — Dini provides it for free through Virginia Cooperative Extension. Call her office or email her directly.
Home-based care through Medicare / Medicaid — ask your parent's primary care doctor to connect you with a home health coordinator, or search for home-care programs in their state. Courtney's family worked with Carilion Clinic's home care team in Virginia; your region will have an equivalent.
Alzheimer's Association 24/7 helpline: 1-800-272-3900
💙 Struggling with addiction? You don't have to figure it out alone. SAMHSA helpline: 1-800-662-4357 (free, confidential, 24/7) or text 55753 to reach the Partnership to End Addiction. aa.org is always there too.
💌 Have a question for Kurt — or a story of your own? Email us at thatwasnttheplanpod@gmail.com or visit thatwasnttheplan.com
📲 Find us on Instagram | TikTok | YouTube — search @thatwasnttheplan
🎧 If this episode made you believe something was possible that didn't feel possible before — subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.
That wasn't the plan, and we will talk to you next week. K bye. 🥂
If today's episode made you laugh, made you Google something, or made you email your mom about egg storage — please rate, review, and share. It's the single biggest thing that helps us grow.
This is an episode about the still quiet voice you spend decades ignoring, about what it costs to finally stop performing wellness, and about the difference between fear-quitting and actually doing the work. Also: why post-gastric-bypass alcohol nearly killed her, why "transfer addiction" is a phrase she can now name out loud, and a stranger in a Texas pickup truck who reminded her that people are also good.
Resources mentioned: 🩷 If you or someone you love is struggling with alcohol — AA has a meeting near you: aa.org
If today's episode made you laugh, made you think, or made you text a science-curious friend — please rate, review, and share. It's the single biggest thing that helps us grow.
