That Wasn't The Plan

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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 wrestler, cavalry commander, and the woman who turned down marriage proposals into the most audacious wealth-building strategy the Mongolian steppe had ever seen. Any man who wanted to marry her had to beat her first. If he lost, he paid her a hundred horses. She won more than ten thousand.

She was never beaten.

The wind is still moving through the feather grass. The wrestlers still dance like falcons. And somewhere in that story is a girl who was told to lose and said no every time she could.

📎 Sources:

• The Travels of Marco Polo — primary account of Khutulun’s wrestling matches and military service
• Rashid al-Din, Compendium of Chronicles — Persian historian, records her military campaigns
• Hannah Jewell, She Caused a Riot — modern retelling; source of the “debris of shattered male egos” line
• Jack Weatherford, The Secret History of the Mongol Queens — essential modern scholarship on Khutulun
• The Travels of Marco Polo, translated by Henry Yule — public domain English translation
• Mongolian horse price data: late 2025 market rates, turic conversion

💌 Have a question, a story, or a historical woman you think we need to cover? Email us at [email protected] or visit thatwasnttheplan.com

📲 Find us on Instagram | TikTok | YouTube — search @thatwasnttheplan

🎧 If this one made you feel something — subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs a reminder that the rules have always been negotiable.

That wasn’t the plan, and we will talk to you next week. K bye. 🐎

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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 Emily goes solo again with the extraordinary true story of the first person in history to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and live — a woman who did it broke, widowed, and terrified of the poor house, on her birthday, at sixty-three.

What you’ll hear:

• The geology of Niagara Falls — because the rock Annie went over is more than 400 million years old, the falls themselves are 12,000 years old and have been slowly walking backward up the river ever since, and the cliff she plunged off used to be the floor of a warm, shallow sea. So we start there.
• Annie Edson Taylor: born 1838 in Auburn, New York, one of eight kids, her father died when she was twelve, her baby son died in infancy, her husband David died in the Civil War — and then she just kept going. Teaching school, giving dance lessons, moving from Texas to New York to Mexico City to Michigan, doing what she always did: “If there’s no door, she builds one.”
• By 1900, she’s lost her home to a fire and her savings to a clergyman. For a single woman in her sixties in 1901, the end of the road had a name: the Poor House. And she was getting closer to it every year
• What changed everything: a man in a bar claiming he’d gone over the falls in a padded rubber suit. Annie heard it and did the math. If that was true, what could a schoolteacher do with a really good barrel?
• The barrel: oak, iron hoops, four and a half feet tall, a hundred and sixty pounds, cushions inside, a harness to hold her in, weight at the bottom so it would land feet first. She designed it herself. She named it the Queen of the Mist
• Her promoter Frank Russell, who put the barrel in a store window — and then told the press she was forty-two. She was sixty-two. “Everybody on this riverbank is lying about their age. Annie’s just the only one doing it on purpose.”
• The test run: her cat — possibly named Niagara — went over the Horseshoe Falls first. Survived with a small cut on its head. Emily has thoughts about this.
• October 23rd: the water’s too rough, the boatmen call it off, and Annie cries in front of the reporters because she’s sixty-two and broke and has psyched herself up for this once already
• October 24th, her sixty-third birthday: they row her out, she climbs in with a little heart-shaped pillow, they pump in the air, they plug the hole with a cork, and they push her into the current
• 170 feet. 90% of a river. One woman in a barrel. Twenty minutes
• “My God, she’s alive.”
• Her first review: “I will never go over the falls again. I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon.” Five stars. Would not recommend
• What happened next: about $400 total in earnings, a promoter who disappeared with the barrel, a younger woman introduced to crowds as “the heroine of Niagara” — with Annie’s barrel
• The years that followed: a souvenir stand, postcards, stock market, a novel she tried to write, clairvoyant work, magnetic treatments. Always building a door where there wasn’t one
• February 23rd, 1921: Annie Edson Taylor walks into the Niagara County Poor House. She’s eighty-two. When they ask her age at the door, she tells them fifty-seven. She never stopped
• And the falls: still moving. Slower now, since most of the water gets diverted for electricity. They have a dimmer switch at night. In 1969, the Army Corps of Engineers turned the American Falls off entirely for six months so geologists could study the cliff. In 1848, an ice jam stopped the falls cold for thirty hours and people walked out into the dry riverbed. All that power, and they don’t get to decide where most of their water goes. Neither did Annie

“Annie Taylor’s plan was never to be poor again. It didn’t work. Her other plan — to do something no one else in the world had ever done — she nailed that one.”

She’s buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Niagara Falls, in a section called Stunter’s Rest.

💌 Have a story, a question, or something you’ve been carrying? Emily wants to hear it. [email protected] or thatwasnttheplan.com

📲 Find us on Instagram | TikTok | YouTube — search @thatwasnttheplan

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That wasn’t the plan, and we will talk to you next week. K bye. 🛢️

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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 [email protected] or visit thatwasnttheplan.com

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🎧 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.

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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.

Reach Dr. Dini Miller directly:
📧 [email protected]
📄 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.

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If today's episode made you want to lint-roll your luggage, please rate, review, and share. New episodes return next week.

#ThatWasntThePlan #TWTPPodcast #FromTheVault #BedBugs #UrbanEntomology #PestControl #VirginiaTech #WomenInSTEM #WomenInScience #DrDiniMiller #IPM #APM #TravelTips #HotelTips #PublicHealth #EntomologyPodcast #ScienceCommunication #StoryDrivenPodcast #WomenPodcasters #MidlifePodcast

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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.
• 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
• Eldercare Locator (US): 1-800-677-1116

Follow the show:
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▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@That_Wasnt_The_Plan
📱 Instagram: @thatwasnttheplan_podcast
🎵 TikTok: @that_wasnt_the_plan

If today's episode made you feel less alone — please rate, review, and share it with the friend who's also in the thick of it. That's the whole point.

#ThatWasntThePlan #TWTPPodcast #SundayBrunch #SandwichGeneration #CaregiverSupport #AgingParents #GenX #CaregivingJourney #Dementia #LewisBodyDementia #AdultChildrenOfAgingParents #MidlifePodcast #WomenPodcasters #CaregiverBurnout #CaregivingAndCommunity #StoryDrivenPodcast

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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 [email protected] or visit thatwasnttheplan.com

📲 Find us on Instagram | TikTok | YouTube — search @thatwasnttheplan

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That wasn't the plan, and we will talk to you next week. K bye. 🐾

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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).

Ways to help — beyond Blazing Hope Ranch:

🌾 Blazing Hope Ranch — Dayton, TN — BlazingHopeRanch.org
 🎟️ Hootenanny for Hope — Thursday, Oct 16 at 6pm — Bryan College, Dayton, TN — free to attend, register at BlazingHopeRanch.org/events

Hotlines to know:

• 📞 National Human Trafficking Hotline: 1-888-373-7888 (24/7, 200+ languages)
• 📱 Text HELP or INFO to 233733 (BeFree)
• 📞 Tennessee Human Trafficking Hotline: 1-855-55-TNHTH (86484)
• 📞 DHS Report a Tip: 1-866-347-2423
• 🚨 Emergency: 911
• 📞 National Center for Missing & Exploited Children: 1-800-THE-LOST (843-5678)

Other trafficking organizations doing the work:

• Polaris Project — polarisproject.org
• International Justice Mission — ijm.org
• Shared Hope International — sharedhope.org
• ECPAT-USA — ecpatusa.org
• Thistle Farms (Nashville, TN — survivor employment) — thistlefarms.org
• Street Hope TN — streethopetn.org
• Seattle Against Slavery — seattleagainstslavery.org
• REST (Real Escape from the Sex Trade, Seattle) — iwantrest.com

Follow the show:
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If today's episode moved you, please rate, review, and share. Awareness is protection.

#ThatWasntThePlan #TWTPPodcast #HumanTraffickingAwareness #EndTrafficking #ChildProtection #GroomingAwareness #BlazingHopeRanch #FaithBasedNonprofit #EquineTherapy #Tennessee #Nonprofit #SafeHouse #ProtectKids #ParentAwareness #StoryDrivenPodcast

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(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.

📎 Find Kurt & Resources Mentioned:

• 🌐 Website: kurtiskemple.com
• ✍️ Medium: "I'm an Imposter" by Kurt Kemple
• 💼 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kurtiskemple
• 📚 Book: Effective DevReel — Springer
• 🔬 Physics Letters B — Kurt's published paper on black holes
• 💙 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 [email protected] 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. 🥂

#SecondChances #ThatWasntThePlan #KurtKemple #ImpostorSyndrome #Prison #TheoreticalPhysics #Salesforce #GEDtoSuccess

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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 (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.

Follow the show:
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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.

#ThatWasntThePlan #TWTPPodcast #PoisonPodcast #TrueCrime #DarkHumor #Botulism #Cyanide #MidlifeWomen #Perimenopause #WomenInTheirForties #FoodSafety #Menopause #StoryDrivenPodcast #FunnyPodcast #WomenPodcasters #Copenhagen

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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.

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

Follow the show:
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🌐 https://thatwasnttheplan.com
🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5RNnSi4FzNM3HbTpFErYgP
🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/that-wasnt-the-plan/id1868758889
▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@That_Wasnt_The_Plan
📱 Instagram: @thatwasnttheplan_podcast
🎵 TikTok: @that_wasnt_the_plan

If today's episode moved you, please rate, review, and share. It's the single biggest thing that helps us grow.

#ThatWasntThePlan #TWTPPodcast #Recovery #Sobriety #Alcoholism #GastricBypass #WomensHealth #Midlife #Perimenopause #Menopause #Bodybuilding #WomensBodybuilding #ElizabethSmart #EnduranceAthlete #Cycling #IronMan #AAmeetings #TransferAddiction #StoryDrivenPodcast

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