&WhatNot

In this Episode We talk about a windy coastal low ruining Amanda’s apple picking plans, naming every apple you can under pressure, whether Red Delicious or McIntosh is the most famous apple, Cosmic Crisp apples, what goes in a good apple pie, not being able to find cardamom, trying to remember the name of an expensive red spice, whether anyone actually cares about pie crust, inventing apple pie dip with pie crust tortillas, Blue’s Clues applesauce, why brightly colored food and drinks work on us, the shark drink at Chili’s, worms and mud dessert, mudslides, whether you can make pudding alcoholic, ruining pudding and pancakes with an electric mixer, whether Amanda should take engagement photos in the fall, people taking wedding photos at Robert Moses and the Fire Island Lighthouse, trick or treating versus trunk or treat, whether you’d take five hundred million dollars if one random person you know would die, and whether you’d take a hundred million dollars to be four inches tall, which turned into four feet tall, which turned into toddler sized.

In this Episode We talk about the first day of fall, a free box of Japanese shrimp chips from a pickleball league that taste exactly like the ocean, shopping at international markets and a possible candy haul, and then Andrew tells the full story of trying an edible for the first time in almost ten years: taking a fifteen milligram gummy at a sports bar, feeling it in fifteen minutes, losing track of every conversation, asking the waitress for ten more minutes, begging his friends to just keep driving, waking up the next morning still high, time moving wrong, pacing the house covered in bug spray, a stress response that turned into days of crying and feeling like nothing around him was real, calling out of a pickleball match, Kyle sending a SpongeBob orb of confusion picture at the worst possible moment, a rainy Sunday of a one tent flea market, a music store, a fox in the woods and a costumed 1800s tour at a historical society, the singers at Uncle Giuseppe’s, waking up convinced he was in a coma, and what he would do differently next time.

In this Episode We talk about what the world would be like if babies came out talking at a fifth grade level, having to change a diaper while the baby holds a conversation with you, whether you’ve ever had a real conversation with a kid, kids who need you to see every single thing they did, feeding a whole gaggle of geese, realizing you and a twelve year old are watching the same TikToks, why everyone can laugh at someone falling down the stairs, adults who watch Bluey, whether simpler media is really the cure for a burnt out brain, missing the world before social media, where Disney adults come from, whether you’d live in a perfect fake world if you knew it wasn’t real, The Truman Show, why people watch strangers vlog their grocery shopping, the grass always being greener, how New York City isn’t what people think it is, living vicariously through influencers, filters changing what normal faces look like, the Snapchat dog filter, pimple patches, how Amanda would feel if her audience turned out to be under fifteen, creators who accidentally end up with young audiences like PewDiePie and MrBeast, why The Sims still has such a loyal following, and Andrew hinting at a life sim game he’s been building.

In this Episode We talk about a perfect weather day, whether Cupertino really has perfect weather all year, why Hollywood ended up in California, Apple’s new event and Amanda wanting her iPhone 12 back, technology stagnating while AI takes off, how fast drives made loading screens disappear, whether you’re actually getting the internet speed you pay for, the first time you ever had Wi-Fi, data plans and parents yelling at you for using the internet, how much data Snapchat eats, a man standing perfectly still in a field who was definitely dumping a body, whether you’d get paid for solving a murder, becoming an information broker, Nightcrawler, Amanda chasing crimes on a police scanner app, whether she could be a 911 operator, people who call 911 over nothing, the night a boiler puff back sent every fire truck in town to Amanda’s house, meth lab explosions, how pharmacies track Sudafed, what breaking bad actually means, and whether you’d take fifty thousand dollars in cash to be teleported to a random spot in a random country and find your own way home.

In this Episode We talk about being past Labor Day, Amanda starting to like fall more than summer, whether retirement homes are actually depressing or secretly a great time, the difference between a retirement community and a nursing home, Amanda’s great aunt who stole jewelry in her nursing home, her nanny who never cursed once until Alzheimer’s, the railroad worker who survived a spike through the head, the guy who filled a microwave with cement around his own head, a man who didn’t feel a pole go through his skull, the Vine of the guy who got a dart in the forehead, how people survive the impossible and then die tripping on the stairs, smokers who live to a hundred, the man who never bathed and died after he finally did, a college friend who stank so bad you could smell his whole hallway, what it would be like to see smells, why hygiene is the hardest truth to tell a friend, whether cancer has a smell, how heavy you’d let yourself get if it couldn’t hurt you, going full Nikocado and monetizing it, how expensive fast food has gotten, a fourteen dollar Raising Cane’s combo, what an iPhone actually costs to make, brand loyalty, Gen Z going analog, and deleting social media off your phone.

In this Episode We talk about it officially being September, the summer going by too fast, Amanda not making it to the beach once, Andrew handing Amanda his orange instead of a microphone, Andrew's trip to Rhode Island and Amanda's trip to Aruba, the McDonald's wedding, the worst places to get proposed to, people proposing at someone else's wedding or bar mitzvah, the one scenario where Amanda would allow it, how weddings and money bring out jealousy, how nobody can afford a house anymore, the mansions in Rhode Island, squatters, a storefront full of umbrellas with a cow out front that turned out to be a dog, Andrew's rock and brick collection, Andrew and his mom getting caught taking rocks from what looked like abandoned land and a man blocking them in and threatening to call the police, truckers leaving jugs of pee on the side of the road, Amanda's Twitch streams, GTA 6 and the TikTok panic about boyfriends dating Lucia, GTA roleplay servers, and acting out a traffic stop that ends with Andrew revealing he's the rock cop.

In this Episode we talk about who our ideal sponsor would be, doing a fake ad read for the Chili's triple dipper, doing another one for NASA complete with a word from Buzz Aldrin, whether we'd actually go to space, leaving a legacy versus exploding in a rocket, the teacher who died on the shuttle, Sally Ride being asked if a hundred tampons was enough for a six day flight, Amanda thinking she was pregnant recently, being scared of what pregnancy does to your body, scheduled C-sections versus natural birth, how big an epidural needle is, what surrogacy costs in New York and how you get matched, IVF and frozen embryos, what an umbilical cord actually does and both of us thinking it was basically an esophagus, midwives and home births, the woman on TikTok who won't see a doctor while pregnant, the woman who faked a pregnancy with a doll, people who keep reborn dolls after a loss and when grief turns into delusion, the egg baby project in middle school and having shared custody of an egg, why every kid wants to be a teacher, whether children should get apprenticeships, being forced to pick a career at eighteen before your frontal lobe is done, whether going back to school is worth the years, plumbers and underwater welders and air traffic controllers, a brick contractor with a beautiful house, and trying to name one single person who genuinely loves their job.

In this Episode We talk about Amanda convincing herself she's having a stroke, whether flushed is something you look or something you feel, what our most memorable years were, another dump truck ruining the recording, using ChatGPT to build a pop culture quiz on the spot, the 2016 round with Leonardo DiCaprio finally winning an Oscar, Beyoncé's Lemonade, Pokémon Go, Zootopia, Stranger Things, Batman v Superman, the Cubs breaking a hundred and eight year drought, Rogue One, Closer by the Chainsmokers, Harambe, the mannequin challenge, Sia, and Brangelina splitting up, Amanda not knowing who Brangelina was, the news round with Brexit, the 2016 election, the Pulse nightclub shooting, Prince and Muhammad Ali dying, the Rio Olympics, Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize and Hurricane Matthew, scared world syndrome, the 2013 round for Andrew with Blurred Lines, The Wolf of Wall Street, Wrecking Ball, Man of Steel, Beyoncé's surprise album, This Is the End, Royals, The Conjuring, Get Lucky and the Breaking Bad finale, a coworker who thought the lyric was up all night to pet puppies, first phones, sidekicks and Razrs, the iPod touch, coloring in a shattered iPhone 4 with markers, how old phones survived anything, the app where you tilt your phone to drink a beer and have to pay for the milk, and how bad Siri got.

In this Episode We talk about Dolly the sheep and the first time anything was ever cloned, why it was a sheep and not a llama, whether clones live shorter lives because of deformities, trying to clone a mammoth without the full DNA, why we don't clone people, a truck that pulled into the parking lot to dump its load right as we started recording, the overgrown lot that finally got cut down, gene editing and whether China is designing human beings, gene spliced mosquitoes and whether that counts as biowarfare, wanting raccoons that can't get rabies, editing out cancer, the religious objection that only God gets to create life, whether test tube babies count as created in sin, what you would actually do if you had a clone of yourself, Amanda's plan to train hers for a month and send it to work in her place, whether it would come out as a baby or as an adult, what a clone would know on day one, whether it would rebel once it figured out the arrangement, the two of them living on a compound and splitting the work six months on and six months off, whether Chris would be weirded out watching her clone date someone else, tattooing a number two on the clone's forehead so nobody mixes them up, getting in a fight with yourself, what it would do to your identity to learn you were the copy, and whether you'd track down the original and steal their life.

In this Episode we talk about a humid August day and summer going by too fast, packing your days full to get ahead of the winter slump, Amanda going to her sister's bachelorette party in the Poconos and pretending the rental is a villa, how badly Love Island is mixed and having to master it yourself on the remote, the premise of Too Hot to Handle, the robot named Lana that runs the show, the prisoner's dilemma, whether producers plant decoys to make people break the rules, how much plastic surgery is on these shows, whether there are people building their bodies specifically to get cast, how you can afford to leave your job for a month to go on a dating show, the risk of getting voted off the first episode and having nothing to come back to, Temptation Island, Married at First Sight and Love is Blind, the suicides connected to the Love Island franchise, how going on a show like that becomes a permanent part of your life, Bonnie Blue's old real estate listings, wanting a disclaimer at the top of these shows saying these people are not normal, influencers and IRL streamers not being well adjusted people, how there are never any real consequences for them, losing your sense of reality when people stop seeing you as a person, and inventing our own dating show where contestants have to conduct Arctic research in Alaska with decoy scientists hidden among them.