Best Gabe Ever · Gabe S. Dunn | Noted Bisexual Inc.

Gabe and John Blakeslee Save The Economy

April 8, 2026·50 min·4 clips

A college student kept a glass eye secret from his parents after a blackout accident with an airsoft gun.

1. Best Gabe Ever hosts Gabe and guest John Blakeslee discuss cooking advice, Reddit confessions, and workplace imposter syndrome. 2. John Blakeslee is a policy researcher and writer who is also Alison Raskin's husband; Gabe notes that John is the first non-ex to appear on a Best Gabe Ever episode after several of Alison's former partners appeared on their shared prior show Just Between Us. 3. The episode's thesis is that confident incompetence and social performance often matter more than actual expertise, illustrated through three separate Reddit posts. 4. John recommends two chicken recipes for a vegetarian of 15 years returning to meat: the 'Ode to Zuni' roast chicken from AOC Beverly Hills, requiring rosemary, thyme, garlic, and a two-day refrigerator brine, and a thin-pounded chicken milanese covered in arugula and shallots. 5. John argues that texture — not taste — is the main barrier for long-term vegetarians reintroducing chicken, and that a crispy milanese 'covered in arugula' mentally reads closer to an eggplant dish. 6. Both hosts acknowledge being 'mostly vegetarian' for environmental and ethical reasons, with Gabe citing factory farming as 'indefensible' and John noting he boycotted numerous fast-food chains over their stances during the Israel–Gaza conflict. 7. A separate cooking thread prompts John to confess he has never mastered the poached egg, partly because he developed what appears to be an egg allergy, and Gabe admits caramelized onions always burn a second too late. 8. Gabe describes cooking Christmas Eve dinner for an ex's family of more than 20 people and distills the lesson as: 'start the pasta water first, you cannot change physics.' 9. Fast-food nostalgia produces a story from Gabe about driving a carpool of middle schoolers to a KFC–Taco Bell combo as a teenager and ordering only quesadillas and biscuits to stay within kosher rules. 10. Gabe's mother told him as a child there was a 'Kosher McDonald's' called 'McMosh's,' cooked the food herself, and put it in fake McDonald's bags to give her children the feeling of having eaten at the chain. 11. A Reddit confession post describes a college student who shot out their own eye while blackout drunk and on Xanax in 2019, had it surgically removed, and received a high-quality prosthetic paid for by their wealthy girlfriend's father — keeping the secret from family and hometown friends for seven years. 12. Gabe and John debate the plausibility of the story, ultimately agreeing that modern prosthetic eyes move in tandem with the healthy eye via muscle connection, making the concealment plausible. 13. Listener comments include an uncle who placed his glass eye on a pool table and said 'always keep your eye on the ball,' and an account of an elderly man whose prosthetic rolled along the pavement after a mild heart attack, causing bystanders to faint. 14. The main advice post describes a data engineer at a German logistics company who spent eight months faking competence while building an end-to-end data pipeline ingesting real-time shipment tracking from carriers including FedEx and DHL into a Snowflake schema. 15. Facing a Monday presentation on the transformation layer — normalizing 14 different data formats with inconsistent field names like 'estimated delivery,' 'exp dlv dt,' and 'when' — the engineer slept 12 hours over four days, watched 15 hours of YouTube tutorials, and 'brutally abused ChatGPT.' 16. The engineer's decisive move was entering the meeting with three prepared open-ended questions directed at senior staff, who then talked for 40 of the 60 minutes; the boss afterward called it 'impressive work' and assigned the engineer to lead Q2. 17. Gabe responds with a direct-to-camera declaration that software and data engineers 'are full of shit,' estimating they work 15 of 40 hours and invent tasks, then discloses he lied his way into the IT department of Shape magazine at 23 and spent most of the time watching videos online until fired. 18. The tone throughout is casual, digressive, and comedic, with frequent tangents — the glass-eye segment generates sustained riffing, and John's policy-research background prompts a brief unfinished aside about an economic model project before the episode closes. 19. People who enjoy workplace imposter-syndrome humor, cooking recommendations grounded in specific techniques, and absurdist Reddit threads will find this episode particularly rewarding. 20. Those wanting structured expert advice, serious career guidance, or episodes without frequent topic changes are unlikely to enjoy this format.

As heard by us

Advice, banter, and domestic detail, with a clear nudge toward Love in the Time of Cholera.

This episode plays like an advice hang with a long-awaited guest, John Blakeslee, and that anticipation gives the conversation an easy lift. The point is less a formal setup than the shifting questions around who gets invited, who gets treated like an expert, and why Alison…

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Why you'd press play

Play it for John Blakeslee's professional-husband energy and the detours it kicks up.

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