High Five Hot Mess Podcast

“For years, I never ordered what I actually wanted.” Losing yourself in a relationship rarely happens all at once. Sometimes it happens one small compromise at a time, until one day you realize you don't even know what you want anymore. Lisa Wilson and Lisa Smith welcome guest Shea Daspin for an honest, funny, and sometimes emotional conversation about people‑pleasing, losing your identity in marr...

How much woo is too woo? Crystals in your bra, moon water, past-life regression, and spiritual wellness trends that make you wonder: Have we officially lost our minds? Lisa Wilson and Lisa Smith are asking where curiosity ends and complete nonsense begins. From Mercury retrograde ruining dinner to questionable cleanses, psychic readings, sound baths, and the promise of healing your money problems...

I thought tarot card readings were a total scam. Then my tarot reading started coming true, month by month, and now my group chat is on fire. So can someone actually predict your future? Lisa Wilson went from skeptic to believer after a 12-month tarot reading called a surprise money call in May, a wave of influential people in July, and a hard August she never saw coming. Lisa Smith, a longtime ta...

You know that friend whose name pops up on your phone and you already feel tired? She calls. She unloads. She feels so much better. And somehow, you need a nap, a snack, and possibly an exorcist. So… are energy vampires actually real, or are some people just exhausting? This week, Lisa Wilson and Lisa Smith are joined by energy healer Jenifer Freer to talk about the people who seem to drain the li...

What Do You Believe That You Can’t Explain? Have you ever had a gut feeling that something terrible was about to happen—and then it did? Or seen something so strange that you're still trying to explain it years later? This week on High Five Hot Mess, Lisa Wilson and Lisa Smith are talking about women's intuition, premonitions, unexplained experiences and all the things we believe even when we can'...

You finally moved into your fresh-start house after your divorce. Then your five-year-old looks at the foot of the bed and says, "Mom, there are three men standing there." Lisa S had to move out of her first house fast because something in it did not want her there. The blessing she asked for ended with "maybe you should get therapy." Lisa W is a ghost hunter who carries salt in her car and was ra...

When the World Feels Out of Control: What Can We Actually Do About It? The world is on fire, but dinner is still at six. This week, we’re asking the question that keeps coming up every time we open our phones: What can we actually do about any of this? From terrifying headlines and AI anxiety to comfort murder, apocalypse prepping, K-pop and some highly questionable self-soothing techniques, we’re...

Are We Really Sorry? | Why Women Can't Stop Apologizing If you've ever apologized for taking up space, asking a simple question, or just existing in someone's way — this one's for you. This week Lisa W and Lisa S go head-to-head on two completely different relationships with the word "sorry." One of them almost never apologizes. The other says it so often it's basically background noise — she trie...

Are We Too Old to Fangirl? | BTS, Fandom & Finding Joy After 50 When did women supposedly get too old to completely lose their minds over something they love? Men can scream at football games, spend a fortune on tickets and build weekends around their fandom. But when grown women fangirl over BTS, K-pop, a TV show or celebrity crush, we're supposed to be embarrassed? Absolutely not. This week...

We’ve both been in things that felt a little cult-y. You probably have too. You just called it your job, your book club or your weekly mahjong game. This week, we’re breaking down why smart, high functioning, skeptical women can still get pulled into cult like situations. From a retail kickoff that had us singing Eye of the Tiger on chairs in boxing robes to the extremely real cult like energy of...

Why Are We Always Ready to Throw Hands? This week, Lisa and Lisa are asking why midlife women are so ready to fight, flee, or freeze over the smallest things. Have years of chronic stress, Gen X trauma, menopause, and being the responsible one left us permanently stuck in fight mode? Or have we simply had enough? Honestly, it could be all of the above. Along the way, Lisa S becomes the angry Amazo...

Have you ever wondered if you're actually happier alone… or if you've just gotten really good at protecting your peace? This week on High Five Hot Mess , Lisa Wilson and Lisa Smith tackle a question more women seem to be asking than ever before: Are we better off alone? From dating before cell phones to navigating relationships after 50, we talk honestly about the expectations Gen X women grew up...

Family emergencies don't just test your plan—they test your family. Most of us prepare wills, insurance, and paperwork. Very few of us prepare for what happens to our relationships when someone gets sick, a parent needs care, or life suddenly changes. This week, Lisa sits down with licensed marriage and family therapist Ryan Wynder, LMFT , to talk about the conversations every family should have b...

High Five Hot Mess Podcast Nobody prepares you for the moment you realize you're becoming the adult. When a parent begins showing signs of dementia, families are suddenly faced with impossible questions: Is this normal aging or dementia? When should we step in? How do we help without taking away independence? What happens when siblings don't agree? When is it time for memory care? In this episode...

What does a Death Doula do, and when should your family call one? We know what a birth doula is, but what is a death doula? In this episode of Help! I Need an Adult , we're joined by Traci Arieli , End-of-Life Doula, educator, grief coach, and founder of Comforting Closure , to talk about how Death Doulas help families navigate serious illness, hospice, dying, and grief with both compassion and pr...

Your Authenticity Is Your Biggest Strength — And Your Biggest Weakness What if the very thing that makes you different is also the thing that makes life harder? In this Gold Star episode of High Five Hot Mess , Lisa Wilson and Lisa Smith dive into one of the biggest contradictions of adulthood: authenticity. Is being yourself really the key to happiness—or does it come with a price? From workplace...

Without My Job, Who Was I? | Rebuilding After Quiet Firing What happens when the job you've built your entire identity around suddenly disappears? Lisa Smith spent more than 20 years building a successful career. Then, after a divorce, becoming a single parent, and a decade of trying to fit into increasingly toxic workplaces, she realized something was terribly wrong. She wasn't being coached. She...

One year ago, we hit Publish on our very first episode with absolutely no idea what we were doing. We thought we'd record in Microsoft Teams. We thought editing would be easy. We thought sponsors would be our biggest problem. Instead, we threw iPads, accidentally deleted episodes, cried in the shower, fought with podcast software, got banned from Facebook, and somehow kept showing up every Thursda...

Show Notes High Five Hot Mess | Help! I Need an Adult: Hospice – What Families Wish They Knew Most families don't learn about hospice until they're in the middle of a crisis. One phone call changes everything, and suddenly you're expected to make impossible decisions for someone you love. In this episode of Help! I Need an Adult , Lisa Wilson and Lisa Smith sit down with hospice physician Dr. Jord...

When did you become the adult in the room? For many of us, it happens without warning. One day your parents are handling everything. The next day you're trying to figure out where the bank accounts are, who's paying the bills, whether there's a will, and how you're supposed to make decisions nobody prepared you for. In this episode of our Help! I Need an Adult series, we sit down with hospice phys...

What happens when the people who always told you to "figure it out" suddenly need you to figure it out for them? In this episode of High Five Hot Mess, Lisa Wilson and Lisa Smith talk about the moment so many adults eventually face: becoming responsible for aging parents, family finances, medical decisions, caregiving, and problems nobody prepared us to handle. Growing up Gen X, many of us learned...

This week, AI made Lisa cry. Twice. Not because of a family crisis. Not because of work. Not because of a fight. Because of robots. One chatbot refused to schedule carpet cleaning no matter how many times Lisa Smith explained she never picked Sunday. Meanwhile, Lisa Wilson spent four weeks battling podcast software, support tickets, audio glitches, AI processing, and what can only be described as...

I had a go bag. Not a hurricane go bag. A leave-my-life go bag. For years, Lisa Wilson kept a secret "leave-my-life" bag at work...cash, a burner phone, extra clothes, and a plan to disappear if she ever needed to start over. The strange part? She wasn't trying to escape a bad life. She loved her husband. She loved her friends. She loved her job. So why did she still feel the need to have an exit...

Do people who say no actually live longer? This week Lisa and Lisa get into the emotional cost of always saying yes — and why so many women feel guilty setting boundaries, disappointing people, or putting themselves first. It starts with a study Lisa found claiming that people who resist outside pressure and act on their own terms may actually live longer. Which immediately sent both of them into...

You got the job. You hit the number. You built the life. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, you started wondering why you still feel tired, restless, or quietly empty. Turns out, that's not a personal failure. That's your brain doing exactly what it was designed to do. This week Lisa Wilson and Lisa Smith went down a happiness rabbit hole and found Yale professor Laurie Santos — whose class...