Lost & Found with Karmen Wiid

It’s been a wild few months, and this episode is the full catch-up.

There was a passport situation that had me low-key committing administrative crimes. Bali, where I hosted my first-ever group trip, learned to scuba dive, and swam with manta rays.

Then I hitchhiked through Thailand with a bunch of friends, slept in abandoned hostels and lost resorts, went wild camping on a deserted island, didn’t touch my phone for days, and had the most insane moment of my life.

And then… I turned my phone back on and got news that changed everything.

We’ll also talk:

So yeah. There’s a lot to cover.

Let’s catch up.

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Watch the Bali group trip video

Watch the deserted island camping video

Find out more about my upcoming Thailand group trip

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✨ Let’s Stay Connected:

📕 Buy my book — Untethered: A Beginner’s Guide To Solo Travel

📸 Follow along on Instagram

📝 Read the blog

Today I’m sitting down with Eileen Botes, chief cosmetic formulator for Willa Krause Skin Care and DC Laboratories.

Eileen has a background in molecular biology and biotechnology, decades of experience in the industry, and a rare ability to talk about skin with both scientific rigour and deep nuance.

We get into:

Why your skin barrier is the real non-negotiable and how to protect it

How climate and environment change what your skin needs

How to tell the difference between science and marketing hype 

How diet, sleep, stress and joy literally show up on your face

And why your twenties are the “puberty of adulthood” for your skin (and how to deal with it)

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Find your nearest Willa Krause Salon or Consultant 

Buy Willa Krause Skin Care Online

Become a marketer and start selling Willa Krause Skin Care!

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Let’s Stay Connected:

📕 Buy my book — Untethered: A Beginner’s Guide To Solo Travel 

📸 Follow along on Instagram 

📝 Read the blog 

Join The Lost & Found Book Club

+ Free episode workbook

In a world of hot takes, rage-bait, cancel culture, and instant certainty, thinking slowly has become an act of rebellion.

In this episode, we talk about what we lose when we trade nuance for noise, how binary thinking flattens our depth in politics, in love, and even in the way we see ourselves.

We’ll talk about how algorithms reward outrage over understanding, and how AI is training us to outsource our thoughts instead of forming them. 

And because awareness isn’t enough, I’ll walk you through a 7-Day Mind Gym (free PDF included!)... a simple, reflective practice to start rebuilding your attention, your curiosity, and your capacity to think for yourself again.

With help from Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Kierkegaard, and bell hooks, we explore how to hold more than one truth at a time, how to listen without rushing to defend, and how to stay human in a world that keeps asking us to react.

This isn’t about neutrality. It’s about resistance.

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Let’s Stay Connected:

📕 Buy my book — Untethered: A Beginner’s Guide To Solo Travel

📸 Follow along on Instagram

📝 Read the blog

🌴 Join my group trip to Bali

Join The Lost & Found Book Club

Get the free episode workbook

Your twenties come with a lot of noise.

Everyone has an opinion on who you should be, how you should love, how fast you should grow, and what your life should look like by now.

But what if most of that advice… was never actually true?

In this episode, we get into some of the biggest lies we’re sold about love, identity, success, healing, and what it means to “get your life together.”

If you’ve ever felt behind, overwhelmed, heartbroken, or unsure of who you’re becoming, this one’s for you.

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Let’s Stay Connected:

📕 Buy my book — Untethered: A Beginner’s Guide To Solo Travel

📸 Follow along on Instagram

📝 Read the blog

🌴 Join my group trip to Bali

Join The Lost & Found Book Club

My first FAQ episode! 

We’re talking everything: solo travel, love, work-life balance, loneliness, heartbreak, creativity, and what “home” even means when you’re constantly leaving it.

This one’s honest and a little chaotic. Kind of like my life.

If you’ve ever thought about packing your bags and building a life on your own terms, I think you’ll find a piece of yourself somewhere in here.

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Let’s Stay Connected:

📕 Buy my book — Untethered: A Beginner’s Guide To Solo Travel

📸 Follow along on Instagram

📝 Read the blog

🌴 Join my group trip to Bali

Join The Lost & Found Book Club

From angry teenage feminist, scowling at boys who opened doors for me, to my misandry era, to now. In this episode, I trace how my thinking about feminism, and about being a woman, has changed over the past 12 years.

We’ll talk about casual misogyny, bad sex ed, double standards, feminist theory, Anaïs Nin, and why I now believe feminism is about the freedom to decide what femininity or masculinity looks like for you.

This isn’t a prescriptive episode. I’m not here to tell you what to believe. I’m here to offer you my story as an invitation: to explore what feminism, femininity and masculinity mean to you, and how to live them out in a way that feels completely, unapologetically yours.

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Let’s Stay Connected:

📕 Buy my book — Untethered: A Beginner’s Guide To Solo Travel

📸 Follow along on Instagram

📝 Read the blog

🌴 Join my group trip to Bali

Join The Lost & Found Book Club

One little decision “for the plot” landed me behind the bar of a hostel in Hoi An, Vietnam.

In this episode, I’m sharing the real story. From five-hour night shifts and crazy pool parties to found-family friendships, I’ll take you inside the chaos, the laughter, and the hidden curriculum of bartending.

I’ll also answer some of the questions I get most often in my DMs:

Come sit with me, let’s catch up.

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Let’s Stay Connected:

📕 Buy my book — Untethered: A Beginner’s Guide To Solo Travel

📸 Follow along on Instagram

📝 Read the blog

🌴 Join my group trip to Bali

Get $$s off Worldpackers 

Join The Lost & Found Book Club

What happens when a woman refuses to be likable, palatable, or contained?

In this episode of Lost & Found, we sink our teeth into Chelsea G. Summers’s provocative novel A Certain Hunger, a literary thriller about Dorothy Daniels, a glamorous food critic with big appetites: for food, for sex, and for human flesh.

Far more than a cannibalistic shocker, this book is a biting commentary on female desire, hunger, power, and storytelling itself. We unpack its themes one by one - female villainy as feminism, appetite as rebellion, consumption as intimacy, culinary satire, and the voyeuristic complicity of readers. 

Along the way I will draw on feminist theory, cultural criticism, and my own reflections as a reader who laughed, cringed, journaled, and sometimes even craved espresso while turning the pages.

Polarizing, visceral, and unsettling, A Certain Hunger refuses to leave readers unchanged.

📚 Plus, the big reveal of the Lost & Found Book Club pick for September: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri.

✨ Join the book club and keep the conversation going! 

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Let’s Stay Connected:

📕 Buy my book — Untethered: A Beginner’s Guide To Solo Travel 

📸 Follow along on Instagram 

📝 Read my blog 

🌴 Join my group trip to Bali 

Join The Lost & Found Book Club

Why do I solo travel? It’s the question I get in my DMs more than any other. The truth is, it isn’t always easy. Yes, it can be lonely, intimidating, and even a little chaotic at times. But it’s also the most liberating, perspective-shifting, and life-affirming thing I’ve ever done for myself.

In this episode, I’m making the case for why everyone should take a solo trip, whether it’s a weekend getaway or a year-long adventure. I share the 12 biggest lessons that travelling alone has taught me: from breaking free of the “blueprint,” to learning self-reliance, deepening emotional resilience, opening yourself up to unexpected connections, and becoming the kind of person who trusts themselves fully.

If you’ve ever dreamt of booking a trip but felt too scared, or if you’ve been wondering whether solo travel is really worth it, this episode is for you. I’ll also leave you with a few journal prompts to help you uncover whose blueprint you’ve been living by, when you feel most like yourself, and what dreams you’ve been putting off.

Because once you experience the freedom of solo travel, you’ll never settle for a life that feels small again.

PS… this episode is based on a chapter of my book, Untethered: A Beginner’s Guide to Solo Travel. Check it out here.

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Let’s Stay Connected:

📸 Follow along on Instagram

📝 Read the blog

🌴 Join my group trip to Bali

Join The Lost & Found Book Club

This is the second instalment in our two-part Getting Out of a Rut series. It’s for those moments when you look around at your life and think, How did I end up here? When the spark is gone, the days feel copy–paste, and you’re mourning something you can’t quite name.

In this episode, I’m sharing the tools, experiments, and uncomfortable (but freeing) truths that have pulled me out of my own deepest ruts. This isn’t about surface-level fixes, this is about getting to the root. Stripping your life down to the base, figuring out the values you actually want to live by, and building something real from there.

If you’re ready to stop waiting for life to happen and start feeling like yourself again (or maybe for the very first time), this is where we begin.

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Let’s Stay Connected:

📕 Buy my book — Untethered: A Beginner’s Guide To Solo Travel 

📸 Follow along on Instagram 

📝 Read the blog 

🌴 Join my group trip to Bali 

Join The Lost & Found Book Club