Spirit Levels
In this weekly show, Frank Magree and Jenny Valentish explore wellness claims. With the help of experts and enthusiasts, the pair road-test disciplines and experiences such as cuddle clubs, facilitated breath repatterning, tantra, motivational techniques, extreme weight cutting, saunas, fasting, colonics, and radical couples therapy, to see if they can extract practical benefits from the more out-there concepts. Now meet your hosts.
Journalist Jenny Valentish considers herself to have a healthy sense of scepticism. She’s a former amateur bodybuilder and amateur Muay Thai fighter (a professional amateur, if you will), with a tendency to treat her body mean to keep it keen. Her book Everything Harder Than Everyone Else delves into what drives athletes who push their bodies to extremes, while her Walkley-nominated memoir Woman of Substances examines a bigger picture about addictive behaviour and gender, crunching 300 studies and interviewing 30 experts in the process.
She has the perfect foil in actor Frank Magree, a cold water therapy and breathwork devotee, keen to go deeper into new age and anti-ageing activities. The tennis player in him is fascinated by peptides and recovery hacks. The performer in him harbours a not-so-secret desire to become more guru-like. Frank is an award-winning filmmaker 12 times over and as an actor specialising in bad dudes has been murdered 10 times by his estimation. Hopefully his obsession with longevity books and biohackers will preserve him as a fighting-fit fella in real life.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Update frequency
- every 6 days
- Average duration
- 28 minutes
- Episodes
- 33
- Years Active
- 2023 - 2024
The First Rule of Cuddle Club...
When confirmed sociophobe Jenny tells Frank about the Japanese trend of cuddle cafes, and how cuddle therapists and snuggle parties are now popping up in Australia, it looks like she’ll be leading th…
Do First Crushes Shape Our Patterns?
Think back to you, aged 10. If your way of demonstrating romantic interest entailed throwing a tennis ball at someone’s head in recess, has anything really changed in your passage to adulthood, other…
Survive the Christmas Party: Game Plans for Introverts
Welcome to episode nine, where Jenny outlines her top 10 game plans for introverts, sociophobes, awkwards, stuck-ups and wary Marys who can’t avoid the Christmas party season.
Let’s check if this epis…
Breathwork and Altered States
Breathwork is increasingly infiltrating our daily routines, thanks to the popularity of James Nestor’s book Breath and the Wim Hof Method. As Nestor says, it’s the new science of a lost art.
This epis…
Getting Shredded
Bodybuilders are perfectionists. They’re fastidious on internet forums, economical in their IRL conversations, and at the gym they wear ‘No excuses’ singlets. As kids they may have been the ones insi…
Taking the Plunge: Cold Water Immersion
Cold water immersion has many different faces. There’s the cold blast in the shower; ice baths; wild swimming… Which one are you prepared to look in the eye?
Frank is building an ice bath at Jenny’s …
Are ADHD Obsessions Bad?
ADHD coach Meghann Birks joins Jenny and Frank on the show to nut this one out. Being 'obsessive' doesn't have the most positive connotations, but our hyperfixations can also connect us to community,…
MDMA Couples Therapy (and Other Intimacy Ideas)
Australia looks set to be the first country to run an MDMA-assisted couples therapy trial. What is it about ecstasy that researchers and couples therapists found promising back in the 70s and 80s, be…
Run Before You Can Walk
Is throwing yourself full tilt into a physical activity a noble leap or a nosedive? It's marathon season in Australia, inspiring many of us to leap from 5k to much grander feats of endurance. And run…
Make Me a Life Coach
As of 2023, the life coaching industry is worth $1.5 billion, with almost 23,000 coaches in the US alone. In Bali that figure is unknown, but if you've been to Ubud or Canggu lately you'll know it's …
Go to Sleep NOW!
If we're going to get you throwing yourself into inspiring new pursuits every week, first we need to improve your sleep. This week's guest, Mike Toner, runs EDM/dance touring agency Thick as Thieves,…
Coming up on Spirit Levels, starting October 3, 2023
"The room was like a zoo. People were jumping up, animating tigers and elephants like they were on some sort of psychedelic drug."
"When you haven't slept for two days, they'll be in your face, barki…
Spirit Levels trailer
In this weekly Acast show, launching October 3, 2023, journalist Jenny Valentish and actor/filmmaker Frank Magree pressure test the wellness industry, from the weird to the wonderful to the WTF. Jenn…