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.

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