Spirit Levels

Jenny Valentish and Frank Magree

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.

  1. Life Coach Cults

    25/03/2024

    Life Coach Cults

    If your life coach is a psychopath, is that necessarily a bad thing? Coaching is marketed to wannabes as a luxury, business-class lifestyle that grants you total freedom and easy money. (And oh yeah, you might have to deal with some clients in crisis, too.) You’ve just got to learn how to hustle, which means paying a whoop-load of cash to other coaches to get 'the codes'. Possibly for the rest of your life. This episode, Frank and Jenny revisit their favourite topic, piggybacking off the Netflix UK documentary Psychopath Life Coach. We ask our guest Danielle Ryan – a former life coach who now makes explainer videos dissecting the scammier side of the industry – what trends she’s seeing. These range from the escalating industry of coaches coaching coaches, to the ‘fitness coach to business coach pipeline’, to business coaches rebranding as spiritual coaches. Along the way, Frank and Jenny discuss Matthew McConaughey’s infiltration into coaching, sweat-lodge disaster guy James Arthur Ray, NLP, Landmark and Dale Carnegie. We also get Jenny’s Indonesian language teacher Jamsen on the show, to talk about how life coaches are taking over Bali and his take on whether that’s all bad. By the way, if you dig this episode, you’ll love our eps Make Me a Life Coach and also the episode Energy Healing, Manifesting and The Placebo Effect. LINKS Danielle Ryan on the most common business coaching scams. Danielle Ryan’s videos on NLP, part one and part two. Jenny’s Bahasa teacher, Jamsen. Hire him! Jenny talking about life coaching on ABC radio and Disrupt radio (scroll down to Mar 12). Further reading: Is Life Coaching Just Modern Sophistry? (Quillette) Life Coaching Industry Scams (BBC). The Cult-like Language That’s Coursing Through Business (Inc). Jay Shetty’s monk back-story questioned (The Guardian). Leave us a voice message for a future episode on Speakpipe. Spirit Levels on Instagram. Our newsletter. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    1hr 6min
  2. Nudity and Naturism

    18/03/2024

    Nudity and Naturism

    The English and the Australians – of which we here at Spirit Levels represent both – are notoriously prudish when it comes to nudity, so Frank and Jenny want to know if they can break their conditioning. This episode takes us from tischtennis halls of Berlin to the secret beaches of Australia. Listen along: 01.16 Frank slept in his mum and dad’s bed till he was six. 02.33 Titillation is not the same as nudity (yeah, Frank). 03.56 Lucian Freud: Oh my god. 04.20 Are all nudists = perverts or is that just an English equation? 05.48 Nude sport options in Berlin. 06.35 Visiting Stadtbad Neukölln. 08.41 Freikopterkultur (FKK) and ‘free body culture’ in Germany. 10.15 Ela, from Frankfurt Oder, tells us about FKK when she was growing up. 16.18 How Bravo magazine freaked out Ela’s sister’s host family in the US. 18.21 Finally! Time for the nude table tennis. 20.01 Naturists and conservation (featuring a cameo from a rare orchid). 22.35 Jenny and Frank go ‘beyond the wire’ in Portsea. 25.02 A sad story about jetskis. 29.44 Ritualistic nude events, like Dark M**o’s Winter Solstice Swim and the Sydney Skinny. 30.20 Yoni sunning – the kinda Taoist practice that draws in solar energy and Vitamin D. LINKS Stadtbad Neukölln Dark M**o Nude Solstice Swim The Sydney Skinny Leave us a voice message for a future episode on Speakpipe Spirit Levels on Instagram Our newsletter Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    33 min
  3. What Can a Performance Coach Teach Us All?

    11/03/2024

    What Can a Performance Coach Teach Us All?

    Sport psychology is psychology on steroids. Athletes experience success failure, goal-setting and pressure at a heightened level, so delving into their mindsets has so much to teach us mere mortals about optimising our everyday lives. Our guest is mental fitness coach Brett Stephens, aka Moose. He’s a former professional footballer who then became a performance coach on the professional tennis circuit for over 20 years (including full-time for Pete Sampras in the last 5 years of the tennis legend’s career), also working with surfers, golfers and other athletes. He’s a larger-than-life character on the Mornington Peninsula in Australia, where he lives now. We’ve time-stamped Moose’s interview below so you can jump to the key points. 05.55 Pete Sampras’s game plan when he didn’t win a tournament for two years 08.20 Moose’s philosophy of effort over perfection 09.25 Your attitude towards losing is more important than your attitude towards winning 09.52 How his first conversation with a new client goes 11.03 The trap of getting caught up in the outcome 11.34 Use negative thoughts as fuel 13.07 You may be evolving fast, but so is your industry 14.21 The language of mindset coaching 15.19 You can lose your temper, but you must reset fast 16.03 The impact of social media distraction on performance 18.29 How do you deal with, overzealous parents? 19.31 Is it important to visualise being number one? 23.51 The optimum state of ‘relaxed intensity’ 25.08 The chief lesson Moose learned on his AFL journey 27.57 Working with Pete Sampras LINKS Moose as motivational speaker Leave us a voice message for a future episode on Speakpipe Spirit Levels on Instagram Our newsletter Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    31 min

Trailer

4.8
out of 5
27 Ratings

About

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.