INSIDE AND OUTSIDE: Nature + Pop Culture News with Jessica Murnane · Jessica Murnane

How Our Mind/Bodies React To The Smell Of Flowers + The Darker Side of the Wellness Industry with Kerrilyn Pamer (founder of CAP Beauty)

·1 hr 10 min·4 clips
Jessica Murnane says politics hidden from public view often signal beliefs that are not okay.
1. Inside and Outside opens Season 2 with Jessica Murnane talking to Kerrilyn Pamer about flowers, animals, and the Maha movement. 2. Jessica Murnane is the host, horticultural therapist, author, and founder of Basker, while Kerrilyn Pamer is the founder of CAP Beauty, a plant-powered skincare and pantry brand. 3. The episode asks what nature, scent, and wellness mean when they connect to politics, public health, and community care. 4. Jessica says she helps people use nature and gardening to help their brains and bodies feel more calm through Basker. 5. Kerrilyn says she grew up in Portland and central Oregon, spent summers at a nature center, and volunteered in the birds of prey section. 6. She describes being drawn to animals more than the human world and says that helped her through a challenging childhood. 7. Jessica notes that Kerrilyn's website, newsletter, and brand aesthetics are beautiful, and Kerrilyn connects that sensibility to birds' texture, layers, and majesty. 8. Kerrilyn says she had her own bird glove and saw injured eagles and owls as proof that humans can help animals in distress. 9. She says owls still matter to her now, including the owl that landed on her roof the first night in a new house two years ago. 10. Jessica brings up a flower-fragrance study, naming carnation, stock, and lilies as scents that affected concentration, tension, and anxiety. 11. Kerrilyn says she loves carnation, grows carnations, and remembers working at Martha Stewart in the 1990s when obscure carnations were a focus. 12. She says many grocery-store flowers are bred to be unscented, and a supermarket florist section taught her that flowers may not smell because they were bred that way. 13. Kerrilyn says stock has a sweet scent, but the water can become stinky, and she now grows spray stock for more branches and more flowers. 14. She explains that CAP Beauty products are built around ingredients that support skin health first, with scent emerging from botanicals rather than being added artificially. 15. She describes Serotoner as the most pronounced scent, Blue as herbally driven like chamomile tea with herbs, and Crema as fresh, green, and cucumber-like. 16. Kerrilyn says her current obsession is 'what's happening in our country and the Maha movement' and calls the wellness industry's shift 'disorienting, confusing, and problematic.' 17. She argues that the Maha campaign is too topical and too privileged because it ignores foundational problems in capitalism, food systems, and healthcare. 18. The conversation turns sharper when Kerrilyn says discrediting news, science, and doctors creates 'total chaos' and that wellness should mean community care, not self care. 19. The tone is intimate, reflective, and increasingly political, with Jessica asking follow-up questions that move from scent and gardening into public-health argument. 20. People interested in plants, scent, CAP Beauty, and wellness politics will get the most from it, while listeners wanting a light botanical chat may skip it.

As heard by us

A sensory, politically minded conversation that moves from plant based beauty to wellness critique.

This episode starts in a sensory register, with plants, scent, and a founderly introduction, then widens into a firmer conversation about the country, the Maha movement, and the wellness industry.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a plant-forward conversation that starts in beauty and ends up asking what wellness culture has become.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
Listen to the show on