What did @dr_naomipotter actually say?
This clip features Davinia Taylor, a wellness personality and author, making two distinct arguments. First, she says the biohacking world is dominated by men like Dave Asprey and Andrew Huberman, while women deal with far more complex hormonal and psychological challenges. Second, she claims that "hacking into dopamine" and understanding what she calls a "new and modulator" has "changed the trajectory" of her whole life. These are two very different claims, and they deserve very different responses.
The first is a cultural observation. The second is a health claim that edges into specific neuroscience territory without naming the substance or mechanism clearly. The phrase "new and modulator" appears to be a spoken reference to a neuromodulator, likely a dopaminergic compound, though which one is never specified. That vagueness matters when we're evaluating whether the science holds up.
Does the science back this up?
On the gender gap in biohacking research, Taylor is largely correct, and there is real data to support this. The evidence on women being underrepresented in health optimization research is solid. On the dopamine claim, the science is more complicated and depends entirely on what substance or intervention she is actually describing.
A 2021 analysis in The Lancet (Criado Perez and others) documented persistent sex-based gaps in clinical trial design, with many foundational studies in metabolism, sleep, and recovery conducted predominantly on male subjects. Research on dopaminergic interventions in women, particularly in the context of alcohol recovery and mood regulation, is genuinely underdeveloped. Taylor's personal history includes alcoholism and postnatal depression, both of which involve disrupted dopamine signaling. Studies like Martinotti et al. (2022, Journal of Psychopharmacology) have examined dopamine system recovery in alcohol use disorder, but translating that to specific biohacking interventions is a significant leap without knowing what she actually used.
What did they get wrong (or right)?
Taylor gets real credit for naming something genuinely true: the biohacking conversation has a male bias problem, and the physiological complexity women navigate, including hormonal contraception from adolescence, IVF, postnatal depression, is not adequately represented in mainstream wellness discourse. That is a fair and evidence-adjacent point.
Where she loses the thread is the dopamine claim. Saying a "new and modulator" has "changed the trajectory" of her whole life is a serious health claim delivered with no specifics. It is not possible to fact-check a mystery compound. If she is referring to a peptide like semax, which has documented effects on BDNF and dopamine pathways in animal models (Dolotov et al., 2006, Journal of Neurochemistry), the human trial data remains thin. If she means something like low-dose naltrexone, which is used off-label in alcohol recovery and modulates the reward system, that is a different conversation entirely. Vague but confident health claims are a pattern in wellness content, and this is a clear example.
Her dismissal of men's practices like cold exposure and light therapy also oversimplifies. Cold water immersion has real physiological effects, including norepinephrine release, documented in Shevchuk (2008, Medical Hypotheses). The frustration is valid; the science is not.
What should you actually know?
The genuine insight buried here is that sex-specific physiology is underserved in health optimization research. Women prescribed hormonal contraception at 14, as Taylor describes, are entering a multi-decade experiment with incomplete long-term data. Research on postnatal depression and dopamine dysregulation in postpartum women is improving but still lags behind general depression research.
If you are interested in dopaminergic support as part of recovery or mood regulation, that conversation belongs with a licensed clinician who can account for your full hormonal picture, your history, and any substances involved. Peptides that interact with dopamine pathways, like semax or selank, have shown preliminary results in preclinical models but lack robust human randomized controlled trial data. Pursuing them based on a podcast clip is not the same as a supervised clinical protocol. The frustration Taylor expresses about being overlooked in this space is valid. The solution is not to swap one set of unsupported claims for another.