Terrain Theory

For years, Amaia Bengoa believed her body was something she needed to fix. Then she began asking a different question. Amaia grew up in the mountains of Idaho, surrounded by nature, raised on real food, and encouraged to question the world around her. By many measures, her childhood reflected the very principles of health and living that we so often discuss on Terrain Theory. But a healthy upbring...

Children aren't born broken. The medical system tells us otherwise. Several years ago, Dawn Lester and David Parker joined us on Terrain Theory to discuss their groundbreaking book, What Really Makes You Ill? , a nearly 800-page examination of the assumptions underlying modern medicine, germ theory, and the true nature of health and illness. Now Dawn returns with a new book, A Fresh Look at C...

It's been nearly a year since Ben and Mike sat down for a Wellness Check on the Terrain Theory Podcast , and a lot has happened in that time. A new marriage, a growing family, a milestone birthday, plenty of music, and a few unexpected challenges have given them plenty to reflect on. Ben shares what life has looked like since welcoming Hazel into the world, blending a family, and marrying Kel...

What really makes us ill? Once you begin questioning germ theory, another question quickly follows: if germs aren’t the cause of disease, then what is? For past Terrain Theory guests like Dawn Lester, David Parker, Tom Cowan, et al, The answer comes down to some familiar forces: malnutrition, stress, and toxins . In this conversation, we focus on one of the most pervasive of those toxins: glyphosa...

When Lisa Strbac first joined us in 2023 to talk homeopathy, tissue salts came up almost in passing. Since then, she’s written an entire book about them. So we invited Lisa back, along with her colleague Natasha Andreo, to give the subject the attention it most certainly deserves.. We begin with the twelve tissue salts identified by 19th-century physician Wilhelm Schuessler, how they differ from c...

Four years after her first appearance on Terrain Theory, Dr. Suzy Harris returns for a conversation that starts with COVID, adverse events, jab detoxification, and quickly moves into much deeper territory. Suzy shares what she has been seeing in her chiropractic and natural health practice, how she approaches lymphatic movement, circulation, detoxification, and recovery, and why she remains open t...

Beana Bern is the founder of Rootstock Retreat, a ten-acre retreat and community in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, where she works with psilocybin through immersive medicine retreats and seasonal microdosing programs. In this conversation, we rethink what we mean when we use the word “medicine.” Beana shares her own decades-long relationship with psychedelics and explains why mushrooms can be remark...

Sharon Daphna is a writer, researcher, and creator of The Chembow , where she documents more than a decade of work with orgone energy, orgonite, atmospheric conditions, electromagnetic frequencies, and the ideas of Wilhelm Reich. Since 2014, Sharon has made and distributed orgonite throughout nine western states, experimenting with what happens when these devices are introduced into environments s...

Mike Cardamone is a comedian, writer, filmmaker, and creator of Don't Slap Snooze . Before turning his attention to health, medicine, money, and some of the stranger corners of our shared reality, Mike spent years in advertising writing and producing for major brands. Then COVID happened, he started pulling on threads, and his creative work took a very different turn. In this conversation, we...

We have been open about our experiences with psychedelics and microdosing and the meaningful role they played in our own journeys into Terrain. But as psychedelics move from the counterculture into clinics, retreats and the mainstream, are we at risk of turning them into another version of the very thing they're supposed to replace: the magic pill? John O'Connor, author of A Short, Stran...

We spend a lot of time on this show talking about creating healthy terrain through food, light, movement, and the environments we choose. But what if our very first terrain wasn't physical at all? What if our terrain was the emotional climate we grew up in, the words spoken over us, and the stories we learned to tell ourselves before we were even old enough to question them? In this conversat...

What does it actually mean to practice naturopathy through the lens of Terrain Theory? In this episode, we sit down with terrain-forward naturopath Nicky Leach to explore a model of health that looks beyond diagnoses, protocols, and symptom management. Rather than asking, "What's the treatment?" Nicky asks a different question: "What conditions allowed this to happen in the fir...

How much of our health and terrain is shaped not just by what we eat or how we avoid toxins, but by the timing of our activities and choices? The when of our lives.   In this episode, we sit down with Avi Jacobson, co-founder of Kintsyougi and one of the creators of the CRD Challenge—a simple three-week experiment that introduced thousands of people to the principles of circadian biology. Built ar...

We often think of health as something that's built through food, movement, sunlight, sleep, and the choices we make each day. But what if one of the most influential forces shaping our terrain isn't something we consume, but rather the people we surround ourselves with? In this conversation, we sit down with author, explorer, and former Global Citizen executive Michael Trainer to explore...

When filmmaker and homeopath Ananda More first encountered homeopathy, she dismissed it as pseudoscience. It wasn't until an unexpected experience while traveling through India that her certainty began to unravel. Years later—even after becoming a practicing homeopath herself—she still wrestled with the question: "is this all simply placebo?" That honest skepticism became the founda...

Tommy Hughes returns to the Terrain Theory Podcast for a conversation that builds on our first exploration of Classical Chinese Medicine and takes it into even deeper territory. Drawing from the ancient medical classics, Tommy explains why Chinese physicians believed disease begins in the heart, how chronic emotional patterns can eventually become physical pathology, and why the body's sympto...

Cannabis has become one of the most polarizing plants in modern history, but hemp may be the more important story. In this episode, Ben and Mike sit down with Florida cannabis cultivators Anya and Jacob Smith of Green Smith Family Farms to explore the remarkable versatility of hemp and why so much of its history has been forgotten. The conversation moves well beyond CBD and THC into living soil, t...

Change your mind? More like change your mindset. In this episode, we sit down with Mark England, founder of Enlifted, to explore the relationship between language, breath, mindset, and health. Mark argues that mindset isn't some abstract self-help concept: it's simply the story we tell ourselves about our lives, our bodies, our relationships, and our circumstances. And when those stories...

Mike Winner has spent decades exploring the intersections of health, consciousness, philosophy, technology, and human potential. Many listeners know him as the longtime co-host of Alfa Vedic alongside Dr. Barre Lando, but his latest project, TerrainTV, may be his most ambitious yet: a centralized platform designed to bring together some of the most influential voices in the Terrain movement. In th...

What happens when the illness that nearly killed you turns out to be the catalyst for your greatest healing? Dr. Caroline Hartridge began her medical career firmly rooted in the conventional system. But after years of unexplained symptoms, a missed diagnosis, and a near-death experience during medical school, she found herself questioning everything she thought she knew about health, healing, and...

Most veterinarians spend their careers learning how to diagnose disease. Dr. Maureen Ann McMichael became interested in a different question: why was the animal sick in the first place? A board-certified veterinary critical care specialist and former veterinary school professor, Dr. McMichael has worked in emergency medicine, academia, and specialty practice for decades. Along the way, she began q...

What happens when a near-death experience completely rewires the way you see the world? Before Pearly Montagu was working with trauma, intuition, reflexology, and energy healing, she was living a very different life in corporate finance and global shipping. But after a devastating boating accident and profound near-death experience in her late twenties, everything changed. What followed was years...

Is cancer a random genetic accident, an isolated physical event, or a message arising from unresolved stress, suppressed emotion, relationship conflict, and deeply rooted patterns carried through a lifetime? In this episode, we sit down with Paul Leendertse and Aria Konrad of the Root Cause Institute for a far-reaching conversation on the psycho-emotional and spiritual dimensions of cancer and chr...

Sexual health is one of the most overlooked aspects of the terrain conversation, yet the reproductive system is literally the engine of life force. It is the system capable of creating new life, regulating vitality, driving creativity, and profoundly influencing our emotional and energetic state. If that system is depleted, disconnected, or chronically unhealthy, it raises an important question: h...

In this episode, we’re joined by Dr. James Odell, Executive Director of the Bioregulatory Medicine Institute (BRMI), an organization dedicated to researching and educating on systems-based, non-toxic approaches to health. With a background in naturopathy, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and European biological medicine, Dr. Odell has spent decades studying how the body regulates, adapts, and heals a...