Vanessa Morgan is a colleague from my Durango years — fifty-four years in clinical practice, an acupuncturist, homeopath, and biological medicine practitioner trained on three continents, with more than ten thousand patients behind her. 

She started at seventeen, living for nine months in the attic of a Mohawk herbalist on Vancouver Island, and she has spent a lifetime working in the corners of medicine the rest of medicine wasn’t looking at. But that’s not why I asked her on. I asked her because in early 2020, just before the injections rolled out, a three-and-a-half-foot bull snake walked into her casita in Taos — and she followed it. 

What came out of two years of study has been a life raft for an enormous number of long-haulers, and a window into something the rest of medicine has been quietly using for forty years without remembering where it came from. Because the snake was never only in her yard. It’s on the wall of every doctor’s office in this country — the Rod of Asclepius, the Bowl of Hygieia at every pharmacy, the word “virus” itself coming straight from the Latin for venom. Captopril, the drug that launched the entire class of ACE inhibitors, is derived from pit viper venom. We have been using this medicine for decades. We just forgot what we were using.

This conversation lives where two of our seasonal inquiries meet — rhythm over force, listening as instruction; and capacity, not compliance — and it moves through the loneliness of clear sight, the reluctant teacher who thought she was ready to retire, and what medicine forgot that the snake in her yard was asking her to remember. Bring your skepticism. Just bring it after you’ve actually listened.

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For as long as most of us have been alive, we’ve been told a story about who we are: accidents of chemistry, driven by selfish genes, thrown into a world that runs on survival of the fittest. Fight. Compete. Dominate. Win. It’s the story underneath our medicine, our economy, and the way we wage war on our own bodies when they frighten us.

Cell biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton has spent fifty years quietly dismantling that story from inside the petri dish. In Beyond Darwin, he lays out the science for a different origin: we are not separate from Nature; we are of it — evolved to tend the Garden, not to conquer it. Genes don’t hold the pen. The environment does. And life, as his hero Lynn Margulis put it, “did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.”

In this conversation, Dr. Nasha sits down with the man whose work gave language to so much of what she has experienced and witnessed at the bedside. His influence arrived at a time when her own survival wasn’t promised — and it became part of the foundation of her turn from surviving to thriving, and of the way she has practiced, taught, and explored ever since. Here she finds him living his own theory in the most unflinching way possible: with a cancer diagnosis of his own. This is a conversation about cooperation as biology, chaos as chrysalis, and what it asks of a person to trade the story of the battlefield for the work of the gardener.

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James Barry spent more than two decades as a private chef to the famous — Tom Cruise, George Clooney, Barbra Streisand — feeding people who could have anything they wanted. For years, he was a vegan. Then his young daughter nearly died of a rare bacterial infection, and the ground beneath everything he believed about food gave way. He came back not with a stricter diet, but with an older question we've been trained to look past: what happens when the most nourishing thing on the plate is the part we've been taught to throw out?

In this conversation, James — founder of Pluck, an organ-based seasoning built from the parts most kitchens discard — sits down with Dr. Nasha to explore organ meats as concentrated life, the ideologies we quietly build our plates on, and why the things we're quickest to reject (in our food, in our grief, in ourselves) may be exactly what we most need to reclaim. This isn't a conversation about liver. It's about what we discard, why we discard it, and what it costs us to keep looking away.

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We live in a culture that promises we can hack our way to health — more data, more inputs, more control. Nathalie Niddam has spent years inside that world and has become one of its most trusted voices, going deeper into peptides and bioregulators than almost anyone. But underneath the language of optimization sits a quieter idea: these molecules don’t override the body — they remind it. They hand back signals the body already knows how to use.

In this conversation, Dr. Nasha and Nathalie sit in the tension between hacking and tending — between forcing a system and restoring the conditions it’s been missing. They talk about what the longevity movement gets right, where it quietly betrays people, and what it might mean to optimize for capacity instead of control. A conversation for anyone who’s ever wondered whether the goal is to do more to the body — or to finally listen to it.

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Dr. Beth DuPree has held a scalpel for more than thirty-five years — a breast cancer surgeon, board-certified in general surgery, the kind of physician who led a cancer center to national accreditation and served as a hospital vice president. Every credential the system can hand a person, she earned. And then she did the thing the system rarely forgives: she started listening to her patients in a way that changed what she believed medicine was for. 

Somewhere between the diagnoses and the margins and the survival curves, she came to a conviction she now says out loud on any stage that will have her — healing is not something we do to a person, it's something we awaken within them. That's a quiet bomb to drop inside a profession built on intervention, and she's spent the second half of her career living it out loud: master-level Reiki practitioner, board-certified in integrative and holistic medicine, trained in psychedelic-assisted therapy, author of The Healing Consciousness and Shifting Gears. She is not a fringe figure who stumbled onto the woo. She's an establishment surgeon who walked straight toward the soul and never once apologized for it. 

That's why I wanted her — because it's the same both/and I've spent my own life refusing to resolve. We talk about the moment the surgery couldn't reach what she was seeing in her patients, about what it actually looks like to awaken something in a frightened, newly diagnosed woman rather than just act upon her, about what it cost her to hold precision and presence in the same set of hands inside a system that wanted her to pick a lane, about meeting pain as information instead of an enemy to numb away, and about survivorship — the loneliest stretch of the whole journey, the after that no one prepares you for, when treatment ends and everyone else exhales and the person is left standing in a body they don't recognize with no map. 

Full disclosure: she's the physician behind a pain patch that got me through a torn rib cartilage I wouldn't wish on anyone, so I'm not a neutral party here. I'm a patient who was helped, sitting down with the surgeon who learned to ask a different question. Her terrain is the operating room and everything that begins where the cutting ends. Mine is the cell. Same refusal to choose.”

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Dr. Arwen Podesta is an addiction psychiatrist in New Orleans who has spent her whole career sitting across from the people our culture has decided are the most broken among us — the addicted, the relapsed, the ones who keep reaching for the thing that’s hurting them. And here is what undid me about her: she doesn’t see broken people. She sees terrain. She sees a nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do to survive. She’s board-certified in psychiatry, addiction medicine, forensic psychiatry, and integrative medicine, and she built her practice on the many hands — psychiatry alongside nutrition, acupuncture, somatic work, story, and the natural world. 

She wrote a whole book, HOOKED, making the mechanics of addiction make sense, and then she spends her days reminding everyone that mechanics were never the whole story. We talk about addiction as intelligence rather than defect, about what real repair asks for that the fight narrative completely misses, about place as terrain in a city that knows something about collapse and something about coming back, and about the hunger underneath the substance — what people are actually starving for. She’s doing in the field of the mind almost exactly what I’ve tried to do in the field of the body. Her terrain is the nervous system. Mine is the cell. Same gospel, different soil.

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Pediatrician Dr. Michelle Perro on industrial food, glyphosate, and what four decades at the bedside taught her about why kids are sick.

For most of a career spanning emergency rooms and children's hospitals, Dr. Michelle Perro watched the patterns in front of her shift—more allergies, more gut trouble, more neurological and chronic conditions in children who, a generation earlier, would have been rare. Rather than treat each symptom as its own broken part, she did what good clinicians do: she stepped back and asked what had changed in the soil these kids were growing in. The answer led her into the tangled relationship between industrial food, glyphosate, the gut, and the developing body.

In this conversation, Nasha and Michelle move past the noise and the absolutes to sit with the harder questions. What does it mean when a child's body is responding intelligently to an environment that no longer supports it? What gets lost when we medicate the response instead of tending the conditions? And what does it take for a physician to let her own observations—not just the literature—reshape how she practices? This is a conversation about children, yes, but also about food as terrain, about the courage to swim against the current, and about what becomes possible when we stop asking what's wrong with the child and start asking what's shaping them.

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Evie Fatz is the founder of Cōpow Foods — a word she made up, colorful and powerful, which is about as honest a description of Evie herself as I could offer. She spent fifteen years coaching people on how to eat and ran into the thing that breaks a lot of us: she could hand someone the truth and they still couldn't reach the food. 

So she stopped teaching about real food and started growing the conditions for it — sourced regeneratively, cooked without the junk, and then, for every meal she sells, she gives one away. Twenty-seven thousand and counting. With her husband Dr. Casey Fatz, a vascular interventional radiologist who came out of twenty years in medicine calling it what it is — sick care, not health care — they've got one foot in the operating room and one in the kitchen, betting everything on the kitchen. We talk about the soil and the soul of it: how the vision arrived, what it cost, and how she figured out you can't tend the terrain for some of us. It has to be all of us.

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Dr. Isabella Cooper is a biochemist and pathology scientist out of the University of Westminster, and she runs one of the only labs in this field that takes no money from the food industry — so when she tells you something, it's the data talking and nothing else. Most researchers study ketosis by asking what it does when you switch it on. 

Isabella walked in through the back door: she took women who'd been in ketosis for years and had them stop, then watched what the body did when the thing was taken away — and what it did when ketosis returned. The body remembered. 

This conversation moves from the mitochondria as a kind of terrain to the wisdom buried in scarcity, the female body the literature keeps overlooking, and the woman behind the rigor. It's terrain thinking in a lab coat, and a reminder that your body is not a machine running down. It's a living system, waiting for the right conditions to return.

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In this conversation, Dr. Nasha Winters sits down with Sophie Trew, cancer survivor, breathwork practitioner, and holistic health advocate, for a deeply personal discussion about life, healing, and the extraordinary intelligence of the human body. Drawing from her own journey through cancer and recovery, Sophie shares how one of the most powerful tools available to us has been with us all along: the breath. What began as a path toward healing became a profound exploration of resilience, self-awareness, and the body's innate capacity to restore balance.

Together, they explore the often-overlooked connection between breath, stress, nervous system regulation, and overall well-being. This episode invites us to slow down, reconnect with ourselves, and consider how something as simple and accessible as breathing may influence the way we experience health, recovery, and life itself. It is a thoughtful conversation about presence, possibility, and the healing that can begin when we learn to breathe with intention.

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