Chris Brewer: Co-Founder & Managing Director
Director of Compliance Operations | Fraud & Risk Investigator | Anthropologist
Chris Brewer brings over 10 years of professional experience in compliance, fraud prevention, and risk operations to Best Retreats. He currently serves as Director of Compliance Operations at Bead, where he oversees regulatory compliance frameworks, risk mitigation protocols, and operational integrity. Prior to Bead, Chris held fraud and risk roles at Square (now Block, Inc.), where he worked within one of the world’s largest fintech ecosystems detecting fraud patterns, conducting investigations, and building risk mitigation processes across Square’s payment platform and Cash App’s financial services. He also provided freelance compliance and risk consulting for Angi (formerly Angie’s List / ANGI Homeservices), applying investigative methodology to marketplace trust and safety.
Chris holds a Bachelor of Science in Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis, where his studies focused on cultural systems, forensic analysis, and cross-cultural research methods. This academic foundation – combined with extensive fieldwork across South America – gives him a rare ability to evaluate ayahuasca retreats not just for operational red flags, but for cultural authenticity, indigenous reciprocity, and the ethical dimensions that most directories ignore entirely.
Based in Colombia, Chris has spent a decade conducting on-the-ground research across South American ayahuasca communities, working in translation, security, and cultural liaison roles that provide direct, firsthand understanding of the retreat landscape in the regions where ayahuasca originates.
What Chris brings to every Best Retreats listing:
- Compliance methodology applied to retreat safety evaluation – the same investigative frameworks used at Square and Bead to detect fraud and assess operational risk
- Incident tracking protocols developed from professional fraud investigation experience, including systematic review of public records, social media, Reddit, news databases, and safety organization reports
- Cultural competency from anthropological training and South American fieldwork, ensuring evaluations respect indigenous healing traditions while holding retreats accountable for participant safety
- Fluency in English and Spanish, enabling primary-source research across Latin American media, forums, and community channels that English-only directories miss entirely
Ben Glaser: Co-Founder & Strategic Advisor
Real Estate & SMB Investor | Consumer Health Entrepreneur | Due Diligence Specialist
Ben Glaser brings a decade of experience in real estate investing, consumer health brand building, and operational due diligence to Best Retreats. As a real estate and small business investor, Ben has evaluated hundreds of deals across property, CPG, and wellness ventures — developing a disciplined eye for the financial, operational, and reputational risk factors that determine whether a business is legitimate, sustainable, and safe for its customers.
Ben co-founded True Health Labs, a direct-access laboratory testing platform that served over 20,000 customers and earned thousands of verified reviews. Building a health services company from the ground up taught him firsthand what consumer trust looks like in wellness – and how easily it can be exploited by operators who prioritize revenue over safety. That experience directly informs Best Retreats’ refusal to accept bookings or commissions: Ben understands that the moment a directory profits from sending people to a retreat, its incentive to be honest about that retreat disappears.
As founder of One Living Earth, a sustainability-focused venture, Ben brings additional perspective on ethical business practices and the responsibility that wellness brands carry when people’s health is on the line.
What Ben brings to Best Retreats:
- Due diligence methodology from real estate and SMB investing – systematic evaluation of financials, operations, reputation, and risk that applies directly to retreat center assessment
- Consumer health industry experience from founding and operating True Health Labs, including understanding of regulatory expectations, customer safety obligations, and the consequences of misleading health claims
- Business model integrity – Ben’s investment background ensures Best Retreats’ no-booking, no-commission model remains financially sustainable without compromising editorial independence
- Operational risk assessment honed through years of evaluating businesses for acquisition and investment, identifying the structural red flags that indicate whether an organization is built to last or built to extract
Chris and Ben’s 20+ years in risk, fraud, and wellness – plus shared Square experience – position Best Retreats as an authoritative watchdog.
Why This Matters for Your Safety
Most ayahuasca directories are built by affiliate marketers who earn commissions on bookings. Their incentive is to list as many retreats as possible, make them all look appealing, and collect referral fees when you book. They have no incentive to warn you about red flags – because warnings don’t generate revenue.
Best Retreats operates differently because it was built by people who spent their careers identifying exactly the kind of risks that unregulated industries create. Chris’s compliance and fraud investigation work at Square and Bead trained him to see the patterns that indicate when an organization is cutting corners, hiding incidents, or misrepresenting its safety record. Ben’s due diligence experience in investing taught him to evaluate whether a business’s public claims match its operational reality. Together, their combined experience in risk, compliance, fraud prevention, and consumer health provides the analytical foundation for every retreat evaluation, trust grade, and incident report on this platform.
This is not just a hobby project. It is a professional safety platform built on professional methodology, by people who have staked their careers on getting risk assessment right.
Important Disclaimer: This page provides context on our team’s professional backgrounds and is not medical, psychological, or legal advice. Ayahuasca carries meaningful physical risks (including dangerous interactions with common medications such as SSRIs and MAOIs) and psychological risks (including potential for acute distress, particularly for individuals with pre-existing mental health conditions). We strongly recommend consulting a qualified healthcare professional before participating in any plant medicine retreat, and reviewing safety resources from organizations such as ICEERS. Best Retreats is editorially independent – we accept no advertising, affiliate commissions, or booking fees – and our evaluations are based on publicly available information reviewed through professional compliance and risk assessment methodology, and working with the retreat centers personally.