Podcast
I Am Interchange
Hosted by Tate Chamberlin · EN
I Am Interchange immerses you in the world of adventure journalism, where we fearlessly explore the monumental global changes, inequalities, and urgent issues surrounding the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Through raw, unfiltered storytelling, we dive into the tension within these goals and share the stories from the front lines of systems change.
12episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Notes from the Earth
4w ago00:57:51Tap to summarizeThere's a moment. A specific moment when someone decides to stop waiting for permission. Maybe it's quiet. Maybe nobody's watching. But something shifts — and the path they were supposed to take starts to look a lot less interesting than the one they're about to make up entirely. Today, we're talking to two people who made that choice — in completely different directions, for completely different reasons, with the same kind of unshakeable commitment. Benjamin Von Wong is an environmental activist and visual artist whose work is almost impossible to look away from. Giant, haunting installations built from plastic waste. Images that don't let you off the hook. His activism isn't about him — it never has been. It's about fighting for something so much larger than any one person that the work almost demands you forget who made it. He's trying to change systems. Actual systems. And he's using beauty to do it. BLKBOK is a neoclassical pianist selling out concert halls and collaborating with some of the biggest names in music. Here's the thing though. Nobody taught him how to do any of it. No conservatory. No formal training. No one handing him a roadmap to the rooms he now walks into like he belongs there — because he does. He figured it out. All of it. And that self-taught, street-smart, stubbornly specific version of himself is exactly the thing that got him there. Choosing classical music when the world had a very different game in mind for him. Two artists. Two completely different relationships to the word change. One fighting for the planet. One rewriting who gets to sit at the piano. And somehow, both asking the same question underneath it all — how do we show up and actually influence anything? Do we do it because someone is looking? Or do we do it anyway?
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The Amazon is Breathing
Mar 3100:58:57Tap to summarizeHere's the thing about the Amazon basin. There's a number scientists use when they talk about it — the number of species living there that we haven't discovered yet. And here's what's strange about that number: we don't know what it is. We can't know what it is. We only know it's enormous. That somewhere in that forest right now, there are creatures going about their lives, doing whatever it is they do — and not a single human being on earth knows their name. Think about that for a second. We are losing something we have never even met. The Amazon produces its own weather. It talks to the ocean. Indigenous peoples have lived inside it, and with it, for thousands of years — and they will tell you, if you ask them, that the forest is worth more standing than cut. That it is not a resource waiting to be used. That it is the resource. That it is the economy — if only we could learn to see it that way. We think we know the Amazon. We've seen the pictures. We've heard the statistics. But we don't know it. Not really. Today on the show — what happens when a forest reaches a tipping point. What wildlife monitoring and illegal human activity in one of the most remote places on earth are actually telling us. And what a shift toward a bio-economy might mean for the future of a place that is, in some ways, the future of everything. I'm Tate Chamberlin. My guests today are Indrani Pal-Chaudhuri and Paola de Almeida. Stay with us.
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Water in the West
Mar 1200:47:53Tap to summarizeWater doesn't begin at the tap. It begins in the dark—underground, in aquifers older than memory. As snow in mountain air. As vapor. As storm. Something that refuses to stay still. By the time it reaches us, it has already lived many lives. There's a saying in the West: whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting. A line that carries history inside it—compacts, canals, courtrooms. Water hasn't always been political. For most of human history, it simply existed. But today, especially across the western United States, it often is. This episode begins in the Arizona desert, at Arcosanti. In 1970, architect Paolo Soleri and The Cosanti Foundation began building this place in central Arizona. The idea was arcology—architecture shaped by ecology. A community trying to imagine living with the land instead of against it. Curved concrete rises from the desert. Light pours through open space. A place built on questions. It was also the site of the HATCH Summit—artists, scientists, entrepreneurs, policymakers, storytellers. People trying to collaborate their way toward something more resilient. Which makes it the right place to talk about water. Because water means different things at once. For some, it's sacred. For others, it's infrastructure—reservoirs, pipelines, allocations and rights. In the western United States, those rights often follow a simple rule: first come, first served. Use it—or lose it. That logic shaped rivers like the Colorado—now feeding cities, farms, and reservoirs like Lake Powell. But reservoirs drop. Snowpack shrinks. And "management" starts to sound more like triage. And this story doesn't stop in Arizona. In the Andes, salt flats hold the lithium powering electric vehicles. In Bogotá, officials count the days in their reservoirs as the possibility of "Day Zero" enters the conversation. Different places. Same question. What does it mean to live with water? In this conversation, Tate chamberlin sits down with Michellsey Benally, David Purkey, and Joel Barnes to explore that question—what a water right really is, who decides, and what it might mean to remember that water was never just a resource in the first place. Because water keeps moving. And the question is how we move with it.
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My Place, My Sovereignty
Feb 1900:39:46Tap to summarizeThis is the third episode. The last in a three-part series. My Place, My Sovereignty. Recorded at the Eco Nomic Futures Summit. A gathering about systems—but really about people. About land. About new economies. I'm Tate Chamberlin. In this episode, I'm joined by Ruben Hernandes and Miles Richardson. The conversation starts with a simple idea that turns out not to be simple at all: knowing where you come from. For some people, lineage is clear. Stories passed down. Names remembered. Teachings held—who we are, what we stand for, where we belong. That clarity is a kind of privilege. From there, the story widens. We talk about building Indigenous economies—not as theory, but as relationship. To people. To place. To the earth itself. There's talk of sovereignty. Of sovereign wealth. Because economic activity matters. We all need it. But the system we're living inside now is built on something else—monetary capital. Scarcity. The idea that there's never enough. What Indigenous communities offer is a different application altogether. An economy rooted in reciprocity. In looking after each other. In the understanding that we're all in this together. And that idea scales up—to something much bigger. A world sense. A human challenge. Because sovereignty, in the end, isn't just about control. It's about responsibility. Stay with us.
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Gangstagrass
Feb 100:54:47Tap to summarizeThis story starts at Arbor Day Farm in Nebraska City, Nebraska. At the HATCH Summit. A gathering about world-building and cultivating relationships—set in a town with a long memory, including its role in the Underground Railroad. And from there, it moves to music. To Gangstagrass. They're Emmy-nominated. Billboard-charting. And they're also the soundtrack for Dispatch from the Heartland. Hip hop and bluegrass sit together here— banjo and bars, rhythm and rhyme— without explanation. Just present. Tate Chamberlin sat down with Gangstagrass— Dolio The Sleuth, B.E. Farrow, Rench, Sleevs, Danjo Whitener, and R-SON, the Voice of Rason. There's a quote they have that keeps coming back: We all do better when we all do better. Can't get better than that. That quote opens up a longer story. One that passes through blackface minstrelsy— an old form of Entertainment in the United States where white performers painted their faces black and acted out cruel, exaggerated versions of Black life, earning premium wages while doing it, taking work, money, and stages away from Black performers, turning real people into jokes and stereotypes. Those images didn't stay on the stage. They moved into songs. Movies. Cartoons. Into culture. This is a story about Music. About memory. About relationship. About Afrofuturism— not as escape, but as continuity. A future imagined with the past fully in frame.
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BioCulture
Jan 1300:43:19Tap to summarizeThis is episode two, recorded at Eco Nomic Futures in San Francisco. Not a conference exactly—more a meeting point. Where conversations crossed paths around food, land, economics, and what happens when systems lose their connection to life. Tate Chamberlin is joined by Jacob Huhn and Warinkwi Flores. This episode is called BioCulture. It's about systems—the ones we live inside now, and the ones that came before them. Indigenous economies were relational, not extractive. Land, food, and water weren't commodities. They were responsibilities. Those systems didn't fail. They were interrupted. From there, the conversation moves into the present. Food as product. Life as data. Supply chains so long and familiar, they disappear. Corn becomes a way to see how meaning gets stripped as things move farther from their origins. We talk about data, the rights of nature, and economies embedded within life—not separate from it. A reminder that the future isn't something we have to invent. It's something we already know how to return to. Stay with us.
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Heart of the Heartland
Dec 1900:59:18Tap to summarizeToday, we're somewhere that feels both familiar and overlooked at the same time—Arbor Day Farm in Nebraska City, Nebraska. The kind of place people call flyover country, a place many don't think twice about, even as the people who live here are quietly shaping a future the rest of us will eventually feel. I'm Tate Chamberlin, talking with Jeff Yost, Chris Harris, and Huascar Medina—three voices who don't see the Heartland as an accident of birth, but a choice. A commitment. A belief that local decisions should be made… well, locally. By the people who actually walk these streets, and raise their kids here, and imagine what this place could become. Because if you really want to understand a community, you don't just start with the data. You start with the people who see it up close—teachers, shop owners, artists, local organizers—the ones who understand the rhythms of a place in a way reports never quite catch. The people who can show you what a community is actually like, not just what it looks like on paper. And right now, these towns—these counties—are in motion. Old systems giving way to new ones. A moment where risk tolerance suddenly matters. Where one wrong move can feel fatal. And the arts—the artists—help us inch forward anyway. They make us brave in ways spreadsheets never will. There's also the quieter story: young people leaving for opportunities somewhere else, communities slowly thinning out, the talent and energy of a place drifting outward like smoke. And the equally powerful force coming behind it—the massive transfer of land and assets from one generation to the next, often to heirs who don't live here anymore. The early signs of a company-town future, unless something different takes hold. And somewhere inside all of this—inside the questions about belonging and the future of work and what makes a place worth staying in—is the story we're following today. Not an invitation. A moment. A snapshot. A look at how the Heartland, by choice, is writing its next chapter in real time.
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First Nations Economic Compact
Dec 500:31:38Tap to summarizeTurtle Island. Before there were countries—before anyone called this land the United States, or Canada, or Mexico—this was Turtle Island. A continent of nations, overlapping territories, trade routes stretching farther than modern highways, and relationships thousands of years old. Today, that history is being carried forward by contemporary Indigenous leaders at Fort Mason—San Francisco's skyline in the backdrop, summit banners hanging over a conversation that reaches far beyond the city around it. This is the First Nations Economic Compact. You're in a conference room that usually sounds like quarterly forecasts, and suddenly Chief Redman is talking about an economic conversation older than all of that—older than the 1763 Royal Proclamation, older than colonial regulatory systems, older than the borders that now cut through nations whose trade routes once ran uninterrupted across the continent. Long before GDP, First Nations had their own economic indicators: ecological balance, kinship networks, sustainable yields, inter-nation reciprocity. Systems the Doctrine of Discovery tried to erase. Systems that survived genocide, forced relocations, and treaties—signed, coerced, or never signed at all. And yet: the nations remain. The economies remain. The knowledge remains. Here, leaders are talking about restoring ancient trade corridors, sharing resources through ancestral law, and building a bio-economy centered on stewardship and community resilience. While modern governments argue over tariffs and trade wars, First Nations are putting forward something older and more future-ready: a sovereign economic compact drawn from traditional trade logic and built for today's global market. "If someone doesn't want to deal with Canada or the United States… they can deal directly with First Nations," Chief Redman says. It isn't a request. It's a reminder. Suddenly, this summit doesn't sound like policy talk—it sounds like nations dusting themselves off and reintroducing themselves. Not as stakeholders. Not as interest groups. But as governments. This is what reconnection sounds like. What continuity sounds like. What a continent remembering itself sounds like. Tate Chamberlin is with Chief Redman. Stay with us. Music by Supaman
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Nutrition Centered Economy
Nov 1900:59:11Tap to summarizeEvery town has one. A school. A cafeteria. A lunch line. And somewhere in that line, a kid is staring down a plastic tray of food that — for millions — might be the only real meal they get that day. We don't often think of it this way, but the school meal program is the largest restaurant chain in the United States. Seven billion meals a year. Forty million kids. Bigger than Subway. Bigger than McDonald's. Which makes it the biggest opportunity we have to change how we eat, how we grow food, and how we think about nourishment. When we let the system run on the cheapest, most processed calories, the cost shows up in hospital bills, chronic illness, and communities that can't afford to be healthy. In one of the richest countries in the world, eating clean, non-toxic food has somehow become a luxury. But it shouldn't be. Healthy food should be a right. So how did we get here? How did we build a system where the things that keep us healthy are the hardest to afford, while the things that make us sick are everywhere and cheap? Maybe it lives in the subsidies and programs meant to stabilize agriculture — systems that now keep us tied to old ideas of what food should look like. Take cattle ranching: once the backbone of rural life, now caught between an industrial model that demands scale and a regenerative one that demands patience — and risk. Four companies control most of the meat market, while the people who tend the land have the least power to change it. This episode, Tate Chamberlin talks with Nora Latorre, R.C. Carter, and Katie Stebbins — people working to shift the food system from the inside out. From how we feed our kids to how we nourish entire communities. Because we are what we eat. And maybe the way we feed our children is the clearest reflection of the future we're willing to build.
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State of Journalism
Oct 3100:53:16Tap to summarizeOnce upon a time, journalism started with a letter nailed to a tree—or a door. Some declaration, some warning, some truth someone wanted heard. And people would gather in the square to listen. News wasn't just information; it was a shared experience. Then came the daily paper. Then the evening broadcast. News once a day—steady, dependable. Until it wasn't. Now it's constant. Twenty-four hours. Push notifications. Feeds that never stop refreshing. And somewhere in all that, we started to wonder—what's the difference between fact and opinion anymore? Between storytelling and spin? In this episode, Tate Chamberlin talks with "Sleevs" Emily Messner, Joey Young, and Chris Denson about the evolution of journalism—from editorial boards and ad sales to freelancers, podcasts, and algorithms. How we depict what's true, and whether journalism can still sustain itself. Because while we were putting this episode together, the press corps was literally packing up and leaving the Pentagon—a small headline that somehow says everything about where we are right now. So… is there a future in journalism? Or do we have to make one, even if there isn't? It's Dispatch from the Heartland, join us, won't you?
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