Follow the Food
I Am Interchange
Okay, think about the last tomato you ate. Not a good one. A regular one — grocery store, middle of winter, pale on the inside, kind of mealy. Doesn't really taste like anything. That tomato traveled further than most people go on vacation. Picked green, somewhere warm, weeks before you saw it. Put in a room and gassed with ethylene so it would turn red on schedule, because red is what we reach for. And it was bred — over decades, deliberately — not to taste good but to survive the truck. And the part that got me, when I first started paying attention to this stuff, is that nobody...
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Unfinished Republic
I Am Interchange
Here's something worth sitting with: the people who govern us mostly come from a narrow slice of the rest of us. Lawyers, for one. In the United States, they fill more than half of Congress. But it's wider than any single profession — it's wealth. The system favors the people who already have. Running for office costs money. Holding office rewards money. And so the rules end up written, again and again, by people who were already winning. When a single class writes the operating system for an entire country, you get a country that can only run one kind of program. Tate Chamberlin wanted to...
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Open Source Society
I Am Interchange
There's a word that keeps coming up when you talk to people who build software for a living. The word is fork. To fork something means you take an existing codebase — someone else's rules — and you branch off. You make your own version. You run it your own way. And nobody can stop you. We're at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. At the Next Democracy Summit. Ruzgar Imski is a Playnet contributor exploring organizations as games and games as organizations. How might we play organizations into existence? And in so doing overcome the division between game designers and game players, rule-makers...
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Notes from the Earth
I Am Interchange
There'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...
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The Amazon is Breathing
I Am Interchange
Here'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...
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Water in the West
I Am Interchange
Water 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...
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My Place, My Sovereignty
I Am Interchange
This 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...
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Gangstagrass
I Am Interchange
This 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,...
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BioCulture
I Am Interchange
This 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...
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Heart of the Heartland
I Am Interchange
Today, 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...
info_outlineTurtle 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