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...
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First Nations Economic Compact
I Am Interchange
Turtle 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...
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Nutrition Centered Economy
I Am Interchange
Every 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...
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State of Journalism
I Am Interchange
Once 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...
info_outlineThis 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.