I Am Interchange

Notes from the Earth

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 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?

The Amazon is Breathing

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 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.

Water in the West

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 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.

My Place, My Sovereignty

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 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.

Gangstagrass

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, 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.