I Am Interchange

About I Am Interchange

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.

Publisher

Tate Chamberlin

Category

science · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

25 Oct 2016

Latest episode

26 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

115 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   26 Sept 2026

   Design Against the Machine

   A kid draws something. Doesn't matter what — a horse, a spaceship, a person with the arms coming straight out of the head. And they hold it up, and the drawing is, by any honest measure, terrible. And they are completely, radiantly proud of it. There's no gap yet between what they meant and what they made. That gap hasn't been invented for them. And then, somewhere down the line, it gets invented. That's really what this episode is about — what happens after the gap shows up. Because at some point every person who makes things learns to see their own work from the outside, the way a stranger would. Learns to ask whether it's good. Whether it's finished. Whether anybody would want it. And that skill, that outside eye, is the thing that makes you a professional. It's also the thing that can quietly kill the reason you started. Tate Chamberlin gets into all of this on the HATCH Podcast with Roshi Givechi, Mark Goerner, and Dave Zaboski. The conversation keeps circling the same live wire. There's the thing you want to make, alone, for its own sake. And there's the thing somebody will pay for. Sometimes those are the same thing and it feels like a miracle. Usually they're not, and you spend your whole working life negotiating the distance between them — deciding when to hold the line, when to listen to the room, when "who would buy this" is a betrayal and when it's just the honest question of a person trying to make a living. None of them pretends there's a clean answer. That's what makes it worth an episode. So: how things get made, what it costs to keep making them, and whether that proud kid with the terrible drawing is still in there somewhere. Stay with us.

2. 

   27 Jul 2026

   Follow the Food

   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 exactly chose that. There's no villain. It's just what you get when the whole system is built to move food cheap and far, and the person actually growing it has the least say of anyone in the chain. That's the world Tate Chamberlin wanted to spend some time in. So he sat down with four people who've each, in their own way, made food their life's work — Katie Stebbins, Tim West, Paola DealMeida, and Sanah Baig. They get into the stuff you'd expect. How you even fall into food activism in the first place — for most of them it started small, learning to cook, getting curious about where the thing on the plate actually came from. Food safety. The tomato supply chain, which is somehow more insane the closer you look. Why a small farmer basically cannot win against processing and subsidies, no matter how good they are at farming. But the part I keep thinking about came later, when the conversation turned to the Farm Bill. Because most people hear "Farm Bill" and picture, you know, corn. Tractors. It's not that. It's school lunches. It's SNAP. It's the thing quietly deciding whether a kid eats. One of them makes the case that we've been calling it the wrong name this whole time — that it's really a community bill, and we should start treating it like one. So that's today. How food got personal for these four, and what it would actually take to keep the local stuff alive. Pull up a chair.

3. 

   29 Jun 2026

   Unfinished Republic

   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 ask what the alternative even looks like. So he brought a few people together to find out. Because democracy was supposed to be the thing that belonged to everyone. Rule by the people — all of them, not the few who could afford a seat at the table. But somewhere along the way it narrowed. The choices got fewer. Two parties. One acceptable range of disagreement. And underneath it, quietly, the thing nobody campaigns on — the monopoly of violence. A state that alone holds the right to use force, and uses it to keep the arrangement exactly as it is. This conversation was recorded at Frontier Tower in San Francisco, at the Next Democracy Summit. Four people, four vantage points. Artur Py, from Ukraine, where the right to govern yourself is something people are fighting and dying to hold onto. Nicole Klau Ibarra, from Mexico, watching her own democracy bend under its own pressures. And Gage Olesen and Bruce McHenry, both based in the United States, both asking whether two parties and a settled status quo is really the best a free people can do. What they're reaching for is hard to name but easy to feel. A world with room in it for more than one world. Many ways of living together, not one imposed on all the rest. And the question that keeps surfacing — the one that outlasts any election: what kind of self-governance do we leave the people who come after us? That's today. Stay with us.

Who has been a guest on I Am Interchange

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Marcela Fernandez
• Alex McDowell
• Meegan Elliot
• Mark Beam
• Ash Eliza Smith

Podcast Authority Score: 39 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

77

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

0

Contact I Am Interchange

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

Questions about I Am Interchange