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.

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 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.

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 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.