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 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?

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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.

Tate Chamberlin is with Indrani Pal-Chaudhuri and Paola de Almeida.

Stay with us.

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