Tuesday, October 6 — 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM PDT
Charles F. “Chuck” Sams III
Chuck Sams brings more than 35 years of professional experience and has occupied many important leadership positions. Currently, he is Oregon’s Council Member on the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, serves as Oregon Tribes Scholar in Residence, and is a Senior Fellow with the Native Environmental Sovereignty Project at the University of Oregon’s Environmental and Natural Resources Law Center. He is also Director of Indigenous Programs at Yale’s Center for Environmental Justice and lectures at Yale’s Environmental School. Previously, Chuck was the 19th director of the National Park Service within the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Prior positions encompass a broad range of organizations and responsibilities:
- Executive Director and Deputy Executive Director for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR)
- CEO/President of the Indian Country Conservancy
- Executive Director of the Umatilla Tribal Community Foundation
- National Director for the Tribal & Native Lands Program at the Trust for Public Land
- Executive Director of the Columbia Slough Watershed Council
- Executive Director of the Community Energy Project
- CEO/President of the Earth Conservation Corps
- House Manager for the City Volunteer Corps of New York
Education
Chuck possesses a Master of Legal Studies in Indigenous Peoples Law from the University of Oklahoma School of Law. Additionally, he holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with concentrations in Management, Communications, and Leadership from Concordia University.
Honors
Chuck has received Honorary Doctorates in Humane Letters from Portland State University and Whitman College, the 2025 LaGasse Medal (American Society of Landscape Architects), the 2025 Lone Sailor Award (U.S. Navy Memorial), the 2024 Oregon History Maker (Oregon Historical Society), and the Walter T. Cox Award (Clemson University Institute for Parks).
Military Training and Service
Chuck served as an Intelligence Specialist in the U.S. Navy with assignments at an Attack Squadron, Joint Intelligence Center Pacific Command, and Defense Intelligence Agency Headquarters. His areas of expertise included Soviet/Russian, Middle Eastern, and Chinese affairs, as well as anti-terrorism.
Personal Life
Chuck is an enrolled citizen/tribal member of the Cayuse and Walla Walla tribes with the CTUIR. Chuck, Lori, and their daughter Ruby reside in Pendleton, Oregon. Their older children—Rose, Chauncey, and Clara—are leading fulfilling lives as adults. The family loves to camp, hike, bike, hunt, and fish.
Wednesday, October 7 — 11:30 AM to 12:40 PM PDT
Baratunde Thurston
Baratunde Thurston is a writer, host, and speaker exploring how we live well with technology, with each other, and with the planet. He has spent nearly 40 years creating with and criticizing technology, from The Onion to The Daily Show to his newest project, the Webby Award–winning Life With Machines, which took home a 2026 People's Voice Webby for Best Creative Use of AI and Tech. His work helps us co-create a future that doesn't suck, integrating humanity, humor, and a deep sense of place into the conversation about where technology is taking us.
Baratunde hosts Life With Machines, co-created and hosts the civic podcast How To Citizen with Baratunde, hosted the Emmy-nominated PBS series America Outdoors, and wrote the New York Times bestseller How to Be Black. He keynotes for and advises organizations that want to think hard about technology and the future without losing sight of the people and the planet it's meant to serve.
His worldview is grounded in the truth of our interdependence, which has made him one of the few voices in technology also trusted in Indigenous communities, cited by faith leaders, built into civic curricula, and formally recognized for making people laugh.
At the end of the day, he's an Earthling.
Thursday, October 8 — 11:30 AM to 12:40 PM PDT
Nick Capodice and Hannah McCarthy
Since 2018, Nick Capodice and Hannah McCarthy have hosted NHPR’s Civics 101, a podcast refresher course on the basics of how our democracy works. The show has received over 35 million downloads and is used in classrooms around the world.
Nick Capodice has been the cohost and coproducer of Civics 101 at NHPR for two years, where he has interviewed scholars on dozens of topics about how our government works and edited those interviews into a narrative podcast. He has presented at schools and conferences across the country on audio storytelling and firmly believes everyone out there should be making radio in their homes.
Prior to NHPR, Nick worked for many years at the Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side, where he led press tours, created digital exhibits, and trained educators in facilitated storytelling.
Hannah McCarthy has been working in journalism since 2013, covering arts and culture on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard, adolescent opioid addiction, urban caving, and professional wrestling in New York, and New Hampshire politics before settling into her role as co-host of New Hampshire Public Radio’s Civics 101.
Over many dozens of interviews and hundreds of hours of research and production, Hannah has worked to refine her approach to our governmental and political history in order to understand how this nation, and the millions of events that define it, really came to be. The daily task of the podcast is to distill unwieldy topics and empower listeners to engage with this democracy. As part of the show’s educational mission, Hannah and her co-host visit middle and high schools to teach podcasting to students and their teachers and discuss the subjects tackled on Civics 101.
Friday, October 9 — 12:00 to 2:30 PM PDT
Esteban Gast
Esteban Gast is an award-winning Colombian-American comedian and writer. He’s lived a few lives: teacher, author, president of an eco-community, and startup COO. Then, he found his passion: comedy about things that matter.
His work has been called “irreverent but aspirational” by Variety, and Esteban says that nails it! In 2023, he was chosen as a Grist50 Fixer. In 2024, his work won an Anthem Award, and he was selected as one of the top 100 Latinos in the world taking action on climate change.
Esteban is comedian-in-residence at Generation180, where he helped create the Climate Comedy cohort and Climate Cultura. He has hosted shows like the Spotify Original podcast, Identity at Play, and a few webseries for SoulPancake and Hyundai. He starred in VICELAND’s Jungletown, a 10-episode TV show about his time running an off-the-grid eco-community. Working with Yellow Dot Studios—the impact storytelling project from Oscar winner Adam McKay—Esteban has hosted So You Think You Can Science, Let’s Not Die, and Do You Even Care?
Esteban co-wrote a 2025 movie, Thena, and the book and lyrics for Teacher of The Year, a comedy musical based on his time teaching that was a 2024 finalist for the O'Neil. He travels as a standup comedian, winning Denver's Rise Comedy Festival and being chosen as "Best of the Fest" for the Burbank Comedy Festival. His work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, NPR's Science Friday, and ABC's Nightline.