Chip Carter Speaking Topics

• Where The Food Comes From: The View From 30,000 Feet

  Sure, we're all confused that tomatoes are a berry (yep). We're all upset that bananas and citrus may soon be gone (what, you didn't know?). And we're all stunned by the fact that Winnie the Pooh had it all wrong: Bears hate honey.

  Where the food comes from and how we get fed is a complex, sometimes mysterious and often misunderstood subject. Food impacts us all equally -- everybody's gotta eat.

  Over generations, we've lost connection to the magic of the land, the bounty it provides. We've gotten mixed up on what's good farming, bad farming, who's wearing the white hats? And farming is everywhere now -- the city, the country, your neighbor's house.

  Chip Carter tells amazing, often-hilarious tales from the road filming "Where The Food Comes From." He also paints a picture that provides a new portrait of farming -- today's reality, not your mental image. He connects the dots he’s seen from his constant North American travels to make food and farming as understandable for your audience as it is for him. And his presentation is full of the kind of “Huh – I didn’t know that” moments "WTFCF" is famous for.

  And Chip also knows nothing brings down barriers like breaking bread together. It's all part of "Where The Food Comes From".

• Bye-Bye Bananas: The Sustainability Prism

  Sustainability is quite the buzzword. We talk about it like it's a single thing. But it's not -- it's a system. In fact, it's a system of systems. Agriculture is one of those systems. And even there, sustainability has layers -- it's not just one thing.

  In fact, farmers have always been about sustainability – they’ve just usually called it “stewardship.” When JFK was president, 51% of Americans made their living from agriculture, directly or indirectly. Now, 1.5% of us are feeding the rest – and exporting food that helps sustain the world.

  For sustainability to be achieved in farming, these six things have to happen. Each is an adventure in sustainability on its own. Together, they’re essential for continued agricultural success:

  (1) The land must be protected and preserved – it must be maintained to produce this year, and it must maintain its capacity to produce in the future. How does that happen?

  (2) The farming practices must be sustainable. There are ways to farm “hot and fast” or “down and dirty” that will produce a solid crop, but strip the land of what it needs. Where’s the balance?

  (3) The crop must be sustainable. That means this year’s crop, and that means viability by necessary means. For non-organic farming, that’s chemical inputs and schedules; for organic, that’s maintenance and eyes-on. Vigilance is the standard regardless.

  (4) The market – this year’s and long-term. The crop is meaningless without a market. Farmers chase hot markets and avoid cold ones, resulting in gluts and gaps. A solid market with predictable pricing is needed for sustainability. Longer term, the overall market has to survive: Florida farmers once led the world in grapefruit production, and still could – but no one’s eating grapefruit these days.

  (5) Us -- plain old regular folks. We have to be sustained which means we must have bounty, volume, abundance, affordability and access to the crop.

  (6) The farmer. For true sustainability in farming, nothing matters more than this. The farmer must be able to make a living to keep feeding the rest of us. But farmers also have to be shielded from the emotional, mental and spiritual toll making a living off the land can take.

  Using the simple Cavendish banana (and the global virus that now threatens it) as a starting point, Chip Carter will take you on a sustainability tour that shows how all those things happen on a regular basis, day-in, day-out, both on individual farms and along the entire food chain. Or don’t happen, as is the case with our beloved and endangered banana.

• Farming The Moon: How We’ll Eat Where DoorDash Doesn’t Deliver

  They’ve talked about it for years. Now they’re finally going to do it: The United States of America will soon be farming on the moon. Heck, they’ve already started on the International Space Station (ISS). This is not sci-fi pie-in-the-sky. There have been humans living in space every single minute of every single day since November 2000.

  Chip Carter and the team from TV’s "Where The Food Comes From" saw this coming long ago. About five years ago, Chip heard researchers had successfully grown Earth grasses in lunar soil samples taken from the Apollo missions. He wondered why they’d waited so long?

  So he started digging. Soon, the "WTFCF" team was on track for its greatest adventure yet: Telling the story of how we’ll be feeding people where DoorDash doesn’t deliver. A special three-part series filmed in conjunction with NASA will be released later this year. And the "WTFCF" team will be sticking around for a long time to come: They’re tracking the Artemis arc and future farming space story to tell in their first-ever documentary film.

  The obstacles NASA researchers had to overcome were daunting. The creativity that had to be applied is astonishing. How do you water plants in Zero Gravity aboard the ISS, when the drops just float away? How do you convince seeds to stay in soil, or soil to stay in a container? And while we’ve proven we can grow crops in moon dirt, what about the hostile atmosphere? And speaking of moon dirt, since lunar soil is one of the most valuable and rare substances on Earth, how did they get enough for all these experiments? (Spoiler: They had to invent a spot-on substitute… and did!)

  The best part? The same research and new technology that will let us farm the moon and beyond will soon find its way to work on farms here at home.

  Chip Carter will take you deep inside the labs at NASA for an amazing, close-up and very unique look at Space Farming – and how it will benefit farmers here on Earth. And then he’ll lead you all the way to the launchpad at Kennedy Space Center, where he and the crew stood and watched in wonder as the subjects they’d been studying slipped the surly bonds of Earth and soared into space.

• Fear of Success?

  It's a constant in our world -- fear of failure. But what if we're not actually afraid to fail at all? We literally do it every day, all day long. Any day we don’t complete every objective, we failed -- in multiple ways, really. If you want a hamburger for lunch, and for some reason don’t get it, that’s a failure. If you don’t complete that deadline project, also a failure – just a different scope.

  So maybe, in the business world, when we say we're afraid of failure, is it possible we're actually afraid of success? Assuming our lives are okay at the moment, it’s intimidating to take chances that might mess things up, even if the payoff is a dream-come-true. Every innovator is afraid of being judged: “I brought my dream to life — now everybody hates it so I’m a flop.”

  That’s scary! And maybe most significantly, dreamers love their dreams — as long as you don’t put that dream in play and see it fail, then you always have it to cling to. If you never do it, it could still come true; if you do and it flops, you no longer have the comfort of that particular dream to cling to.

  So how do you know if it’s the fear of failure that’s keeping you from moving forward -- or if it’s something else?

  Could it be fear of success?

  Chip Carter first encountered this concept in a lunch meeting seven years ago. He was struggling to get his new company in gear. "Where The Food Comes From" was still just a concept fighting to be released from his Dream Inventory. He knew what he wanted to do and where he wanted to go, but he found the process daunting.

  It shouldn’t have been. In addition to building his own business, he was already a reporter for The RFD-TV Network news team. He had just produced the network’s highly successful Christmas special (which still airs every year). But nothing was moving.

  And then came The Meeting. Lunch with a trusted and successful business friend came to an abrupt standstill when that friend asked Chip, “Are you maybe afraid of success? Success changes things. I was afraid of it. Now I’ve been successful for years and I’m still afraid of it.”

  Chip thought it was a stupid question. Who’s afraid of success? And then he thought about it some more. He soon realized it was true – he was clinging to the dream of "Where The Food Comes From" so tightly, he feared making it reality… and potentially losing it.

  He soon figured out what he was doing wrong. He realized he was relying on other people to do things he should be controlling himself. He’d surrounded himself with “yes men” who offered much support but little action. And he realized he was doing that because it helped him created an easily explainable stall: “I can’t move forward because other people can’t carry out my vision.”

  Which was the exact moment Chip realized he had to commit to owning it all – everything, even the possibility of failure. He decided to do what he’d always known was right: He stopped looking to others for help, cut the dead weight loose, and made the commitment to lay every brick himself if necessary.

  It was. He did. In January 2022, "Where The Food Comes From" premiered on RFD-TV. Now the show is heading into Season 6 and has even become part of USDA’s National Ag In The Classroom program.

  And that all started with an honest contemplation of a simple question. Afraid of success? No more.

• Meeting Mario: My Years Inside The Video Game Industry

  Okay, so Chip Carter’s not all about farming, or at least he didn’t used to be. The grandson of farmers and the son of a farmtown minister, all of Chip’s early jobs were in farming – and he was horrible at it. So he headed for the big city to engage his actual gift: Telling stories.

  In the 1980s, grownups didn’t play video games. That was purely kid’s stuff. Fortunately, though he was already established as an early career journalist in Atlanta, Chip still had a lot of kid in him.

  Chip had been a gamer since the release of Pong in the 1970s. He got an Atari system for Christmas one year… when he was already 21-years-old. He loved arcades. He collected games. In other words, he was in a state of arrested adolescence.

  Good thing he didn’t go ahead and grow up just yet. Chip was already a well-known journalist in Atlanta in 1990 when he had the idea for a regular column that would review video games and let people know what was good, what was bad, and – an industry first – what games were appropriate for what ages.

  The Chicago Tribune quickly snapped up the idea. In Fall 1990, Chip’s “Inside The Video Games” column began running in newspapers around the world, reaching a weekly audience of as many as 500 million at peak.

  For the next 19 years, Chip got to see the first-emerging, then-exploding video game industry from the inside. He was there the first time Nintendo’s legendary Mario character – who turned 50 this year! – spoke. He rode a train across America to test out the release of the first “Legend of Zelda” handheld game. He and his son went snowboarding with a young Sean White, years before his Olympic glory, to check out a new game from Sony.

  He played paintball in the Hollywood hills, hung out with Stan Lee (who granted Chip his first public interview in years!) and even flew a fighter plane upside down over San Diego Bay in relation to a new flight simulator from SEGA.

  Chip soon realized he wasn’t the only adult playing games – the appeal seemed to extend to anybody with time and money on their hands, especially if they had children (and Chip was raising a 4-year-old by himself). Celebrities and star athletes certainly fit that bill.

  Chip started reaching out to the that community. His first hit came with the legendary author Steven King, who played games with his son Owen. They helped write Chip’s special Halloween column in 1992. From there, the celebrity chase was on.

  Chip worked with and interviewed virtually every significant sports and entertainment star of the 1990s. He spent three days hanging out with Derek Jeter for a series of articles. He hung out with Jon Stewart on the set of “The Daily Show”. He once partied all night with Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters. Heidi Klum, Mario Andretti, James Cameron… the list goes on and on.

  But none of that would have been happening without Chip’s privileged seat inside the video game world. He and his son traveled constantly, visiting developers to see new games in progress. They saw the origin of classics like “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” and “Doom” and “StarFox” – he and his son actually spent a day playing the game with the legendary Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon, for that one.

  In this presentation, Chip takes the audience through a whirlwind tour of the “Wild West” days of the video game industry, starting well before, as he puts it, “the guys in suits finally showed up.”

  It was a time of untamed creativity, passion, innocence and pure fun. And, given his seat at the table, Chip Carter can take you there like no one else.

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