America Revealed

Over the past century, an American industrial revolution has given rise to the biggest, most productive food machine the world has ever known. In this episode, host Yul Kwon explores how this machine feeds nearly 300 million Americans every day. He discovers engineering marvels we’ve created by putting nature to work and takes a look at the costs of our insatiable appetite on our health and environment. For the first time in human history, less than 2% of the population can feed the other 98%. Yul embarks on a trip that begins with a pizza delivery route in New York City then goes across country to California’s Central Valley, where nearly 50% of America’s fruits, nuts and vegetables are grown and skydives into the heartland for an aerial look of our farmlands. He meets the men and women who keep us fed 365 days a year—everyone from industrial to urban farmers, crop dusting pilots to long distance bee truckers, modern day cowboys to the pizza deliveryman.

America is a nation of vast distances and dense urban clusters, woven together by 200,000 miles of railroads, 5,000 airports, and 4 million miles of roads. These massive, complex transportation systems combine to make Americans the most mobile people on earth. In this episode, host Yul Kwon journeys across the continent by air, road and rail. He ventures behind the scenes with the workers who get us where we need to go; at the Federal Aviation Administration command center, he listens in on a call with NASA, the secret service, the military, and every major airline to learn how our national flight plan works today. He meets innovators creating ways to propel us farther and faster in years to come; in Las Vegas, he heads out into the wild night to see how transportation analysts are keeping traffic at bay by revolutionizing the use of one basic tool: the traffic light. And he uncovers the minor miracles and uphill battles involved in moving over 300 million Americans every day on infrastructure built in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Our modern electric power grid has been called the biggest and most complex machine in the world – delivering electricity over 200,000 miles of high tension transmission lines. But even though the grid touches almost every aspect of our lives, it’s a system we know very little about. Yul Kwon will travel around the country to understand its intricacies, its vulnerabilities, and the remarkable ingenuity required to keep the electricity on every day of the year. At New York State’s governing grid control room, he learns how a massive blackout cut power to 40 million Americans and to understand how we can protect against this type of colossal failure joins a live wire repair team who do their daring repairs from the side of a helicopter in flight. He also visits the country largest coal mine, rappels down the side of wind turbine, takes a rare tour of a nuclear plant and travels on a massive tanker – where Kwon reflects on the challenges and opportunities we face now and in the days ahead to keep the power flowing.

American manufacturing has undergone a massive revolution over the past 20 years. Despite all the gloom and doom, America is actually the number one manufacturing nation on earth. Yul Kwon crosses the nation looking at traditional and not-so traditional types of manufacturing. Along the way, he meets the men and women who create the world’s best and most iconic products, engineers who are reinventing the American auto industry, steelworkers who brave intense heat to accommodate radical new ideas about recycling, and engineers who are re-imagining the microchip. He visits one of the most innovative manufacturers on earth: a small start-up company that is building personalized robots – machines that may one day reshape our homes and offices, driving our revolution further forward. Yul further explores the emerging notion that manufacturing itself is changing from a system based on the movement and assembly of raw materials like steel and plastic to a system in which ideas and information are the raw materials of a new economy based around communications and social connections via companies like Facebook and Google.