Like it or not, our lives are shaped by the biggest and most powerful business on the planet: crime. This episode will delve into how the small, rural town of St. Albans, Vermont, is making big money for drug dealers; how the local economy in Canon City, Colorado, benefits from incarceration; and how the gangs in Washington, D.C., compete to control territory, a fight that is happening more and more through social media.
There are billions of dollars out there — you just have to know where to look. We’re on a quest to dig up the goods, from the most remote ends of the earth to our own backyards. And we’re charting a course to where X really does mark the spot of buried treasure. We’ll travel to northeastern Nevada, where more gold has been found than in the entire California Gold Rush. And in Defiance, Ohio, we’ll meet a family who discovered a bin of old baseball cards and found out that these rare collectibles are worth millions. Finally, we journey to Lodz, Poland, with treasure hunters seeking gold and jewels thought to be lost forever from World War II.
All sex is not created equal, and some places are blessed with more of it than others. We travel to Hurley, Wisconsin, a town with the unlikely distinction of being the Strip Club Capital of America. Know where to find the fastest-growing group of sexually active people? We head to Delray Beach, Florida, where senior citizens are turning retirement communities into sexual meccas. And as more countries experiment with legalized prostitution, we journey to Switzerland, to a drive-in brothel in Zurich.
When an idea goes viral, it spreads like a disease. When a sickness goes viral, all of us are at risk. Whether it starts with animals, humans or bombs, how can we improve our chances of surviving the next global pandemic? At the Centers for Disease Control headquarters in Atlanta, a researcher studies mosquitoes (the world’s most dangerous animals) by letting them suck blood from his arms. Starting in the Hong Kong hotel where SARS turned into an epidemic, we trace how the disease spread worldwide. In a top secret U.S. government lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico, researchers track biological weapons around the world and map their potential impact.
Data and number crunching have taken over the world of sports. The highest proportion of NFL players comes from the small towns of the Louisiana bayou, thanks to a unique combination of roads, talent and history. We travel to Argentina to meet the highly organized soccer hooligans of Buenos Aires, who look more like a mafia than a fan club. Picking a name and mascot for your team is a serious business. Is it better to go for a top name (“‘Eagles” is most popular in the U.S.) or a rare one?
As we build an overlapping map of natural disaster threats around the world, we make an unsettling discovery: Mother Nature has handed us our eviction notice, and almost no place is truly safe. Drought is a major threat around the world, and in San Angelo, Texas, pilots are fighting back by seeding the clouds to create weather the local ranchers desperately need. We travel to Iceland to delve into a town on the edge of a volcano where residents dodge molten lava and constantly rebuild as eruptions eat their property. The U.S. has more damaging weather and disaster threats than any other nation, and the epicenter of it all is New Madrid, Missouri, home to the biggest earthquake in American history, along with a laundry list of other potentially deadly natural disasters.
Don't be fooled–the internet isn't invisible and wireless. Our data is not stored "on a cloud." Today’s cyber-world is made up of real places, and those locations matter more than you might expect.
The question “What’s for dinner?” has very different answers around the world. From snacks, to main courses, to drinks and even condiments, we’re building a plate of the world’s most popular dishes. We go to the surprising No. 1 pizza town in the U.S. — Orlando, Florida — to meet a guy who has lived on nothing but pizza for 25 years.
Host Kal Penn puts a dollar sign to all that cash that we're leaving on the curb. We visit Freeburg, IL, where farmer Shane Reinneck's family has been saving money by spreading excrement.
Outer space, and the idea of humans colonizing it, are a lot closer than you think.
Think of your body as a city unto itself, and discover how -- like any urban metropolis -- it rises, evolves, and, eventually... collapses.
You’d think after thousands of years of exploring the earth that we’d know where everything is by now... but we don’t. Not even close.
