– This Four-Part Series focuses on America’s food, transportation, energy and manufacturing industries. –
Viewers will be in for a new experience as they take to the skies for an epic journey and aerial look at the complex networks and systems that keep America running. Technology expert and communications attorney Yul Kwon (winner of “Survivor: Cook Islands”) serves as the adventurous host and guide for this four-part series, helping viewers discover and appreciate the vast infrastructure that makes our modern lives possible.
Wednesday, April 11 at 10:00 p.m.
Food Machine
Over the past century, an American industrial revolution has given rise to the biggest, most productive food machine the world has ever known. Host Yul Kwon explores how this machine feeds nearly 300 million Americans every day. He embarks on a trip that begins with a pizza delivery route in New York City then goes across the country to California’s Central Valley, where nearly 50 percent 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.
Wednesday, April 18 at 10:00 p.m.
Nation on the Move
America is a nation of vast distances and dense urban clusters, woven together by 200,000 miles of railroads, 5,000 airports, and four million miles of roads. These massive, complex transportation systems combine to make Americans the most mobile people on earth. Yul Kwon journeys across the continent by air, road and rail and ventures behind the scenes with the workers who get us where we need to go. At the FAA 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 who are 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 with the simple traffic light.
Wednesday, April 25 at 10:00 p.m.
Electric Nation
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. Yul Kwon travels around the country to understand its intricacies, its vulnerabilities and the remarkable ingenuity required to keep the power on every day. At New York State’s governing grid control room, he learns how a massive blackout cut power to 40 million Americans and joins a live wire repair team who do their daring repairs from the side of a helicopter in flight. He also visits the country’s largest coal mine, rappels down the side of wind turbine, takes a rare tour of a nuclear plant and travels on a massive tanker.
Wednesday, May 2 at 10:00 p.m.
Made in the USA
Contrary to recent widely held beliefs, America is actually the number one manufacturing nation on earth. Yul Kwon 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. 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.
About the Host - Yul Kwon
Yul Kwon is host of the PBS miniseries AMERICA REVEALED. He is also the host of the weekly news program “LinkAsia” on LinkTV.
Yul has enjoyed a diverse career across technology, business, law, public policy and media. He obtained his B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, serving on the editorial board of the Yale Law Journal and later clerking for Judge Barrington Parker on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. Yul’s early career focused on the intersection of technology, law and policy. He practiced transactional law with Venture Law Group and communications law with Wiltshire & Grannis. He served as a legislative aide to U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman, for whom he helped draft the Homeland Security Act, authored a landmark bill on nanotechnology and organized a congressional caucus on science and technology. Yul then transitioned into the business sector, first working at McKinsey & Co. as a management consultant before joining Google, Inc.’s Business Operations and Strategy group.
In 2006, Yul became the first Asian American to win the CBS reality show “Survivor.” Throughout the show’s controversial, racially segregated season, Yul applied the leadership and social skills he developed over his career to lead multi-racial teams and break stereotypes about Asian Americans in the media. Following “Survivor,” he worked as a special correspondent for CNN, co-hosted a show for Discovery Channel and became an adjunct instructor for the FBI, where he helped teach a counterintelligence course on social dynamics.
Yul was appointed by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski to become deputy chief of the FCC’s Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau, in which role he served from 2009 to 2011. As one of the key officials charged with transforming the FCC into a more pro-consumer agency, Yul oversaw a bureau-wide reorganization and developed regulatory initiatives to promote consumer choice and protection. He also spearheaded a series of FCC task forces and working groups on children’s issues, broadband adoption in minority communities and distracted driving.
Yul is active in a wide range of charities, particularly those seeking to increase the number of minority bone marrow donors. He is the vice chair of the Council of Korean American Leaders and sits on the advisory boards of the Asian American Justice Center and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center. Yul has been profiled in VIBE magazine’s annual “Juice” issue of people with power, People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” issue and Entrepreneur magazine.
Go to www.pbs.org/america-revealed for more information about Yul Kwon and this program.
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