S01E01 Crime, Inc.
Explore 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.,...
The Big Picture with Kal Penn
S01E04: Going Viral
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.
Overview
With the explosion of infographics and big data, maps aren't just about geography anymore. They can tell us all kinds of things about the human experience. National Geographic Channel’s new series "The Big Picture With Kal Penn" is all about finding the unexpected — and sometimes surprising — realities in both the world at large and our own backyard, revealed by crunching the numbers and finding new ways to visualize data. Host and producer Kal Penn is taking viewers on a journey to understand how things like money, sex, food, sports and crime influence our daily lives. Exploring and generating infographics from information banks and data analyses, we investigate different themes through the mapping of new data, the creative visualization of information, and in-depth personal stories with fascinating characters.
Episodes
S01E02 Treasure Hunt
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...
S01E03 Sex Drive
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...
S01E04 Going Viral
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...
S01E05 Fantasy Sports
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...
S01E06 Surviving Nature’s Fury
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...
S01E07 Born to be Wired
We explore the role LSD played in making Silicon Valley the hub of today's PC and Internet revolutions and journey to a town in Romania that is getting rich from running Internet scams that milk...
S01E08 Eat This!
We're building a plate of the world's most popular dishes, including going to the number one pizza town in the U.S. to meet a guy who has lived on nothing but pizza for 25 years.
S01E09 Cash for Trash
They say that one man's trash is another man's treasure. But in the right hands, all trash has the potential to be treasure.
S01E10 Space Invasion
At the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, a group of ambitious scientists is conducting research into how humans could survive on Mars.
S01E11 Body City
Think of the human body as a city unto itself, with buildings, utilities, traffic patterns and rules and regulations that make the whole place hum. Our bodies aren't done evolving — they have urban development...
S01E12 Off the Map
You’d think after thousands of years of exploring and mapping the earth that we’d know where everything is by now. Well, we don’t. Not even close. We’re going on a global quest to reveal the...
Cast
Kal Penn
Himself - Host
