A few years ago, home ownership was at an all time high, unemployment just 5.6% and falling. But when the bottom fell out of the real estate market, millions of Americans fell on hard times. Some lost everything. And it’s not just people and businesses who’ve suffered. All over the country, entire cities are going broke. On the next “Inside Man,” Morgan Spurlock visits the city of Stockton, California, which recently declared bankruptcy.
Labor unions gave us weekends, child labor laws, and the guaranteed minimum wage. They virtually created the American middle class. But a lot of people are asking what unions have they done for us lately. In the United States, union membership has been on the decline for half a century. And lately, they’ve come under attack. Workers still need protection, but the question is: Are unions still the best way for them to get it?
Spurlock enters the brave new world of extreme life extension, embarking on a life-prolonging regimen and trying everything from genome hacking, to creating an avatar and uploading his consciousness in preparation for the “Technological Singularity.” Spurlock’s quest to live forever includes visits with radical futurist Ray Kurzweil, Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, and Cambrian Genomics in San Francisco.
From toy dogs in fancy purses to puppy mills to shelter animals, Spurlock takes a humorous and poignant look at America’s cultural obsession with pets. To explore how less fortunate “would-be” pets live, Spurlock gets down and dirty as an animal shelter worker for the Animal Rescue League of Berks County (Reading, PA.), where each day can mean adoption or euthanasia.
How easy is it to track someone online? How much info does the government have on each of us? And how much info do corporations keep on us – tracking where we live, what we buy, and for whom we buy it? To uncover the scary truth about big data collecting, Spurlock journeys out to find out just how much information is kept on him.
Spurlock travels to Nashville, TN – the buckle of the Bible Belt – to become a guest preacher at an atheist church, a controversial and growing movement in the US. Along the way, he visits evangelical mega-churches, Baptist gospel churches, mosques, Mormon gatherings, and more to try and figure out exactly why people need religion in their lives, why it creates so much conflict in this world, and what his own message is for his Sunday sermon.
With an open mind, Spurlock steeps himself in the history, theories, and photographic ‘evidence’ of UFO sightings, embedding himself at several MUFONs (Mutual UFO Network) and communing with watchers, conspiracy theorists and other interested parties to make his own determination as to whether or not we are truly alone in the universe.
Spurlock travels to New Orleans, Louisiana to see how achievable the American Dream really is in one of the most economically unequal places in the United States. From working at a food pantry to racing Ferraris with the city's elite, he'll explore what wealth looks like, what's changed, and where we're headed.
Spurlock imbeds in some of the top college sports programs in the U.S. to see first hand what it takes to be a top-level college athlete, what kind of education these kids are actually getting, and what life is like under the watchful eye of the NCAA. Schools are making millions off the backs of these kids – should the athletes themselves be able to share in the profits?
Morgan lives off of nothing but the e-currency Bitcoin for a week to figure out whether the world is ready for a new kind of money. With all of the misinformation and misunderstanding surrounding bitcoin, Spurlock is determined to understand the pros and cons of the peer-to-peer digital currency and what its effect might be on the global economy.
Spurlock enters the seductive world of professional gambling by spending a week in Las Vegas determined to beat the house. His exploration of this pastime, which often leads to serious addiction, takes him to casinos, bookies, the racetrack, Off Track Betting and just about any place that allows him to gamble.
Spurlock “virtually” experiences life as an astronaut and investigates the future of the space industry. The host’s journey takes him to government and private facilities including NASA’s Johnson Space Center (Houston), the X-Prize Foundation (Culver City, CA.) and Virgin Atlantic’s Mojave Air & Space Port (CA.) to see how the rules of the game are changing and what it means for the human race.
Separating fact from TV dramatizations, Spurlock embeds in a forensic science unit to understand first-hand how crime scene investigations are actually conducted. From the first responders, to the collection of evidence (at CSI Academy in Alachua, FL and ATF training facility in Huntsville, AL) and its analysis in the lab, he gets a crash course in Crime 101 from beginning to end.
Screaming fans, sold-out arenas, and teenage superstars, Spurlock joins the ranks of professional video gamers in one of the fastest-growing sectors of the “sports” world. Committed to understanding this shockingly intense industry, he joins reigning League of Legends North American Champions, from Counter Logic Gaming, as they train to compete for a big cash prize at the World Championship in Paris.
In a quest to rid his life of contaminants – which are prominent in food, cleaning products and even furniture, Spurlock gets professional help to “de-tox.” The host puts his body to the test, dabbling in chelation therapy, infrared saunas, electromagnetic-free sleep chambers, and various cleanses, to see if poisons can truly be flushed out of our bodies and surroundings in the modern world.
Inspired by companies like Google, AirBnB, and Spotify, Spurlock attempts to fill a void in the marketplace and re-write the rules by becoming the next disruptor. An eye-opening trip to Silicon Valley provides industry advice from tech giants, and examines why companies like Uber often leave a trail of enemies in their wake and questions whether this golden era of tech will solve age-old problems.