Original subtitles

[vehicle horns honking, siren blaring]

[music]

Ari Wallach: The most important thing for any human being

is to be with other human beings.

We are not solitary creatures.

We are not individuals in the way

that we think of it or the stories that we tell.

Evidence shows us that we have been traveling and moving

in groups as far back as we can actually find

skeletons and bones in caves.

Humans feel the most in themselves, the most happy,

the most joyful when they're

actually in large groups together.

We're all kind of focused and aligned.

We're actually having a sense of awe

at whatever is happening.

We find that when people are at certain events together,

that eventually their hearts are actually beating in unison.

What we are meant to be is to be in groups together.

It's who and what we are.

Drake: ♪ Listen ♪

♪ Seeing you got ritualistic ♪

♪ Cleansing my soul of addiction for now ♪

♪ 'Cause I'm falling apart ♪

♪ Yeah, tension

♪ Between us just like picket fences ♪

♪ You got issues that I won't mention for now ♪

♪ 'Cause we're falling apart ♪

♪ Passionate from miles away

♪ Passive with the things you say ♪

♪ Passing up on my old ways ♪

♪ I can't blame you, no, no ♪

[music]

Wallach: So there's two things that Homo sapiens do

fundamentally better than almost any other species

on Planet Earth.

It's to work together, to cooperate,

and also a sense of prospection,

actually, to think about the future.

And those are inextricably linked.

As my journey continues, everywhere I go,

I'm struck by how similar we all really are.

We want to connect, to belong, and to see ourselves

as a part of a team or a tribe.

Why is this sense of togetherness so central

to who we are, and what does it mean

in a moment when that's often not reflected

in the world around us?

How can we build on the best parts of who we are

in order to create the future we want to see

and leave behind?

That's led me to Japan, headed out to a small island

I've read about for years.

Coming here is a dream come true,

as this quiet, distant place is

home to a troupe of world-renowned drummers,

who've always struck me as a beautiful picture

of what's possible when individuals come together

to create something they could never achieve on their own.

[people vocalizing]

♪

[scraping and clanking]

Leo Ikenaga: My name is Leo Ikenaga,

and I'm a performer for Kodo.

Kodo is a Japanese drumming ensemble.

Japanese drumming is called taiko.

And we are a group that uses the taiko,

but we try to incorporate different traditional,

cultural elements that are native to Japan.

And we try to kind of create something new out of it.

We travel all over the world

and perform and work with a lot of different artists.

And we're just trying to create something new

from this Japanese tradition.

♪

Wallach: What does it take for someone to join Kodo?

So, to join Kodo, you first have to complete

a two-year apprenticeship.

And then you become a junior member,

and then you become a full-time member.

And the two-year apprenticeship is

a very, very rigorous process.

You're living

in an abandoned 70-year-old middle school

with 15 to 20 other people.

You have no privacy.

You have no phones, no TV, no Internet.

And you wake up at 5:00 in the morning.

You run every day. You plant your own rice.

You harvest your own food, and then you practice all day.

And you do that for two years.

So it's a pretty crazy process,

but it's a great opportunity

to get in touch with yourself,

because you're constantly under pressure

and you're constantly under stress.

Right now there are about 15 apprentices.

Maybe one or two will make it into the troupe,

so it's very, very selective.

But the beautiful thing is, these apprentices,

even though maybe one or two make it into the group,

they have to work together.

They have to cook for each other.

They have to perform with each other,

because we're never looking at them individually.

We're evaluating them

based on how well they work with others,

how much they improve others.

It's hard to see that when you're in the apprenticeship,

but once you become a member, it's very apparent,

because, you know, when we're performing,

you have to be in sync with everyone without a conductor.

So these apprentices, they're constantly

fighting and competing with each other.

But at the same time, they have to be,

like, very, very close-knit with each other.

So it's difficult,

but a very, very rewarding journey.

Wallach: What's possible when you move

from being kind of a solo player

to being an ensemble?

What is it that you're able to do

that you couldn't do alone?

Ikenaga: You're able to create something that you

could never do by yourself.

You are able to put yourself into a situation

where you strive to be better

and you strive to make others better.

And it's this process that we go through every day.

It's really hard to do that alone.

It's possible.

But when you have someone next to you

that's drumming their heart out

and they're doing the best that they can

and they're doing it every day,

you want to be like that person.

Yeah, it's pretty incredible.

♪

Wallach, voice-over: Being here and experiencing

how the drummers live and work together is moving.

And it makes me wonder just how much we've lost

in the pursuit of seeing ourselves as individuals

above all else.

In a time when distrust feels more common than trust,

what kind of collective price are we paying?

And what type of futures are waiting

on the other side of us coming to see ourselves as connected,

not alone?

Man: We are the only species in the animal kingdom

with the ability to blush,

which is, I think, a telling fact.

We involuntarily give away our feelings

to other members of our species in order to establish trust.

We are the only species among primates

with white eyes, right?

So that means people can see--

I'm looking in the camera right now.

If I was a chimpanzee,

that would have been much more difficult.

I'm looking to the left. Now I'm looking to the right.

So I'm involuntarily giving away my gaze,

which, again, helps to establish trust.

So it's in our biology.

It's in our DNA that we've been optimized for trust.

You want to feel like the social system of which you're

a member and a participant has something

legitimate, fair, desirable, good,

something worthy about it.

We want to feel like our sports team is

better than the other sports teams.

We want to feel our town or our city is better than others

or our university or college is better than others.

It could also be a racial or ethnic group

or other kinds of social groups.

That's where the tribalism comes in.

Rutger Bregman: We have created systems

that increase the distance

between people, right, increases the distance between

people on the work floor and the managers,

between the citizens and the politicians.

The longer the distance becomes,

both physical distance and psychological distance,

the more difficult it becomes to trust one another.

So that's what we have.

We have a deepening crisis of trust.

Person: Listen, why must we divide?

Why are we dividing people?

[indistinct shouting]

[both speaking Georgian]

You're completely destroying our city!

You come down--

Reporter: Things got so heated that

the board members eventually walked out,

leaving the police to deal with the unruly crowd.

Different person: I was so disgusted, like,

that people would do this.

People: Close the border! Close the border!

Close the border!

...for 20 years.

You're just screaming...

I was screaming...

Come on. No one's giving me free food.

No one's giving me free housing.

We do a tax-- I need order.

Right? This is what everyone does.

[overlapping chatter]

Woman: OK. Time-out. Time-out.

[chatter continues]

[people chanting indistinctly]

Wallach: We've always had disagreements,

but something more serious is happening here.

The ideas and institutions that govern our societies--

long taken for granted-- have begun being challenged

in new and unsettling ways.

Here at Stanford University, Alice Siu

is working with her team at the Deliberative Democracy Lab

to better understand where we are right now

and what we can do to create lasting change moving forward.

What is the state of democracy today?

Many will say democracy is in crisis.

A lot of democracies around the world are backsliding,

and we have trouble trying to figure out

what a lot of people actually want,

what kind of system of government

people want to live in.

But I think, as of today, a lot of people

are concerned about whether their voices are being heard

and if people are really representing

their likes and dislikes.

Wallach: But Alice also sees an opportunity here,

a chance for new and needed ideas

around how to improve our democracies

in order to better face the future

and engage directly with the citizens they serve.

A growing set of ideas known as deliberative democracy

are beginning to take hold in countries around the world...

like here in France, where they've started holding

citizen conventions--forums designed to better engage

their citizens in addressing

the major challenges and opportunities before them.

Wallach: So how did this all first come about

here in France?

Look, I mean, first, we had this yellow vest crisis

in France,

a crisis of working classes in France.

You have a lot of fears and anxieties,

climate change, digitalization, geopolitics.

And a lot of people in small cities and so on

having this feeling not to be respected by our policies,

not to have a place anymore in this world,

and not to be prepared for this change.

So I made this tour,

and I launched a series of citizen conventions.

On a random basis, you take 100, 200 citizens

and you formulate a question.

You put them in a situation to have

a lot of interactions with experts.

They propose a solution,

which is based on a consensus and collective intelligence

and ability to understand the complexity of the problem.

So I did it on climate change.

It worked because we passed a law after that

largely inspired by the citizen convention,

and the feedback was very positive.

They learned.

They were very committed, but they respected each other.

But for me, this is a constant work in progress

because it's never perfect.

But where I'm really optimistic

is that you can have emotions, positive and negative,

and argumentation and rational discussion

to be merged together

regarding our collective future.

Wallach, voice-over: Back in the U.S., Alice and her team

have pioneered something with similar ideas in mind.

Wallach: Your team put together an event

called America in One Room.

What was that?

It was a four-day-long deliberative poll,

where we gathered a nationally representative sample.

We flew them in to Dallas, Texas,

from across the country.

There were 523 people that came from all walks of life,

and they gathered together in small groups.

They deliberated about immigration,

economy, foreign policy.

And for four days, they discussed

in their small groups about these topics,

and then they had panels of experts.

And, actually, five then-presidential candidates

answer their questions.

What we learned from 500-plus people is

that people can and will change their minds

after just four days of being with each other.

We learned that those that may have had extreme positions

on either side of the spectrum actually moderated

and became closer to each other.

We learned that after deliberation together,

they liked each other more.

They came to understand

why the other person held certain views.

President Macron: I think, especially on a local basis,

we have to find a way to involve citizens,

make them much more player of the game

and doer of our democracies.

Wallach: Paint a picture for me of the democracy

that you want to see.

We don't have to live like this today.

We can change it now, and we can have those conversations

that build empathy.

We can have those structured conversations.

We can build those skills.

And if we just start somewhere and not wait,

then we can really get to that future

where everyone actually listens to each other

and our democracy is held together

by everyone that's involved.

[applause]

Man: It's the organization of humanity,

the self-organization of humanity

which is the key change that needs to happen.

Now, we live in this extraordinary situation

where a tiny number of people,

which calls itself a government,

claims to be able to control

this complex system that we call society from the center.

There is no complex system on Earth

that can be controlled from the center.

It can't possibly work.

And yet at the same time, we have this tremendous capacity

for participatory, for deliberative democracy,

where we can come together and make decisions together

for the good of all.

And where we've been allowed to do this,

if only on a small scale, or a partial scale,

the results have been extraordinary.

♪

Rutger Bregman: I think it's quite clear that we are living

through probably the most dangerous century

in the history of our species.

It could also be the most prosperous century

and the most exciting century to be alive.

What we need are people who are willing and able

to look forward to a future that could be

so, so much better than the world we live in today.

Wallach: In some ways right now,

that can feel naive, even impossible.

But this idea of building on our desire

for connection and cooperation can begin anywhere.

And that's what's led me to Nashville,

where Reverend Jennifer Bailey is working to create

new forms of community

to reach across what feels like a growing divide.

It used to be, you know,

we kind of find some common ground.

We kind of live together. We broke bread together.

Now it just seems ripped apart.

What do you attribute that to?

It's feeling--it feels very strong right now.

Yeah.

People are experiencing, in the U.S. context at least,

higher rates of loneliness and isolation than ever before.

And where they find community can often be

in these online pockets,

where they're getting talked to by the same folks.

And, see, the world becomes--

rather than becoming bigger and having spaces

where people can hear more in the marketplace of ideas,

it becomes smaller and more rigid.

And then you, like, make the fool's errand

of believing everybody thinks like you.

And the person who doesn't, then, must be my enemy.

Tell me about the work that you're doing

and how you kind of got started in it.

Yeah, so the People's Supper was a project

that I co-founded with two friends

after the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

We wanted to create spaces around dinner tables

for people to begin having conversations

across lines of difference,

whether that be political, ideological, religious,

racial difference.

We've hosted thousands of suppers around the country.

And I think at the core of those suppers

and our time together is really an ability

for people to hear each other and not just deeper speech,

but deeper personhood,

to be reminded of the fact

that we are not just how we vote

or how we look, but that we are a collection of stories

and that our story is not individual

but the continuation of other stories

and prologue to the stories that are to come,

even if it's just for one meal.

Wallach, voice-over: While I was in town, Jennifer invited me

to one of these dinner parties,

joining a small group of people

from various walks of life and different backgrounds

to sit down together for a shared meal.

[indistinct chatter]

We're gonna have a fun conversation tonight.

I like to say you all are joining,

whether you knew it or not, a movement of people

who've been gathering around the country

over the past six years almost.

Well, just to toast you all, thank you for being here.

So grateful for this time together.

Wallach, voice-over: That night, I experienced something

so simple and yet profound.

I witnessed a group of strangers,

who in some ways have nothing in common,

come to see the common humanity they all share.

Our past and our stories are unique,

and yet what we want to see unfold in the future,

for ourselves and for those we love,

is so much more alike than what we often stop to consider.

I really feel like we're at a period of rebirthing

and remaking the world.

And we see that

with the intensity of the climate crisis.

We see that

with threats to the notion of democracy globally.

We're at a real inflection point in global history.

I find myself asking,

What does it mean to be human in the future?

What are the things that aren't replaceable?

And care for one another feels like something

that we will never be able to fully replace.

Wallach: For tens of thousands of years, even for centuries,

we would live kind of collectively

in relatively dense accommodation.

Even just in the past 150 years,

many of us began living in cities,

but something happened,

especially in America after World War II.

We had returning GIs and a rapidly expanding population

with not enough housing.

A lot of these people

needed to be close to cities for jobs,

and so the cities gave way to surrounding suburbs.

You and I live in a period of tremendous growth

with many problems.

Across the United States,

new homes are springing up by the thousands

for our rapidly growing population.

Modern shopping centers satisfy most

of the material needs of suburban dwellers

who no longer depend on the city as a retail center.

Wallach: Now, the suburbs could only happen in America

with the advent of the vehicle.

We needed vehicles to live in these new kind of communities.

And as they continued to expand,

the newly needed roads did as well,

in some cases paving roads

right through the heart of existing neighborhoods,

separating what had been thriving communities.

American suburbs were held up as a symbol

of a thriving middle class,

but they had a distancing effect on people as well.

Common areas for human connection

were replaced by individual spaces

and separated by greater and greater distances.

What ends up happening

is a sense of separation between people

right in the midst of their own communities.

How does architecture, how does urban planning,

and how do the neighborhoods we live in today

impact how we relate to each other?

How can we build futures where we design

for more human connectedness?

And is that even possible in a moment

that feels more deeply divided than anything in our lifetimes?

I came to Washington

to sit down with the Secretary of Transportation,

Pete Buttigieg,

someone who thinks a lot about how we are shaping

not only the social fabric

but the actual infrastructure of America.

You're leading the Department of Transportation.

That's real infrastructure.

It's bridges. It's tunnels. It's airports. It's roads.

That being said, what are the takeaways to build

other types of kind of social infrastructure,

in a sense more of that human connective tissue?

Well, there's a very real relationship

between how we connect to each other physically

through transportation

and how we connect to each other socially.

Even in an era where we are discovering

remote and hybrid and virtual interaction,

we're also seeing how important it can be

to just be around each other

or to literally walk the streets

of one another's communities,

to travel and understand through travel

how other societies work.

One finding that I think is very powerful

is when people get to know each other better,

they tend to trust each other more, not less.

It's 30 years from now,

and you're talking to your children about this era,

this moment in human history.

How do you describe it?

Well, I'm gonna tell them that this was a moment

when a lot of changes happened in our society,

certainly in transportation,

and those changes led to their lives getting better.

I think that we need to be in a season of building,

not just because we have a backlog

and there's a bunch of stuff we should have been doing

the whole time but because the projects

that are ahead in this century--

the big shared national and human projects--

like confronting climate change,

staying a step ahead of the next pandemic,

preventing nuclear conflict--

will require levels of cooperation

that, in turn, require

a lot of good infrastructure.

Are we able to rebuild

to that kind of golden era of community

that we once had?

Yeah, I believe we can, and I believe we must.

This is not just important

because of some vague and romantic conception

of neighborhoods and communities.

It's also got life-and-death consequences.

There's evidence, for example,

that the survivability of tornadoes--

all other things being equal--

goes up in neighborhoods or communities

where neighbors know each other.

So a simple principle or test,

whether you're designing a suburban subdivision

or a dense city block,

would be, Does this design encourage

or discourage people

from knowing who their neighbors are?

I really believe in so many of these dimensions--

political, social, even technological--

our salvation will come from the local.

And we need processes

that empower local decision making.

♪

Wallach, voice-over: We spend a lot of time these days

separating ourselves into groups

based on ideas and identity.

But I wanted to see what's possible

when a local community decides to build together

around a shared sense of belief and belonging.

In Amsterdam, Marjan de Blok decided

to do just that, when she helped create

a floating village right here in the heart of the city.

Wallach: Usually when I show up to a village,

I just take, like, a path,

and I just, you know, start walking among the homes.

But here I immediately walked

onto a dock on the water.

So tell me where we are.

You are in the north of Amsterdam

in Johan van Hasseltkanaal.

And I'm the founder of this village

that you are in right now.

One school--one school is here, very near...

Marjan de Blok, voice-over: So we have a big jetty

connecting all the houses.

There are actually 46 households living here.

We are a community, so we share a lot together.

And we try to live as sustainable as possible.

All our houses have solar panels.

All our houses have a heat pump.

We have a green roof, and all the houses are built

with sustainable materials.

All houses are really well-insulated.

And we have a smart grid, which is quite special.

By the smart grid, we are all connected,

so we can exchange

the surpluses of the energy we generated.

And all the houses have a battery.

And in this battery, we can also save energy

that we don't need at that moment.

If one house generates more electricity

and another house needs more electricity,

you can share electricity among the homes?

Yeah. That's how it goes.

So what was the motivation

for starting a community like this?

Well, it actually started 15 years ago.

At that time, I was living in a small house in Amsterdam.

I hardly knew my neighbors,

and it was all really kind of lonely and individualistic.

And I just completely fell in love

with the concept of living sustainable on the water,

but also to live a more social life,

because that was something

that I was really missing at that time.

I had this idea of starting a group.

Build a couple of houseboats together,

make them sustainable.

And living on the water makes you feel closer to nature.

And the fact that you would generate your own electricity

gave me this really great sense of freedom,

a feeling that I would never have

in the house that I was living in.

[indistinct chatter]

[music]

Whoo.

Wallach: So tell me more about

what it's like living in community.

De Blok: Yeah. It's uncomparable.

It's uncomparable. It's a feeling...

You are never alone.

You have like-minded people around you.

If you have to do everything by yourself, it's not fun.

And so then the community makes it nice

to try all these new sustainable technologies.

So I really think that the community is needed

for a transition to a more sustainable society.

Hi. Hello.

De Blok, voice-over: When I started this

or when I had this initial idea,

I had no idea how important it was, what we were doing.

[indistinct chatter]

And that it's also about, what can you do,

instead of what you can't do or what is--

you can't eat meat,

you can't drive a car, you can't fly.

It's all, like, negative.

And, of course, those things are important to keep in mind

and to adjust your behavior,

but there's also another side to it.

And I think that's the side that we touched

and realized here with this community,

because it's all positive.

It's all about connection-- connection to your neighbors

but also connection to your environment.

If you are connected to your environment,

you will think twice before polluting it.

There's a lot of respect for one another,

and I think everybody realizes that it's

not just a jetty with some houses.

I feel that it's an organism that is still growing,

and it's almost an organism in itself,

like, a live thing.

It's not just a project.

And I think people realize that.

So they know it's special, what we have.

And that's a really nice feeling

if you have that in your daily life.

[both speaking Dutch]

Wallach, voice-over: It's so exciting to think about

the futures we can create when we design

with human connectedness in mind.

Collaboration and cooperation is how we got to this point,

and it's our only path forward.

And yet, in so many ways right now,

it feels like we're moving further away

from these primary human traits.

Bregman: What makes us special?

Why have we humans conquered the globe?

Why not the Neanderthals, you know?

The Neanderthals were pretty smart as well.

Actually, they had bigger brains than us.

Why not the bonobos? Why not the chimpanzees?

What distinguishes us as a species?

John Jost: All of us are individuals.

And we have individual needs, wishes,

wants, desires, and so on.

But we also are part of social groups

that can mean a lot to us.

Man: Being human is this team sport,

is this collective, collaborative

endeavor that we actually have to bring ourselves to.

This whole story of evolution, that may the best man win--

that's not what Darwin was saying at all.

Page after page, what he's actually doing

is marveling at the way different species

communicate and collaborate for mutual survival.

Bregman: There's a really old idea that's deeply embedded

in our culture and in our history,

which says that human beings are fundamentally selfish.

So what scientists now believe is

that the secret of our success is not our intelligence,

it's not our strength.

No, it's our ability to work together.

It's our friendliness.

So this is what they call survival of the friendliest,

and it's basically the secret of our whole story.

Wallach, voice-over: These ideas matter more than ever

because we have important, unfinished things

to do right now that we can only do together.

One of these things is creating enough housing

for everyone who needs it.

In Austin, Melodie Yashar and her team at ICON

are working on ways to meet this challenge

by building 3-D-printed homes that can be printed

in a matter of weeks.

OK, so tell me, Where are we right now?

We are in House Zero.

House Zero is a project that we both designed and built

in collaboration with the architect Lake Flato.

And it is intended to showcase

what is possible using 3D printing.

It is a project that we took on

as a research-and-development effort to show what's possible

and to introduce to the general public

what it's like to live on the inside

and be on the inside of a 3-D-printed home.

Give me a sense of the problem.

Like, how many people are we talking are unhoused

in the U.S. and globally?

Melodie Yashar: It's close to a billion people,

a billion homes that we need to deliver

to address the global housing crisis.

The way that we've been building--

using sticks and bricks of the past, and steel--

is just not getting us there fast enough.

And so, to really address

and make a true impact in this problem,

automated technologies can get us there.

And 3-D printing, of course, is one of them.

Take me through what actually happened here

and in general, right?

We'll start off with a concrete slab.

So you have level ground. Now what happens?

Yashar: Once a slab is poured, we deploy our 3-D printer,

which is a 9,600-pound Gantry-based robot.

We deploy it on rails adjacent to that slab,

so the Y rails run back and forth and parallel

to the slab.

And then we have two towers, as well as an X beam,

that goes across those towers,

which essentially comprise the overall Gantry system.

We have a material-handling system

that travels through a very long hose

and gets deposited at the nozzle of the printer.

And layer by layer, the structure is fabricated.

Yashar: We are at the Wolf Ranch development.

This is a 100-home community.

This represents the largest 3-D-printed community

that we're aware of in the world.

And as you can see, it's well underway.

We have multiple printers printing simultaneously,

adjacent to slabs that have been poured by Lennar.

And we're delivering the vertical-wall system,

which is the 3-D-printed walls of these houses.

Wallach: And how long does it usually take

for one of these homes to go up?

Roughly, two weeks on average,

assuming that we have

continuous 24-hour-a-day printing.

But that's essentially the idea,

is that we deploy the printer within a day,

the printer prints the home,

and the home is finished traditionally.

You put on a traditional roof.

Your plumbing and all of that--electrical--

happens still traditionally.

I also know in your bio, you're an architect

for both on-world and off-world architecture.

So the on-world I get. We're here.

Tell me more about the off-world work.

3-D printing is a leading contender

in in-space construction

because the premise for 3-D printing in space is

that we would use local and indigenous materials

on the surface of the planet

rather than bringing anything with us from Earth.

That's a really high-impact concept

because it is prohibitively expensive

to launch heavy materials from Earth to space.

And it's not going to enable us to create

the kinds of infrastructure, small cities, and settlements

that we've seen in science-fiction images

for decades in the past.

So NASA is really interested,

and other aerospace companies are really interested,

in this idea of using

the soil that is local to the moon and Mars

and sending up a single 3D-printing robot

that can leverage that soil and those materials

to 3-D print, really,

any kind of infrastructure or any kind of surface element

that would be beneficial to the crew.

Wallach, voice-over: The collaboration and innovation

at work here is beautiful.

And it's inspiring to see how solving problems

with creativity and concern for the here and now

is the same work as building far-off futures as well.

Narrator: Our story is about you and me

and why we are alike in some ways

and yet why each person is different from every other.

Bregman: Cynicism is another word for laziness,

because if things are lost anyway,

then you don't have to do anything.

You can just sit back and, I don't know,

make the best of your own life, and that's it.

If things are not lost,

if we can do so much better as a species,

then that gives you a certain responsibility.

Douglas Rushkoff: If you want to call human beings

the most evolved species, it's because we've evolved

the most elaborate means

of collaboration and communication,

letting us do stuff together.

When you start to understand that nature is

a collaborative dance of different things,

you start to understand, Oh, well, being human is that, too.

We are not alone.

We are in one big, connected nervous system.

Bregman: We become the stories that we tell ourselves.

What kind of society are you gonna create?

So, for example,

I think we should get into that problem-solving mind-set

and think about, like, What are the really big challenges

that we face as a species today,

and what are the most effective solutions?

Wallach: I'm often asked how new tools will enable us

to solve these challenges,

but the truth is that all too often,

what we lack are not the technologies

but, rather, the collective will to act together

on behalf of our neighbors and communities

rather than just ourselves.

One of these challenges is around food,

a constant source of unnecessary suffering

all over the world,

including right here in this country,

where a shocking amount of

us are still hungry and food insecure.

In Upstate New York, a farmer named Karen Washington

has spent her life fighting for a different future,

one in which healthy, affordable food for everyone

is seen as an essential human right.

Wallach: Here we are--

beautiful, kind of, Upstate New York.

Tell me, did you grow up here?

No.

Believe it or not, I grew up in the concrete jungle

of New York City.

As a matter of fact, I grew up in the projects,

Lower East Side, so those were my roots.

I started really growing food back in the city,

back in the 1980s.

And then came a time where my friends and I decided,

Let's try something bigger.

And so we landed here back in 2014.

You're here at Rise & Root Farm,

which is in Chester, New York, Orange County.

We are in the Black Dirt Region of Orange County.

So what does that mean, the Black Dirt Region?

Well, if you look at soil,

normally, it's between 1%, maybe 2% of organic matter.

But here, the soil is 40%.

Wow.

So GreenThumb is the organization

in New York City that runs the community gardens.

So we grow for them.

There are over 400 community gardens in New York City.

And so we've been asked the task

of growing their starts.

And so each community garden will get

a tray of flowers and herbs

and a tray of vegetables.

And so yesterday we did

all the flowers and herbs.

And today we're doing all of the vegetables.

Wallach, voice-over: When they leave the farm,

these plants are sent out to community gardens

across New York City that are working

to fight hunger and food poverty

by equipping local communities in underserved neighborhoods

to grow their own food.

Wallach: What's the role of food in America today?

I think it has been co-opted.

If you think of food, food is the essence

of nourishment for human beings.

But I think that has now been made

more of a profit sort of thing.

And it has divided the human race

for the haves and have-nots.

You know, people in low-income neighborhoods

have food that is cheap.

It's processed food. It's fast food, junk food.

And people who are more affluent have

"healthy, organic foods."

Back in the day, it was the small farmers.

It has been industrialized.

And so what happened is that this sort of

commercialization of farmers

started swallowing up small farmers.

The emphasis was on that mighty dollar,

you know, on a capitalistic system

to produce food at a rate

that we wind up producing so much food

and wasting so much food,

yet that food is not getting

down to the people that need it the most.

Why is that?

Why is it that just the healthiest stuff

goes to one group

and the overly processed goes to another group?

I think for so long,

we have been complacent as a society.

We have gone home in our nice houses

with our nice cars and closed the door

and said, you know, "That's not my problem.

That's someone else's problem."

Why, in the greatest country in the world,

where we grow enough food and we waste enough food,

yet that food is not getting

down to the people that need it the most?

Why is it it's based on race,

the color of your skin?

Why is it based on where you live?

Why is it based on how much money you have?

And start having those hard conversations

that we don't have.

Wallach, voice-over: The challenges in food systems

here and around the world can easily feel insurmountable,

but Karen's work reminds me that

real, scalable, and lasting change

is going to start in our own communities.

Wallach: What can it look like,

from where we are right now to where we want to be?

Tell me, Where do we want to be?

Karen Washington: I think where we want to be is

that everybody, everybody--

and not only here in the United States

but globally--

but everybody has to understand

that food, clean water,

and shelter are human rights.

And we're not there yet.

Wallach, voice-over: To create a future

where all people have access to good, nutritious food

isn't just going to happen.

Better futures are not easy or inevitable.

But together, we can look around

at the systems across our societies

and decide they are not sufficient for the world

we're building.

That's the story of all progress throughout our history--

people coming together to decide the injustices of today

have no place in our tomorrows.

Jost: I think of history as essentially two steps forward,

one step back.

Resistance to change is

part of what it means to be human, for better and worse.

We grow up in a world,

and we're socialized to see the way things are

as essentially the way things should be.

And most of the adults in our lives are telling us this.

Literally, our teachers, our parents, and so on

are all doing things that make us experience

the reality that we're growing into as natural,

perhaps even inevitable.

We want to feel good about the social, economic,

political institutions and arrangements

on which we all depend for our livelihoods, for our lives.

And it's painful to believe that you're living in

and operating in an unjust social system.

Bregman: Every single milestone of civilization

that we are used to right now,

whether it's democracy or the welfare state

or equal rights for men and women,

all these milestones were fantasies once.

It's ideas that really govern and determine

our trajectory as a species.

And that idea in itself, that progress is possible,

is probably one of the most powerful ideas we've ever had.

[vehicle horns honking]

Wallach: Being here, you see, on the one hand,

just kind of cutting-edge infrastructure--

high-speed rail--just things that are just so amazing.

And on the other hand, you see folks

who are carrying drinking water on their heads

back to their homes.

They don't have indoor plumbing.

And so when I think about, What does it mean

to live sustainably and regeneratively,

it can't just be for the richest countries.

We won't have the futures we want for everyone

until we can run basic electrical lines into homes

and allow for indoor plumbing.

The project of moving forward

to a more kind of sustainable way of living on Planet Earth

is going to require electrification of everything

for everyone.

♪

I'm here to visit a community that made news around the world

by becoming the first village in India

to become completely powered by solar energy.

Wallach: Thank you for inviting me

to your village today.

So I thought we would start by you letting me know,

like, who you are and what your role here

is in the village.

[speaking Hindi]

What is the kind of historical and spiritual significance

of the sun here in India?

[speaking Hindi]

Wallach, voice-over: Safir explained to me

how this new form of energy is

especially meaningful, here in a place

with such a long, rich history with the sun.

Wallach: So what were the challenges

that you were facing as a village that led you

to have to and want to take on a project like this?

[Safirmiya Sumarmiya Sindhi speaking Hindi]

Wallach: How many panels are there

here in this entire village?

[Sindhi speaking Hindi]

Wallach: How does it feel to see children playing

in a community that isn't using dirty energy sources,

that's using the sun to power, you know,

their homes and their schools and their way of life?

What does that feel like?

[speaking Hindi]

Wallach: When you think about the future of India

potentially moving to all solar,

how do you feel being such a kind of pioneer village

for the entire country?

[speaking Hindi]

Wallach, voice-over: Seeing countries take very small steps,

like you see in a very small village,

saying, "You know what?

"Here's how we're gonna contribute to the solution.

"We're not gonna wait for something

"to come from Brussels or from Washington,

"even, necessarily, just from Delhi.

We're gonna do it here locally."

And, you know, they say all politics are local.

All energy is local. All everything is local.

Even a sense of community, right?

We talk about the need for there to be more community.

And it's sometimes talked about

almost at a national or a nation-state level.

But you come to a village like this, and I walk the town.

And that's community.

That's how futures are made,

really, at this much more ground level,

be it about how you're gonna make your electricity

and how you're gonna power your homes

or how you're just gonna act as a community

towards one another.

And it's beautiful to see that happening in a place

that, to be honest, has been getting,

really, just the exhaust from all these other countries

who have been contributing to the problem.

They're actually showing us another way forward.

Program host: What must we do as active and informed citizens?

We must decide now,

for how well we live tomorrow

will depend on the action we take today.

Jost: I do want people 50 years, 100 years, 200 years from now

to know that people were really trying hard

to leave the world in a better place for them.

And I don't know whether it will succeed,

but we have to try.

Washington: In order for us to look at the future,

you got to understand the past.

I have real hope that these young people

are looking for a more just system.

Pete Buttigieg: If we're not tapping

into shared humanity,

then we're not gonna be finding the best answers.

The best answers are the ones

that allow everybody to prosper

and to succeed and to belong.

Ikenaga: We all have to have a common goal.

We all have to know what the other person wants.

It's a collective experience.

It's a state of mind.

Bailey: How can we take what we see as some of the worst

of humanity's propensity towards violence,

isolation, and exclusion

and transform that into an opportunity

but also cast a new way forward?

This distrust is hurting us as a society.

Humans have evolved to connect with one another.

We need to connect. We need our friends.

We need our family members. We need our coworkers.

We need the strangers in the streets, right?

But if society keeps telling us that we can't trust them,

that they're dangerous,

that we should be wary of one another,

then that's tearing us apart.

De Blok: We are not supposed to be alone.

You have to be connected,

and happiness comes from connection.

People don't realize that enough, I think.

♪

Wallach: I thought people would want to talk about the future

through a kind of almost individualized lens,

they would want to talk about

the careers that they're gonna have

or they're worried about artificial intelligence

is gonna come for their job or for their children's job.

But what I keep hearing is

a desire and a hope for community.

Everyone I'm speaking to, when I ask them,

"What do you want the future to look like,"

inevitably, the idea or just the term of community

comes up--this idea of human connection.

And sometimes it's more deeply with their friends,

and sometimes it's more deeply as a town or a village

or as a state

or, really, just as a kind of human family,

you know, as almost something post-nation-state,

something bigger.

And that's both been surprising and unbelievably delightful.

As we move forward, as we kind of rethink

these baseline assumptions about how we order the world,

there can no longer be

an "I win, you lose" mind-set or mentality.

No one flourishes until everyone flourishes.

As we move forward, we have an amazing opportunity

to do that for ourselves and for our species.

♪

[laughter, excited chatter]