Newt's World

For thirty years, a computer was something only governments and corporations could own—an entire room of machinery. Newt tells how that changed in 1975, when a $439 kit computer on the cover of Popular Electronics inspired a Harvard student named Bill Gates and an HP engineer named Steve Wozniak to imagine something radical: a computer anyone could own. From Microsoft's garage-built software to Apple's Apple II to IBM's indus...

On the night of October 29, 1969, a UCLA student typed two letters into a Stanford-bound terminal before the system crashed—and the internet was born. Newt traces ARPANET's Cold War origins as a decentralized network built to survive nuclear attack, through Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn's TCP/IP protocol, to Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web. He argues the internet's true significance lies in a policy choice: the U.S. government buil...

Before 1955, polio closed swimming pools, filled hospital wards with iron lungs, and terrified American parents every summer. Newt tells the story of Dr. Jonas Salk, who defied scientific consensus with a killed-virus vaccine, tested it on 1.8 million children in the largest clinical trial in American history, and then refused to patent it. "Could you patent the sun?" he asked. Cases plummeted from 58,000 to near zero within years....

At Bell Labs in December 1947, three scientists—John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley—demonstrated a tiny device that would outlast the vacuum tube and launch the digital age. Newt traces the transistor's evolution from a sliver of germanium into the integrated circuit and, eventually, chips containing over 100 billion transistors. Born from pure scientific curiosity rather than a commercial mandate, the t...

Every invention in this series—the phone, the internet, the smartphone—depends on one foundational breakthrough. Newt unpacks the electrical power system's tangled origin story: Thomas Edison's Pearl Street Station, Nikola Tesla's alternating current, and George Westinghouse's bet that AC was the future. Their rivalry erupted into the "War of Currents," settled dramatically at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. From there, ...

Two bicycle mechanics from Ohio, with no college degrees and no government funding, beat every well-financed rival to achieve the impossible. On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright flew 120 feet in 12 seconds over the dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina—and humanity's earthbound existence ended. Newt tells how Wilbur and Orville out-engineered the experts, building their own wind tunnel and testing over 200 wing shapes while a ...

Alexander Graham Bell grew up obsessed with the human voice—his family taught elocution and speech to the deaf. That obsession led him, on March 10, 1876, to transmit the first intelligible words over a wire: "Mr. Watson, come here." Newt traces Bell's race against rival Elisha Gray, the birth of what became AT&T, and the telephone's explosive spread from 21 subscribers to millions within decades. More than a faster teleg...

In 1844, a painter named Samuel Morse and machinist Alfred Vail shattered the oldest limit on human civilization: the speed of information. Their electromagnetic telegraph sent messages by wire at the speed of electricity, ending an era when news traveled no faster than a horse or a ship. Host Newt opens his 15-part series, Greatest American Inventions: 1776 to 2026, with Morse's historic first transmission—"What hath God wro...

Most startup founders are doing it backwards — and Harvard Innovation Labs fellow Rob Snyder spent two miserable years learning that the hard way. After failing to sell a product that made perfect logical sense, a single phone call from a Dunkin' franchisee changed everything: the customer didn't want what Snyder was selling but offered to pay for something else entirely. That pivot took his company from zero to $4 million in...

For years, Hollywood executive Chris Fenton helped American studios chase the Chinese market — inserting pro-Beijing messaging into films, moving production offshore, and teaching China's own industry how to compete. Now he regrets it. Fenton joins Newt to explain how 60% of American film and TV production has moved overseas, costing Los Angeles alone more than 40,000 jobs, and why the US is the only major film-producing nati...

The Ukraine war has now outlasted World War I — and there's no clear end in sight. Former CIA Russia analysis director George Beebe joins Newt for a sobering assessment of where things stand. They dig into how AI-guided drones costing $17,500 apiece are reshaping the battlefield and challenging a century of military doctrine, why Ukraine's deep strikes on Russian oil infrastructure are more effective than previous campaigns b...

What does it mean to have the American can-do spirit — and who best embodied it during the most turbulent century in our nation's history? Author Richard Battle joins Newt to discuss his new book, AmeriCANS Who Made America: 20th Century — The American Century, the fourth volume in his celebrated series. Battle profiles 43 patriots, leaders, and innovators who carried America forward through the Spanish flu, two World W...

With the SAVE America Act stalled in the Senate for the third time, Senator Rick Scott is sounding the alarm. The former two-term governor and successful entrepreneur joins Newt for a frank conversation about the Senate's capacity, and willingness, to get things done. Scott makes no secret of his frustration: the Senate has been in session only 79 days this year, and the SAVE America Act — requiring proof of citizenship to re...

In January 2023, Kevin McCarthy endured five grueling days and 15 rounds of balloting to win the Speaker's gavel — the most dramatic Speaker's race in a century. John Leganski was at the center of it all. As McCarthy's Deputy Chief of Staff and the youngest floor director in House history, he watched up close as a small band of "Never Kevins" brought the People's House to a standstill. Now he's written the definitive inside a...

What would the Founding Fathers think of America today? That question sparked historian and novelist Johanna Neuman's new book, Trump's Superpower, in which George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and other founders — plus revolutionary-era writer Mercy Otis Warren — are summoned back to earth for America's 250th birthday and dropped into today's culture wars. Neuman joins Newt Gingri...

Every year, millions of Americans vote with their feet — packing up and crossing state lines in search of something better. But what exactly are they looking for? In this episode, Newt talks with Jack Salmon, research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, to dig into his new policy brief analyzing 34 million interstate moves between 2018 and 2023. The results challenge some conventional wisdom: cost of liv...

On America's 250th birthday, Newt delivers a special solo episode dedicated to the document that started it all: the Declaration of Independence. Newt sets the scene in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776 — the heat, the secrecy, the weight of the moment — and traces the path from Lexington and Concord to the Continental Congress, explaining how 56 extraordinary men came to risk everything for an idea. He reflects on the...

Newt talks with Fort McHenry National Park Ranger and historian Shannon McLucas about the remarkable story behind America's national anthem. McLucas recounts how Francis Scott Key, a Georgetown lawyer sent to negotiate a prisoner release, found himself aboard a British ship during the 25-hour bombardment of Fort McHenry in September 1814, unable to leave as he anxiously watched the battle unfold. His eyewitness emotional reaction b...

Newt welcomes bestselling biographer Walter Isaacson to discuss his new book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, a deep dive into the Declaration of Independence's most celebrated passage: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Isaacson traces how Jefferson, F...