Newt's World

Marine combat veteran, former Assistant Secretary of Defense, and military historian Bing West has spent six decades on battlefields from Vietnam to Afghanistan — and he's angry. In his new book, Cat 5: The 2033 War, West argues that America's leaders won every battle in three wars but lost every war, driven by what he calls the "Jupiter Complex" — the dangerous belief that America is so powerful it doesn't need to figh...

On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs walked onstage and declared three "revolutionary" products were actually one: the iPhone. Newt closes his 15-part series with the invention that fused the telephone, the transistor, the internet, GPS, and the camera into a single device now carried by six billion people—three-quarters of humanity. From the App Store's trillion-dollar economy to the industries it upended outright, the smartphone ...

By the mid-1990s, the web was drowning in pages and starving for a way to find anything useful. Newt tells how two Stanford PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had a better idea: rank pages by how the web itself linked to them. Their algorithm, PageRank, became Google—incorporated in a Menlo Park garage with a $100,000 check written to a company that didn't legally exist yet. From 10,000 daily searches to 8.5 billion to...

For most of human history, seeing inside a living body meant surgery. Newt tells how Dr. Raymond Damadian and physicist Paul Lauterbur turned 1940s nuclear magnetic resonance research into the MRI scanner—a machine that images soft tissue in astonishing detail without radiation or a single incision. From Damadian's hand-built "Indomitable" scanner to today's 40 million annual U.S. procedures, this episode traces how basic phy...

On a Manhattan sidewalk in 1973, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper made the first handheld cellular call—to his rival at Bell Labs, just to say Motorola got there first. Newt traces the mobile phone from a $3,995 status symbol to a global phenomenon with more subscriptions than people on Earth. Beyond the American story, this episode spotlights the developing world, where mobile networks leapfrogged landline infrastructure enti...

Twelve thousand five hundred miles above Earth, 31 satellites quietly guide nearly every navigation app on the planet. Newt tells how GPS, developed by the Department of Defense as a military tool, became a free gift to humanity after President Reagan opened it to civilian use following the 1983 Korean Air Lines tragedy. From synchronizing financial markets to guiding precision agriculture, GPS now contributes over $1.5 trillion an...

Beneath a football stadium at the University of Chicago on December 2, 1942, Enrico Fermi's team achieved the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in history—producing just half a watt of power but proving a concept that would reshape the world. Newt traces the Manhattan Project's dual legacy: the atomic bombs that ended World War II, and the nuclear power plants that now generate clean electricity more safely than al...

Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile—he invented a way to make it affordable. Newt examines how Ford's 1913 moving assembly line cut Model T production time from 12.5 hours to 93 minutes, and how Ford's controversial $5-a-day wage turned his own workers into customers, helping create the American middle class. But this episode doesn't shy away from complexity: the same system that built American prosperity was also dehuman...

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...