Newt's World

Most political analysts say Generation Z is quietly turning conservative. Rich Baris says the data tells a completely different story. The director of Big Data Poll and the most accurate national pollster of both 2016 and 2024 joins Newt to discuss his new book, Burn It Down: What the Polls Say Young Americans Really Want. Baris argues that young Americans aren't becoming more conservative; they're becoming more radical and revolutionary, convinced the system can't be reformed, only replaced. He and Newt dig into the staggering affordability numbers driving that anger (home prices up 230% since 2000, real wages up just 13%), the rise of "ledger politics" and left-wing populism, why two-thirds of Democratic primary voters now identify as socialists, and the urgent warning Baris has for Republicans heading into 2026: you can't out-resent the left. You have to out-deliver them. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The federal debt just crossed $40 trillion, months ahead of schedule and less than a decade after hitting $20 trillion. Net interest payments now exceed what America spends on defense or Medicare. Thomas Hoenig spent 38 years at the Federal Reserve, including two decades as president of the Kansas City Fed, and was one of the earliest voices warning that the Fed's own quantitative easing policies were enabling Congress to borrow without consequence. He joins Newt for a frank diagnosis: how cheap money created a decade of fiscal irresponsibility, why abandoning the gold standard in 1971 removed the last external discipline on spending, what the slow decline of the British pound tells us about the dollar's future, and whether Washington can bend the curve before the debt hits $50 trillion. Hoenig's conclusion: it's possible, but only if Congress chooses to act. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Most people think they're investing. David Bahnsen thinks they're speculating — and there's a profound difference. The founder and chief investment officer of the Bahnsen Group, which manages over $10 billion in client assets, joins Newt to discuss his new book, Profit from the Profit: The Past, Present, and Future of Dividend Growth Investing. Bahnsen argues that dividend growth investing isn't merely a smart income strategy — it's the only coherent investment philosophy for people who want to own something real rather than gamble on price. He and Newt explore why the "grow now, dividends later" advice most young investors receive is historically flawed, what the dot-com bubble and the Cisco paradox reveal about today's AI boom, how the Hollywood consolidation mess perfectly illustrates CEO ego destroying shareholder value, and why Charlie Munger was right: the big money is in the waiting. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Twenty-five years after September 11th, is America ready for the next generation of threats? House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford joins Newt to discuss the bipartisan task force review of the original 9/11 commission report — what worked, what didn't, and what must be built for the dangers ahead. Crawford warns that the post-9/11 intelligence architecture, designed for counterterrorism, is now facing a threat environment that has expanded far beyond it: AI-guided drone swarms, gray zone warfare, cyberattacks on water treatment facilities, Chinese infiltration of agricultural research institutions, and adversaries who organize not around our bureaucracy but around our vulnerabilities. A former Army bomb disposal technician, Crawford brings a "left of boom" mindset to the conversation — and a stark warning: America cannot afford another failure of imagination. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

An 83-year-old great-grandmother, legally blind and in failing health, has spent nearly a year in a South Korean detention cell — and Newt believes her case is part of something far larger. Dr. Hak Ja Han, co-founder of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification and known to millions worldwide as the Mother of Peace, faces charges that could send her to prison for 13 years. With a verdict days away, Dr. Demian Dunkley, president of Family Federation USA, joins Newt to speak on her behalf — tracing her remarkable journey from a six-year-old girl fleeing North Korea on foot to building a global peace movement spanning 170 countries. Newt and Dr. Dunkley also address what Newt calls a global war on God: the worldwide pattern of governments targeting religious liberty, from South Korea's courtroom to Nigeria's killing fields. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In Part Five of his "How to Win 2026" series, Newt Gingrich lays out the Republican case on healthcare: what President Trump and congressional Republicans have already done to lower costs and expand choices, and what still needs to be built. American families are paying roughly the price of a new car every year just for job-based health insurance — and still facing narrow networks, sky-high deductibles, and bills nobody can explain. From TrumpRx's historic prescription drug price cuts to price transparency legislation, direct primary care, rural investment, and the Make America Healthy Again initiative, Newt makes the case for moving America from a sick-care system to a true healthcare system — one centered on the person, not the bureaucracy. The closing argument of the series: Republicans are helping Americans pay less today while building a healthier future for tomorrow. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In Part Four of his "How to Win 2026" series, Newt Gingrich makes the case for what he calls "the American Party" — not a new political organization, but a governing platform built on issues where seventy percent or more of Americans already agree, across party lines. Drawing on eight years of polling by his own America's New Majority Project alongside independent pollsters, Newt walks through dozens of issues — voter ID, congressional term limits, middle-class tax cuts, drug pricing transparency, border enforcement, parental rights in education, and more — where supermajorities of Americans agree with each other, even when their elected representatives in Washington don't. Newt is also candid about where his own organization's numbers don't match what other pollsters are finding — and why that transparency matters more than a perfect scorecard. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In Part Three of his "How to Win 2026" series, Newt Gingrich tackles the two hardest arguments in the entire 2026 campaign: the economy and Iran. On affordability, Newt makes the Republican case with specific facts and dollar figures: the steepest drop in prescription drug prices in sixty years, GLP-1 medications now available for $149 a month through TrumpRx, $82 billion in individual tax relief claimed in a single filing season, and concrete steps already underway on housing, energy, and regulation. On Iran, Newt is equally direct — the war has not gone as planned, the Iranian regime has proven more determined than expected, and there is no easy exit. But backing down, he argues, means gambling that a regime chanting "death to America" won't eventually make good on it. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In Part Two of his "How to Win 2026" series, Newt makes the case against today's Democratic Party — in their own words. This is the most substantive episode in the series — a methodical, documented case that today's Democratic Party has drifted far from the tradition of Roosevelt and Kennedy into something most Americans simply don't recognize. Using real names, real quotes, real dates, and actual congressional roll calls, Newt builds the argument across eight acts: Democrats calling to abolish ICE and defund the police; open hostility to Israel; a DSA national co-chair calling for abolishing the U.S. Senate on Fox News; candidates who denigrate America on tape; a coalition that rejects free enterprise while a government-run grocery store in Kansas City already proved the model fails; and a brand-new congressional report naming sitting Democrats in what prosecutors call the largest pandemic fraud scheme in American history. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker Newt Gingrich launches a bold five-part series on how Republicans can win a historic victory in November 2026. In this opening solo episode, Newt argues that the coming election is not a referendum on the present — it's an argument about the future. Drawing on his famous 2016 "two parallel universes" exchange with Megyn Kelly, he explains how winning campaigns identify what's moving beneath the surface of public polling and stick to it with discipline. He walks through four historic examples — his own 1978 comeback, the 1988 Bush campaign, the 1994 Contract with America, and the rise of MAGA — to extract the single lesson each shares: find the true, provable contrast and never let up. Then he lays out four building blocks he believes can define the Democratic Party as unacceptable to most Americans for a generation. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lenny McAllister has been in rooms most people never occupy at the same time — CPAC and the NAACP, Americans for Prosperity and the ACLU, Tea Party events and the Essence Music Festival. That's exactly the point. The Pittsburgh commentator, CNN and Fox analyst, and one of the earliest prominent Black Republicans to emerge after 2008 joins Newt to discuss his new memoir and policy manifesto, A Venn Diagram of One: An American Story. McAllister traces his journey from college dropout and 24-year-old father to national media figure — a transformation sparked by the night he learned his father had been shot. He argues that the path back to a united America runs through three pillars every citizen deserves: security, empowerment, and opportunity. On America's 250th birthday, he believes the country's best second act is still ahead. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Pentagon ranks biological warfare as a greater threat than nuclear war — and investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen spent years finding out why. The Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Nuclear War joins Newt Gingrich to discuss her new book, Biological War: A Scenario, which charts the terrifying hours and days following a lab leak at Russia's Vector Institute. Jacobsen reveals how a Soviet-era "super plague" engineered with a euphoria gene could spread across six continents in days, why 3,500 BSL-3 labs worldwide represent a ticking clock, and what COVID failed to teach us about preparedness. Most chillingly, she exposes the classified U.S. government "Devolution Plan" — a secret continuity program designed to preserve the government underground while society collapses above. Her reporting is a warning — and a call to action before the next lab leak makes the scenario real. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 fight with full resolve. Now, he warns, that same hubris is converging with a crushing national debt and Xi Jinping's determination to seize Taiwan to create a Category 5 catastrophe by 2033. West joins Newt for a blunt, unsparing conversation about an emaciated military still buying legacy weapons, a debt spiral that leaves no room for defense spending, and what the next president must do to hold the line. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 is where every earlier episode converges. Newt closes the series by reflecting on 250 years of American inventors who were told it couldn't be done—and built it anyway. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 today, this episode traces how an intellectual question about information became a two-trillion-dollar company, and a case study in curiosity preceding value. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 physics research, conducted with no medical purpose in mind, became one of medicine's most powerful diagnostic tools—and examines the controversial Nobel Prize snub that still stings decades later. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 entirely—connecting fishermen in India to real-time market prices and bringing mobile banking to millions of unbanked Kenyans through M-Pesa. It's a story of connection reaching where wires never could. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 annually to the U.S. economy alone. It's a case study in the right relationship between government-funded infrastructure and private-sector innovation—and a daily demonstration of Einstein's physics. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 almost any other energy source, despite enduring public fear. This episode grapples honestly with an invention that carries both extraordinary promise and the shadow of annihilation. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 dehumanizing for many workers, and Ford himself was a deeply flawed figure. It's a clear-eyed look at innovation's power—and its costs. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.