Episode 1043: Alzheimer's Disease Breakthrough New Blood Tests, New Treatments, and What Congress Must Do Now

More than seven million Americans live with Alzheimer's disease today, a number projected to nearly double by 2060. It already consumes 20% of all Medicare spending and costs the economy close to half a trillion dollars annually. But the science is finally catching up. Newt is joined by former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield and Dr. Brent Beasley, a retired internist who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's at age 57, for a conversation about new blood tests that detect the disease early and what treatments are being developed. Dr. Redfield draws on his decades leading America's response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic to argue that Alzheimer's disease demands the same sense of urgency. Dr. Beasley shares his remarkable personal journey: how an early blood test and a new monoclonal antibody treatment reversed his decline. Together, they lay out the five policy changes needed now, from routine blood testing for everyone over 50 to removing CMS barriers blocking access to approved treatments, including passage of the bipartisan ASAP Act, which would create a Medicare pathway for FDA-cleared blood-based Alzheimer's biomarker tests.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.