Episode 1002: America 250 – The Netflix Effect in America with Clete Willems
Newt's World
Gingrich 360
4.6 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 1 July 2026
⏱️ 31 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
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Summary
Newt talks with Clete Willems, Chief Global Affairs Officer at Netflix, about the company's sweeping impact on the American economy and culture as the nation marks its 250th anniversary. Willems, a former Deputy Director of the National Economic Council, explains how Netflix has contributed over $225 billion to the U.S. economy over the past decade through 1,700 productions filmed in all 50 states, creating more than 140,000 jobs. He discusses Netflix's $1.2 billion investment in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, a former Army base being transformed into a 12-stage East Coast production hub, and the company's "local for local" international content strategy. Their conversation also covers the "Netflix effect" on shows like Breaking Bad and Suits, the company's growing sports programming, and its special America 250 content hub featuring the documentary series The American Experiment and the historical drama Death by Lightning.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:08.2 | Welcome to Newts World Podcasts on the IHeart Podcast Network, the greatest American inventions. |
| 0:14.3 | Today, the device that connected the world, not the Internet, we've covered that. |
| 0:19.2 | The device to put a phone in every pocket on every continent, |
| 0:23.1 | reaching people who had never had access to a landline, the mobile phone. |
| 0:28.7 | On April 3, 1973, a Motorola engineer named Martin Cooper stood on a sidewalk on 6th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, held up a |
| 0:39.9 | device to weigh two and a half pounds, and stood nine inches tall, and made a phone call. |
| 0:47.7 | He called Joel Engle, the head of cellular research at Bell Labs, Motorola's chief rival in the race to build a |
| 0:56.9 | handheld cellular phone, to tell him politely that Motorola had done it first. Cooper's prototype |
| 1:04.4 | could make calls for about 30 minutes before the battery died, needed 10 hours to recharge, had no display, and did nothing except make and receive calls. |
| 1:15.5 | It cost the equivalent of about $30 million to develop. |
| 1:20.9 | The concept of cellular communication had been developed to Bell Labs in 1970. |
| 1:26.6 | The key insight, instead of one powerful transmitter covering a wide area, |
| 1:32.5 | divide geography into small cells, each served by a low-power base station. |
| 1:37.9 | And as the user moves from cell to cell, the call is automatically handed off. |
| 1:43.8 | This made mobile telephone a scalable. You can serve far more |
| 1:47.7 | simultaneous users. This made mobile telephony scalable. You can serve far more simultaneous users. |
| 1:55.6 | AT&T proposed to the FCC that they built a cellular network. The FCC allowed trials that included Motorola. |
| 2:03.3 | The race was on. Motorola won the race to the portable handset. AT&T built most of the early |
| 2:10.4 | network infrastructure. Commercial cellular service launched in Chicago in October 1983. |
| 2:18.0 | The first commercial phone, the Motorola DinaTac 8,000X, retailed for $3,995, roughly $12,000 today, |
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