The News Items Podcast

Benn Steil, director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, joins John Ellis to examine why the postwar global economic order is under growing strain, and how China sits at the center of that story. Steil traces the evolution from Bretton Woods and GATT to the WTO, arguing that China’s integration into the global trading system created enormous benefits while also exposing deep tensions between different economic models. The conversation covers the first “China shock,...

Perry Boyle, co-founder and CEO of MITS Capital, joins John Ellis from Kyiv to discuss how the war in Ukraine is reshaping modern warfare, and why he believes the West is not adapting fast enough. Boyle, a former Wall Street executive, explains how he went from retirement to investing in Ukrainian defense technology, backing startups working on drones, autonomous systems, AI, and battlefield components. He describes a war increasingly fought through sensors, robotics, data, and unmanned syste...

MIT political scientist Adam Berinsky joins John Ellis to examine why modern polling is harder to trust and what that means for politics. They discuss collapsing response rates, the limits of margin-of-error claims, online surveys, media incentives, and why “accuracy” can be a misleading way to rank pollsters. The conversation then turns to partisan media, negative advertising, voter turnout, political fragmentation, and the persistence of conspiracy theories. Berinsky explains why misinforma...

Rebecca Patterson, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former chief investment strategist at Bridgewater Associates, joins John Ellis to explain why the U.S. and Japan intervened jointly to support the yen, and why Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is so focused on keeping U.S. yields under control. Patterson traces the risks from currency weakness, Treasury selling, and financial contagion, while arguing that today’s conditions are far from a repeat of the Asian financial cr...

John Ellis talks with AI researcher Alan D. Thompson about the rapid advance of artificial intelligence and the prospect of artificial superintelligence. Thompson explains his methods for tracking progress toward AGI, the growth of trillion-parameter models, and the narrowing gap between leading American and Chinese systems. They discuss the enormous capital investment in data centers, the economics of AI infrastructure, and the sectors most likely to be transformed first, including healthcar...