You're listening to Non-Zero World.

I'm Andrew Day.

And I'm Connor Eccles.

Each week, we break down the latest developments in U.S.

Forum Policy and other global news, and we interview a leading expert or activist.

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today at Robert Bright's Non-Zero Newsletter on Substant.

So, Connor, this week we've got a lot of important topics to get into.

We'll be talking about the future of U.S. Venezuela relations, President Biden considering military strikes on Iran, the funding sources of foreign policy think tanks, why Trump might improve relations with North Korea, the House of Representatives voting to sanction the ICC, and AI characters posing as humans on social media. Then we'll have a more analytical

deep dive discussion about Iran and U.S. foreign policy. And after that, we'll be talking to

our boss, Robert Wright. I'm not sure exactly what we're going to be talking to him about.

To be perfectly honest, I'll probably ask him about his book. He's writing on artificial

intelligence. I wouldn't be surprised if he has things to say about U.S. politics and U.S.

foreign policy. And it's always a good bet that he'll talk about the JFK assassination and possibly

his new glasses, but we'll see. But now let's do our newsbytes. What is the first story you want

to talk about, Connor? Yeah. So I want to start off with this think tank report. So basically, a new report from the

Quincy Institute found that military contractors and foreign governments have given at least

$145 million to major American foreign policy think tanks in just the past five years, so since

2019. Now, that data is necessarily limited because this report looks at the top 50 foreign policy

think tanks and finds, among other things, that about 19 of them don't disclose anything about

their donors at all.

These are, of course, the think tanks that house many of the experts that are relied upon by both the government and media for kind of expert comments and advice and that issue reports that often get coverage.

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