You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero Podcast.

Hello, Matt.

Hi, Bob.

Great to see you.

Good to see you.

Let me introduce us.

I'm Robert Wright, editor and chief of the non-zero newsletter.

This is a non-zero podcast. You are Matthew Duss, the executive vice president at the Center for

International Policy, and formerly foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders and some other things.

And we're going to talk about, well, international relations, foreign policy, various things.

Just quickly.

So I guess you would call the Center for International Policy an anti-blob think tank or is that going too far, man.

I mean that we wouldn't dispute that, you know, a progressive foreign policy think tank that often puts us at odds with the conventional wisdom, the blob, so-called. The blob? Yes. Yes. Okay. And so, like, how many anti-blob think tank? So, so Quincy is like a left-right coalition anti-blob think thing.

I guess you could, I mean, Cato isn't mainly foreign policy, but it has a foreign policy arm. And I guess you would call that kind of anti-blob. Right. No, I think they've been doing good work in that space for a long time. you know, I'd say some of the work that Chris Preble, formerly of Cato and Emma Ashford, are doing now at Stimson, even though I wouldn't put Stimson. Oh, Chris is at Stimson. Yeah, they're at Stimson doing some really good stuff. But no, I think people who take a more critical view, I mean, these ideas have filtered out. You know, you have Steven Wertheim,

who was one of the founders originally of Quincy, who's now at Carnegie. You've got the state

craft program there where I sat for a year after leaving the hill, which is, you know, doing

some critical thinking about some of the ideas that have gotten the country in so much trouble

over the past few decades. So there is a good proliferation of some of this stuff.

So there's hope.

Okay, well, enough.

Enough hope.

Let's move to the real world.

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