When we talk about alliances in the United States, we have allies that matter in terms of bringing technology, capability, intelligence to the table. And we have allies who matter from a broader foreign policy perspective. Israel is one of the US's most effective intelligence allies, is one of the US's most effective technological allies, and certainly because of the degree to which it's in a rough neighborhood, provides a tremendous number of lessons about how to counter advanced militaries like Israel saw with Russia in Syria, or like Israel saw with Iranian advanced ballistic and cruise missiles, all the way through to militant groups like they saw whether it's Hezbollah tunneling into the geography there, or whether it was Hamas and the tunneling capability and just the raw additional information warfare capability that is very much in American interest to maintain.
I'm Deborah Parardis, the host of Ark News Daily. What's happening in Israel and the Jewish world right now matters, but it can be hard to keep up, let alone make sense of it all. And that's why we started Ark News Daily. Every weekday morning, I walk you through the most important news, give you the context you need, and let you know what to look out for next. I don't try to convince you of anything, and I don't want to waste your time. So, on most days, I'll be in your ears for about 10 minutes or less. Then, you can move on with your day, hopefully feeling a little smarter than before. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or follow the link in the show notes. I hope to see you tomorrow. [music]
Welcome to What's Your Number. I'm Yonathan Adiri.
And I'm Yael Wner Levy and it is 7:30 p.m. here in Tel Aviv. Where are you, Yonathan?
I'm in Tel Aviv. I just landed from my wife's grandfather's 100-year-old birthday, which lasted for four days in their native Switzerland. And you know, it was crazy because I started seeing the news of the flare up in Hormuz and everything was going on. I was like, are we going to be able to land? Is this going to, you know, four days have passed, quite some friction on the other end of the Gulf. So far, Israel's out. Let's hope it stays that way.
Absolutely. And I can say from the people here in Tel Aviv and the rest of the country, I think a lot of people here are just very tired of it. And you know, they're watching what's going on in Hormuz, but taking deep breaths.
I'm excited about today's guest though because she will definitely kind of make some more sense of this craziness because she really looked over what is today national power. And for much of the modern era, national power was measured in fairly familiar terms, things that we know. The size of a country's military, its population, its industrial base, its access to natural resources. But tech is really changing all of that, the entire equation.
Yeah. And you know, we found that natural resources still matter quite a lot when the rare earth switch was, you know, flipped on earlier this year by the Chinese, which, you know, kind of created a chain of events. And we just mentioned Arose, but in strategic terms, you know, up until very recent times, major tech breakthroughs, ones that had transformative geopolitical power at least, were led by superpowers. You know, nuclear US, industrialized UK, space-faring Russia and its famous Sputnik moment.
But it seems like today a relatively small country or even a relatively small group of engineers can develop capabilities that once belonged to those superpowers. Much of it happens in the digital domain. Therefore, you don't need these large supply chains. You don't need a lot of people. Drones, artificial intelligence, cyber weapons, autonomous systems, and commercial satellites, they are in essence a highway or a railway equivalent for the modern era. Increasingly, they are the military power itself.
Correct. And few people on this globe have observed that transformation from as many vantage points as has Anne Neuberger. Anne spent more than a decade at the NSA, the National Security Agency, where she held a series of senior leadership positions, and she later became the first director of the NSA's cyber security director. She later served in the White House as deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology, and she helped shape US policy on cyber warfare, AI, quantum computing and advanced telecommunications. And now Yonatan, she has moved from government to VC land, our stomping ground or former stomping ground for some of us. She's joining Andreessen Horowitz as a general partner and head of global affairs at a16z, placing her at the intersection, really at the intersection of national security, tech innovation, investment for founders in sectors from healthcare to consumer to fintech to infrastructure and of course cyber and AI.
Yeah, listen, this transition from the Biden administration, which was a kind of foresighted-driven administration when it came to, you know, where tech meets those new powers vis-a-vis China, vis-a-vis other countries, it is actually very, very interesting to see and hear from Anne. You know, how does she now wear her VC hat and how do insights gained over her period in government now translate into, you know, investment strategies. I'm very excited about this intersection.
Indeed. And I'm also excited to hear about how this is kind of consequential almost for Israel, right? Because Israel is this frontline lab for emerging defense tech. It always has been a very important source obviously of global innovation and the target of growing political and financial pressure. But the experience, the Israeli experience and the history raises a very much larger question which I want to kind of get down into the depths of with Anne, which is as tech, capital and geopolitics become increasingly inseparable and kind of the boundaries become very unclear between all of them, what determines which countries and which companies will succeed in this new future. And welcome to What's Your Number.
It's wonderful to be here. Yeah.
So I'd love to start with the first question about what we just talked about, the major factors that create successful companies or countries in this new era. What would they be?
You know, it's interesting. I often think that small countries in rough neck of the woods with technical populations are really the ones that are set up for success. Why? Because sometimes if they're small, they can't waste resources. They really have to think about problems in the most economical way, and economics matters in national security. Second, nothing creates that sense of urgency like being pursued and having an adversary who's at the top of their game. And finally, you know, it used to be that weapons were tanks and they still are, right? They were just produced for military. But today, some of the most cutting edge technologies are built in software and they adapt very, very quickly. So, if you have a population that's trained and comfortable in that world, that's serving in your military and intelligence community that comes from that world. And ideally, if you have a reserve force that draws from that as well, those three components together really help a country and of course then its industrial base as well succeed, I think, with today's challenging threats.
Okay. And let's step back a minute and let's hear a bit more about you given your impressive and varied bio at this point, and what do you think helped you advance and what do you focus on intellectually and professionally to keep ahead given how things change so fast in this era?
It's so true. You know, if I could summarize my background in the last 20 years, it's really been at the nexus between national security and technology, trying to gain insight into the threats as well as what's happening in the technology space and then ensure that we and our allies are at the top of our game in using technology to identify and to counter threats. And that depends, right? Because threats can come from countries, they can come from criminals and they can come from transnational groups, terrorists, weapons traffickers, drug traffickers who really try to blend into the noise. And increasingly that blend into the noise is also in a technological way, right? Where they're using the same kinds of technologies everybody uses. So in the past a satellite constellation and that kind of global visibility was only the remit of countries. Today countries or companies or criminals or terrorists can really buy satellite imagery in places around the world. So the edge between what it used to take to present a threat in terms of the investment of money, the investment of high-end capabilities has really now democratized. It's spread considerably. All you have to do is look at Ukraine using first-person video drones in order to over time take out Russia's navy in the Black Sea to get a sense of how the nexus between tech and national security has changed a great deal. So for me, to your point, I try to continue to keep an eye on what's happening around the world with different countries or different groups' adoption of technology. We see, for example, North Korea using crypto to get around sanctions all the way through to understanding the tech from a positive perspective. Right? If you look at what's happening in AI with drug discovery, that's hugely promising. So keeping an eye on both because what's so interesting about current technologies, they're dual use. They present so much cool opportunity for our economies, for our safety, and yet they present threats as well. And we really want to understand both and keep an eye on both to ensure we can lead and stay ahead.
And in that context, how do you view, you know, the importance of supply chain networks and energy? Because we're seeing that, you know, getting the tech right is not enough. You're seeing it in China. A lot of the tech is advanced, not the most advanced, but a lot of the competitive advantage comes from the control of the supply chain and sort of the full kind of end. We saw the US playing a different role with the Strategic Minerals Act in this administration. Understanding how that sort of underpins the tech stack. Any thought of how those two, energy, supply chain, intertwine with tech as it steps up to the national security level?
You know, 20 years ago the buzzword was globalization. We would have global supply chains and essentially capital would follow wherever the lowest labor costs were, wherever the cheapest cost of production was. We all remember the just-in-time production. And what happened during COVID was suddenly people saw that those supply chains could actually become contested either because everybody was demanding the same thing, masks, vaccines at the same time. So those who were producing in their countries obviously gave priority to their countries or their allies, or because they could be weaponized. We first saw China weaponize the supply chain with Japan and critical minerals a number of years ago, really critical minerals that were key to Japanese auto production, a big part of their economy. People suddenly saw there was both an economic risk and a national security risk as well. So I think you're seeing that shift now back. Critical minerals, as you noted, is a great one where it's core to production in so many areas, whether it's solar panels or cars. It's core to national security, whether it's used in aircraft or tanks, and China really maintains a large monopoly both on the mining of critical minerals, where it's over 90%, and in the refining and production of it, which is also at a very high percentage, and it varies, of course, for different critical minerals. So you've seen countries, namely in the West, start to say we can't afford that risk. We need to ensure that those critical minerals are refined and processed in the West as well. And that's where, as you noted in this administration, there's a recognition that if it's purely economics, it'll go to the cheapest place. But when it's economics tied to a real security need, there are various efforts. Governments are trying. You know, the Trump administration has financed certain critical minerals production. It's the venture capital ecosystem is investing in different innovative ways to use AI to optimize on drilling or optimize on refining. So we're watching that in terms of the change in strategic thinking and the way it's playing out practically as well.
And tell us a little bit more about your role in government and the challenges that, you know, working in government pose when dealing with such a rapidly changing tech scene.
I've been, as you noted, at the intersection over the last 20 years, both practically in the intelligence community and then policy-wise in the White House. And it's such an interesting space because in government you really have a broad window into threats, right? You're watching how technologies can be used for ill. You're collecting intelligence, but you have a more narrow advantage when it comes to tech on the solution space because so many of the coolest solutions are often built in the private sector. And certainly in an age of AI, the core technologies, AI is built really completely in the private sector. So as a result, you know, when I left government after 20 years, I knew I really wanted to be closer to seeing tech and understanding whether it was in the areas of autonomy, whether it's in the areas of new software-driven hardware, whether it's in the areas of mesh networking, what was being done because that was shaping our economy and our national security as well. So I think in some ways when you come from government, you have that window into threats. When you're in the private sector, you often just have the window into the coolness factor, and one can try to be a bridge to say, okay, where does government policy enable advancement, and then where are there threats that private sector founders should be aware of as they're selling and deploying their tech around the world. I had a, you know, just a really cool conversation a number of months ago with the CEO of a very large insurance company, and he said to me, you know, Anne, we're really a data company. We have massive amounts of data about which cardiologist has the fewest patients who are readmitted to the hospital, or when you're looking at 50-year-old women of a certain ethnic group, what are likely to be the side effects of a certain drug, right? So that's a cool space where in order to have that next generation of capability that we all want in our lives for patient safety, for clinical results, you need enabling government policy that helps there.
So in this context, maybe it's interesting to hear your thoughts about something very pertinent. You know, we saw the White House National Security Strategy published late December putting AI sort of at the center. Then we saw the Pentagon putting the AI on a war footing, and then the whole Anthropic dynamic sort of unfolded, the supply chain for the Pentagon. And then we saw Fable being limited for global users. And it's very clear that whatever Washington decides has a massive ripple effect on developers, on companies, on total factor productivity maybe, and ultimately also on the US-China competition in this space. You have such a unique vantage point to kind of opine on what we're looking at here and what we're in the middle of, which seems like a really historic time.
So, a lot to unpack there. Yonatan, I would say I was often reflecting during the Anthropic-Pentagon debate on a role I played in 2013. So I was asked to be NSA's first chief risk officer in 2013 after the Snowden media leaks. Right? Snowden was an NSA contractor who stole massive amounts of information, very sensitive intelligence information, fled the country and eventually ended up in Moscow, and then slowly started, you know, leaking information regarding sensitive intelligence capabilities, some of which had involved the US tech sector. And it really led to this sharp rift both between Silicon Valley and DC, but also, you know, for the average American or in some cases citizens around the world who said, really, is that what the intelligence community does? Certainly when that kind of thing occurs there's multi-levels of things that go wrong. Put in place a risk program across the entire agency that ensures across operational risk, across work we do with partners, we can protect capabilities. But the second part of the conversation which struck home very much for me was as intelligence agencies in a democracy, what does the average citizen need to know about what their country is doing in order for them to trust it? Because in democracies, we don't have to know every single rule about intelligence policy and minimization rules and compliance. But if you ask the average educated person on the street, they should feel like their country's military and intelligence services are in line with the country's policies, rules, and more importantly, the culture. In the US, the culture of equality, civil liberties, protections. So I thought about that a lot in this context because first what's different is AI, the game-changing technological capabilities are built by the private sector, and yet in a national security context the laws, the cultures, the only people who really understand the laws of war are the people trained for it. It's not just the written piece, right? It's the actual training, different scenarios. So I think the first big picture thing I would say is for AI use in the national security world, the military and intelligence world, that needs to be done at working level understanding, really understanding the development of capability, where it hallucinates, how it generates results, and working together with technologists who understand the tech well as folks in the military determining how do we use these capabilities in the case of targeting, in the case of precision, in the case of autonomy, right? Where is it safe to do so? Where it's not. That's the first thing.
You know, in the case of Anthropic, Anthropic clearly overstepped because everything they were asking for was not lawful, right? They were asking to put in the contract that there couldn't be, you know, broad domestic surveillance. That is not lawful. In the United States, you cannot do broad domestic surveillance. And certainly, the place to legislate new laws in any event is Congress, not in a contract. And the military is ultimately responsible for our safety. They're the ones who need to determine within the law, of course, how technology is used. And finally, my experience has been with military and intelligence cultures. Often they're more small-c conservative in deploying tech. They really want to understand how it works, where it doesn't work, which scenarios it may fall short because they know that they're making life and death decisions. So I think that was the first piece, which is AI presents new challenges to the way we work across government, the national security, and the tech sector. And it's not in high level discussions. It's in the back and forth of the military understanding the tech and its use and really having people who are cleared and working on those scenarios.
And then I would say to your point about the US and China, one thing we want to keep big picture is understanding that in an authoritarian country like China, like Russia, like Iran, the kind of civil liberties protections we're accustomed to in the US, in Israel don't exist. Right? So, China can hoover up millions of images from commercial cameras around the world and use that to train facial recognition models and then deploy those in a military context. In the US, we will not just be training broad government facial recognition models on privately gathered images, right? That's not the way that we would work with those models. So as a result, what we want to always ensure is that even as we compete with authoritarian countries in context, we remain true to who we are. And I think there are areas hopefully that we can also work together. You know, AI in the context of drug discovery while also accounting for the supply chain issues you talked about before, Yonatan.
So now that you're head of global affairs at a16z, I'm going to make an assumption that you do see a lot of defense tech in the portfolio, or you know, we've spoken about this quite a lot on this podcast about the surge in defense tech and there have been two labs that have been put to the test, Israel and Ukraine, where we see defense tech, you know, not as an idea or an ideation form but really on the field. What insights into this landscape are driving your thinking when you think about defense tech and where do you think things are headed in defense tech?
First, there's a big picture lesson from, as you put it, the labs in Ukraine and Israel, and that is that allies matter. Why do they matter? They matter because we learn in war. There is the textbook, and then no plan meets first contact and survives, right? So, there's things that you learn operationally in war. What Ukraine has learned in the use of commercial technology, in the scaling of it, in the degree to which, you know, advanced precision targeting capabilities that came from the US and its allies were disabled pretty quickly by Russian electronic warfare and the need to quickly adapt that in a flexible way in terms of how we manage spectrum in a given area. So that's lesson learned one. You know that allies matter, whether that's Ukraine, whether that's Israel fighting Hamas and tunnels, right? Clearly tunneling, anti-tunneling capability is something that matters to many, many landlocked countries around the world. So the reason we have allies is because we want to learn together to enable us all so that we, I speak as an American now, don't need to learn the same lessons that our allies learn and we can gain the benefit from the technological advancements and the war fighting advancements that they make. So that's first.
I think second from a practical level, I recall being in the Situation Room as we first were discussing the intelligence we had about Russia planning to invade Ukraine. And there were confident briefings about, oh, Russia, major, massive military, scaled military, they're just going to overrun Ukraine in a few days. It didn't happen. And it didn't happen because of a number of things, notably Ukraine's Zelensky and the Ukrainian leadership's persistence, but also the degree to which the Ukrainians scaled commercially available tech, cheap tech, quickly and adapted very, very quickly. So they showed that it's not only the ability to build and deploy, it's the ability to scale and the ability to quickly adapt. And those are lessons particularly in the drone environment that now show what smaller technologically advanced countries can do in that space.
And I think in Israel's case is a different lesson. In Israel's case, I mean we all watched Iron Dome particularly in April, I think 2024, May 2025, and the broader capabilities along with that defend against hundreds of Iranian ballistic and cruise missiles. And we also watched the system, you know, somewhat choke in the first hours of October 7th as it faced thousands of projectiles coming in from Gaza. But overall, that AI-driven air defense system where it's the software and the hardware working together and adapting to determine what is that projectile, what is the right capability to counter it, the handover of the capability, the determining where it'll land because the economics matter. These are expensive interceptors. That national kind of air defense system is what we saw, that linkage between hardware, software, AI and adaptation. We learned from an Israel perspective that provides helpful, helpful lessons to us as well. So those labs are, you know, they're both key broader messages about alliances but also the practical operational lessons of war.
So I just have to ask, you have such a sobering empirical viewpoint and I'm wondering because you said allies matter, is there any concern in your mind about the alliance between Israel and the US given the politics, or is it just politics and this too shall pass?
Everything is a combination of both politics and operational reality. And the reality is that in the US today, you know, there are those who have real concerns about Israel's handling of the post-October 7th period and are looking to shape the dynamics of the US-Israel alliance. We will see how those play out. From my perspective, at the end of the day, the United States needs its capable allies. You know, we have multiple different classes of allies. We talk about alliances. And I think multiple presidents, you know, bipartisan across Democratic or Republican administrations have pressed European allies to say, you know, it's really cool that you're funding your very rich social safety net systems, and spending nothing on defense. The United States spends a very large amount and we deploy soldiers and sailors and airmen all across Europe. You're wealthy countries and wealthy economies. It's time for you to step up and spend not necessarily what the US spends, but at least the target was closer to 4%. Most countries in NATO were less than half that. And certainly, we saw that President Biden pushed that point hard, particularly after Russia's second invasion of Ukraine, when we saw how empty many of European militaries' coffers were in terms of their capabilities. And when we saw that the adaptation mattered, if you had tanks from 20 years ago, they were hard-pressed to stand up against today's electronic warfare, today's missile capabilities.
Right? So I think when we talk about alliances in the United States, we have allies that matter in terms of bringing technology, capability, intelligence to the table. And we have allies who matter from a broader foreign policy perspective. Israel, and I served for, you know, almost 20 years in government, 15 years in the intelligence community, is one of the US's most effective intelligence allies, is one of the US's most effective technological allies, and certainly because of the degree to which it's in a rough neighborhood, provides a tremendous number of lessons about how to counter advanced militaries like Israel saw with Russia in Syria, or like Israel saw with Iranian advanced ballistic and cruise missiles, all the way through to militant groups like they saw whether it's Hezbollah tunneling into the geography there or whether it was Hamas and the tunneling capability and just the raw additional information warfare capability. So from a US perspective the alliance with Israel brings raw unique and real value that is very much in American interest to maintain.
There was a running joke here a couple of years ago when the Houthis fired their ballistic missiles, Iranian make, and the first instance of, you know, the Reagan space war ended up between Israel and tribes in the middle of the Yemenite desert, which was funny to see those interceptions in outer space. But, you know, if we want to get a bit more specific, as you look at investment themes in defense tech, how do you kind of look at the landscape and where does Israel fit beyond having, you know, kind of what you've just outlined as the friction and the know-how? When you look specifically at sort of what is the next, you know, wave of the way war is going to be conducted and how does that play out to the critical technologies?
You know, the sentence you asked, which was investment in defense tech, even 10 years ago that was a non-starter because the way militaries, and I know the American military procurement system best so I'll stick with that one, I came into government in 2007 for one year, as my husband likes to say, 19 years later, but I remember somebody handed me a chart and said, 'Okay, you really need to understand this.' And it was one of...
Those folded-over charts, and I unfolded each level. And when it was opened, it was this massive chart that covered most of my desk, and it said the Department of Defense weapons acquisition process. And it was all the various steps from the steps that the Pentagon used to generate its requirements to where it conveyed them, to where it received first ideas, the way it analyzed alternatives, tested them, evaluated them. Multi-year process. And certainly you didn't have private sector money going into that because they said there's only one set of customers, militaries. There's often controls on what's shared on sensitive technologies. You never quite know when anything's coming out on the other end. So why would we invest in this? And what changed is that in the ensuing period, you know, commercial software, whether it was satellite networks, whether it was the way networking overall is done, whether it was drones and autonomy, AI, people started to see that many of those technologies coming out of the commercial sector not only had military application, but the process of adaptation in, you know, being first to market and adapting and staying first to market was something important, particularly as you no longer, to your point, had Reagan-era, US-Soviet Union, two massive acquisition systems facing off against each other.
But you had post-2001, 9/11, right? All, you know, terrorist groups adapting technology and moving from there. And certainly as a result you now have venture investing going into defense tech and trying to say rather than the process starting with government requirements, which by definition are going to be built on what has been done before, maybe with a step layer or two of creativity, but now can we just reimagine based on what's happening in commercial tech in a given area and essentially fund that first level of development so the military can evaluate technologies and test with them, and you just make the process not only much faster but potentially much cheaper.
And for sure within the ecosystem of Silicon Valley and Israel specifically, we do see a pretty aggressive movement internationally from both companies and funds and governments to divest from Israel financially, and there's a lot of pressure on these funds. What do you make of that, this kind of divestment from the financial standpoint?
First, I would say Israel needs to do a better job telling its story. And much as I mentioned earlier, you know, post-Snowden, where I reflected on really the urgency of democracies doing a better job of ensuring that the average educated citizen understands how their militaries are used, with an attempt to really minimize civilian deaths and wounds and really use it for the purpose it's intended, which is to keep a country safe in a way that obviously not only meets the laws of war, but that a country's culture is proud of. Right? I recall once a conversation with a particular colleague in Europe. He was a military attaché from a European country serving in the United States, and I asked him what he thought most surprising when he came to the US. He said, you know, when I'm in France I would never walk on the street in my uniform because it's not something you're proud of. He said in the United States people fly the flag. There's a sense of pride in the military. Now obviously the sense of pride in the military's capabilities, but also there's a sense of pride in this is a military that reflects who we are in the makeup of it, in the way it pursues defending the country, but also doing so as a light unto the nations, right? And I think that I recall somebody saying a comment to me, you know, AI and targeting is a terrible thing, and I said, look, I'll share with you a perspective coming out of the intelligence community. Said the hardest problems we have are the individuals who try to blend into the noise: weapons traffickers, terrorists, militants, right? Because they're using the same email we use. They're using the same VSAT connectivity we use. You know, the lone wolf, how do you ensure that intelligence services identify them and prevent an attack from happening? The proverbial needle in the haystack, you can't find the needle unless you've collected some part of the haystack. And I said, in many ways, I view AI as a way to be much more precise in our targeting. And you can actually lay out how you've identified somebody. In order for people to really understand both the threats we face, but also how democracies pursue them in that way, the story has to be better told. So back to Israel, you know, I think Israel needs to do a better job of telling that story and ensuring that's done in a rapid, effective way. That's A. And then finally, I would say B. At the end of the day, investment dollars go to where there's value. And as we talked about earlier, countries that are in conflicts and crisis frequently are labs for development of tech. And those who want to ensure they're deploying the best tech will seek to partner or learn from those areas.
In that context, we spoke about it earlier. We live in an era where smaller countries can really, you know, create big differences. We saw the UAE buying BrahMos missiles a few weeks ago from India. Like, is it going to be a mix-and-match dynamic which is going to allow for smaller countries to gain a bigger share? How do you kind of see the stack from smaller countries, Japan stepping in, Germany transitioning? Interesting to hear your thoughts on how do smaller countries compete in this evolving landscape.
So versus the national security, economics matter, right? Countries need to first of all make decisions about how much they spend on their militaries, and in many, you know, Western countries you have aging populations, you have more demand for social programs, so countries are making choices as a result. They want to get the highest ROI for every dollar they spend on their militaries, right? And then second is there's now a whole new wave of technology from drones to autonomy to, you know, unmanned vehicles, where fundamentally if something doesn't have a person in it, the cost of production, because you have far less careabouts in terms of safety, etc. Right? The cost of an unmanned ship, we're talking in the single-digit millions, and you can scale them much more across a long waterway, for example. You may have seen the US just used an autonomous ship for its first combat operations in the last 24 hours in the Straits of Hormuz. So as a result, both at the national level and then at the practical level, countries want to spend less. So the cheapest technology that gets the job done, now it's going to vary where they are, right? So in Sweden, certainly autonomy in the navy, but how you ensure whether it's fresh water or salt water, they're going to optimize for the temperature of the water, the kind of water, the kinds of conflicts they see. You know, protection of undersea telecom cables is a mission that in the North Sea, the Nordic countries are uber-focused on based on what they learned in terms of suspected Russian operations cutting underwater cable. Certainly, when you look at Taiwan, right, as an island, Taiwan is thinking about its own resilience to undersea cable. Taiwan is an example of an ally that really does need to step up its game. So I think smaller countries are in some ways uniquely positioned to be at the cutting edge of showing how software-based ecosystems adaptation is game-changing, because bigger countries are going to leverage that both with exquisite capabilities. Right? The F-35 is an exquisite capability that's unique. Many countries can't afford it, and those kinds of capabilities are still the ones that the wealthiest, most important global leaders will still have, augmented by the smaller ones that are what's available.
Hi, I'm Dan Senor, host of the Call Me Back podcast. These past few years have asked a lot of the Jewish world. We've been wrestling with pain, disagreement, and dilemmas: the war in Gaza, the war with Iran, the pressure on Jewish communities in diaspora societies, and the upcoming Israeli elections, which may bring many of these tensions to a head. These are not simple stories. And in a moment filled with bad information and overly simplistic answers, it can be hard to know who to trust. At Call Me Back, we know that trust has to be earned. We know your time is valuable. So when you spend it with us, we take it seriously. We don't claim to have all the answers, but we do try to ask better questions with honesty and humility. And maybe that is where hope begins: not in pretending this moment is simple, but in believing at a minimum we must face it together. You can find Call Me Back on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you there.
And we're back with Anne Neuberger. I'm nervous to ask this next question because things are happening so fast in this region and also in technology, but what is your read on the renewal of the crossfire now in the Gulf? What do you think it means for investors worldwide? They've been spooked a few times now. Where do you think this is heading?
You know, we talked a little bit earlier regarding globalization and the idea of like global trade, freedom of navigation, and America was often a guarantor of that freedom of navigation around the world. Those of us in the '80s, we recall America flagging ships during the Iran-Iraq war to show that ships and cargo that belonged to countries who were not part of that conflict would be protected even if there was a regional conflict. And I think that's why Iran's shutting down of the straits was so concerning to the Trump administration because it was a game-changer. If you allow that there, it sets precedent for any number of other geopolitical geographic choke points around the world. And I think that's the reason that you've seen the Trump administration say we can't let this stand because first it sets precedent. Second, fundamentally would change the cost of shipping. You know, we saw after the Houthis shooting in the Red Sea several years ago, you had shippers suddenly shipping to go around the Cape of Good Hope, right? Adding significant time and significant cost. That drives global inflation. That has an impact on energy cost, has an impact on every product that we buy. But I think that's why we're seeing this emphasis on trying to break through and ensure that freedom of navigation for countries around the world remains a global freedom.
