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Bonus Episode: Game-changing Tech for War & Peace - with Anne Neuberger
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- [00:00]
Dan Senor
Foreign
- [00:04]
Anne Neuberger
you are listening to an art media podcast.
- [00:22]
Dan Senor
It's 4:00pm on Friday, July 24 here in New York City. It's 11:00pm on Friday, July 24 in Israel, as Israelis are already immersed in in Shabbat. For most of modern history, the technologies that reshape geopolitics belong to superpowers. Think nuclear, US industrialized uk space racing with Russia. But that's no longer true. Today, a small country, sometimes even a small team of engineers can build capabilities that once required the machinery of a superpower. Drones, artificial intelligence, cyber weapons, autonomous systems, commercial satellites. These aren't just supporting military power anymore. Increasingly, they are military power, and the barrier to entry keeps falling. Few people have watched that shift unfold from more angles than Ann Neuberger. Anne spent over a decade at the National Security Agency in the United States, rising to become the first director of its Cybersecurity directorate. She then moved to the White House, serving as Deputy National Security Advisor for cyber and emerging technology, shaping American policy on cyber warfare, AI, quantum computing, and next generation telecommunications at the highest level. Now she's crossed over from government to the private sector to venture capital, joining Andreessen Horowitz as a general partner and head of global affairs, sitting exactly at the intersection of national security, technological innovation and capital private capital working with founders across healthcare, consumer, fintech, infrastructure, and beyond. That intersection matters nowhere more than in Israel, a frontline lab for defense technology, a major source of global innovation, and increasingly a target of political and financial pressure all at once. Which raises the question at the center of today's conversation. As technology, capital and geopolitics fused together, what actually determines which countries and which companies come out on top? This fascinating conversation was published last week on Arc Media's what's yous Number? Podcast, which covers the outsized impact of Israeli companies on the world stage and the latest developments affecting Israel's own economy. It's co hosted by Yonatanadiri, an Israeli entrepreneur, and Yael Wisner Levy, who's chief communications officer at Tenzai, which is a cybersecurity company in Israel. She's also a former speechwriter and journalist. Please make sure to subscribe to this monthly podcast from ARC Media. You can find a link to what's your Number in today's episode Description here's the conversation
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Yael Wisner Levy
and welcome to what's yous Number.
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Anne Neuberger
It's wonderful to be here, Yael, so
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Yael Wisner Levy
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?
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Anne Neuberger
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, it used to be that weapons were tanks and they still are. 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 threat.
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Yonatan Adiri
Okay, Ann, 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, you know, how things change so fast in this era?
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Anne Neuberger
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 in 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 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.
- [06:34]
Yonatan Adiri
And in that context, how do you view the importance of supply chain networks and energy? Because we're seeing that 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 to 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?
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Anne Neuberger
You know, 20 years ago the buzzword was globalization. We would have global supply chains and essential 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 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, strategic thinking and the way it's playing out practically as well.
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Yael Wisner Levy
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.
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Anne Neuberger
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, 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 just a really cool conversation a number of months ago with the CEO of a very large, large insurance company and he said to me, you know, Ann, 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, what are likely of a certain ethnic group, what are likely to be the side effects of a certain drug?
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Yael Wisner Levy
Right.
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Anne Neuberger
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.
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Yonatan Adiri
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 in 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.
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Anne Neuberger
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 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 for the average American or in some case 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 as 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 U.S. 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 working level, understand, 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 are 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 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 broad domestic surveillance that is not lawful. 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 seat 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, 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 and 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 currents like China and use AI in national security 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.
- [16:36]
Yael Wisner Levy
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 a 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?
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Anne Neuberger
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 and 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 and in a flexible way in terms of how we manage spectrum in a given area. So that's lesson learned. One that allies matter, whether that's Ukraine, whether that's Israel fighting Hamas in tunnels. Right. Clearly tunneling anti tunneling capability is something that matters to many, many landlocked countries around the. 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, 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 show that it's not only the ability to build and dep, 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 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 this 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.
- [20:21]
Yael Wisner Levy
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 U.S. given the politics, or is it just politics and this too shall pass.
- [20:38]
Anne Neuberger
Everything is a combination of both politics and operational reality. And the reality is that in the U.S. today, you know, there are those who have real concerns about the Israel's handling of the post 10-7-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 and Republican administrations have pressed European allies to say, you know, it's really cool that you're funding your very rich safety net, 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, your 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 military's 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 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.
- [23:10]
Yonatan Adiri
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 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 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 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?
- [23:52]
Anne Neuberger
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 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, 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 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 the post 2001, 911 right, all 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.
- [26:11]
Yael Wisner Levy
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?
- [26:32]
Anne Neuberger
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 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. I recall once a conversation with a particular colleague in Europe. He was a military attache from a European country serving the United States. And I asked him what he thought most surprising when he came to the U.S. he said, you know, Anne, 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 and 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. So the hardest problems we have are the individuals who try to blend into the noise. Weapons traffickers, terrorists, militants, because they're using the same email we use, they're using the same VSAT connectivity we use. 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. 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 crises 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.
- [29:04]
Yonatan Adiri
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 your thoughts on how do smaller countries compete in this evolving landscape?
- [29:33]
Anne Neuberger
So for us, 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 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. And then second is there's now a whole new wave of technology from drones to autonomy to unmanned vehic. Fundamentally, if something doesn't have a person in it, the cost of production because you have far less care abouts in terms of safety, et cetera, 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 saltwater, they're going to optimize for the temperature, the water, the kind of water, the kinds of conflicts they see. So protection of undersea telecom cables is a mission that in the Northern 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 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 gains. 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 F35 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.
- [31:40]
Yael Wisner Levy
We'll be right back.
- [31:47]
Dan Senor
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 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 your podcasts. See you there.
- [32:52]
Yael Wisner Levy
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?
- [33:10]
Anne Neuberger
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 that and cargo that belong 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 strait 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 costs, has an impact on every product that we buy. And 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.
- [34:24]
Yonatan Adiri
You mentioned in passing AI and drug discovery, right? Molecule candidates for drugs and so on. Which technology gets you most excited in terms of optimism?
- [34:36]
Anne Neuberger
You know, there are so many. It's hard to pick one. Yonatan, to be honest. And I just think AI and drug discovery. There are so many diseases and illnesses today that have small numbers of people affected by them. And the cost of drug trials are significant. So if you can simulate those results, at least parts of them. So you know that when you're actually doing the drug trials on humans, you've already kind of gone through what you can before and cut the time and cost of drugs and potentially just increase the volume to tackle a whole set of diseases that heretofore weren't economically viable. That's a game changer, right? And it's something that I think we'd all love to see as a gift of these technologies. I think the second place I would say is our world rides on digital infrastructure today. You know, whether we're communicating with a friend halfway around the world or whether in the United States, our country's massive electricity infrastructure, we can use different kinds of energy infrastructure at a given moment in time to bring down costs and to optimize for green energy, that digital infrastructure is incredibly fragile. Had you told me before I went as deputy national security man in the White House that I'd spend a good portion of my time responding to a ransomware takedown of the second largest school district the day before school was supposed to open on Labor Day? Or hundreds of hospitals around the country where they had to hire runners to run images into surgery because there were cyber attacks, took down those networks, or frankly, one country, China, pre positioning an infrastructure around the world to shut it down in a crisis or a conflict. The economics of cyber defense had failed before AI because it's so much easier to find a vulnerability to attack than to defend every digital door and window. And I think AI fundamentally makes cyber defense possible because you can just essentially be one step ahead of attackers and just run models to identify where you're vulnerable and generate patches much more quickly, check your code using AI much more quickly, and then fix it before you deploy. So I'm very hopeful that as our world really relies more and more on digital infrastructure AI for cyber defense, even as it helps attackers. But attackers were already had such a leg up, I think it'll significantly help defenders. So those are the two areas that, you know, one human, one digital that I'm most excited about among many.
- [36:53]
Yael Wisner Levy
And I, I hesitate to ask this question as a woman myself, because of your unique career that you had doing so more as a observant Jewish woman. I mean, you didn't have a lot of peers from that identity Pool, I would say, by your side. How was that? Was that a challenge? Was it an advantage?
- [37:11]
Anne Neuberger
You know, I would read it, you know, right to left, as you do in Hebrew woman and then Observant Jew. I think it's a particularly stark moment in the aftermath of the Graham Platner controversy in Maine, where I've seen among a lot of women go, which woman with a resume that thin, talking garbage as he did online with let alone that tattoo and everything else would ever have been allowed to continue because they were charismatic. I think a lot of women are going, so things haven't really changed. Right. Believe her, but only if she's of the right political ideology. So I think there's a moment for us to pause and go, there's a fair amount of stark hypocrisy in the Green Platner story. And just wondering, as women, how was that allowed? Right. You know, it's funny because after my. I came to government for one year for a fellowship and then felt deeply grateful to America and very much felt a call being part of something larger than myself, the sense of dedication and sacrifice of the military. And I went to talk to a four star general who was a mentor about taking on a particular role. And I'll never forget because I appreciated his candor. This is in 2008, so it's 18 years ago. And he said to me, anne, I want to be up front. You're a woman. You need to work twice as hard to be taken seriously. If you're prepared for that, you'll get a lot done. And I remember looking at him going, my dad came as a refugee. My grandparents are all refugees. In my mind, I'm thinking hard work was never something I was raised to be afraid of. Game on, right? But I think that's certainly a the case. As a woman, I think as the observant Jewish part, I would say that in some ways being different, both in my work environment and frankly, in my community. While it was difficult in the beginning, over time it made it easier for me to ask questions or to sometimes challenge the accepted doctrine, because every day of my life I was challenging accepted doctrine, so to speak. And over time, I think I learned that actually the worlds were more similar than different. We say in the Hebrew Bible, in God's image, he created man. It's very similar to the American idea of equality, right? If each person is in God's image, then each person is fundamentally godly and equal. And more and more I found those similarities. And eventually when we were in the White House, My husband and I would invite colleagues for Shabbat dinner. And we found that everybody related to the idea of this is time for human connection, for thinking about what we're grateful for trying to achieve, the unique role each of us has in this world with the unique capabilities we have. And it really showed us that the worlds were perhaps closer than one, certainly than I felt when I started 20 years ago.
- [39:50]
Yonatan Adiri
I was telling Yael before we started the show. I came back this morning from celebrating my wife's grandfather's 100-year-old anniversary, his birthday.
- [40:00]
Yael Wisner Levy
Wow.
- [40:00]
Anne Neuberger
Mazel tov in Switzerland.
- [40:01]
Yonatan Adiri
He's a Holocaust survivor from Germany. Was 12 years old when he left Germany for a school in Belgium. Came back to save the family. And he's like, he walked 2km a day with us the other day. And when we asked him sort of what's the main theme now that he's into his second century, kind of resonated what you're saying. Yeah, a strong sense of akharata tov, gratitude towards everything that did work because he saw so many things that couldn't right. In humanity, in institutions and so on. And you find that along the way, advice that have this Akaratov, this notion of persevere and it will obviously pay itself out. It's great to hear you kind of, you know, observe on your career with such candor. So thanks, really appreciate your thoughts on that. And that comment, I will say to
- [40:49]
Anne Neuberger
your point, I had a quote that I saw on one of these daily calendars and I ripped it out, actually two quotes that I posted under my computer. And one was a ship is safe at shore, but that's not what ships are for.
- [41:03]
Yonatan Adiri
Nice.
- [41:04]
Anne Neuberger
Which I thought was just a beautiful message. And then the second one was a quote from the Talmud that a particular sage, when he walked into the study hall would say a prayer that nobody should be hurt by his hand through the intellectual argument. And when he would leave, he would give thanks for his portion. And I often would think about that as I walked out of work, often tired, often a little disheartened. But I would say I give thanks for my portion. When I think about my family history, my great grandparents were lost in the camps. My grandparents came as survivors. My father came as a refugee from Soviet occupied Budapest. I give thanks for my portion, my chance to try to contribute to a country I love, love and be part of a people that I think has been an example of resilience and contribution for 2000 years or more. But at least for since we began in our diaspora 2,000 years ago.
- [41:56]
Yael Wisner Levy
And speaking of resilience, you know that we recently, of course you know that we recently marked the 50th anniversary of the Entebbe operation. You have a very special and specific connection to that. Tell us a little bit about it.
- [42:08]
Anne Neuberger
I do. So on July 4, 1976, when the Entebbe operation happened, I was a six month old baby at home with my grandmother, waiting for my parents to come home. This was their first international trip. They had dreamed of visiting Israel. They were Americans. And on the flight home, the plane was hijacked and taken to Entebbe, Uganda, where the Palestinian and German terrorists separated the Israelis and Jews. My parents were American Jews. My father wears a skull cap, so they took him and my mother didn't want to leave him. And my parents were held hostage for a week and then rescued. You know, it was interesting. I was talking with a colleague in Singapore recently and she said to me, ann, did your parents tell you anything, you know, about their particular story? And I said, look, I learned about it when a teacher in fifth grade came over to me and said, your parents read Entebbe, right? And I remember looking at her going, enwa.
- [43:00]
Yael Wisner Levy
Oh, wow, wow.
- [43:01]
Anne Neuberger
And she said, well, could you ask your mom if she would come tell the story?
- [43:04]
Yael Wisner Levy
No way.
- [43:06]
Dan Senor
What?
- [43:07]
Anne Neuberger
And my mom told one story that stayed with me. And she said that when they got back to Israel, you know, everybody else had family. My family is all in America. So they got back and they're standing there and the IDF had come, the Israeli military had come, middle of the night, right? So my mom had slipped. My mom and dad had slipped off their shoes. So my mom said, she's standing on the tarmac, she had no shoes. And it was hot, it was in the summer. An Israeli female soldier slipped off her sandals and gave them to her. And my mom said, that was like. When I started my recovery, I felt like I was starting to come back. But for many months, she said she couldn't feed me bananas because that was what they were fed in Uganda. And I was a six month old baby. Anything but that.
- [43:47]
Yael Wisner Levy
Understood? Wow.
- [43:48]
Anne Neuberger
What a story I sometimes reflect on, given the time I spelled in the intelligence community, was that when the commandos took off on that flight In July of 1976, they were flying blind, right? They wanted to ensure that they were below commercial radar, they couldn't be picked up because this was a surprise raid. Today, in the intelligence community or the military, there is an entire system of intelligence analysts, satellite communications, secure comms that are there to ensure that Commandos going in for a military operation or a hostage rescue have the benefit of many eyes supporting them. And it still takes tremendous courage to fly voluntarily into the middle of a hostile situation. But I often reflect on the courage of those individuals 50 years ago, when there wasn't the tech overwatch, they were going in silent. They'd had a few days to train, if any, but yet they were driven by a desire to save lives. And I think that's the definition of rock art and probably commitment to something larger than yourself and to saving lives, which is huge.
- [44:54]
Yael Wisner Levy
Absolutely. So to wrap up the show, Ann, we're going to try out this new format of kind of a lightning round. And this is what's yous Number? So any number or short sentence or word that comes to mind, let us know what is your number for? How many news sources do you rely on every day to stay informed?
- [45:12]
Anne Neuberger
18. Exactly.
- [45:17]
Yael Wisner Levy
It's a happy number.
- [45:18]
Anne Neuberger
No, honestly, I have a bunch of tech sites. I use Apple News that just feeds a whole set of sites and then I have my classic ones with some foreign policy stuff, et cetera.
- [45:28]
Yael Wisner Levy
No, no, that was pretty precise.
- [45:31]
Yonatan Adiri
Yeah. The next one is how many countries do you believe will become true AI superpowers? How big can this club really be?
- [45:38]
Anne Neuberger
I'm defining superpower as use AI broadly for their health systems, for making their governments more efficient, for ensuring they can protect themselves against adversaries. Using AI, you can have a broad set of countries, you know, 25, 30. Because in a real world, the models and increasingly you're seeing the cost, new, more cost efficient models will be available that are optimized for different use cases.
- [46:04]
Yael Wisner Levy
What percentage of cyber attacks could be potentially prevented if we had better basic
- [46:09]
Anne Neuberger
cyber hygiene, a lot of the same basic cyber hygiene, multifactor authentication, data encryption, et cetera, vulnerability management systems are the core defenses. Even in an AI era, they matter much more and they've got to work faster. So I would say definitely 65 to 70% with the basic stuff. We just talked about monitoring your system, potentially using AI models, encrypting your data so if it's stolen and can't be used for blackmail, you know, using a factor digital identities as well as for agents. So yeah, so just cleaning up and descending forward.
- [46:42]
Yonatan Adiri
You know, you've been around world leaders and you've led yourself, you know, branches of government. From your experience, how many hours a week should leaders spend learning something new, kind of carving out that time to learn something new.
- [46:56]
Anne Neuberger
I love this question. I'm going to relate a quick anecdote so one of the finest people I worked for in government was Secretary Bob Gates. I worked for him when I was a White House fellow in the Pentagon. My first job in government, and I'll never forget I called him once when I was serving in the White House as Deputy National Security Advisor, and I think he served in that role as well. And he said to me, ann, you sound tired. And I said, yeah, there's been a lot going on. And at that point, there wasn't a particular crisis happening. There was just a lot going on. And he said to me, ann, at the times when there's not a particular crisis, you cannot be running full speed, because when the crisis happening, you can't run any faster. And I think a part of that, that is the intellectual learning, right? I'm sure all of us, like a part of filling up the tank is learning something new. So I think carving out an hour a day to be reading something new, talking to a part of government you've not talked with before, talking to a foreign colleague and saying, how have you tackled this question? Is important.
- [47:52]
Yonatan Adiri
These last two are not a number, but a book podcast newsletter that you may recommend to our listeners to kind of expand their horizons.
- [48:00]
Anne Neuberger
So I would say the podcast I enjoy is one, that many people listen to Dwarkish Patel on tech and a book that I. I would say two. So the book I really enjoyed is called Geniuses at War, and it's the story of the encryption device that the Brits built during the Second World War to break German encryption. And it's a beautiful story, I find, because the people who were involved were not the people you would expect, right? They came from working class families and they faced tremendous, tremendous resistance. And in some ways, because they came from those kind of backgrounds, but really believed in it, they were able to build that Enigma machine which broke German encryption and shortened the war. I had a grandmother who was in Auschwitz at the time, potentially the reason I have the privilege of being here. So it just goes to show that it's not a certain class of people or a certain class of advanced education that enables you to make a difference. It's really believing in something and being willing to put it all. And then the book that I most recently read that just I've been reflecting on is the Last Days of Budapest. My family's Hungarian. And, you know, I had. My paternal grandmother and her sister were hiding out in Budapest. They'd fled there because they weren't on the lists. You know, in their smaller city, they were on the list, which is how the Nazis and their Hungarian collaborators found people. But the reason it's such a story to read is because Hungary was in a different class than the other allies of the Nazis. Essentially the Hungarian leadership remained the same same. But the horrors started when the Nazis pushed out the Hungarian government and took over. But the story is told about how many times average Hungarians could have stopped it. And Hungary had a well integrated Jewish community, part of finance and the arts and business as well as culturally contributing. And all it takes for evil to persist, as Edmund Burke said, is for good men to do nothing. And that tells that story. And I reflect today on the rise of anti Semitism in America and how crude some of the discourses is. So it's a book to read at this moment and to reflect.
- [50:02]
Yael Wisner Levy
And thank you so, so much for coming on and sharing so much, so much wisdom.
- [50:06]
Anne Neuberger
It's wonderful to be here with both of you. Thank you so much. Ellen, you're on the 10.
- [50:10]
Yonatan Adiri
Thanks Ann.
- [50:10]
Anne Neuberger
Thank you.
- [50:27]
Yonatan Adiri
This podcast offers general business and economic information and is not a comprehensive summary for investment decisions. It does not recommend or solicit any investment strategy or security.