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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
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B
You are listening to an art media podcast.
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C
So Yael, what's your number?
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B
My number is seven as in, you know, Israel has been ranked now seventh in the world in the global AI index. It's a widely cited benchmark that measures stuff like talent research, infrastructure, government strategy and real world AI adoption. It's a solid position, especially for a small country and obviously reflecting world class talent and a powerful ecosystem. But it also highlights a very competitive path ahead, is Israel is going to need to invest a lot on a national level in compute and infrastructure, expanding the AI talent pipeline, of course, and not confining it only to elite units in the army. This is going to be crucial, Yonatan, for the path ahead to determine whether Israel can stay in seventh place or even improve. What's your number?
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C
Seven is my favorite number. It's Eric Cantona in Man United. It's David Beckham, it's Cristiano Ronaldo. So I like the number. Mine is a bit more technical. It's 3.15 as in 3.15 ago or 3 shekels and 15 ago to the dollar. This is the strongest the shekel has ever opened a year compared to the dollar. This is a very significant benchmark for Israel. It is actually troubling on some fronts because we raised capital in dollars and now the dollar is 25% weaker than it was in the beginning of the war two years ago. So on one end it's a great strong macro figure. On the other end it does hide some risks to the economy, such that the chairman of the Israeli bank late yesterday announced that he is reducing the interest rates by a quarter percent to fight the strength of the shekel. Who would believe after October 7th that we would be at a point that the central bank has to intervene to weaken the shekel. So who wins?
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B
Yael, I'm going to give this one to you since I'm the newbie here. So you win.
- [01:53]
C
I actually wanted to give it to you and I'll take the win and let's dive into the episode. So as you guys probably noticed, Nihal is away throughout January. And Yael Wisner Levy, who is a friend, an incredible leader in the Israeli tech scene, one of the best storytellers we have in the country. She's responsible for some of the biggest brands and global stories that came out of Israel in the tech scene. Super excited to have you, Yael. Rather, you know, than giving the listeners your padded bio. I think there's a specific story that kind of captures your incredible talent and journey and Involves one senator, late presidential candidate John McCain.
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B
First of all, thanks for having me. This is a huge honor. I've been a listener and now I get to be a host. So that's like a nice transition. I don't think a lot of people get to do. And I'm filling huge shoes. Michal is obviously a super respected journalist. I love reading her in Fortune and seeing her on CNBC and others. The McCain stuff is funny because it really does bring me back a long time ago and in my military service, I was on the Lebanese border, an intelligence unit. And we were using a lot of American technology. And we had visits coming up and one of the visits was Senator, at the time, John McCain and I, as you can tell, grew up in New York. And I was able to kind of give Senator McCain the lay of the land and tell him a bit what we're seeing. The region. This is right before the Second Lebanon War. So it was a pretty intense front. And visit ended with Senator McCain offering me a job. I was 19 years old, had no idea really who this guy was. Knew he was someone super important. Fast forward a few years later, I started working in Congress, this time for Congressman Steve Israel, a Democrat from New York. He's no longer in Congress. He spent 16 years really serving the Democrats and heading the DCCC. A huge mentor of mine. So actually, I really give all the credit to John McCain for letting me kind of do my first steps in my career in Congress, in the U.S. congress.
- [03:59]
C
So more on that. Towards the tail end of the episode, we're going to hear about your more recent endeavors and really some exciting stuff. Super excited about today's episode. We have Daniel Schreiber with us today to talk predominantly AI. Yael, take it away. He's been your boss and partner throughout, I think, you know, more than a decade or so.
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B
Yes. Being this my first episode, I decided to bring maybe one of the most important mentors of mine. I just went from another mentor to another mentor. Daniel Schreiber is the co founder and CEO of Lemonade, which is a publicly traded insurance company. I know you've guys spoken about the company in the past, and I had the privilege of being at the company from the early days for nine years, taking it public and so forth with Daniel and Shai, the co founders. But Daniel also has another hat and we're going to be talking to him about his work in AI policy. You've followed Lemonade a lot in the Windex and you were just talking about them just last week.
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C
Yeah. So you know, Lemonade has been a star of the what's your number index? That is the Windex. But you know, Daniel is an incredible storyteller and his sort of approach, his framing into the challenge of AI, I found that to be a brilliant framing. And his take is, you know, the aliens have landed, they are super intelligent and they're willing to work for free. Then this is not a scenario for the future. This has already happened. And Daniel sort of opens the framework for how do we deal with AI with this posit. It makes us understand this is not something that's going to unfold a decade or two from now. And so I think we're up for a super interesting conversation. Thanks for bringing Daniel Overiel. And I think we're just going to move on to the Windex.
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B
Okay, Joel, let's get our latest update on the Windex of what's yous Number Index that tracks the performance of publicly traded Israeli based or founded companies.
- [05:44]
C
All right, so 2026 is opening in the red across all three indices. We know that the Windex actually won over Nasdaq and the S and P in performance for 2025, but it is unfortunately starting off slower than the other two. The Windex shed 2.27%. Ouch. The S&P she 0.65%, Nasdaq 0.76%. So all three in the red. Windex starting more or less 2% below the comparable indices. Digging deeper there in the red, we see developer tool pioneer JFrog shedding 6.68% and autonomous car hardware Innovis in double digit territory in the red with 10.56% lost. We see similar performances from Mobileye that shed almost half of its market cap in 2025. That sector is undergoing some challenges. We see Tesla choosing its own stack and byd which became the biggest electric car seller this year, end of 2025, which also has its own stack. So this is challenging for both Mobileye and Innovis who focus their strategy on Europe, I.e. bMW, Daimler, Mercedes Benz.
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B
It's been a great week actually for private though, Israeli companies. I know you spoke about armies last week, but hearing reports about companies like Papaya Global and AppsFlyer being almost dating private equity funds looking at big, big numbers in terms of acquisitions.
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C
Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. I think this could be a trend whereby Israeli companies at growth do not seek the path to go public in New York, which is not a good sign. Oftentimes we see Israeli companies at that level of growth and maturity sort of date or have a romantic dynamic with private equity as a means to lever up ahead of the ipo. So this might be what we're seeing. We saw, you know, Wiz turning down Google once, then saying we're going to IPO and then ending up with a massive exit to Google. We saw Armis. We had Evgeny Dibrov on the show a couple of weeks before Armis was bought out, and he was saying, we're gearing up for an ipo. So this game whereby entrepreneurs kind of play out private equity in the public markets is a known game. It's a known dance. I really hope this is not the case in Israel and we're not going to see big, strong Israeli companies end up with private equity. I think the path that Lemonade carved and so many others, WIX and Monday and JFrog and Sentinel 1 and so many others over the last couple of years, allowing retail investors and institutional investors from all over the world to. And it builds better companies. What's your take? I mean, you've been part of an ipo.
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B
Yeah, I think there's a lot of things that have to do also with global trends. I don't want to be too hard on these Israeli founders who are, you know, at the end of the day, Evgenian Adir sold the company for, I think, an estimated seven and a half billion dollars. I totally agree that it's not great for Israeli society. And also, yes, let the world share in Israeli tech. The industries have changed. I think cyber is a much harder sell on the public market. You mentioned Lemonade, of course, and Fiverr. Those are more consumer tech. It's a different kind of technology that also the public markets can understand better, can price better. It's going to be interesting. There's a bunch of cyber companies that are kind of waiting in the backstage to see exactly how big they need to get in order to go to public. I think that's like a kind of like a most of the dance between the banks, the public and the companies themselves.
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C
Whatever turns out to be the case. Israelitek is going to be a winner here because liquidity in these numbers benefits Israeli entrepreneurs.
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B
I would definitely agree with that. And just for the morale even, it gives other entrepreneurs in Israel the kind of the stamina to keep on going, to continue innovating. It's almost contagious among founders here. Hopefully it spreads to more and more people in society.
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C
All right, Gail, I think it's time to welcome Daniel Schreiber. So let's move on. To our deep dive in the interview. All right, guys, I am super excited to have Daniel Schreiber with us. Throughout my journey, Daniel has been an incredible inspiration on thinking big and being able to tell a global story when you build a company that is trying to break the path for other companies. We did it in healthcare, other companies did it in so many different parts of the ecosystem. And Daniel was always there on his other hat.
- [10:09]
B
Besides Lemonade, which we talked about a bit earlier, he's also the founder and chairman of the Mosaic Institute for AI Policy. It's a nonprofit here in Israel that he established to ensure that AI is going to contribute to the prosperity of Israeli society as a whole and not just for a selected few. And Yonatan, you and I and the team here got a sneak peek at the model that Mosaic is going to be publishing very soon. Daniel, welcome to the show.
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A
Gosh, guys, with that level of expectations, I can but to disappoint. Great to be with you both. Thank you for having me on the show.
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C
Daniel, so you're a busy guy. You're leading a publicly traded company that almost doubled its market cap last year. Why did you decide to invest in developing this in depth survival guide for societies that are going to deal with these aliens that have landed and are willing to work for free? What was the impetus or what got you focused on that?
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A
So the two are related. My work at Lemonade has been predicated on the power of AI really since the founding of the company 10 years ago. So the very first slide that I showed our management team and our board at the very first board meeting spoke about artificial intelligence rather than artificial delays, kind of a playful insurance kind of joke or whatever. But it really was. It was this notion that we are going to build a company based on artificial intelligence. And in those early days, that's pre LLMs, but machine learning, deep learning, other forms of AI were already fairly well advanced. I push us to adopt these technologies. I'm in the thrall of these technologies, thrilled by their power. Everything that drew me to technology and entrepreneurship is manifested in AI. So I'm unapologetical and not in any way hesitant in terms of pushing for the adoption of artificial intelligence. And I say all of that as a CEO of a public company. But there's more to us than that one dimension. And I'm also a citizen of the country and I'm a father to three boys who are entering the workforce and I have two grandchildren. And so my topics that preoccupy me go beyond the success of lmnd. And they're the very things that I'm seeing as so transformative and forces for the fulfillment of our vision at Lemonade. Those very same forces put some pretty big question marks about the future of labor in general. Just to give you a couple of stats, over the course of the last three years, really, since LLMs hit the scene, Lemonade has almost tripled its revenue. Gross Profit has fully 10x'd. We've added well over a million, maybe a million and a quarter customers. But our workforce has actually shrunk during that time. So, as I say, in my capacity as a CEO, that just brings a smile to my face. And in other capacities, it says we need to think about how this makes life better for everybody.
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B
And so you form Mosaic and you create what we're going to hopefully see in coming weeks as a blueprint kind of for government, how to operate and how to see this AI revolution through. How should we understand this AI moment that we're in before we get to kind of the plan itself?
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A
So much has been said about this. I doubt I'll say anything new. And the blast radius of what we're going through will transform pretty much everything. So I'm focused on labor and the distribution of the abundance, but education and politics and healthcare and families and epistemology, and just so many things are going to be upended by this. But within the context of what I'm focused on, I find myself going back to 2007, when Netflix launched its streaming service, and it kind of sucked. There was endless buffering and a very limited catalog, and resolution was nothing to write home about. But I think that what Reed Hastings understood then, which Blockbuster did not, is that you dare not look at the snapshot in time. You really have to look at the trend line. In my mind's eye, what Reed Hastings did is he looked at bandwidth and its progression in the three years leading up to 2007. And he just took a ruler and he drew that line out, and he said, bandwidth is going to be free and infinite, and it's not quite free and it's not quite infinite. But we're speaking on the bandwidth without giving any thought to the cost or to its limitations. So at first approximation, he was right, and he built half a trillion dollars of value based on that insight. And I think if you do the same exercise with AI today, you don't bicker about exactly what GPT 5.2 can or cannot do today, but you just look at the progression over the last three years, whether it's in intelligence evals like GPQA or whether it's in METR's length of tasks that it can do by any measure, you just draw that line forward and you have to conclude that we are just a few years away at most from intelligence being infinite and free. And that is a startling thing because in everything about our lives and our economy is organized by the notion that intelligence is something that's rare and has to be invested in and is expensive. And I think all of that's about to disappear.
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B
And Yonatan mentioned earlier, you compare AI kind of to an alien invasion. You have this viral YouTube. We can send it later. And Daniel, you say, yes, they're here.
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A
They'Re here, they've landed. They're reading and listening and watching everything that humans have ever produced and getting pretty good at replicating that. And yeah, so the aliens have landed and then they're willing to work for free. And I stand behind that.
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C
Daniel, I think people listening couldn't. Not listening to the fact that you were born in London in the uk. So in preparing for the episode today, I'm reading this great book by Philip Agon about creative destruction. And there's a beautiful story about the Queen of England. And it goes like this. William Lee invented the machine to knit stockings. The working class was so fearful of the consequences that he was rejected everywhere and even threatened when he presented his invention to none other than Queen Elizabeth I in the hopes of obtaining a patent. She was the one, you know, giving people patents at the time. She refused, declaring, consider that thy invention could do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring them to ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars. And you argue that AI actually creates automation surplus. So walk us through the strategy here. Are we going to see Queen Elizabeth's around trying to push this out and be negative about this, and then having to deal two or three years down the line with the consequences. Are we going to see more and more people listening to the Mosaic story and thought process and winning the automation surplus?
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A
Companies will displace people with AI because there's a buck to be made. And unlike the Elizabethan times, when there were a lot of other jobs created which machines couldn't do, machines were dumb. They generated much demand for intelligence, but they did displace our brawn. They were very good at displacing our brawn. Right. We don't do that stuff anymore. This time they're displacing what's left, which is our brain. And then with what part of our humanity will we add value in the workplace when machines will do stuff 100 times better, a hundred times faster, and for 100th of the cost, which I think is rounding to where we're going to see things ending up. But if you take those very same numbers and you think that through, it will create what you're talking about, this AI surplus. If I displace an employee with AI, just think about where the dollars go or what happens there. So let's say there's somebody who's earning X dollars and I displace them with AI and let's round AI to be free. It's not, but let's just round it there for the ease of the story. So I've suddenly got X dollars more. That person is X dollars poorer. But I have X dollars more in return for that. I'm generating more production and I've also pocketed this extra money. There is more money in the system. Even if I actually ended up paying that person that I let go a salary, I'd still be better off replacing them with an AI because for the same salary I'd get an employee who's much faster and does so much more. Surplus is definitely created. The question is who? We're accustomed to thinking that we couldn't possibly pay everybody a salary even if they're not working, because there's not enough money in the system. And that's true. And historically, unemployment, our association with the term of unemployment, is catastrophic because for every 1% of unemployment we saw about 2% contraction in GDP. But here you flip it on its head because you're not generating less labor, you're actually generating a lot more labor. When you fire somebody, you're not letting them go in return for less labor, less production, but in return for more production. So it becomes absolutely, as you say, it becomes a question of distribution. How can we make sure that not all of that benefit accrues to the owners of the capital and the labor is ending up impoverished in an era of absolute abundance. And I'll just say, if you had to summarize the AI revolution in its most succinct framing, I think you would say that it's displacing labor with capital.
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B
But aren't there mechanisms that we have in place already that I guess they just wouldn't apply now to this AI driven economy? They wouldn't apply to the future.
- [19:23]
A
It was after the Elizabethan times that the current social safety nets were put in place. You know, the early days of the Industrial Revolution were Terrible for the masses of people. They were very good for the owners of the factories. But you just read to Charles Dickens and see what it was like for child labor. There was no trickle down economics back then. Policies eventually were put into place to prevent child labor and enforce health codes, et cetera. We need policies now to make sure that it ends well. It can end superbly well. But I think left to market forces alone, no.
- [19:55]
C
So there's an argument right now, Daniel, that we actually may have longer time than we think because AI at scale would require so much energy that it's very hard to produce right now. So the catch up effect here may actually win us more time to figure out how we put in place the right policies, be them universal basic income or negative income tax or any other framework. Do you think we are actually going to see a lag time created here because of lack of energy intensity of AI, or are we going to see this accelerate and have to make up our mind really quickly here?
- [20:29]
A
I'm always a little bit leery of giving precise predictions. It's much easier to talk about broad strokes than it is about when things will happen. The progression of technology is relatively predictable. Things like Moore's Law and the scaling laws more broadly, and AI do allow us to think about what the next few years might bring. That's that line that I suggest that we should draw out. I think the most conservative thing to do is just to assume that the next few years look like the last few years. But socially there'll be some countervailing forces, right? There'll be regulation that will slow us down. There may well be labor disputes that will slow things down, politics that could slow things down. We should come back to those in a minute because Israel should do everything it can to prevent those things. And then there may be the limitations that you're speaking of, of energy or just not enough tokens in the world to do what needs be done. So there definitely may be some forces. But whether it takes 2 years, 3 years, 5 years or 10 years to get to the point of an AGI that can displace labor at scale, I think for our purposes, doesn't matter. It's not 100 years. Any of those years is very short, very quick for this kind of transformation. It means that our children who are in school today, whether that's primary school, secondary school or university, they are going to be impacted by this tremendously. Our field, just engineering and software, it's being felt already, people who are studying computer sciences degrees today are rightly worried that Writing code is a perishable skill, or one that's actually no longer relevant in 2026. I'm not talking about five years hence.
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B
Daniel so Mosaic is focused first and foremost in Israel, and this obviously can be something that would potentially be a global example for other governments. You talk about in your plan and you tell us how much of your plan you'd like to expose here on the show. But you talk about a negative income tax and universal basic income is something that we've heard, we've heard from leaders in Silicon Valley for quite a while now. What is the distinction between the two and bring it to Israel?
- [22:33]
A
I think a negative income tax may be more palatable. The idea of giving a check to everybody just seems very, as they say in Yiddish, far fetched. So people kind of struggle with that idea. But a negative income tax ostensibly says put a floor beneath which nobody will have to go in terms of their earnings. In other words, today you have to earn a certain amount before you can pay income tax. Now let's reverse that and say below a certain level, income tax pays you. So really what you're putting is a flaw. And in our modeling work, if we put the right mechanisms in place, and maybe we can talk about them a little bit, because you have to capture all that abundance, otherwise it will just go to shareholders. But if you put the right mechanisms in place to capture it without scaring away capital and enterprise, that's the kind of balancing act today, before you've got that abundance, the state of Israel could afford to pay a rather measly 1500, 2000 shekel. That's below the poverty line. So that's not going to be Elon Musk's universal high income. But when you model it forward, if you're doing a good job of generating and then capturing some of that abundance, I could easily see how within just a few years we could see that 10x. And if you could 10x it, that would mean that a couple, a household where both parents are unemployed would be having the purchasing power that today reserved for the top fifth of the population. So you'd eliminate poverty. This is really be kind of something extraordinarily powerful for the state of Israel. If you could really get to the point where everybody is upper middle class by today's standards just five or ten years from now. But I think that that is the kind of thing we should be striving for. That is the kind of vision that is perhaps realistic but will not happen if we don't put policies in place in order to capture and distribute all of that wealth.
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B
Okay, so this could be described as an AI dividend, I suppose. Why do you think or believe that society has a legitimate claim on it? I'm sure there are people listening in and are like rewinding, going back and trying to understand exactly what just happened here. Giving two unemployed people 10x of what they could have gotten from the tax authority.
- [24:38]
A
Well, I guess these are moral questions, but some things that we are accustomed to, the meritocracy, we think in a few terms, terms, many of which are going to break down. One of them is that you get your wealth because you earn it, because you worked hard and because you're super smart. Parenthetically, I don't believe that. I believe that there's a lot more luck and determinism in making a fortune than people credit and that therefore redistributing it is actually a good policy for everybody. But however true that may or may not be, in an era of AI, that's definitely going to be true. When you're using AI models to do the hard work, it's going to be hard for entrepreneurs or others to claim all of that to themselves. But more to the point, what kind of country would we become if we generate the kind of wealth that AI generates and we don't ensure that everybody benefits from it? We don't share would be such a dark and divisive place with trillionaires, billionaires on the one hand, but an impoverished masses. And that's not a country or vision for the country that I would like to see. And finally, I think that if we don't just kind of the broader self interest of the capital owners, if we don't put these mechanisms in place, I'm not sure that the AI era ever comes to fruition. I mean, we remember the Luddites and Jonathan was talking earlier about what happened and there, there was some kind of vision of alternative labor for them and for their children. Take away that hope and see what happens to society. I don't think anybody would benefit from that. More broadly, when policies are adopted and the compensation principle isn't part of them. In other words, you great enjoy, but it shouldn't be at the expense of others. At a minimum, they have to be no worse off than they were before. That, I think, is a basic policy attitude that serves everybody's interest and is entirely appropriate. Otherwise you're making money on other people's despair.
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C
Daniel, I think you were referring to that earlier in terms of the lag effect of the Industrial Revolution. In terms of people feeling the benefits and so on. John Maynard Keynes made the point that there would be. What you're referring to right now is this deflationary effect. Things are going to cost less and we're going to work less and less. And we are in a way right in developed economies, we are working 40 hour work weeks, 32 hour work weeks. If we're in France and GDP has kept growing and life standards keep on climbing. Where do you see sort of an era of AI driving human creativity? I mean, is it going to be sports, is it going to be crafts and other types of hand kind of physical labor where you do, if you kind of close your eyes and imagine a success story, are we going to live in this Keynesian deflationary reality and people are going to be doing competitive sports and craftsmanship and so on?
- [27:28]
A
I think certainly the happy ending would look something like that. And you can go back further in time. The word utopia comes from a book from 1516 by that name. You go back 500 years before that to Maimonides, who spoke about the Messianic era as a time when little labor will produce everything that you need and that abundance will prevail. Maimonides is fascinating because he insisted that this would not be miraculous, that nature would still prevail. And yet he somehow thought that this would be enabled. And Micha Gudman pointed out to me that he thought that that would happen through intellect. He didn't realize that the intellect would be outside of our bodies, but he somehow thought that intellect taken to the extreme would produce that kind of abundance. So I think a vision where we use our time for kind of higher value activities, becoming more better rounded human beings, etceter, is a worthy one. I do think that there is a real challenge here which is that I'm preoccupied with the first layer of Maslow's hierarchy, which is that everybody should have basic standard of living. Once you solve that, and let's not wave that off as an easy thing to solve, but even if you solve that, I should say the questions of meaning and how we should conduct our lives and okay, great, you gave me a generous check. Now what? I've got the next 70 years to live. How do I do that fruitfully and without feeling sense of emptiness? I think those are profound questions that we have to deal with. And I think here there are strings that we can begin to pull on, including the Jewish tradition of seeing education as a value not in the service of a salary, but as a standalone value. And you see kind of religious traditions of studying just for its sake, not in order to receive a reward. And I think you go back to Herzl's vision for the state of Israel and you can draw on there as well about using technology in order to make sure that there is shared prosperity. There's a lot of both Zionist and Jewish traditions that can help us think this through, but we do need to think them through because the utopian vision that you're kind of encouraging me to paint, it's easy to see alternatives. And is our education system preparing the next generation for that? Non trivial questions. I think there's a new social contract that we need to really work on here. Right? So maybe there is this abundance coming our way, but what do we need to give to our state in return? Do we precondition that on a national service that is significant, perhaps lifelong? Are there other things that you have to do in order to be entitled to that kind of negative income tax? So I think there's a lot of work to be done on what kind of society we want to build and just how paternalistic it needs to be. Do we just trust that we'll all do the right thing? The aristocrats enjoyed prosperity, but by the third generation it was often pretty corrupt and fell from its greatness. So I think a lot of work to be done on that.
- [30:25]
B
So taking the utopia down today in real, real time. Israel is in an election year, we have an election date. So there's probably going to be a very narrow window to act before disruption peaks and also before there's a new government. Are you hopeful? Is there any kind of historical precedent, I guess, to societies that have responded to something like this before the bottom falls out?
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A
No, I'm not sure there are.
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B
This would be a big first if you get this past the finish line line.
- [30:55]
A
FDR made changes that transformed things for the 100 years that followed him, but not before the great crisis of the early 1930s. More recently, you can think about COVID where the government did do some pretty dramatic things, but there was a global pandemic. It wasn't done preventatively. We did some things which again weren't entirely preventative, but I think were not bad in terms of when gas was discovered off our shores and making sure that that was shared more broadly than the entrepreneurs alone allowed for. So there are elements that you can draw upon. I think our best chance of getting governments to adopt this is kind of greed rather than fear. And the greed story, the fear says it's going to be diabolical if we don't do it. The greed story is we need this in order to win the AI race. You want a smooth adoption of AI by government agencies, by entrepreneurs, by businesses, by everybody else. You have to smooth away by taking care of the labor disputes and precluding them or preventing them or to some extent neutralizing them. And that's yielding some really good discussions behind the scenes with both big labor unions and some of the major employers for whom this is a really live issue. Today, big, big companies in Israel are planning mass layoffs, I know this as a fact. And they are very concerned about what will that look like. And you think back to 2023 and the Hollywood shutdown because of AI in large measure. And, and then they won because they got contracts that said that humans would keep doing that. And it's going to be a pretty short lived victory because in Silicon Valley they're going to produce movies for a hundredth of the price using AI. And we'll see how that plays out. So if we want to avoid that, and we want Israel to be a rapid adopter of AI across government, across industry, you've got to find a mechanism that will smooth away. So I think that's the best hope.
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C
I'm actually optimistic on three counts. Curious to hear your thoughts. I think the best example, Israel outperformed over the last 20 years and we had an episode focused on that is the desalination, the action taken ahead of a drought, ahead of a famine that ended up killing the Egyptian, the Syrian. Now we're seeing the Iranian regime struggling with inaction over 20 or 30 years whereby the solution was there, desalination. It is complicated and politically very challenging. I think Israel outperformed way before rock bottom. And I think that this is now top of mind and we're going to see with the right push, with the right people, and thankful to your kind of work here and to Mosaic being very practical and pragmatic about it, we may actually have a good shot at being first here.
- [33:39]
A
Amen. And we are a relatively small country, a relatively centralized country, a relatively technological country, and we do have some strong kind of, not socialist, but some strong roots ensuring that nobody is left behind. That's part of the ethos. And I think you bring that together and if anybody can pull it off, we should be the ones to do it.
- [33:59]
B
So besides policymakers who are obviously central to getting us across this finish line and Mosaic itself, what kind of responsibility do you think CEOs and other founders have in making sure this AI transition plays fair for everyone? How do you see responsible leadership, I guess, in Israel today?
- [34:16]
A
It's a wonderful question, and I don't have a pat answer because strange as this may sound, when I was meeting with the labor unions, I said to him, listen, I don't to want, want to promote these kind of policies in case there's mass displacement, but in order for it to happen, in other words, I think that this is the path to Israel really taking the bull by the horns and just doing amazing things in the AI era. And not everybody's going to come out a winner in this era. And again, the Industrial Revolution was great for Britain, but for the Africans, it didn't work out so well. So there's no guarantee that everybody will come out on top here. And you see the forces and the dollars that the Americans and the Chinese are putting into this and Paxsilica and or an attempt to catch onto their coattails and make sure we're not left behind. Of course, and that's very, very good and very, very welcome. But I think my kind of perspective is employers need to do the right thing for their businesses. They need to be adopting these technologies, adopting them fast in order to help grow the pie. And their job is growing the pie. The distribution of the pie is really the policymakers. And so long as entrepreneurs and businesses aren't standing in the way and aren't blocking it, they have to work hard to make sure there's a huge gdp, Michael Eisenberg's vision and beyond. And policymakers have to make sure that nobody's left behind and that that pie is shared in a way that will make us all proud.
- [35:36]
C
I think, Daniel, this sort of leads me to my last question. Before we let you go, I want to ask you about a very intimate, an internal conversation you had at Lemonade in the early days following the October 7th attack. We're going to play a clip from that video.
- [35:53]
A
Israel's army is a conscript army, and it's about 170,000 people strong. Israel has called up twice that number now of reservists. So the ranks are filled by people on this call or their spouses, teachers, doctors, employees of Lemonade, including our third son, who's now doing what I consider to be the Lord's work. You should just assume that your colleagues in Israel have either been called up or have loved ones who have been called up pulled up. They're either themselves in mourning or people close to them are. I delayed on everything that I delayed on in order to give you a window into what's happening to your colleagues and how tough it will be for the next while for the Israelis, in order to help you empathize and navigate these uncharted waters in a way that you'll feel good about, and we all will.
- [36:45]
C
So you've been a moral voice on this one, and you decided to go beyond the town hall with the Lemonade team. What drove you to open this conversation so that people can hear? I can tell you, you know, personally, this touched us at Healthy IO at the time. It touched, I think, every. Every Israeli company that tries to make the world a better place and has a global workforce. What drove you guys to just put it out there?
- [37:08]
A
Honestly, Yael? Yeah. The town hall was, I want to say, on maybe the Thursday after the 7th, so whatever that was the 11th or the 12th or something like that, it was still very, very, very raw. We were going still to funerals because bodies were still being identified. And yet it felt so necessary, particularly, you know, over a thousand employees around the world, to give them some perspective. Alternative voices and kind of pretty awful narratives were taking shape. And we know how popular those became over time. But it felt very natural for me within Lemonade, to be the voice of helping people gain proportional these events and perspective and trying to frame it in a way that would, I think, help us remain cohesive and focused and people feel collegiate and beyond, which was non trivial when we know what was happening on campuses straight away, et cetera. And then it was Yael and maybe a couple of our colleagues who came up to me and said, you know, that was a message that had much broader application. And while it was not intended for that, we do record these events for people who miss them. And it just felt right that if indeed that has a broader audience. And I was taken aback by how much that was the case. There was so much going on at that time, but it got, I don't know, 12,000 or something. People spent 15 minutes listening to me rabbit on and share my thoughts. So I'm really grateful to Yael for her counsel on that, as on so many things.
- [38:40]
B
I haven't heard that clip since that very day. And I just heard that now for the first time. I can't believe it. That was a very brave and noble town hall. And thank you, Daniel, for your leadership there.
- [38:52]
C
Thank you for the leadership there. And I think it also kind of concludes the story behind Mosaic. It's very clear it comes from your concern for the sort of moral high ground, for the ability to care for the other. As you see this tidal wave or this Tsunami coming. So thanks for everything you've done in so many different contexts and for the conversation today.
- [39:13]
A
Yeah. Daniel, I hold you both in such high esteem and I'm deeply moved by your comments. Thank you. And it's wonderful as always to have a conversation with you both. Thank you so much.
- [39:21]
C
Thanks, Daniel.
- [39:22]
B
Thank you.
- [39:28]
C
I love the way he concluded and gave you credit for that.
- [39:32]
B
No, it's all him.
- [39:33]
C
Such an incredible privilege to have him on the show. And I think really the thinking moral first and ethics first before the bottom or the top line line is really inspiring.
- [39:44]
B
Yeah. And I want to kind of double down just one or two things that he said. You know, this. He takes Israel as a case study. Israel's a small country. We know our AI capabilities and where it's going. It really can serve as a blueprint for other countries. And the struggle here is going to be with policymakers and making sure that, as he said, you know, go for their greed versus their fear. We don't want fear of AI. That's not going to be helpful. Can we kind of position Israel as being a leader in this, in this space and can this mind model that will be released in coming weeks, can it be adopted by other countries? I think it can. And I think that's a kind of a win win for Israel, for the world and really for societies.
- [40:23]
C
Before we adjourn with the words of the week, I'm not going to let you off the hook. In the beginning of the episode, we promised our listeners that you'll give us.
- [40:30]
A
Oh, God.
- [40:31]
C
A broader sneak peek of your background. I will embarrass you a bit further to say, you know, you have your fingerprints, your imprints on some of Israel, Israel's most important political speeches. You've been a key player in launching some of the most important brands out of Israel. And Daniel kind of gave you credit for that on the Lemonade story. So just share with our listeners, you know, how you ended up from, you know, growing up in New York to be such a, an important player in the scene here in Israel, beyond tech, into politics and other areas.
- [41:04]
B
You know, at Lemonade, no one ever wants to speak after Daniel because this is a tough act to follow. As you said, I grew up in New York. I'm American mom, Israeli dad. My Israeli dad, I'm the oldest of four, wanted to make sure that we're not going to be too American and we're not going to we'll also have the Israeli side and whisked us off to north of Israel. And I worked as you said, a bit in media and then in politics as a speechwriter, a bit in Congress as well in the US and found myself to lemonade in its very early days and Daniel and Shai were gracious enough to take a bet on, on me and kind of see that through to IPO and beyond. And today I'm, I'm in cyber, as I like to say, you know, like.
- [41:47]
C
As lead to cyber.
- [41:48]
B
I mean, yeah, you throw, you throw something in Tel Aviv, it lands on some cyber company just, you know, in its seed round. So I'm now the chief communications officer at a company called Tenzai, which raised a record breaking seed round, the biggest round in history for now until someone else comes and breaks that record. Yeah, building AI hackers. So. So you and I have always spoken about this, Yonatan, of having kind of one foot in the public Sphere. You are 100% there and kind of making sure that we chug along with Israeli tech as well.
- [42:21]
C
Look, I think your contributions also in the Munich conference on security fairs and being a mom of four also is important here in Israel. We all contribute to the demographic growth of Israel. So that's it for today's show. Thanks for tuning in to Arc Media's what's your your number? We hope you found it interesting and if you did, be sure to like subscribe, rate, review, you know the drill. Most importantly, share with us or with others. If you want to make suggestions or share your feedback, please reach out to us at what's your number? That's one word. @arc media.org.
- [43:00]
B
What's your number? Is an ARC Media podcast. Arc Media's executive producer is Adam James Levine Aretti. Our production manage is Brittany Cohen. Sound and video editing is by Liquid Audio and our theme music is by Midnight Generation. I am Yael Wisner Levy.
- [43:17]
C
I'm Yonatan. I'll see you back here next weekend.
- [43:20]
B
See you. 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.