Loading summary
Transcript58 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:04]
B
You are listening to an art media podcast.
- [00:10]
C
So Yale, what's your number?
- [00:11]
B
My number is 2000 and I think it's super relevant for the time we're recording right now because that's the number of ships currently trapped in the Strait of Hormuz and that's along with 20,000 sailors. And this is according to the International Maritime Organization. I'll just remind everyone we're recording this on a Monday. The U.S. president labeled Project Freedom operation to escort these vessels out. But Iran is threatening to attack any foreign military presence and we're already hearing reports that it has attacked the UAE in response. So this isn't just a shipping conflict as we we've discussed is. This is now becoming a live standoff and maybe this is a climax of the conflict that began back in February.
- [00:52]
C
Well, okay, mine is 20%. That is Israeli cyber giant checkpoint that lost 20% of its market cap on a single day in Wall Street. This is the equities worst day of trading right since 2002. Now is this another sign of this aspocalypse and a risk of the broader cybersecurity industry of Israel, or is this Wall street signaling to the first non founder CEO of the company, Nadav Zafrir, that his strategy is deemed to be subpar? Nadav Zafir, we should say, is a genius, a recognized investor, a leader of some of the most elite units in the idf. Really one of the top elite Israel. It remains to be seen how the company adapts to this signal from Wall Street.
- [01:36]
B
Yeah, that is quite the drop for Checkpoint and for personally probably Nadav to Freer. I'm going to take the win this time. We're going to be talking about Iran and the Straits of Hormuz quite a lot this episode. And as we speak things are happening. So 2000 vessels and sailors get the win this week. Let's go, let's go.
- [02:02]
C
All right, it is 7:30pm here in Tel Aviv from the Elena studios today. For those watching YouTube, all eyes are once again on the Hormuz Straits as the American President tries to escalate on the subwar level. But it already seems from the news coming in from the Gulf over the last, I would say 60 minutes that it is becoming kinetic again. So let's hope that by the time you guys listen to this, we're still not in Shell, back in shelters and things at least in Israel are normal.
- [02:34]
B
And the oil has been jumping as well with regards to Iranian resisting. The offer from the US President to help the ships through the Strait of Hormuz, what I just called Project Freedom. There's lots to be looking at and we're going to do so later in the episode. But first, as usual, we're going to take a quick look at some of the week's pressing news, AKA our big shorts. And of course, the latest update on the Windex. The what's your index that tracks the performance of publicly traded Israeli based or founded companies. All right, Jonathan, how is it looking?
- [03:09]
C
Well, listen, the Windex is doing well. It is already climbing above double digits from the beginning of the year. So year to date above 10% beating both S and P and Nasdaq on an annualized basis year to date, which is good news to all our listeners. Last year the Windex beat both S and P and Nasdaq on an annualized basis. On the week it's 295% up, 1.87% above the S&P, 1.68% above NASDAQ. One of the leading greens this week is Tower Semiconductor, the Israeli fabless silicone veteran. 10.23 up on the week. This is analyst sentiment kind of pushing the equity up on news of collaboration in Japan and an ongoing look. This is a very interesting company from Igdala Emek outside of Tel Aviv, outside of Yoknam. Hi. You know the classic areas led by Russell, you know, one of Israel's veteran CEOs, an incredible company. Very happy to see them enjoy that growth this week. And overall positive sentiment from Wall Street. Another kind of smile from fiverr.com back in high single digit green territory. 9.4% this week mainly due to Wall Street. What seems to be Wall Street's trust in the company's leadership's AI steps. Great to see Israeli leaders making clinical decisions in real time. What are your thoughts on those?
- [04:31]
B
You know, totally. And Fiverr has needed this kind of break. I want to kind of point out the communication and narrative style from Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman who has been very blunt throughout the years, but especially so in the last year or so with regards to AI and so forth, kind of trying different approaches, being very candid about hiring and firing, being very candid about where can go and where it might not go and, and really kind of taking to social media in the most kind of almost like a blogger of telling, you know, what's going on in the business in and out. And many other CEOs I would say should try being candid and upfront about what they're going through and what the company's going through I think that it shows real seriousness in dealing with it and I'm happy to see that it's kind of paying off also with investors in the red.
- [05:24]
C
So we already discussed Checkpoint. I will say I think is there a broader cyber concern or is this really about Checkpoints strategy? We've seen the classic Battle of the two founders, the two OGs, Nir Zuk Building Palo Alto Networks 130 $140 billion company and Gil Schwed who built Checkpoint. Both of them early on in their early days working together. Palo Alto running a very aggressive M and a strategy. Most recently with CyberArk north of $20 billion acquisition and check point was still is, you know, famously counter acquisitions more kind of conservative in its approach. And it seems like the market is telling check point. You know, this has gone too far in this day and age with the atmosphere velocity of the field, you know, you can't hold onto this for much longer. Maybe another notable one is Nova measurements. We've seen Nova go up and down with Nvidia and high correlation. The company lost 7.8% on the week correlated with Nvidia's 7% and in the red on the week. This weakness obviously Nova being a major supply chain player in that space is dependent on the growth of the overall silicone market. So that's it for the Windex. Curious to hear your thoughts on the cyber market and overall, you know, what are the thoughts on Checkpoint?
- [06:44]
B
Yeah, you know, we've been looking at the cyber market mostly in the green as you said. So I think the market is basically just asking for some kind of catalyst to justify higher multiples. It's been so far up in the green that you know, of course a crash checkpoint by 20% is significant but you know, it's a digestion phase after a long re rating cycle that kind of saw cyber go up and up and up. What's the new kind of catalyst or new trigger for a higher multiple. And, and we'll see that in coming weeks with you know we're hearing about Anthropic signing new deals with Goldman Sachs and others to invest more in kind of selling anthropic. So. So things like that are going to be very much jolting for the cybersecurity market as well.
- [07:26]
C
I agree. All right, let's go to the big shorts.
- [07:28]
B
Okay, so here's a story that looks like it could be real estate. And when you read the economic papers in Israel in the past few weeks you see quite a bit of retailers, a bunch of non techies, if I can call them that. Spending hundreds of millions of shekels on land. And this time it's not for brick and mortar stores, but it's to build a data center. And the latest one to do so is an Israeli retailer named Johananov, who's a retailer for mostly groceries and everyday items now doing it for a data center. Israel has seen very much of a surge in data center investment, driven of course by AI demand and understanding that players like Nvidia who are already anchoring activity locally, there's somewhere to go there. So we're seeing all these non tech companies also jump in because these data centers are now becoming the pick and shovels of our gold rush, which is the gold rush of AI. What I found interesting, and that's the reason why it's a big short this week, is that this boom runs straight into Israel's structural limits. Right. We have many limits here. Energy constraints, regulatory friction, water resources, of course, the geopolitical risks. So can Israel become a hub for data centers? Can retailers be the ones funding and kind of being the source of it? We'll be speaking later on the show about us, China and the AI race and how does it comes to Israel. But I thought this was super interesting to kind of set that conversation up.
- [08:53]
C
Yeah, look, there are two funny kind of one is funny and one is, I think profound. One is that Omer Adam, Israel's leading pop singer, sold 20% of his investment last year. So he was early on on this bandwagon for a billion shekel valuation of the total company. So, you know, this is a serious kind of dynamic happening right now in Israel. I will say though that one of the things we learned from the Iran war is that Iran targeted data centers in what was considered a super safe space to build them cheap energy and very high safety, which is the Gulf, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE and Saudi Arabia all got hit in data center infrastructure. And so when it comes to Israel in the region having Iron Dome, having the defense mechanisms in and around those data centers, I think it's a very interesting and telling story of, you know, you deploy them not only where you have cheap energy in the Middle east, but also where you have good air defenses in a bit of a similar direction. My big short this week is the drone interceptor challenge. We've had a number of soldiers over the last three weeks died of attack drones from Hezbollah in Lebanon under the US enforced cease fire, so called. Right. These are fiber optic LED drones, FPV as they are called. We've seen them in the Ukraine. They Wreak havoc. They're very accurate. They are very, very difficult to apprehend because of their speed and the fact that there is no rf, there is no radio frequency. So all the electro warfare capacities that Israel developed are null. They don't work on this one. Now the theory is that this would be the trend unless Israel finds a solution actually very rapidly to come out of Gaza and more, I would say a bigger concern in the West Bank. Right. Like imagine this is a 20 kilometer radius capacity and it actually cancels the entire Israeli civilian defense notion of mamadim safe rooms and so on. These things are super accurate. They are flown first point of view and they can be flown through a window. They can be flown into your living room without a siren.
- [11:05]
B
They're completely kind of immune to electronic jamming.
- [11:08]
A
Yeah.
- [11:08]
C
And so that concern level, the reason I'm bringing it up on our pod, is not just a defense one. It has a lot to do with maintaining an economy. The Israeli defense dynamic is geared towards missiles. So there's a siren, we go in six, seven minutes and then we continue to deliver. Whereas if this is a swarm where you don't know when it arrives, there is no siren and it doesn't come into your safe room, but it rather comes into your living room, then that's a whole different architecture of defense that entails money, it entails different dynamics of resilience of the market. That's my big short for today. I don't know how you see this one growing. My thought process is this gets resolved within the next six to nine months by tech. Otherwise we have a serious macroeconomic issue ahead of us.
- [11:55]
B
And I know we want to talk mostly macroeconomic, but when you say six to nine months, all I can think of is the six to nine months that until these effective countermeasures are deployed and developed and deployed by technology. Technology. The troops are completely exposed in southern Lebanon. And the Prime Minister here in Israel and the IDF both promised that a solution would be found. But they, as you say, admitted that it would take time. All right, let's go to the long play. All right, so last week the Chinese startup, not much of a startup anymore, Deep Seek dropped its latest new open source AI model that it claims rivals OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. And unlike them, it's fully open. At the same time, the US is accusing Chinese actors of extracting knowledge from its top models. So this is becoming more than just a tech race. It's open versus closed AI. And this is all happening while the US and China get ready for a summit this month between their leaders, where they've openly shared their desire to stabilize ties, to make sense of all of this, including how Israel fits into the AI open source battles. Our guest today is Dr. Ariel Sobelman. He's had a long career in the semiconductor industry, academia, working at the inss, the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, and has a deep understanding of AI and its geopolitical implications, especially the race between the US and China. And just a few months ago, Dr. Silberman moved to become the senior advisor to the head of the Israeli National Artificial Intelligence Agency. Welcome to the show.
- [13:29]
A
Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.
- [13:30]
B
For those of us who didn't know even that such an agency existed in Israel, tell us exactly what it does. Is it part of the government?
- [13:38]
A
Yes. The Artificial Intelligence Agency is inside the Prime Minister's office. And my boss, the head of the agency, Brigadier General Erez Escal, he reports directly to the Prime Minister. And the reason the agency has been formed inside the Prime Minister's office really is to reflect how important the artificial intelligence arena is for Israel and how seriously Israel has decided to take this. It took some time for Israel to sort of rev up its engines in artificial intelligence.
- [14:08]
B
We speak a lot about Israel and how it's trying to deal with AI, both on the government level and also in the private markets. But how did it become such an urgent geopolitical issue? And what's really at stake when we talk about the Chinese and US tensions?
- [14:23]
A
Every generation and every time in history had the driving force of the economy. The driving force of the economy today is technology. And the application, the most exciting application that is artificial intelligence. And because it costs so much money to generate, not to use it to generate, it's become really the scrimmage line between nations that are fighting over control. And that's really how it became the geopolitical issue of our generation.
- [14:49]
C
Ariel, we discussed on the pod, the AI and Great Divergence document that was issued by the the Economic Advisory team to the President of the us. We discussed the national security strategy. We also saw, in our Words of the Week a couple of months ago, how Secretary Hegseth made sure that the chief AI officer of the Pentagon is now in war footing. And that's a quote.
- [15:12]
A
Yeah.
- [15:12]
C
We then saw Israel under Brigadier General Askal also join the Pax Silica, borrowing the name and alluding to Pax Americana, the period in which the world enjoyed the peace. Driven from Washington, the notion of Paxilica is a select group of countries that are partners of the US to secure its victory and win in the AI race. And some of them, including Israel, have great access to minds, talent density and the capacity to build the actual AI layer itself. So what are the breakthroughs that everybody's kind of running after that are considered to be the long hanging fruits?
- [15:48]
A
So first and foremost I think that the reality is that in AI there are no low hanging fruits. Everything is very hard to achieve. That's sort of, I think, the difference between, between how Israel viewed AI in the first place. Israel sort of viewed everything, every opportunist, like we're this agile wave surfing nation. We go around, there's a new buzzword, the entire industry is there within a day. But artificial intelligence is very, very different because the Israeli notion of doing business and it's like you need some smart kids, they're 17 years old, they're really smart, they have a computer, they have a garage and boom, boom, boom, they're, you know, you have a startup and you exit it. When it comes to artificial intelligence, that 17 year old smart kid needs a PhD. That laptop suddenly has to be a supercomputer. And it takes years and a lot of money to deliver these kind of things. So the economy of artificial intelligence has changed and the divergence there is between economies that use, utilize, leverage, artificial intelligence and those who actually create and generate it. To generate these things, it requires really tremendous infrastruct investments from countries. And these are typically beyond the reach of any private sector, no matter the size of it, any private sector on its own. So, so really this requires state involvement. And that's what we really saw and that's on the backdrop of really the great divergence of the economy, of the globalization era.
- [17:16]
B
In a recent paper you helped write, I'm going to quote from it, it's written that if Israel elects to quote, continue the current strategy, refraining from any direct industry intervention while prioritizing focus on research and development, it risks reaching the limit and exhausting the effectiveness of its technological innovation strategy. That's a lot. So what do you think the government should do?
- [17:38]
A
Well, I think the government has done. The reality is that Israel had launched already a year and a half ago, perhaps the Naga Commission that was going to look at this and their primary recommendation was a. The era of infrastructure is back, right? Infrastructure is back everywhere in the world. And there's an understanding that you cannot win only based on applications. You have to have some degree of control on the lower layers of technology. And really the primary recommendation of the government of Israel was to form the AI Agency. And I'm really excited that they did that, that the government adopted this resolution, formed the agency. And personally, I'm happy that I was invited to join.
- [18:17]
B
Do you think the agency was formed a little bit too late, or do you find it when you look at it on a world scale and kind of compare it to other developed nations that were just on time?
- [18:28]
A
You know, it's an interesting question. When I was in academia, it was easy for me to say, oh, we're late and the world's moving ahead. As I start taking responsibility for this, I learned that like, when you enter a race late, you can see the other people's strategies, the other country's strategies, and you can be much more adept and adapt yourself to what's going on. And you can, like, then you can identify the opportunities. And I think think Israel were never good straight out of the gate. It takes us a while, but once we get our groove and emojo, I think we're unstoppable. So I really think in many ways it was frustrating to see the world moving forward, but I think now I can see it from the other side that it was really good that we can see what other countries are doing and react and respond to those in a much more mature way.
- [19:11]
B
So just to hop onto that, now that you're on this side, what is Israel's AI? Mojo, if I can take from your
- [19:17]
A
language, one of the most important things that we're looking at. Israel is a very unique, possibly singular, in a singular situation that has a tremendous density of fabless semiconductor companies, development companies, software, application everything. And there's serious know how and expertise in the manufacturing fronts of this. Right? So combining manufacturing and R and D is really the holy grail of what the world was looking for for many years. So during globalization, R and D and manufacturing were separated. Manufacturing went to Asia and R and D stayed in the Western world. And that had advantages for 30, 40 years, but then it, it sort of flipped on us and became a disadvantage. So now trying to reconnect R and D and manufacturing is a challenge, but it's a way bigger challenge across bigger geographies, bigger countries. Israel has all of these opportunities in a very small and dense location. So we're really geared up to be the great beneficiaries of this kind of era where manufacturing and R and D work together. And that's, I think that will be our secret sauce for AI. How we were able to do that in Israel, I think Yale.
- [20:27]
C
And this has to do also a lot with what we heard from the government. There are different elements here. Some of them have to do. And just last week we had a Vigdo Villens sell. I think his fifth Ariel, fifth company
- [20:39]
A
possibly is free of the air.
- [20:40]
C
I mean the silicon infrastructure, space, Israel has a lot of strength that other countries don't. Ariel, I don't know how you think about that. It will take probably another six to nine months to figure out kind of which parts of the maturity of our ecosystem compared to the world are going to be the ones where we also kind of aim higher. We have honestly a lot to choose from but we have very strong foundations in the broader sense of the AI industry.
- [21:07]
A
I think it goes back to you'd mentioned pacsilica and pacsilica is really about trying to redefine the global supply chain from the China Sinocentric one to a different to an alternative American LED one. And what I think the US sees one of the primary values is exactly what you were referring to is that the fact that we can be a forward deployed technological base for the US interest and a trusted ally here with all those things and everything that you talked about in this industry, all these companies, everything that drives tremendous innovation that the US can benefit from. And a lot of the US companies are based here at Apple, but there's Nvidia who committed to build a gigantic campus here with many, many employees that are going to be working here designing their next generation of products. Think of that in terms of forward deployed technological base where you manufacture things, develop things. What Israel delivers best, being a secure, safe, reliable, innovative node in the middle of the supply chain, that's the holy grail and that's really what we're all aiming for and to help help the Israeli industry capitalize on this opportunity through the introduction and building of infrastructures that will serve the Israeli industry to continue soaring further.
- [22:22]
B
And when we look at kind of the US China tensions, there's obviously many other actors in the AI arena, not just the US and China. What do you think from Israel's standpoint? There are rooms, there are areas for cooperation with whom we know that with India for instance, there's been lots of cooperation around broader technology, but also AI.
- [22:41]
A
First of all, there's our immediate neighborhood, the Abraham Corps, the coordinations. I think there's dramatic interest and hunger or thirst or whatever the word is for collaborating with Israel on technology. That's one that goes to energy, communications, AI infrastructure, hosting, infrastructure building. Then you go a bit further, you go to India, they're an Ascending, massively ascending power. But they're also dominating the envisioned IMEC corridor. Right. The India Middle Eastern trade cord that will really is another effort to usurp the China centric supply chain and build that. The China supply chain is really a one way road. Right. People export things out of China. No one sends anything back to China. It's very difficult. It's a one way street. India being a democracy, it's a two way trade route. So it's a much more attractive one I think, and very, very appealing. And that goes energy, construction, communications, artificial intelligence, chip fabrication, everything that falls off China, India is picking it up. It's really exciting to see how enthusiastic they are about technology. And I think also it's a country that fundamentally gets along with Israel very, very well and we enjoy working with them a lot.
- [23:51]
C
Ariel, do you think that the tension that we're seeing between the US and China on that? We just saw a publication yesterday that at least the open source models from China are significantly inferior still to the top end of the line American models. This was portrayed on Twitter and some other sources as that card that Trump takes with him to Beijing. That is important in the sense that this is the war that America really can't lose. We see Egypt playing with China and the us we see Turkey playing with China and the us. We see the UAE you had mentioned playing with China and the us. Israel seems to have cordoned off completely cut off China from any infrastructure. So there's no future in which Israel when it comes to AI, borrows or hybrids or creates any kind of a mesh between best of breeds of Chinese state of the art and American is this sort of Israel America, Pax Americana also kind of decides on that as well.
- [24:52]
A
So fundamentally regarding China, I mean I spent years writing about this and studying this topic. A I think in the last 15, 20 years there were always voices claiming oh, that was the American century, now it's the Chinese century. I don't see it that way. Right. I believe that Israeli innovation fundamentally flows west. There was a brief period for a few years that there was a lot of Chinese investment and I think it peaked in 2018 and steadily decreased since then. I think after October 7, I think there was a very rude awakening in Israel to what China's stance is on Israel. I think we all learned who our friends are in the world and who doesn't support us. So if I take this back to artificial intelligence and technology, you had started talking about out Deep Seek. That's how we started the podcast, like Deep Seek Shocked the world in many ways. I mean it was, there were people who were calling it the China Sputnik moment and things like that. Right. But when we studied this, even within days of Deep SEQ coming out, we had suspected that something was off with the math. The numbers just didn't add up. Something was going on. They were giving numbers of how much it had cost to train the model, but they weren't giving cost of the infrastructure around it. They were giving costs of the final training plans and things like that. And I do not think that the breakthroughs in Chinese technology are such that they are able to overtake the west and the innovation. I've been to China several times. In my opinion, non democracies have a serious problem with innovation. Innovation is like art and serious engineering, semiconductor engineering, artificial intelligence engineering is way closer to art than you'd think. And it only flourishes in a world in which you can decide what you want to do, where you decide how to innovate and you have freedom to do that.
- [26:41]
C
It's interesting, Ariel, and you're an expert on this, so allow me a bit to push back on that. And I'm curious to kind of hear your thoughts on the nber. The National Bureau of Economic Research in January wrote an amazing summary of, you know, they call it the geography of science in which they conclude on empiric evidence that in 13 of the 20 fields outside of biotechnology, which still has in biochemistry and others, where the west still leads, Chinese research universities are delivering the most cited peer reviewed, top notch studies.
- [27:13]
A
So let me just clarify. First of all, I don't think there's no creativity or an innovation in China. That's not what I'm saying. In fact, I love the Chinese people. They're fantastic, they're innovative, they're hardworking, they're everything. Some fantastic people. Research is phenomenal there, they're a great university and everything. When it comes to semiconductors and artificial intelligence, China has been engaging in one of the largest technology transfer efforts the world had ever seen, if not the largest one. And that is done through investments, a large spectrum from legal to gray areas to espionage. And when we've seen this on semiconductors, which is my expertise, we've seen a consistent attempt of China to deliver commercial grade semiconductors below 7 nanometers. And there was this phenomenal breakthrough moment that they were able to build a 7 nanometer chip and who knows how they did it, but never matured to a commercial process. And there's so dramatic innovation coming out of the west in these Fields that really, to me personally, it's just hard to see how a closed society would be able to catch up with that. That's how I feel about it.
- [28:20]
B
Okay, Ariel, so then, just to bring it back here to Israel, what do you think Israel should do or continue doing or start doing so that it can achieve and maintain what you, I think, have coined in a lot of your publications and this digital sovereignty.
- [28:33]
A
So digital sovereignty is a bit different from just regular sovereignty because sovereignty is a binary notion. You're sovereign or you're not in the digital world where no nation can really control everything. So there's always going to be some collaboration, some exchange. It's a spectrum. So when we look at sovereignty, we need to be more sovereign. And when we look at this, we look at the holy grail of technological sovereignty starts from the bottom floor, every building. You have to start from the foundations. The foundations of technology are compute, compute, national compute and data centers. They depend on semiconductors to populate these. And if you don't have access to semiconductors or you're restricted in some way, then you're really not sovereign or not even close to sovereign. So the holy grail here is for Israel to up its game in semiconductor fabrication. It's something we ran away from this notion because it's so expensive and difficult. But the world has shown us that if you want to lead, you have to fabricate semiconductors, then you have to have the compute infrastructure. That means data centers. You have to have enough data centers to really train foundational models and to really enable your industry to train their models here locally, not through the cloud. I mean, also through the cloud. You want to collaborate with everyone, but you don't want to be dependent on a foreign cloud service that could just kill you down with a kill switch one day, whatever the circumstances. And finally, electricity, energy, all these things require a lot of energy. And there are going to have to be energy partnerships to make sure that we have the energy to support Israel's needs in general and to support these infrastructures. And that will come, we hope, through a plethora of avenues, really new innovative energy technologies that are being developed, collaboration and partnership with our regional neighbors here. So that's the trinity of what a technology infrastructure is all about. Once you have the compute, then the sky's the limit because then you can invite the multinational companies to come and use your compute, have more centers here then all academia, industry, everyone, government can use these services to provide really cutting edge services. And that comes back to our vision and general escala's vision of the Agency pushing real life verticals, real life impact, and using that, so identifying areas of education, healthcare, whatever, and changing the lives of Israeli citizens and then using that as a diplomatic currency, really using it as AI diplomacy to share this with our friends, nations and strengthen our ties with other countries. Say, look, we know how to help you with smart cities, we know how to help you with transportation, we know how to help you with medical stuff, with research, with communication, with healthcare, with education. We can do so many things and we can help you. And we've solved these things wonky. Use the Israeli know how and that will be a new form of diplomacy,
- [31:22]
C
we think we called it on the pod, the model of Taiwan's Silicon Dome. Right. This is a country that, through its prowess in the silicon space, really delivered phenomenal geopolitical leverage. And the replication of Taiwan's Silicon Dome is something that other countries may aspire to do in, in broader fields, not just AI in material science and robotics and quantum in synthetic biology and in space. So I totally agree with you that this notion of AI is not just a socioeconomic power, it's also about geopolitical leverage, for sure.
- [31:58]
A
Fully agree.
- [31:59]
B
Dr. Ariel Sobelman, the senior advisor to the head of Israel's national Artificial Intelligence Agency. Your success is our success. Thank you so much for coming on to the pod.
- [32:09]
C
Thanks, Ariad.
- [32:10]
A
Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity.
- [32:17]
C
All right, so as if we didn't have enough of a problem regionally, now we also have to worry about the US China relationship, the meeting between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump and what that means to our region. This is happening in, I think, 10 days or two weeks. And you'll be my witness, Ciel, that my words for the week were put on our episode script before the recent events in the UAE in the Gulf. And I found those words to be very, very meaningful. This is Anwar Garga. She is one of the top advisors on national security to the President of the UAE after they had left the Arab League and OPEC in one week. And he said the following. With the confidence of one who has triumphed over a perfidious assault, we will scrutinize the map of our regional international relations with precision and determine who can be relied upon. I read into this. Israel can be relied upon. I read into this. The US can be relied upon. I also read into this. And the OPEC decision in the Arab League. The old system has expired. The old loyalties, Saudi Arabia, the region, Egypt and others have all expired. And the UAE is charting his own future. I think these words are so, you know, poignant. They're so indicative of the energy we've been discussing coming out of the UAE over the last, you know, three to four months of really understanding. They are in their second founding moment, so transformative. And I think these words kind of speak for themselves. How do you feel about that?
- [33:53]
B
Yeah. This is kind of verbatim a rational review of all of their national priorities. Right. What is going to be the recalibration of the foreign policy and the security alliances the UAE makes in coming days and months? US recording this on a Monday evening as Iran fires on the uae and knowing that people will hear this in just in a few hours on Wednesday, most likely. And what will have happened by then? But for sure, the trend is as exactly what the senior diplomatic advisor to the UAE president just said, there's going to be a serious reckoning of where the UAE goes next. All right.
- [34:31]
C
All right, Yale, that's it for today. We visited Beijing, we visited the Gulf, we've visited Washington. And we now, I think, have a better understanding of how sovereign AI and digital sovereignty takes shape. So to our listeners, we hope you found it interesting as well. If you did, be sure to subscribe, rate, review, share it with others. And if you want to leave a message to us with feedback, please do it on what's your number? @arc media.org.
- [35:05]
B
What's your Numbers? And ARC Media podcast what's yous Numbers? Interim executive producer is Beth Pearlman. Production manager is Brittany Cohen. ARC's community manager is Ava Weiner. Sound and video editing is by Liquid Audio. Our theme music is by Midnight Generation. I am Yael Wissner Levy.
- [35:21]
C
And I'm Yonatadiri. And the more I think about it when you're listening to this, the reality has has shifted from what we recorded. As it seems before we adjourned the recording that things are picking up in the Gulf. So I hope to see you here next week, Yael, in a peaceful manner.
- [35:37]
B
Yep.
- [35:38]
C
And that's it for today. 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.