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Foreign
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I'm Deborah Pardes, the host of Ark News Daily. What's happening in Israel and the Jewish world right now matters, but it can be hard to keep up, let alone make sense of it all. That's why we started ArkNews Daily. Every weekday morning, I walk you through the most important news, give you the context you need, and let you know what to look out for next. I don't try to convince you of anything and I don't waste your time. I on most days I'll be in your ears for about 10 minutes or less. Then you can move on with your day, hopefully a little bit smarter than before. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or follow the link in the show notes. I hope to see you tomorrow.
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You are listening to an art media podcast.
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So, Yel, what's your number?
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My number is 6.8 and that's 6.8%. And it's Israel's expanded unemployment rate in April, and that is down dramatically almost half of where it was. It was at 16.6% just a month earlier. If you'll remember, that was the height of the Iran war disruption. And so if you think about that for a second in the middle of a regional conflict with tens of thousands in reserves and airlines, tourism, retail, all disrupted, the the Israeli labor market basically snapped back. And I can tell you from firsthand about snapping back. Almost immediately after the ceasefire, job openings are already back above 130,000. So anyone asking about how are things over in Israel? Well, despite all the noise of war, and we still have the noise of war in the background, we have snapback and not sure that anyone had any other choice. But what is interesting, and we're going to talk about this later in the show, is at the macro level, Israel still has a labor shortage, especially because of reserves duty, the rebound after the war, and everything we just spoke about. But inside Tech, for instance, we're also seeing something very different, and that's a brutal efficiency wave, layoffs and so forth. We'll get to that. But first, what's yours?
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So mine is $375 million. It's not a big number. We usually talk about, you know, rounds of billions or big acquisitions. This one is an acquisition of an Israeli company by US Cardiovascular special specialty company Artivian. The company that it bought is called Endospan. It's an Israeli company out of Herzliya. The acquisition follows a coveted FDA clearance for Endospan's specialized aortic valve stent. Now, the reason I like this number, although it's not a star number. It's not a 32 billion from the Wiz deal. Is that behind it hide tens of thousands of hearts that will be healed through an Israeli technology? It's that simple.
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All right, whose number wins?
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I like my heart number, but I'm happy to award you the win this time because I think at the end of the day, the fundamental of Israel is the agency and the workforce. And to see that bounce back is really inspiring.
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All right, let's start.
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All right, it is 9pm here in Tel Aviv as we again follow the news closely as the Trump XI meeting is over and the unfolding events in the Gulf are now back in the headlines in the broader context, and we'll talk about that later in the big short, is the death of Taiwan's Silicon Dome already within reach and that will have massive effects on the Israeli economy if that is indeed the case following the Xi Trump meeting. Yael, what's on your mind?
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As I said in our opening noises of war and the sounds of war is still kind of hanging over our heads like a black cow.
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The drumbeat is still on very much
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of drum beat, although I think I speak maybe only for myself. People have become almost indifferent. You know, as I said, we have to snap back. Life goes on. We have our jobs, we have our families and we got to kind of just keep at it. Yeah, you give me hope when you talk about kind of the big picture in the macro world.
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It helps when we're stuck in traffic, which is the main indicator that life is back.
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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 number index that tracks the performance of publicly traded Israeli based or founded companies. All right, Yonatan, how is it looking this week?
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Well, Windex is breaking from the pack this week. It's on fire. 8.93% in the green in one week. The S and P and Nasdaq are mostly neutral in the past week. In the same period, The Windex is 16.7% year to date compared with 12.87 for NASDAQ and less than 10% for the S and P. Got to love the Windex. Last year our listeners got a 6 sense of how the Israeli founded companies beat both Nasdaq and S and P. It seems like at least as we record in May, that Windex is once again superior to the other ones in the Greens. Specifically, we have Palo Alto Networks that's driving the growth 14.59% on the week. This is on the news of a new identity platform that signals a very effective onboarding of the acquired cyber ark. So especially technology. Another green week for Nova. You know, as sort of the tide goes up for all the AI, Nova continues to rise. Incredible data in Q1, Yale. Get this, almost $250 million in revenue. 235 million on the quarter.
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Wow.
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That's a rate of a billion dollars a year in revenue. Strong demand in both memory and AI markets as well as a positive outlook for the stock. The leaders of the company from Rehovot Israel, the classic area for Israeli companies of this size, are driving that growth. 6.71% on the week. Visiting new highs market cap records north of $16 billion. That's fourfold where the stock was about three years ago. Really impressive stuff, truly.
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And you can really see a common thread through these companies. And as you said, Palo Alto and others keep on getting rewarded because investors kind of see them as the rails of the AI economy. It's companies that are tied to AI infrastructure and security. And unfortunately that's not what you're seeing in the red.
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Yeah, exactly. I think we're seeing a split. You know, what's called the K shaped dynamics. So in the red we have one key company. We've been following that very closely over the last eight to 10 weeks. That's Wix, losing 34% on the week after a share buyback that seems to have failed at least in the short term. And a set of super aggressive moves by the management to lead in AI. These guys continue to inspire, but the battle is morphing each day, really, Yale, and we spoke about this a lot. It is so hard to lead through what seems to be a very violent. I just can't find any other word in terms of velocity and pace of change that AI is bringing to the industry via transportation. Shedding almost 17% on the week, nearing $1.2 billion market cap very low compared to its IPO. Several others of our big digs, that's Lemonade and Monday are in the red to burgundy territory this week. You know, they all have kind of a forcing mechanism on the industry to change. I think we may be looking at a fundamental shift in the structure of the Israeli tech industry. Look, it's a double whammy effect when it becomes super expensive to hire Israeli engineers due to the strong shekel. Right. Like it is now 30% more expensive to hire the same Israeli talent that you had, you know, two years ago. In comparison, you compound that with the pressure of AI on the SaaS foundation of the industry. So I think we're going to start seeing massive pressure on the industry to shift more into specialty cyber, more into hardware, more into defense tech and other areas where you're more immune to AI. Or Israel has stronger foundations for sure.
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And we kind of focus especially on the Windex, just on Israeli founded companies, but you really see it broadly across other parts of the SaaS sector. You know, we thought with companies like Adobe at different points this year, if Wall street thinks that AI could commoditize what they do, no buyback or any kind of aggressive moves that we've seen that WIX has taken in the past few weeks is really going to help. Right now they're really wix specifically sitting in that global debate of are they more than just building great AI tools? What does website creation even look like when there's an AI native Internet? And that's really kind of most philosophical foundational questions that I think Wall street hasn't yet come to terms with.
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Yep, I agree. And I think the short term may kind of infuse a Cambrian explosion. Right. Like when you see companies collapse, but then out of the ashes of the fire you see really incredible companies being formed in the other industries where there is bigger demand, where capital is seeking and is willing to pay the salaries and the risk for the returns that fields like silicone, like, you know, hardware, like defense tech, like cyber can deliver. So we may be looking at this inflection point in the structure of the industry.
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All right, let's start with our big shorts at something very timely. Talking about the brutal AI economy story out of Israel this week. And that's AI21 Labs is now laying off more than 60% of its workforce. And not because AI is failing, but because it's really evolving too fast and the company is shrinking from 180 employees to just 70s and pivoting very hard into what it calls AI agent optimization. Basically they're going to help enterprises manage and control fleets of AI agents reliably and cheaply. This is me in parentheses telling you that there are abundance of companies saying that that's exactly what they do. They've stopped trying to compete heads on in foundation models. And this is also me in parentheses telling you that was their moat, that was what they kind of started out to do. And now they're going to be focusing on the orchestration layer. I'm bummed because AI21 was kind of the first in its field, maybe even globally. You know, it started out quieter than the Silicon Valley frontier labs, but they were there. And the bigger picture is that now even these AI companies are being disrupted by AI and the market is consolidating now around infrastructure, efficiency, automation. That's better business. It's fewer people, more compute, more leverage. So the question really is, are we going to be watching a temporary correction in the AI boom like we've, we've been talking about, or is now like a really going to be cutthroat to the AI companies themselves?
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Look, I think a couple of points here. You're making the argument for what may be that kind of forcing mechanism that changes the structure of the Israeli technology tech industry. You know, you have to love the free market, you have to love capital to see how it drives efficiency. It is a bit critical, somewhat violent, right? These are jobs, these are people. At the end of the day, a couple other, you know, multinationals have closed their centers in Israel last week. And you saw immediately how the market was fighting for that talent. Right. So I think the talent level at AI 21 is kind of top percentile globally. These people will start new companies. They have learned, to your point, foundational models. At the same time, Descartes, you know, another Israeli AI company just raised another 300 million now at a 4 billion valuation. I think Nvidia was one of the players in that capital raise. And so we saw Ken Griffin this week kind of go 180 degrees. This is a guy who, you know, nine months ago said AI is moving too slow. We don't see that in the investment space in a pace that would make a difference. And he was just saying earlier this week that, you know, just considering what happened in the last three months, they've changed their opinion. They've replaced PhD level finance experts at his firm. Right. And so I think the exponential curve, the knee of the curve is experience and that drives violent changes, shifts. I'm not really worried about sort of the growth of the tech industry, but it is not going to look the same 12 months down the line. I think you're super right to indicate that AI21 is a bit of a canary of what this is going to look like.
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All right, what's your big short?
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My big short is sort of the possible, the potential death of the Silicon Dome of Taiwan. It was a bit cryptic when I mentioned it when we started the episode. But, you know, we discussed this before, how Taiwan is a model for Israel over the long term in how their command, they're you know, somewhat of a monopoly in the space of silicone, defended them geopolitically. The Xi Jinping and President Trump meeting last week. The most important thing is that you started seeing hints of America being willing to accept Chinese dominance over Taiwan. So President Trump, in the summary, talks about how 9,005 miles away from the U.S. america's not necessarily going to fight that war, and that would be crazy. We also saw, I would say, contributors on Twitter that are very close to the administration starting to leak to the press how the Arizona TSMC factories are successful at the 3 to 4 to 5 nanometer production. This was not achievable three years ago. That allowed Taiwan to keep the leverage very strongly. So I would argue that what we're witnessing there is the massive leverage that Silicon Dome, that dominance in the wafer industry that kind of kept Taiwan away from the pack. And having it win a geopolitical shield is now, I think, being questioned, and I think there's doubt around that now. The reason I'm talking about it here, where it relates, our show relates to the Israeli economy. What happens if Israel misses out on what is now considered one of its biggest moats? Right. Is it going to be cyber? Is it going to be an element related also to silicone? Right. Or is it going to be a multinational presence, you know, around the corner? This is very critical for Israel over the span of the next three years, be it through defense tech, quantum robotics, space. We have to keep a very, very close view of how the Taiwan dynamic unfolds over the next three to five years. And I don't just mean the kinetic war part, but how, if at all, it misses out on its silicon monopoly, because that's one of the main reasons they're still a free country.
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And there's also another second layer to this, which is deterrent. If we do anything to Taiwan or Israel, what happens to the chip ecosystem or the Israel cyber ecosystem? They become indispensable to the global economy and. And therefore the world has more of an incentive to protect them.
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Right.
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So it's kind of like a, we said a double whammy before. You know, on the one plan, you want to become that superpower and you have the intel, the people, capital, and you're a small population that you can become that. It's feasible. But on the other hand, you also want to make sure you use it for deterrence purposes as well. And in our time and day, that is definitely something that is important.
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Yeah. And again, we are very much dependent on the consequence of Our own war right broadly in the region. How is UAE going to respond? How is Saudi going to respond? Is the Middle east going to look the same in 12 months? I think overall, it is fair to say we are witnessing the expiration of many of what used to be a world order with certain kind of tenets that we all knew were going to just be there. That's why the big short there is not about Taiwan. It's about what can we learn in Israel in terms of how strong our moats are when it comes to tech and when it comes to the geopolitics that enables the growth of the Israeli economy?
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Okay, let's go to the long play. So, Yonatan, for decades, the US Israeli relationship felt untouchable. It was strategic, it was political, it was emotional. And Israel has received more than $300 billion in U.S. support since its founding. And since October 7th alone, another $16 billion in military aid. But at the exact same time, government cooperation is deepening. Public opinion. This is not news to anyone in America is shifting hard in the other direction. A new survey, a Pew survey, shows that 60% of Americans now hold an unfavorable view of Israel. Younger voters in both parties increasingly see Israel negatively. And suddenly something that used to sound fringe, something, you know, what if America cuts aid to Israel is becoming a mainstream political conversation from both sides of the aisle. So. So today I'd like to unpack with you the mythology around American aid. Would Israel actually collapse without it? What does this money really buy? Is it charity or a strategic investment? And maybe most importantly, if the political winds in America are changing, and they seem to be changing, how does Israel preserve the relationship beyond the checks and weapons systems? There's something much more to that relationship, because this story is really about something bitter, right? It's an alliance that has been built over generations. Now we have to suddenly rewire that alliance and justify it to a new generation.
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To me, the most recent kind of expression of this challenge was Tucker Carlson on the New York Times interview a few weeks ago where he made a fully contradictory argument. And he kept on both ends of that argument. Israel's dependent on the US the military aid. If we just click the button, Israel collapses. That was sort of one argument. The other, Israel controls us. You know, we are the ones being pulled by Israel. So that doesn't kind of make sense. Is Israel dependent? You click the button, Israel dies. So if that's the case, how does Israel kind of get its way right in Washington? I think the second piece here is that American Aid, military, and none, is kind of a driving force of American foreign policy throughout the Marshall Plan and subsequent years following the Second World War. The design of the global system that we all know is to a great degree driven by American aid. If you think of countries like Egypt, like Saudi, with a petrodollar deal, right. It's not always kind of like a straightforward military aid. The sums of money are infinitely higher than they are as it relates to Israel. There is a degree of anti Semitism here, of singling out Israel, looking at the big numbers. But I think where we want to focus today, and that's a question of we kind of framed it. The headline of the episode, the Last dance, right? The next mou, the next memorandum of understanding is now being negotiated. It will come into force in 2028. Is this going to be the last military aid deal between the countries? If so, is it going to look the same? And how do we kind of go about understanding how does Israel move forward while winning the military, the diplomatic, the political ties, deepening them, but showing to both parts of the aisle that it can basically say goodbye to this level of dependence, or at least the structure of the aid the way it is today? I think we can cover how it was born, right. What's going on? Is it fiscally doable for Israel to avoid. So a lot to cover, a lot to unpack.
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So first, let's kind of like talk about the aid itself. And, you know, Tucker threw the word around. And even the Prime Minister Netanyahu, when He spoke with 60 Minutes, also threw the word aid around. Give us some perspective about how much money aid really means to Israel proportionate to our own budget. What does it mean in practice?
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So this package of aid that relates to military started in the late 1980s. Remember, Israel was climbing out of a horrendous financial crisis, right. 400% inflation, three weeks away from its bankruptcy default on the debt in 1985, 86. And so in the early 90s, as part of a broader, I would say, post Soviet Union policy for the US in the region, America decided to award certain countries a new type of aid that relates to military. Egypt won that. Saudi and others. Israel won $2.8 billion of aid per year. Back in the day, this was a significant number because the size of the Israeli economy was 60 billion. So it's almost 5%, right?
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Right.
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It's huge. It is really significant. How does it work? It's not really aid in terms of we get cash, we do whatever we want. This has a lot to do Also with Israel at the time developing a fighter jet that could have been competitive to the F16. Part of the decision that Israel made to close that project had to do with how military aid would look like. So this was not just Israel begging and getting something. The mechanism is we get US dollar aid and we have to buy in the US for the total sum of the aid. So if the aid is 2.8 billion, the money stays in the US, it doesn't go to Israel and then Israel develops on its own or goes to buy stuff outside. So that's the genesis of that. Now let's fast forward 40 years, right? The aid, the Obama era aid, the last MOU was $3.8 billion. Realistically speaking, it's still the same 2.8 from before, kind of adjusting for inflation. The Israeli economy multiplied by 10. Basically it's a $600 billion economy. Right. So I think right now in the Prime Minister's right to say fiscally this is not a big deal, this is less than 1% of the economy. And if we want to make that statement towards the Tuckers of the world, towards the left hand side of the aisle, but also I think truthfully speaking, Israel can do without the aid. From a fiscal perspective, on the fiscal
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angle, where do you think it would hurt Israel the most short term, and then of course long term we'll get to.
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So look, I think ultimately as a 650almost billion dollar economy with 68% debt to GDP, now where we stand after a massive $120 billion unexpected spend on the war, all we do is extend our debt to GDP by 1%. So again, I don't think that's what we should do. I'm just saying that if we want to click a button and kind of have it go back to zero, the Israeli economy can sustain that. It's either a cut of the budget, broadly speaking, or you know, expanding the debt to gdp, which is in a very healthy perspective. Yale, just to give a number to our listeners, the central bank in Israel holds foreign currency reserves that are close to quarter trillion dollars. We can sustain 50 years, right? So that's just a matter of scale. But honestly it's not about the fiscal dynamic. Right. I should say maybe one last thing here before we kind of go into the broader bilateral relationship and what that does, we speak about these numbers. You know, you kind of tally them, $3 billion over 80 years and so on. You can play a lot with these numbers. So this is not a fiscal story for Israel. It has $660 billion with phenomenal debt to GDP, you know, rates that allow us that flexibility. And it is frankly not a big deal fiscally for the US considering one and a half trillion dollar defense budget coming into the Pentagon and almost a $40 trillion economy. So from a fiscal perspective, it is time to move on.
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So one thing before we go beyond fiscal, that caught my ear Is you said 120 billion costs of the Iran war. It's safe to say that war will happen again. And so it's probably smart to factor war as a recurring theme in the Israeli budget.
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It dep on also how fast the Israeli economy grows currently. The IMF is projecting actually very healthy growth over the next few years. And yeah, again, if the Israeli economy grows by an extra half percent, you don't need that. Right. So point being, I agree with the Prime Minister. I agree with the point that from a fiscal perspective, it's time to Israel to wean itself from that. It was critical for us. It was almost 5% of the GDP. Now it is less than half a percent of the GDP. This is two orders of magnitude in 40 years. Time to continue to walk past the aid model in this relationship.
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And when we talk about aid, we also, as you said yourself, historically, there's been a lot of, you know, vested interest of the US in this region. And it wasn't kind of just aid. Right, right. So maybe a future cooperation looks more like kind of a strategic venture partnership, right?
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No, and I think you're spot on. This is the negotiation now underway. Right. In Washington as we start kind of the contour of the last dance, if you will. Right, right. It's not going to be strictly aid. That's sort of what I'm hearing in the corridors of those who are at play here. It's not going to be strictly aid. There's going to be a model. As you've really insightfully kind of framed it, it's kind of like a joint venture fund. Now, just to give you a sense, the Wall Street Journal argued this week in an opinion ad that America needs to have one of its biggest data centers in the region, not so much in the Arab Gulf, which proved itself to be very vulnerable. Right. But actually the Negev in Israel. That argument was made on the pages of the Wall Street Journal last week. Israel's now part of the State Department's PAC Silica. We discussed this on the pod. Right. So a broader perspective of what mutual national security interests look like. How do we co invest? Is it the next arrow system, Arrow four, which is already Kind of co founded by the US and how that fits in with the Golden Dome.
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I actually am thinking about, you know, the cultural connection. This is maybe the hardest part here is the human connection. There's been a web of connectivity between the two countries since Israel's establishment. Even before the establishment. You know, money is measurable and as you pointed out, it's becoming less and less of a dependency on the Israel side and also unimportant on the American side. But there is kind of an emotional infrastructure that has been laid down over the decades. And the deepest risk I think in my mind is really cultural separation. And what do we tell the new generation, right. What is this new relationship? What will be special about it?
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So I think, you know, we're talking about a narrow piece of the broader bilateral relationship, right? That's military aid. I think all the rest continues to kind of move forward. That is Nasdaq, that is New York, that is San Francisco, that is Judeo Christian values. I think that kind of broader spectrum remains. The question is, and I think your intuition sort of leads to a very important place in four decades of aid. And again, remember, aid means we get the dollars, we spend them in the US we don't get them and do whatever we want.
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Right.
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There have been hundreds of thousands of connections created, jobs created, tens of thousands of jobs in the US as they relate to producing the F35s, the F15s, the iron domes, the arrows, the components and the bilateral dynamics in which we actually generate inventive technology that then goes back and perfects further the American arsenal of democracy, as it is called in the Pentagon. It's a very nice reference to the weapons of war, to call them the arsenal of democracy. But at the end of the day, how do you preserve what mechanism, joint venture, investment, whatever they decide and negotiate on. How do we not lose the web of connections that are very profound, of tens of mayors, key governors, people who've intertwine themselves, they visit Israel once every two to three years to see what the jobs that were created in their respective region. Right. What do they contribute to on the Israeli side and the other way around.
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C
Right.
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That is to me the main question. The fiscal piece is doable. What kind of structure allows for this really profound web of relationships to not only remain but to continue to thrive?
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And you layer on that the negative or increasingly negative views that more and more Americans have. That does keep me up at night.
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Yeah. So I think at the end of the day, when American tech is going defense tech, when you look at Palmer Luckey that calls himself a proud Zionist right on record, right? When you have the likes of Alex Karp, when you have the likes of Elon Musk, spoiler alert. Stay with us towards the end of the episode in a few minutes. I actually think that within defense tech, if you don't operate within an aid framework and you co invest, then you can get a flurry of new relationships to be born that are actually adequate and reflective of the current, you know, moment in time for the US and for Israel. There's a lot that we can do, I will say to kind of conclude on that thought. When you double click on the data that relates to Israel and favorability, aid is sort of like an excuse. I don't expect that finishing aid will, or restructuring it will make a big impact there. I just think it's the right thing to do. The reason I don't think it's going to make a big difference is if you kind of look at the dominant variable driving the challenges to Israel, it has a lot to do with anger of Americans against America. It's very reminiscent of the late 60s and the Vietnam War and the objection by average Americans to the actual, the very use of military power. And as an extension, Israel is the one being portrayed and kind of thrown into that context. But it is more profound than Israel's action in the Middle east or, you know, one way or another, what we will or will not do with the military aid. I think it's a broader story than just opinions towards Israel as they relate to what's going on in the Middle East.
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C
So look, I think this is a complex issue and you can finally find the pros and cons of each side. On the one hand, if Israel stops receiving US aid, will this look like a win for the lawmakers and the constituents in the US that have been asking for this? At the same time, you know, I cannot unhear the Israeli Prime Minister on 60 Minutes who also said that he doesn't need to be dependent on U.S. aid. And he said it in a way of triumph, showing that Israel doesn't need to be dependent and kind of along the lines of what you're saying of how minuscule it is on the Israeli budget in the grand scheme of things. So when you look at public opinion in the US I agree with you that this is not going to make it or break it in terms of favorable opinions towards Israel, because as it is, the rise of antisemitism is well on its way. I do think that narratives are being written as we speak and that we need to get ahead of it in terms of understanding what is exactly military aid to Israel and what part of it is a proportion of is it for the budget and what strategic interest America has in this region as well. But I do worry about the negative opinions with or without the aid, the fraying of the cultural connections, as you said, about the jobs being cut after aid is being cut. But you know, there's a lot more around it and the fraying of public opinion is very much felt. And yeah, I think that that train has left the station.
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Look, I think either way what's being negotiated is going to take a decade as a sunset. So I don't think we're going to see jobs lost like you know, within an instant.
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C
Right.
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A
I also think there is fundamentally an open, free market logic, strategic logic for Israel and the US it is far bigger than the 4 billion in aid. So I don't expect that to change the strategic kind of path on which both economies and defense industries are. I don't think they could ever be stronger than they are right now. The Pentagon calls Israel its model ally. So I actually think we're on a good path there. But I think you're raising two important issues. One, once it's not aid, it's not run through the Appropriations Committee, it's not run through the political process. Right. So it's less susceptible to that kind of pressure. I think that's a big win that people don't go to the Hill to protest that. I think that's very important. And the relationship becomes a sort of business like relationship. They'll have to protest the Lockheeds, the Boeings. That's a far more difficult, you know, challenge than it is to lobby certain people in Congress in the Appropriations Committee. So I think from that perspective, it's actually in the benefit of Israel beyond it just being the right thing to do. The second piece is, and this is a concern, is Israel going to wake up a decade from now to an embargo? Right. To legislation says you should not sell arms to Israel full stop, irrespective of whether or not it's financed through an aid package or through shekels. Right. That's a good question. I think it's very hard to predict, but it is a risk that Israel runs irrespective of sort of what happens in the next kind of year or two. One last thought to kind of leave you with Germany, India, other countries that are now vying for Israeli technology willing to pay for it. Some other countries, Azerbaijan, South Korea, other countries I think that Japan, to an extent, I think that Israel also needs to show to the US that it can serve much of those joint interests, globally speaking, beyond sort of I'm buying this from you and we have this symbiotic relationship and sort of that's also a leverage for you and it's a dependency for us, that potential broadening maybe a very healthy outcome of the change to the structure of the defense financing in between the two countries.
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C
All right, so we still have a few more years ahead before this kind of cuts short. There's going to be a gradual, as you said, it'll take a few more years until we see an end to this. Let's go to the words of the week.
- [32:39]
A
Well, look, I think at the end of the day there's going to be a recalculation, an American recalculation of its alliances worldwide. This dynamic with Israel is also reflective of what we're seeing with Germany, with NATO and so on. And in this type of atmosphere, it's always great to hear titans, leaders in America, in the industry and close to Washington kind of speak freely about Israel and what they think. Such a statement was made today on the 18th of May by none other than Elon Musk, who admits in a way I'm paraphrasing in his video remarks in a big mobility conference here in Israel today, that he loves the Windex, not per se, but here's what he had to say about Israeli entrepreneurship. I'm a big fan of the entrepreneurship that comes from Israel. Israel is achieving amazing results relative to the size of its population and definitely number one in the world. I take my hat off to Israel for its innovation. I think these are great words of the week to finish with. And it gives me a lot of hope to know that people of that caliber that just came back from China and witness all they saw there and they're really at the bleeding edge of robotics, of autonomous cars, of space, of NeuroLink, of advanced AI and healthcare. That that's what they think, not just about Israel, but of Israeli entrepreneurs worldwide. That's why I made the Windex.
- [34:03]
C
Well, I'm just bummed that we didn't get an in person Elon Musk. He was supposed to be here for the conference.
- [34:10]
A
That's right.
- [34:11]
C
You can think of a million excuses why he wasn't able to get here. But nice to hear and nice for the audience. And yes, there was not one Israeli media outlet that didn't have this as its top story for a couple of minutes this evening. So good news is always a blessing. All right.
- [34:27]
A
Yeah. All right, that's it for today's show. So thanks for tuning into Ark Media's what's yous Number? We hope you found it interesting. The topics today, they have a lot, lot of impact on the Israeli American relationship going forward. So if you did, be sure to, like, subscribe, rate, review, you know the drill. Most importantly, share it with others who you think will find it interesting. If you want to make suggestions, share your feedback, do it on our social media or also reach out to us at what's your number? @arc media.org.
- [35:01]
C
What's yous Number Is an ARC Media podcast. What's your numbers? Interim Executive producer is Beth Pearlman. Production manager is Brittany Cohen. Arc Communities manager is Ava Wiener. Sound and video editing is by Liquid Audio. Our theme music is by Midnight Generation. I am Yael Listener Levy.
- [35:18]
A
I'm Yonatan and see you here next week. 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.