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- [00:04]
Yonatan Adiri
You are listening to an art media podcast.
- [00:09]
Michal Ivram
Yonatan. What's your number?
- [00:11]
Yonatan Adiri
60,000. As in 60,000 Israelis that signed up for the Elal rescue flights. I'm one of them. So it's 59,999 in Yonatan. The only people on Earth, the Israelis, who call a flight into harm's way a rescue flight. I think it's a true demonstration of the spirit of Israel.
- [00:28]
Michal Ivram
My number is 12. And this is the number of European Research Council grants that was won by Israeli research institutes. And by the way, the Weizmann Institute, which we will talk about later, was hit directly by one of the Iranian missiles. 1, 6. Just Weizmann Institute alone, which outperformed entire countries. So whose number wins?
- [00:50]
Yonatan Adiri
I'm optimistic about science. And given the hit on Weizman Institute, I'm siding with your number this time.
- [00:56]
Michal Ivram
I'm from Rehovot originally, so I am siding with mine. I win. Welcome to what's yous Number? From Ark Media, where we focus on Israel's economy through a global lens. I'm Michal Ivram.
- [01:15]
Yonatan Adiri
I'm Jonathan Ediri.
- [01:16]
Michal Ivram
Jonathan, it is 11:30am ish here in Charleston. Don't ask why I'm here.
- [01:23]
Yonatan Adiri
Yeah, it is 11:30am here in DC. I'm here because I'm stuck and can't go back for the last week again, one of those. Just 60,000 sign up for Alala, but it seems like 200,000 Israelis are stranded outside of Israel, trying to make their way back.
- [01:37]
Michal Ivram
We'll get a little bit more into your story in a bit here, but I have to say this is the first time that we're actually on the same time zone, even though we're not in the same location. So that is kind of nice. Although the circumstances for you being where you are are not good ones for sure. Do you know when you're going home at this point?
- [01:53]
Yonatan Adiri
Look, I don't. I tried a number of ways to get back, none of which has worked so far, I think. Overall, you know, this episode is different than previous episodes. While Israel has been at war for almost 20 months, the turn of events last week is more dramatic and more consequential. Me not being able to fly back or being far away from my four kids, my wife, and practically not sleeping as we're on opposite time zones. And every time there's a siren and rockets are dropping In Tel Aviv, three to 400 yards from where we live, is a very tough dynamic emotionally. From a practical perspective, I feel great in the sense of, you know, Trusting the safe rooms and the, the fact that the infrastructure is proving itself to be very strong, but emotionally not being there, not being able to provide that emotional support to my kids and my wife is not easy.
- [02:43]
Michal Ivram
I know there are many others in your position and it's an awful one to be in. This is a unique episode. Obviously the big focus now is on the ongoing Israel, Iran conflict. I think at the crux of what we want to dive into is this question of why in spite of everything happening, in spite of this conflict, conflict and the back and forth, the stock market is rising. And not just that, we're seeing other signs of resilience and even vibrance elsewhere in the economy. And so we'll talk about that and also look a little bit into the future and try to speculate. Of course there's a lot that is uncertain right now of, you know, where this goes and when it ends. But we'll try to give a little bit of analysis also of where it could go, economically speaking. Of course. We will first of all start with the Windex and the big shorts. Stay with us. Let's kick things off with this week's what's your number index or Windex. This is our very own index of Israeli based and or Israeli founded companies. So Yonatan, how is this week's Windex looking?
- [03:51]
Yonatan Adiri
So it's important to say the windex is from June 9th to 14th. We do that on a Monday to Friday basis. So we have one day of war on this Windex And Windex as the market overall was in a correction week, so S and P fell 1.8%, Nasdaq fell 1.85, Windex shed 1.54%. So Windex is in the red. Obviously the most notable rise and it was towards the tail end of the week was elbit system. Remember we discussed elbit through quite a number of episodes as it is one of the big players in the Israeli defense tech space and the market. On Friday, having seen the early signs of the Israeli advanced technologies deployed in the opening scene of the Israeli military campaign above, IR has decided to kind of bet bigger on elbit. We'll see that growing. We already see that growing this week and I guess next week on our episode we'll have a full week in perspective around elbit, around defense tech and around the overall performance of the Windex.
- [04:53]
Michal Ivram
Well, we certainly had interesting timing having Oded Ben David on just last week and now getting to see elbit in action, of course, with everything going on and also at least like you said the initial impact on the stock price and. And we will see more in the week ahead. Okay, let's move on to our big shorts. We're going to start off with talking about what happened at the Paris air show, speaking of defense contractors, where we saw a number of Israeli companies, Israeli contractors literally being fenced off from the rest of the show. According to the organizers, this was because offensive weapons were not allowed to be on display. But it seems that the story is much more complicated, complicated than that, and that this was politically motivated, maybe economically motivated as well, to shut off some of the Israeli competitors. Yonatan, what do you think?
- [05:52]
Yonatan Adiri
So I think three quick things to say here. We saw President Trump in one of the comments early this week mentioning the strength of American weapons deployed and were on display in the Israeli opening scene Thursday, Friday. There's a lot to be said about the American Israeli collaboration in terms of defense and the I would say the last mile being developed uniquely by Israel. What did we see? We saw incredible cyber capabilities. Just this morning. We're recording on Wednesday, Novitech, the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in Iran was basically taken down about $2 billion of cryptocurrency that was fueling the use of certain dynamics in Iran. So very strong cyber capacities on display, aerial dominance that was achieved over a country 80 times the size of Israel within a couple of hours. Ground n loss and ATGM missiles, the Spike family that was also on display in the salon. So all these technologies were not just on display in and of themselves, they were displayed in conjunction as a system. There hasn't been in modern military history such a display. So in many ways the concern in France, at least in my view, the political motivation and concern of the incredible might of the Israeli technologies as part of the American kind of military technology space are very clear to me. It's very clear where the motivation is. Israel doesn't need Israeli technologies, don't need a booth. Right. The real world, the defense of my family of 10 million Israelis, of critical sites at war is the best proof out there for the superiority of the Israeli defense tech sector.
- [07:38]
Michal Ivram
Let's talk a little bit more about the Israelis who are stranded abroad. This isn't just a number. Jonathan, as you shared, you are one of these people. I'm sure we all know at least one, if not more. I have a cousin who's in New York waiting to get home. There, there are all these stories. There's really so much desire to get back home, which is unbelievable and unique, as you mentioned at the top. But Also a really, really big challenge. So we are seeing Elal trying to address this, but it's not easy. So let's talk about some of the complications and the little bit of progress that has been made. And I know people are finding some creative ways to get back home as well.
- [08:17]
Yonatan Adiri
First, it's important to understand what's going on. Ballistic missiles with a half a ton warhead full of explosives are falling on Israeli cities and on civilian infrastructure with the aero system and the air defense at this, you know, doing 85 to 90% interceptions. A half a ton rocket falling on Tel Aviv, on Haifa, we've seen those is a big deal. So the decision was made immediately at the beginning of this campaign to shut down Gurin Airport and shut down actually all airports. People can't even leave Israel, which that has been also politically contested. Now, the reason is, at the end of the day, an airplane fueled is in and of itself a bomb, right? And so imagine a situation that Iran targets 20, 30 rockets specifically on Ben Gurion Airport, knowing that two or three would make it through, right? Imagine the size of the calamity of the amount of people injured and the images and so on and so forth. The initial decision, which I fully support was let's not deal with this too risky. We don't know. We actually anticipated five to six hundred rockets in every barrage. And it is a credit to the Israeli air force that's able to intercept those far out and also to suppress the actual shooting and the launchers. And we'll get to that in the long play. So that's the fundamental. That's why we can't fly back. I have full sympathy to decision makers. While I hate it on a personal level, it makes a lot of sense to me. I think the authorities should withstand the pressure and not open the gates also for leaving Israel. So the challenge of bringing in 150, 200,000 people is not just can we, do we have enough airplanes and so on is how do you land, get people out and move on without becoming a target? So this is a major issue. We're starting to see this unfold. You know, kind of land and sea and ground folks are coming through Jordan and Egypt, which is very hard to do, very complicated. Again, their airspace is also not open. All the time. We're seeing folks trying to figure out, you know, a yacht or some kind of a naval vessel, tugboat, tugboat from Cyprus to Tel Aviv. We saw doctors boarding a cargo ship to go back to Haifa port. And we're seeing people trying to figure out you know, flights. This morning, the first rescue flight, again, that's such a weird nomenclature. Rescue flight that actually takes you into harm's way was launched. We're looking at 2, 300 people a time. It's kind of touch and go, right? It lands, it has to take off very, very quickly. This is a very complex problem. And until the time at the airport is going to be allowed for more than one airplane at a time and kind of do the taxi, this is going to be like water drops as opposed to like a full, you know, hose open. So I would say to my Israeli friends who are stranded outside, like, check in, hunker down. Yeah. I mean, this is not gonna be. Unless we're gonna see an American, we're gonna talk about it on the long play. An American decision to cut this short, either by deciding to intervene or by enforcing some kind of a stop mechanism. I would anticipate Israelis taking a good number of weeks for all the 200,000 to come back home.
- [11:22]
Michal Ivram
Well, Yonatan, I'm sure everybody listening is wishing you a safe return home. And for all other Israelis, let's move on to a very, very different piece of news. This is a tech deal again. In the midst of all this, we are seeing economic bright spots for sure. This is an acquisition by Wix of base 44, an $80 million transaction. This is all about the AI economy. Yonatan, did you see this coming?
- [11:51]
Yonatan Adiri
So, yeah, actually there was a lot of speculation in the tech ecosystem. Maor Shlomo, the founder. This is a bootstrapped business by a single founder showing to the world what everybody had predicted will happen in the era of mature AI. A single founder, not many employees, creating an $80 million exit in less than six months. Right. The notion of a single founder, single employee, billion dollar company was never as clear as it is right now. I think it's a very clever move by wix. We discussed that on the Windex a couple of episodes ago. Because the WIX was underperforming. The markets are trying to figure out what are wix, what are fiverr, what are those kind of companies that provide web services gonna do with the wake of this super easy AI? Where about people can build their own website very quickly and render wix, you know, irrelevant. Base 44 has, you know, I've used it a lot. We've used it at Aleno, at the nonprofit, the most powerful and basically the first, the real pioneer in natural language interface for you to develop your own app. I've written apps for my kids on base 44 for them to prepare. I'm not good at math. My 13 year old's already doing junior high, very advanced math. I don't know how to help her with that. So I wrote the software with base 44 that made me look smart. It is a phenomenal piece of software. The question was always sort of, you know, what happens six months after? Does somebody compete with you? Because that, you know, keeps on getting better and better. I think WIX proved that it is very hard to compete with already a mature base 44 and they prefer to acquire it in whole as opposed to invest in its growth. And I think this is very indicative beyond Israel. I'm happy and proud that this is happening in Israel, but, you know, as we often cover at what's your number? You know, again, we said this is a bit of an odd episode given the circumstances. This is a very, very strong signal coming out of Israel that is significant globally in terms of how do AI companies allow for bootstrap single founder dynamics to grow. And if I'm a vc, I'm paying very close attention because this guy didn't raise a dime. And there are many of those who with half a million or million dollars can build viable, strong, scalable solutions that would rattle the space for early stage investors in series A. Yeah, this was.
- [14:13]
Michal Ivram
Sam Altman's vision, right, that you could have one founder get to a billion dollars on their own. I think it's also, it's indicative of what's happening more broadly because we're seeing more, I don't know if to call it consolidation quite yet, but we're definitely seeing more deal making among the AI players in the US and elsewhere as well. OpenAI making some acquisitions and others. So, you know, it fits into that trend to what we're seeing in Israel.
- [14:38]
Yonatan Adiri
Yep, I agree. And I think again, if this wasn't an episode at war with Iran, we would have expanded on this because there's so much to unpack here from an investor perspective from attack, a founder, a culture and dynamics that is so typical of Israel to be first and try this out. Maybe we'll cover this in future episodes and maybe shout out to Mo, we'll have him on the show.
- [15:03]
Michal Ivram
All right, let's get to the focus of this week's episode, our long play. We talk a lot about sort of the duality, especially in light of the last year and a half or so in Israel, of the ongoing war and the resilience for the most part, that we see in the economy. So this is the question today is why is the Israeli stock market rising even as we're seeing this big new huge wrinkle in the conflict? This is the front that we were all, I think waiting for and knew would very likely happen. And so we are seeing that resilience. And I think the question is why? Right. So just to throw a few numbers out there to get us started. Tel Aviv 35 is up 36% in the last trailing 12 months. Real estate index up almost 9% this week. The dollar to Shekel exchange hasn't budged much. So what's going on? Give us your analysis of why in light of even this reality now with Iran, with the constant attack back and forth and the disruptions to Israeli life, the very real disruptions, why are we seeing these numbers up?
- [16:11]
Yonatan Adiri
So I think I see this through four different lens. And again, everything we say is true for this moment in time given the dynamics thus far. Right. So number one is fundamentals, the fundamentals of Israeli and Iranian economy. Number two is the interception economics. We discussed that in our last episode, so we'll take a double click on that. I think the third dimension is the institutions. Israel is a live democracy. Iran is a theological tyrann. Iranian. This is now being brought to bear. And the fourth is that overall, the reckoning from global investors, however you look at the macroeconomics of Israel over the last 20 years, was at some point they're going to have to deal with Iran. So this was weighing heavily on every projection of the Israeli economy over the long term. And so while the short term cost of the war is kind of, you know, in plain sight, the weight of the long term growth, given Iran's dominant kind of overbearing position on the Israeli economy is being lifted as the days go by. So I think those are the four.
- [17:11]
Michal Ivram
You'Ve mentioned before, that the Iran threat, it's been baked into the economic forecast. Right. So how big of a role does that play in what we're seeing here?
- [17:20]
Yonatan Adiri
Look, Iran has strategically and openly stated that it wants to destroy the state of Israel. Over the last 20 years, this has gone from, I remember us preparing the speech for President peres in the UN General assembly of 2000. A person by the name of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became the president of Iran and explicitly called for the destruction of Israel. This has been going on for a long time. So if you're an investor, there is this giant country almost 80 times bigger geographically with a very strong military that has Hezbollah, that has the Houthis, that invests in Hamas, that has these ballistic missiles and openly says it's going to destroy Israel. You know, when you're looking at this, if you're in a global investor, you're looking at the scenarios for Israel, you always have to ask yourself, how does Israel, you know, kind of reconcile that? That weighs heavily on Israel's long term view. And again, the economy grew, so people focused on that and so on. But the scenario of Iran, you know, actively trying to realize that goal was always there. Now, I think the most important stat in this context you brought it up is 12 trailing months. Tel Aviv 35 is 36% up. So when we took out Hezbollah, global investors saw that and said, okay, that's one element that's been taken off. When the Syrian regime, that was a puppet regime for Iran, collapsed as an immediate domino, that further strengthened the macro perspective of the Israeli economy. And I think what the market is telling us so far is it seems like the arsenal, the capacity, what we thought would be 80 million people war with a 10 million people kind of dynamic is actually David versus Goliath. Israel is smaller, but in many ways David grows into the Goliath within 12 hours of the beginning of the campaign. So I think from that perspective, that's the weight being lifted from the Israeli economy. Let's see where it goes and we'll talk about that at the tail end in terms of resolution.
- [19:21]
Michal Ivram
Now I'm going kind of in reverse order here of your points, but the interception economics, because I think that's a super fascinating one, what are the key points people need to know here?
- [19:30]
Yonatan Adiri
So a couple of facts, right? And this goes also for Iran's fundamentals. Iran is a $400 billion economy. Israel is a $550 billion economy. Israel has $225 billion in net cash reserves in the central bank. Iran has basically virtually no reserves. Every rocket Iran fires is 10 to 12 million dollars. These are very expensive ballistic missiles, right? So let's make the quick calculation here. For every 100 rockets it fires, every 100 missiles, 90 get intercepted. 10 are there on the outside creating damage. In Israel, the damage is roughly $100 million per day. That's the damages in Israel so far. Okay, so you're launching 100 rockets that cost you $12. That's let's 120, $30 million per 100 rockets, 10 of them fall, creating a damage of 100 or $80 million in damages in Israel. Now when you expand at its scale, they fire 120, 150, they're already at 3 or 4 billion dollars worth of rockets fired and Israel is at $100 million per day. So 4 billion versus 4,500 million. That's sort of the interception economics. The second piece going back to ODED from last week, Iron Beam. Here's the number. Michal. A thousand drones were fired since Thursday night into Israel. 270ish made it to the border. So that means almost 750 were intercepted along the way by the Israeli Air Force and by some of our allies, I should say, above their skies. And the 250 that made it to the border never made it to their destination. That is zero. Zero drones made any damage in Israel. Now, we cannot say for a fact, but I have good reason to believe that has a lot to do with the laser interceptor system and the economics in and around that. That is a very substantial threat that has been diminished to zero at, you know, we called it last week double espresso cost per interception. So, you know, traditionally Israel is for short wars and not long wars. Every day in which the war protracts is a strain on the Iranian economy. That is probably 100 to 150 fold more difficult than it is on the Israeli economy.
- [21:40]
Michal Ivram
I'm curious also what we can read into some of the targets that have been hit. Let's put aside for a minute the nuclear targets in Iran, energy infrastructure, for example, that Israel has targeted and hit, versus some of the targets that Iran has managed to hit in Israel. Obviously, very, very different strategies here. And we are seeing Iran go after very heavily concentrated civilian population areas, but also hitting the Weizmann Institute, which we mentioned. There's a lab there that was destroyed that does research on Alzheimer's, which is like, you know, heartbreaking. Right? I'm sure they will rebuild. Thank God nobody was hurt, of course. But also a refinery in Haifa. And so talk a little bit about what we're seeing in terms of some of the infrastructure targets and the effectiveness there.
- [22:30]
Yonatan Adiri
So I think it's important. And in our conversation, head of recording, we spoke about the price of oil. Israel is very cautious when it comes to those types of infrastructure in Iran. Let's talk a bit about what that means. Iran sells 2 million barrels of oils. That's 2% of the global consumption on a daily basis. It sells it to China and it sells it some to India, some to Russia, some other countries, because it is under sanctions. So even if Iran exports zero, it shouldn't make a big difference on the price of oil. And I think what we're seeing right now, price of oil hasn't moved that much since the beginning of the war, because Israel's been very, very careful not to hit infrastructure that pertains to global oil supply or that may lead to global oil supply disruptions. Iran being a tyranny, being very backward, investing most of its money in the ballistic missile infrastructure and the nuclear project does not refine its own oil. Can you believe? I mean, this is a country with so much oil that actually exports crude and buys back refined oil. So the refineries we hit and the energy targets we took are all related to the Revolutionary Guard and the infrastructure of the regime. So I think that's very important to understand how those play out. The Israeli refinery was closed for 30 days after two significant hits. That doesn't really impact the Israeli energy economy if the war does not, I would say, prolong beyond 30 to 35 days. So, so far so good when it comes to, I would say overall the Israeli market, you know, food supplies, water, energy, we haven't had any shortage so far. So I think that's very, very important. And maybe to conclude that's kind of dynamics of why is it that Israel's faring so well? Democracies will forever fare better than tyrannies. In these dynamics, there are working institutions. The home front command gets to the sites in the middle of Tel Aviv or to Rishonitzi and Pattayam where the ballistic missiles have hit directly. Residential buildings arrive really fast. The casualty rate is extremely low. So I think the institutions of an Israeli democracy that's working are proving themselves to be extremely resilient. Whereas on the tyranny side, propaganda people don't know the truth. Iran has withheld WhatsApp and any other social media from its citizens and Internet. We saw Elon Musk committing to allowing Starlink to operate. It's very hard because they don't have the infrastructure on the ground. But overall, tyranny versus democracy, from a macro perspective, I would bet my dollars on the democracy and especially after what we saw in the last six days.
- [25:00]
Michal Ivram
And I'm going to add another point here which I think just adds to everything you're saying, and that's that Israel has had, unfortunately, practice since October 7th. Right. So I've talked to a few tech companies, just kind of asking, you know, how are you guys dealing with. Because it is constant disruptions. Right. And, and it's fascinating that despite everything, they've been accustomed to it, they've had to do it before. And they know how to just delegate and offload workloads to their partners in the US and you know, Development centers everywhere that they have. And people are resilient. And so we're seeing that in the workforce, even though of course, everybody's, you know, everybody who can is working from home other than essential workers. This isn't new, right?
- [25:46]
Yonatan Adiri
Yeah. Look, this goes back to two things. That's the fourth dimension. That's the fundamentals. Right. Israel is a $1 to three and a half shekel economy. Iran is a $1 to 42,000 officially, but really one to a million, $1 to a million Iranian tomans. Right? The fundamentals of the economy, its capacity to rely on partners. To your point, it's the level of integration to the global economy provides Israel with that capacity of resilience. And maybe one last point. I think what we're witnessing is the maturity of a new national security doctrine in Israel. Whereas for 25 years, the villa in the jungle thought process of like, we're behind the border, you know, we don't initiate, allowed for our adversaries to build this ring of fire around us and to activate it at their own volition. In the last 18 months, we've seen Israel gradually kind of building a new national security strategy, which I call the friction doctrine. So we increase friction. We didn't just go out into Gaza. It took us three to four weeks to figure out how to do that. We didn't go into Lebanon and Hezbollah only nine months after they've, you know, kind of created a lot of bleeding for Israeli military infrastructure. And we didn't, you know, significantly respond after the beeper thing, like things gradually happened. And so the Israeli economy and the Israeli public kind of figured out how to live with that. I think, though, that when it comes to Iran, it's different. First of all, level of interruption and damage is higher. But Israelis feel, if I can sort of represent that, but I think it's sort of an overarching kind of feeling, this is our last fight. This Iran is behind everything we suffered in the last 18 months. And the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu decided Thursday night, with all the political bickering and him being unpopular and so on and so forth, the public rallied behind him and rallied behind this military campaign because we do understand everything we've been going through in the last year and a half had one brain, had one heart, had one sort of driving hand, and that's in Tehran. And so people are kind of taking a deep breath. This week has been harder than the previous, you know, 65, 70 weeks, no doubt. But people understand that that's sort of the price to pay for lifting this Iranian octopus from our shoulders.
- [28:02]
Michal Ivram
So let's wrap up here, Yonatan, with a little bit of a look toward the future. You know, everything we discussed pretty much up until now is a look and an analysis of what we're seeing currently. A lot of questions on what's next and where things go economically depending on that. And I think that the obvious, you know, big question is, what does the US do next? What's the US Involvement? Because obviously you mentioned this earlier, that will impact how long this takes when it ends. And so I guess, you know, for starters, just give a really quick take on what you think the possible scenarios are from US Involvement going forward.
- [28:39]
Yonatan Adiri
There is no positive resolution, I would say, that is finite. Nothing is finite, but kind of gets you to the finite line. Without either an Israeli campaign on Fordeau or an international decision to support led by the US President Trump was reluctant for a number of days to opine and to provide his opinion. I think yesterday we saw. That was Tuesday. We saw a change in the rhetorics. I think what's important is what President Trump had to say to Tucker Carlson and some other wings of the party to kind of say, I'm in charge. I'm the commander in chief. This is not about politics. This is about Iran not having a nuclear weapon. I campaigned on that.
- [29:17]
Michal Ivram
I say what America first means.
- [29:20]
Yonatan Adiri
Exactly. Owning the narrative. Right? So for me, that's a very interesting point. I would say if I had to kind of capture where we are right now. We are in a Hiroshima moment. Remember how Hirohito, the Emperor of Japan, was basically told, unconditional surrender. You'll be able to live, you'll be able to lead your country, but under an unconditional surrender. And when he persisted in not surrendering, the atomic bomb landed in Japan. And folks don't remember, but there was an interval of a few days before the second bomb hit. So the obstinance of Emperor Hirohito is, I think, reflective of what we're seeing right now from Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran. So I think what the president's been doing over the last 48 hours is to basically drive a similar dilemma. So put Khamenei in Hirohito's shoes. You have a choice here. You can surrender unconditionally and there will be consequences, but the regime will not necessarily fall, because that's not our goal in this campaign. Our goal is to make sure you don't have a nuclear weapon. To which Khamenei answered a couple of hours ago, to quote Churchill, we shall never surrender. And you know, my Iranian grandfather used to say, for 3,000 years, he didn't call it Iranian. He called it farsis parasim. We, the Pharisees, lost all wars, but never lost a negotiation. And I think what I just said is, I'm not going to lose this negotiation. I'm not going to cave in. If it means my people are going to die for my honor as a supreme leader, then so be it. Now, what of that is theatrics and maybe in the back sort of channel, there is, I would say, another 24 hours until the president decides to act. I think there is. And I think he wants to see a capitulation. Absence of that, I would expect America to convene and for the president to make the decision that is best for America. And one last comment here, I side 100% with Prime Minister Netanyahu on this. He was asked, asked yesterday, should America do it? Does Israel ask America to do it? And Netanyahu said, our military plans are to do it ourselves and we leave for America to do what America finds at its best interest. And I think that's the way to look at it. And the Hiroshima dilemma that President Trump drove down to Tehran, I think is a very clever framing such that if there is any military action, it's very clear who made the decision. The ball is in Khamenei's hands.
- [31:43]
Michal Ivram
Well, for what it's worth, I am not seeing many people refer to President Trump as Taco this week. So there's that.
- [31:51]
Yonatan Adiri
Yep. You know, you can't prophesize. These are the tools through which I think we can and should look at the next 72 hours and sort of where we're going next.
- [32:04]
Michal Ivram
Well, we began our show with the numbers of the week, and as usual, we will end with our words of the week. And Yonatan, I'm gonna let you do the honors this week.
- [32:13]
Yonatan Adiri
So, Maru Shlomo, the founder of the bootstrapped $80 million exit base 44 from a few hours ago, published this on Twitter. And I think it is a quintessential Israeli resilient tech entrepreneur take. And here's what he has to say. I believe we have a real shot at building something transformative. The amount of love and support that base 44 and I received so far from the community has been unbelievable. We have everything we need to win and the backing of the best possible partner. And then he signed lfg, which is let's fucking go.
- [32:48]
Michal Ivram
I think we're in the middle of a war.
- [32:50]
Yonatan Adiri
We are in the middle of a war. This is an acquisition that is so indicative where the economy is going, where the ecosystem is going. And you see the strength and the resilience and positive attitude that is just striking and optimistic and inspiring from the team. So I think these are strong words of the week.
- [33:08]
Michal Ivram
Well, and speaking of positive attitude, I'm going to commend you, Yonatan. You're in a very, very tough situation. Being away from your wife and kids with everything going on and hoping you get home soon.
- [33:21]
Yonatan Adiri
She's amazing from a practical perspective. You know, she's leading it like a real leader. I don't think there's anything to be concerned on the practical side. Just emotionally. I want to be there for her. I want to be there for the kids.
- [33:33]
Michal Ivram
Lfg.
- [33:35]
Yonatan Adiri
Lfg, Exactly.
- [33:37]
Michal Ivram
All right, that is it for today's show. Thank you for tuning in to ARC Media's what's your number? We hope you found it interesting and if you did, please be sure to, like, subscribe rate review. You know the drill, but most importantly, please share it with others who you think will find it interesting. If you want to make suggestions or share your feedback, please reach out to us at what's your number At ARC Media.
- [34:08]
Yonatan Adiri
But yout Number is produced by Ilan Benatar and edited by Michalev Ram. Sound and video editing is by Martin Hurgo. Our theme music is by Midnight Generation. I'm Yonatan Adiri.
- [34:18]
Michal Ivram
And I'm Michal Avram. See you back 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.