Bonus Episode: The Defense Tech Revolution is Here - with Josh Wolfe

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It's 6:30 PM on Thursday, August 21st here in New York City. It's 1:30 AM on Friday, August 22nd in Israel. As Israelis turn to a new day, and as they eagerly await any news about a possible hostage deal. I wanted to share with you all a conversation I really enjoyed listening to. It's from one of the other original podcasts in the Ark Media family called What's Your Number? The What's Your Number podcast provides unique insights into the Israeli economy, tech, and business. It even has its own market index tracking publicly traded Israeli and Israeli-founded companies. It's hosted by Michal Levram, a longtime business reporter based in Paluato, who is editor-at-large of Fortune magazine. She also contributes to CNBC, and also Yonatan Nadiri, an Israeli tech entrepreneur who previously served as an advisor to former Israeli President Shimon Peres. On this episode, which aired last week, Michal and Yonatan talked to Josh Wolfe, who's co-founder of Lux Capital, a venture capital firm focused on deep tech and science-driven investments. I've known Josh Wolfe for a long time. I even remember when he was first raising the first Lux Capital fund. He now has about $5 billion under management. In his investing, he also puts an emphasis on defense tech and was one of the early backers of Anduril. Josh Wolfe also has a smart and dynamic framework for integrating our changing geopolitics into his investment strategy. I should also say that since October 7th, 2023, Josh Wolfe has been an especially outspoken and fearless voice on issues related to Israel and rising antisemitism over here. I've had many conversations with him about these topics. He cares deeply about America, America's role in the world, and Israel. He's a futurist who spends a lot of time, as I mentioned, thinking about the future of security and the future of warfare. So you can imagine why he's such a natural fit for a conversation with Arc Media. Mikhail and Jonathan asked him about all of this, and I thought the conversation was fascinating. Without further ado, here's Josh Wolfe on What's Your Number?

Today we're interviewing Josh Wolfe from Lux Capital. Josh, welcome to What's Your Number?

Great to be with you guys.

For those who are not familiar with Lux Capital, you were founded in New York City in 2007. The size of your last fund was $1.15 billion and you have over $5 billion assets under management. But I want to get beyond the numbers and have you tell people just who you are really at the core, because you've always done things a little bit differently at Lux. So tell us about why you founded the firm and what's made your approach stand out over the years.

So by the way, my number is, uh, I guess 40, which is, is how many years I've been obsessed with science fiction. And I always say that the gap between sci-fi and sci-fact is always shrinking. And so a lot of that is the inspiration behind Lux. About a third of what we do is, uh, healthcare, biotech, uh, med device, robotic surgery, things that would traditionally be in life sciences. Another third is aerospace defense, industrial manufacturing, things that sort of come out of the mechanical, physical engineering systems. And then the final third is core technology, which is more defined by what we don't do. So very little in like internet, social media, mobile ad tech, things that are much more sci-fi heavy. And then we do thesis-driven stuff, which is sort of my personal passion. I am very intellectually competitive. I like to understand what is the consensus in a market and what's the variant perception. What are the things that people haven't figured out? And then I have to understand why they haven't figured out so that I'm just not arrogant or aloof about it. Then we do people-driven, which is the great thing about venture, which is you back people and then you get to back their cadre of lieutenants and you do company after company with them. And then we also do special situations, which you never know when or where they're going to arise. But these are the kinds of scenarios that might be a corporate spinoff, a divestiture, a recap. And so, yeah, today we're a little under $5.5 billion. As you said, last fund, just under a billion two, and we will do everything from the first $100,000 into a company to the last $100 million.

I think for me, as an ex-entrepreneur back in the entrepreneur days and also on the government side, what stood out is you always had a transparent thesis, be it a quarterly report that you share or, you know, kind of broad strokes of geopolitics that informed your subsequent investment. You were very open about it. To me, the elemental energy was like one big thesis that came around, —in your ability to kind of put yourself ahead of the curve on, for instance, the peace dividend concept around Iran and the region. We just had Azerbaijan and Armenia kind of make a step forward in that. Tell us a bit about why and how you feel comfortable sharing your thesis kind of out there at the open with its geopolitical components as you build the deal flow or kind of attract the right type of opportunities for the fund.

Well, when you share a thesis, it's generally because you're out there sending a beacon signal of light and hoping to attract entrepreneurs. And most of the things that we like to fund are not things of the thing du jour. I always say that there's a 5-year psychological bias where everybody wants to be invested today where they should have been 5 years ago. And so our jobs and sort of the raison d'être of Lux is figure out where should we be investing today that 3, 4, 5 years hence our competitors and our peers are going to want to be investing. And so we always like to say, as every venture investor likes to say, that they're contrarian. But of course when everybody's contrarian, then you're not. And so we always like to say we actually want people to agree with us just later. So on your point, Elemental Energy, this was what I rebranded nuclear because if nuclear energy was discovered today, people would be running around like, oh my God, this is magic. We're able to extract energy from the nucleus of an atom. And like, you know, it just, it would feel like utter magic. But, you know, we had a bunch of issues from Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, an entire generation that sort of lost the zeitgeist. I think that is coming back slowly as the younger generation that actually are pro-nuclear and pro-green and pro-environment and zero carbon and all that realize the virtues of it. And the crazy thesis we had back in the day, this now goes back 15 years was while everybody else was focused on clean and green and alternative energy, nobody was focused on nuclear. And the biggest unsolved problem with nuclear is what do you do with the waste? And so we decided to start a company that was doing high-tech nuclear waste cleanup, really focused on two markets. One, the domestic production for nuclear power. And so you had 104 domestic nuclear reactors and 440 globally, and there was low-level nuclear waste for every one of those plants. Maybe you make a million to $2 million per plant. That could be a few hundred million dollar business. But the bigger market was pre and post Cold War bomb making cleanup. And so we started a company, locked up the best talent, the best technologies, and then frankly got very lucky when Japan got very unlucky because this little company that we started named Kurion after Madame Curie became the only company picked for the cleanup. And, um, that was a fund maker for us very early on. So sort of validating of having a contrarian thesis, putting the team, the technology together, financing it, and then, you know, ultimately executing and negotiating the sale. So yeah, when we put out crazy theses, we're often trying to say If anybody's working on this problem, come in and find us. Okay.

I want to ask you about, I think, a really good example of this 5-year psychological bias that you mentioned, and that's your investment pretty early on in Anduril in 2017. This is before everybody was talking about this big boom, FinTech. It's pre-Russia, Ukraine, obviously pre-October 7th. So walk us through the decision. What was the thesis there? And why did you guys decide to invest in Anduril so early?

Well, let me give you the post-reality narrative, which isn't true. First, we did a deep DCF model, discounted cash flow, and we analyzed the market comparables and we summed total the enterprise value of the top 10, you know, okay. And the reality is a good friend of mine who's a partner at Founders Fund, Trey Stevens, who had worked at Palantir and was, um, early at NSA and was just very interested in, hey, is there an opportunity for physical kinetic thing in defense that's like Palantir? And we had long invested in physical kinetic related things, but nothing to the scale or ambitions of this. And he said over, we debate whether it was breakfast or brunch or lunch at Balthazar in SoHo in New York. He's like, I'm going to be starting this company with Palmer Luckey. And Palmer Luckey in particular embodied one of the great attributes that I love universally across any sector or any company that we invest in, which was chips on shoulders, put chips in pockets. And Palmer had recently been fired from Meta after selling Oculus to them for several billion dollars, became a billionaire himself. And had fu views after making fu money. And he decided, I want to build a real-life Stark Industries out of Iron Man. I want to build the great next-gen defense company that doesn't really exist. At Balthazar over brunch, I said, I'm in. And we became founding investors alongside Founders Fund and some others in Anduril. And initially was focused on one application, which was border protection. So contracts with the CBP. This was at the time, by the way, when Trump was like, build the wall. And I'm not a Trump voter. The idea was that they were going to attract the best and the brightest. And we went from a, I don't know, sub-50 or from a $60 million valuation in the founding round to now $30 billion plus and nearly $2 billion in revenue in 7 years. And it's just been an amazing success story and an element of cool, by the way. Super cool.

I mean, just the product launches, the animation, it made it cool to go back to doing defense. In Israel, defense tech is a big part of the economy. But I think what Andrew did is very much beyond the products, the science, and the impact. They made it cool for engineers to go out there and say, yeah, I'm going defense tech, I'm gonna work for Anduril. There was an ad, I think last year of why not to work at Anduril or something like that. Someone's doing a great job there, and I think it's critical to attract talent to defense tech this way.

They're a mix of sort of irreverence and snark, and part of that is rooted in the ethos of we're not gonna be one of the big cost-plus contractors. We're gonna use large equity dollars and hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to fund programs, win competitively, and then deliver to the warfighters. So absolutely. And on the Israel point, it's very interesting because, you know, everybody serves. There's this great sense of camaraderie, this incredible culture facing existential threat that the U.S. doesn't face or hasn't faced really in 3 generations or 2 generations. And so the idea of the U.S. being a victim of its own success in many ways that I think creates present-day vulnerabilities when rising stock markets and everybody, you know, or reasonable portion of the population, you know, living high on the hog. That's why as a culture you get what you celebrate and we celebrate celebrities and you get Paris Hiltons and, and, you know, Britney Spears and, and nonsense kind of stuff and Kanye and Puffy and all this stuff. And, and I think now you're starting to see a return to people saying, wait a second, you know, I don't want to just focus on ads and hacking people's attention and I want to do matter that matters, which is sort of a mantra we have at Luxe. I think people look and you go back to Americans that have read some of Dan Senor's books and, and just this idea of really having deep, meaningful connection to your people and your community and the sense of patriotism. It's been lacking really since like World War II in the United States. And that feels something that is reignited, unfortunately, because of global events and something that's very special. So for us, it's a big thrust. We've made our first investments in Israel beginning, I want to say, a year and a half ago. And we've now done 4, 2 kinetic defense companies, 2 cyber companies, and we'll probably do another 10 over the next 2, 3 years. And, uh, very bullish. I truly believe this is like greatest generation in Israel, you know, born literally out of fire and existential threat.

I want to go back to just kind of your broader view of defense tech and where it's going, because it sounds like the Anduril investment was more on like the people thesis side of things. You wanted to invest in Palmer Luckey, but tell us more broadly, where are things going for people who haven't been following the sector super closely?

Thesis is unfortunately the world is not a kumbaya safe place, that there are bad actors that want to do bad things to good people. And to fight that, you need better people with better technology. So that to me is the first and foremost sort of philosophical principle. We have what was a 50-company defense industrial base in the United States going into the '80s. And with the decline of the Soviet Union and sort of winning the Cold War, you know, there was this famous Last Supper where the Secretary of Defense and leaders in government basically pulled together some of the top companies and said, this is it. You're going to see declining defense budgets as a percentage of GDP. And so you got to get your acts together and start merging. And they did. And you went from 50 down to 5 between combinations, acquisitions, and some failures. And that really created oligopolistic industry structure. And only now when you're seeing versus a peer adversary, which we didn't have for arguably 30 years with the Soviet Union in disarray and the Baltic States not really a threat. And you saw the rise of China in part because of us as we outsourced so much of our industrial manufacturing capabilities start to rise, whether it was shipbuilding, aircraft, munitions production. And those are against what I would consider major adversaries for us in the United States, which are CRINC, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea. And of course, Iran and that sort of octopus that has all of proxies and dedicated to the existential erasure of Israel has been an enormous threat. So that is the backdrop of demand, which are bad people that want to do bad things. And you need defensive capabilities that deter them and deter them into understanding that you cannot and will not win. And so equipping warfighters, women and men on the front lines, whether that's with intelligence capabilities, kinetic capabilities, shared allied vehicles and platforms to be able to deliver lethality when necessary. Is just going to be unfortunately for mankind and then fortunately for those of us who get to sleep soundly at night because our warfighters don't, a long-term trend and way more important than, you know, I don't know, video games or ads.

Would you agree that there is a culture also of support for the people in the front, right? That is not in big corporates, but is actually people, you know, the more here in Israel, it is that way, knowing that the best and brightest are investing in you when you're in the front line. That it's cool, that it's not just big corporates. There's a cultural element to a broader defense tech base. You know, you're seeing now the chancellor in Germany saying, "We're going to be the biggest army in Europe by 2030," but then his people don't want to fight. In every survey, it's like 50, 40% of the people don't want to defend their country. How do you tie, you know, the breadth of startups in the space to a broader cultural change as it pertains to defense?

It's a recognition of common threats and enemies. And so war is always, I mean, two of our partners, you know, serious military and diplomatic people. One is Tony Thomas, who is the 11th commander at SOCOM and oversaw 90,000 people in 90 countries. Another is Brett McGurk, who was in the past four White Houses and most recently ending with the Biden administration after serving Trump and Obama and Bush too, with really focused on Gaza and Hamas and Israel and, and his counterpart in Lebanon, Amos Hochstein, all brilliant people, but they will always say that war is the will of the people. You know, that to me is where technology and the defense space plays a role in that the people that want to work on these problems like Palmer and all the people that are drawn to Anduril, yes, they want to make a fortune. Yes. But they want to make history and they want to be involved in really protecting country. And I think that that's something noble and bold and relatively new in the past generation. Remember the roots of venture capital go back to defense. Like defense was the cause célèbre of venture capital. It was why we had computers calculating trajectory of missiles and projectiles. It's why Sunnyvale became home to Lockheed and, you know, built up this big base. It wasn't just Hewlett-Packard computers, you know, in a garage when the sort of fanciful narrative— it really, all of venture capital in general, Dorio, started with defense focus. So a little bit back to the future, it's a return to the roots. And as you note, a cultural zeitgeist that people want to fight and defend. You saw this after September 11th in the U.S., particularly in New York City. So many people enlisted, whether it was a Navy intelligence or, uh, on the war on terror. I think you just see it now again, whether it's China, Russia, Iran, North Korea. Seeing even things in the commercial space like drones that people use on an everyday basis and seeing how far superior the DJI Mavic drones are to anything that the US had in a capability woke people up. And then when you have law enforcement and first responders and military that are using these Chinese drones until they were restricted not to, people are like, wait a second, we have a serious problem here. We've been asleep at the wheel. So culture pushes forward talent, which attracts capital in the one case, and in the other case, external exogenous threats to your livelihood motivates people to say, wait a second, we have to do something. And that particularly in Israel is what has been, you know, sadly massively inspiring.

You know, at the same time, there's also a cultural backlash, right? I just walked by Palantir's Palo Alto offices and they've got windows smashed and red paint thrown all over the building, which happened, I guess, after one of the recent protests. You know, Jonathan was talking about the percentage of people in Germany who do not want to serve, and you can have all the great tech that you want, but ultimately if people don't feel that sense of both real threat and patriotism to their country, like, how do you think about all that? Do you think about it as you're making investments?

Yeah, I mean, for us, the first lens that we look at is a moral one, which is, are we reducing human suffering? And it's easy when we're funding a cancer drug, although wrought with cancer clinical trials are that people may die so that you can save millions. It's no different. And I remember one of our early investments, which was on a visual or computer vision AI capability for aerial drones and planes. I actually said this is a moral discriminating positive, meaning the higher your resolution technologically to discriminate between a person that is walking home with a pickaxe or a shovel coming from farming or mining to deliver food to their home and take care of their children. Versus a guy that's going with an AK-47 to shoot up a school of girls, that is a clear moral discrimination. And the higher your resolution to discriminate an AK-47 from a pickaxe, you know, the higher your moral resolution to be able to make good decisions. And for particularly for warfighters who are charged with the God call to be able to decide, you know, do we take that shot? Do we eliminate somebody who cannot be negotiated with? They are hellbent on doing something bad to good people. You want to equip them with better technology, which was, by the way, during your war, our war, this sort of counterintuitive idea that you're not going to give precision munitions, but instead give these imprecise munitions, which cause more harm. That's an immoral decision. The second piece of this is popular opinion. And there's going to be some popular opinion that is totally against war and always has been and should be. I mean, I think when you talk to generals and military folks, they are the first and foremost people who are against war because they're the ones that have to visit the people that are under their command and the families to report that somebody has died and lost a limb. And it's horrific. They know firsthand the horrors and the tragedy of war, and they're the ones that are most anti-war. They're not warmongers. Some of those people that are protesting, I consider to have good moral instincts, but are relatively naive about geopolitics and naive about bad people with bad intent. So my view is at Lux, we have a moral dimension. Are we reducing human suffering? And it's easy for me to identify that when we're funding great people with good morals trying to deliver technologies to the warfighters. And I can have both sympathy and empathy and understand the people who are protesting these things. But I just think that they're really on the wrong side of history.

Let's, uh, let's pivot to Israel. So tell us a little bit, like, we all know the edge that Israeli tech, Israeli startups and founders have had when it comes to cyber. But if you think about defense tech as we're kind of currently defining it and some of the newer technologies that we're seeing, what do you see as Israel's edge here, if at all? What is it? What could it be?

Well, for us, our story really started with two individuals and individuals, at least one that had had been on the front lines post-October 7th and returned and seen gaps in capabilities and saw an opportunity to use cutting-edge tech to solve those. And that was Alon Dror and Hamital Meridor. And we became investors in Kela, and I'm super bullish on them as individuals and the team that they've recruited. And now with technologies deployed on borders and beyond, but that was really the starting point. And it was very reminiscent of the early Anduril days, because when you talk to, if you were doing diligence and you talk to somebody in the US primes, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Lockheed, L3, they would all say, oh, I mean, you know, these guys might be cute, you know, small upstarts or whatever, but they massively handicapped their ability to win. And I remember senior people introducing me to senior people at Rafael and Elbit and IAI, Israel's main three, and you'd get the exact same thing. Oh, these guys are cute, but they're never going to. And I think it's one of those Gandhi-like moments where, you know, first they laugh at you and then they fight you. And then they join you and then you win. I'll give you one anecdote about Anduril. Peter Thiel and I were on a panel at the Reagan National Defense Forum right before COVID I think it was late fall, December of 2019. And all the brass are there. The Secretary of Defense are there. We're dressed in suits. Palmer Luckey shows up in his hallmark Hawaiian shirt, cargo pants, flip-flops, and people are joking, considering him a joke, you know, passing around his Comic-Con cosplay costumes. You're like, this guy's not serious. I would guess that between 1% and 5% of the people that attended there have now applied for and probably been rejected for jobs at Anduril. They went from being like not taken seriously to being taken very seriously. And I think every small Israeli defense tech company is going to be able to face that upward hill battle that suddenly seems wrought with a high slope, but suddenly has the propulsion of foreign investment, which I think is a validating thing and an incredible base of talent, including people that are leaving some of the big 3 primes. We funded our second company, which is going to come out of stealth in a few months, but mostly focused on one of the big directional arrows of progress in warfare, which is large, attritable systems and the ability to send economically asymmetric swarms of things to combat an enemy and overwhelm its defenses. And I think that's something that's not only important for Israel, historically focused on the Iranian threat, but also thinking about, uh, allies and be it India or elsewhere that I think, you know, could become big customers. So I'm just generally very bullish about human capital, the financial capital that follows them, technological invention capability. And remember, small startups, they, they don't have the luxury of having long-term contracts or cash flow or all the things that can make a big bureaucratic sclerotic incumbent be lazy and slow. And so you have to be fast and nimble. I'm just like really inspired by every single person I met.

I think that's a great point in terms of the demand side. How do you reconcile procurement? It's a big deal now in the White House. In Israel, it's been a lot easier, and there is now a $30, almost $35 billion defense budget, some of which will go— these are meaningful dollars. You also expect the demand side to shift, or is this going to be like the next 5 years, like the FDA-type dynamics, and then it will roll out in, I don't know, 2030 and onwards?

I think that there's going to be a lot of process reform. To be able to do rapid fielding of technologies. You're seeing small bouts of that with the US, whether it's DUI or some others, but you're starting to see major programmatic wins and congressional budget items being awarded to startups in, in significant way. These aren't small SBIR grants, you know, they're $100 million plus wins and they're important. So I think the same thing will happen in Israel in part because there's a model now of this move fast, outcompete, win. And for the U.S., that's everything from manufacturing ships to 155 shells to autonomous aircraft to drones to satellite and space capabilities. And I think for Israel, it's going to be the same thing. I remember last April when the major attack happened with 300 ballistic missiles and drones and whatnot. Everybody else is going to look at this defense and say, I want that, you know, whether it's Guyana against Venezuela or India against Pakistan. And I think that's the case, you know, whether it's David's Sling Arrow 3, Everybody wants these capabilities and Israel is going to be careful about who and what they work with, but I think show a superior capability kinetically and the demand is going to be there.

So Josh, before we let you go, I do want to ask you, on the one hand, yes, we've gotten to unfortunately see a lot of Israel's capabilities on full display, right? Over the last close to couple of years and especially with the recent war with Iran. And then on the other hand, we're also seeing a lot of elements that are increasingly isolating Israel. And, you know, we just saw the German chancellor saying that they're halting some defense exports to Israel. We're seeing all sorts of threats of potential boycotts and things like that. What are you hearing? You know, you're out there, you've got your LPs, your own investors. Are there concerns that you have going forward or is it all bullish, Josh Wolfe, all the time? What are you hearing and what are you worried about, if at all?

We have not had a single concern from a limited partner about investments in Israel. Israel. And in some cases, we had such high demand for some of our companies related to defense and with exposure to Israel that people wanted us to create a separate vehicle to add on to some of these. So if anything, we're facing a surplus of demand and support. And a lot of that is the cultivation of our investors and who they are. And so that's been a positive. You know, I remember I was with Dan Senor. We know that guy. He's awesome. But, uh, I was with Dan, I think the first week after October 7th. And I remember that somebody posed a question to him and the Qatari ambassador was there at the time, which was interesting. Somebody said, you know, what does this mean? And he said, look, the era of deterrence is over. And there's 3 things that are going to determine Israel's response. And he was pressing about this. Number 1 is going to be, like I said, as relates to our general friends and partners, the will of the people. And right now, a country that was divided significantly this summer, and of course still is going to be divided, which is the great virtue of a democracy, are unified right now to get our hostages back and to deter this threat, an existential threat. Number 2 is going to be the Arab street. And the countries that either have become part of the Abraham Accords or on the cusp of it are not drawn towards Israel because it is weak and vulnerable, but because it is an economic, technological, and military juggernaut. And I thought that that was profound. But number 3 was going to be world opinion. And the fact that world opinion in that first week, which to me was quite honestly the thing that radicalized me after October 7th, it wasn't what happened in Israel. It's what happened in the US on October 8th. And to see the placards and the signs and all these things and the weaponization of the words and genocide and apartheid. And baby killer. Oh, it was so clearly an information operation that before Israel had even stepped foot in Gaza, before a single shot had been fired, before there had been any counterreaction, before there'd been a decision from the war cabinet of what was going to happen, that world opinion— and I realized that Israel was going to win the kinetic war and they were probably going to lose the information propaganda war. And I think that Israel is identifying this now. I think leaders increasingly understand that there has been a deficit of attention here. It's hard. You can't focus on all fronts at all times, but the information sphere is now one that has to be contended with. You mentioned Europe. I think when France made their announcement they were going to recognize a Palestinian state came ahead of the Arab nations at all, and I think they knew and wanted to front run that to sort of win brownie points. You have a 20% Muslim population or 10% Muslim population in France, 0.5% Jewish population. So it's politically expedient. It makes a ton of sense. And I think When you look at the other European countries, all of them were like, oh, we're suspending sales and like you win brownie points. Like Europe had very little to do with the defense of Israel during any of this, very little to do in the Gaza operations. And so it's inconvenient. It's uncomfortable to watch. It's unpleasant for Israelis or even for diaspora Jews that might travel to Europe and wear a chai or star of David or, but it's relatively insignificant. And so maybe I'm being naive, but I think in the next year or two, that will abate because Western democracies will realize that this is the canary in the coal mine that they are facing. And the great threat really is violent religious extremists. And especially when you're seeing a flood of porous borders that have, you know, brought people into London and Paris and elsewhere that don't want to be British or don't want to be French, they're going to contend with something that they've been warned about and, and frankly, have been warned about by people like Abdullah bin Zayed of the UAE and others. Know it first and foremost. And so this is the world's next fight. And Israel has been the tip of the spear on this. And so while it's uncomfortable and unpopular, it's necessary. And, um, I just think the weaponization of public opinion, so much of the lies and it's, it's disheartening, but I think Israel has up to this point done the right thing of basically being inured to it. There's nothing that public criticism is going to do to say, no, please sit back, sit down and die.

No. Uh, no, and I agree. I think also geopolitically, Josh, between India, Azerbaijan, and the UAE, there are partners that would— that stood by Israel throughout a very hard time. I mean, I was just telling a news correspondent here about the Azerbaijan-Armenia thing. She said, why should we care? I said, listen, every second time you fuel your car, 50% of the fuel in Israel comes from Azerbaijan, and it continued to flow throughout the war even though it came through Turkey. This partnership and the Abraham Accords sustained and to an extent even flourished during the war should signal to those on the right, on the right, meaning, you know, not on the political right, but basically those who want to get it right, you know, what it looks like, what the visionary Islamic, you know, progress-driven administration in Azerbaijan, in the UAE looks at this.

They want peace, they want prosperity, they want access to technology. And, you know, unfortunately, you know, there's a small minority of people that still are quite very numerous that do hold religious ideologies that will cause them to commit, you know, horrific crimes. And they are a real threat globally. But I am optimistic, particularly when you look at like a counter Belt and Road Initiative in China, like IMEC, you know, not enough people are talking about IMEC or I2U2 where you have India, Israel, US, and UAE. You have the India-Mideast Corridor, but the flow of talent, infrastructure, capital, energy technology from India to Saudi and UAE to Israel through the Mediterranean up to Europe, and then conversely, particularly with a degraded, if not, you know, seriously degraded Iran, the probability of that happening and seeing tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars of investment there from large-scale infrastructure to growth investments to venture investments, I think is really optimistic for the world. And I think it will be a peace corridor. I don't know if Saudi normalization happens in 2 months or 2 years or how long it takes, but they probably bring Indonesia with them. You have a huge part of the Muslim world that can see that we can coexist. And I don't know why the world is not demanding, as they did during the Vietnam War, for peace and coexistence instead of the zero-sum endless thing that just hasn't worked for 80 years for people that are opposed to Israel.

Well, I don't know if you know this, Josh, but imek is basically Jonathan's love language. Anyways, thank you so much. This was just awesome. Thank you. Thanks, Josh.

Great to be with you. Love listening to you.

Thanks a lot.

If you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did, please follow What's Your Number? You can find it on any podcast player or subscribe at our website, arkmedia.org. That's arkmedia.org. And also, just a reminder, if you value what we're doing here at Call Me Back and Ark Media and you want to support our mission, please subscribe to our weekly members-only show, Inside Call Me Back. Inside Call Me Back is where Nadav Eyal, Amit Segal, and I respond to challenging questions from listeners and have the conversations that typically happen after the cameras stop rolling. Inside Call Me Back will come out every week as an extension of our regular Thursday episode. To subscribe, please follow the link in the show notes, or you can go to arkmedia.org. Again, that's A-R-K media .org. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Arc Media's executive producer is Adam James Levin-Aredi. Sound and video editing by Martin Huergo and Marian Calis Burgos. Our director of operations, Maya Rockoff. Research by Gabe Silverstein. Our music was composed by Yuval Semoh. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.