Bonus Episode: Game-changing Tech for War & Peace - with Anne Neuberger

**Anne Neuberger** (0:04)
You are listening to an Ark Media podcast.

**Dan Senor** (0:21)
It's 4 p.m. on Friday, July 24th here in New York City. It's 11 p.m. on Friday, July 24th in Israel. As Israelis are already immersed in Shabbat.
For most of modern history, the technologies that reshape geopolitics belong to superpowers. Think nuclear US., industrialized UK., space racing with Russia. But that's no longer true. Today, a small country, sometimes even a small team of engineers, can build capabilities that once required the machinery of a superpower. Drones, artificial intelligence, cyber weapons, autonomous systems, commercial satellites. These aren't just supporting military power anymore. Increasingly, they are military power. And the barrier to entry keeps falling. Few people have watched that shift unfold from more angles than Anne Neuberger. Anne spent over a decade at the National Security Agency in the United States, rising to become the first director of its Cyber Security Directorate. She then moved to the White House, serving as Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology, shaping American policy on Cyber Warfare, AI, Quantum Computing, and Next Generation Telecommunications at the highest level.
Now she's crossed over from government to the private sector to venture capital, joining Andreessen Horowitz as a General Partner and Head of Global Affairs, sitting exactly at the intersection of National Security, Technological Innovation, and Capital, private capital, working with founders across healthcare, consumer, fintech, infrastructure, and beyond. That intersection matters nowhere more than in Israel, a frontline lab for defense technology, a major source of global innovation, and increasingly a target of political and financial pressure all at once, which raises the question at the center of today's conversation. As technology, capital, and geopolitics fuse together, what actually determines which countries and which companies come out on top?
This fascinating conversation was published last week on Ark Media's What's Your Number podcast, which covers the outsized impact of Israeli companies on the world stage, and the latest developments affecting Israel's own economy. It's co-hosted by Yonatan Adiri, an Israeli entrepreneur and Yael Wissner Levy, whose chief communications officer, Tenzi, which is a cybersecurity company in Israel. She's also a former speechwriter and journalist. Please make sure to subscribe to this monthly podcast from Ark Media. You can find a link to What's Your Number in today's episode description. Here's the conversation.

**Yael Wissner-Levy** (3:02)
Anne, welcome to What's Your Number.

**Anne Neuberger** (3:05)
It's wonderful to be here, Yael.

**Yael Wissner-Levy** (3:06)
I'd love to start with the first question about what we just talked about, major factors that create successful companies or countries in this new era. What would they be?

**Anne Neuberger** (3:16)
You know, it's interesting. I often think that small countries in rough neck of the woods with technical populations are really the ones that are set up for success. Why? Because sometimes if they're small, they can't waste resources. They really have to think about problems in the most economical way. And economics matters in national security.
Second, nothing creates that sense of urgency like being pursued and having an adversary who's at the top of their game. And finally, you know, it used to be that weapons were tanks and they still are, right? They were just produced for military. But today, some of the most cutting edge technologies are built in software and they adapt very, very quickly. So if you have a population that's trained and comfortable in that world, that's serving in your military and intelligence community that comes from that world, and ideally, if you have a reserve force that draws in that as well, those three components together really help a country and of course then its industrial base as well succeed, I think, with today's challenging threats.

**Yonatan Adiri** (4:14)
Okay, Anne, let's step back a minute and let's hear a bit more about you, given your impressive and varied bio at this point. And what do you think helped you advance? And what do you focus on intellectually and professionally to keep ahead, given how things change so fast in this era?

**Anne Neuberger** (4:31)
It's so true. You know, if I could summarize my background in the last 20 years, it's really been at the nexus between national security and technology, trying to gain insight into the threats, as well as what's happening in the technology space, and then ensure that we and our allies are at the top of our game in using technology to identify and to counter threats.
And that depends, right, because threats can come from countries, they can come from criminals, and they can come from transnational groups, terrorists, weapons traffickers, drug traffickers, who really try to blend into the noise. And increasingly that blend into the noise is also in a technological way, right, where they're using the same kinds of technologies everybody uses. So in the past, a satellite constellation and that kind of global visibility was only the remit of countries. Today countries or companies or criminals or terrorists can really buy satellite imagery in places around the world. So the edge between what it used to take to present a threat in terms of the investment of money, the investment of high-end capabilities has really now democratized, it's spread considerably. All you have to do is look at Ukraine using first-person video drones in order to, over time, take out Russia's Navy in the Black Sea to get a sense of how the nexus between tech and national security has changed a great deal.