Each week on their new podcast “What’s Your Number?” Michal Lev-Ram and Yonatan Adiri take a deep dive into their favorite topic — data — to examine Israel’s economy from a global perspective.
From energy independence to U.S.-Saudi relations to laser defense tech, the nature of the numbers differ from week to week. But here’s one data point that remains constant when these economics wonks record an episode: the 7,400 miles between Lev-Ram’s home in Palo Alto and Adiri’s in Tel Aviv.
Lev-Ram, born in Rehovot, moved with her family to the Bay Area at age 8. Raised by parents who worked in tech, Lev-Ram became a business journalist and built her career at Fortune magazine. But after 15 years at the publication, the Israel-Hamas war put her on a new path. She decided to step away from her full-time work at Fortune and merge her Israeli American background with her focus on economics into a new endeavor.
“It’s called ‘What’s Your Number?’ for a reason,” Lev-Ram said of the podcast. “These aren’t just anecdotes. We’re really looking at making this as data driven as possible.”
Adiri, whose parents immigrated to Israel from Iran and Iraq, grew up in Tel Aviv. A precocious child, Adiri graduated from Israel’s Open University at age 17 with a degree in international relations and then began his service in the Israel Defense Forces, serving as an operations officer of the IDF’s foreign relations division.
After the army, Adiri worked in the U.S. as a counterterrorism researcher and then became an adviser to Israeli political leader Shimon Peres. Later, Adiri shifted from public service to entrepreneurship, founding Healthy.io, an Israeli health care startup.
“What’s Your Number,” which launched April 30, is available on all podcast platforms. Video versions of the episodes stream on YouTube. The podcast is part of Ark Media, whose president Dan Senor is best known for co-authoring the 2009 book “Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle.”
Episodes of “What’s Your Number” consist of discussions between Lev-Ram and Adiri, as well as interviews. For example, their June 11 episode, “(Real) Jewish Space Lasers,” featured Oded Ben David, chief technology officer at ELOP, the electro-optical division of Elbit Systems, discussing Israel’s recently declassified Iron Beam aerial defense system.
When J. spoke with Lev-Ram and Adiri on June 20, the war between Israel and Iran was at full bore. Lev-Ram was home in Palo Alto, while Adiri was in New York City, unable to return home due to the shutdown of Ben Gurion Airport. He finally made it back to Tel Aviv on June 22.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
J.: First off, before I get into your backgrounds and the podcast, can I hear a little bit about what you have gone through in the last week?
Yonatan: I left Israel on [June 11] on a three-day mission in Rome with a couple of business partners. We had a few important presentations there with the government. And as I was in the beautiful city of Rome, my phone rang at 2 a.m. My wife called saying, “Look, something weird is going on. There’s been a siren.” My wife made aliyah to Israel from Switzerland. We’ve been there for 17 years. So she’s been through rounds of hostilities. And she wasn’t sure what was going on. So I immediately woke up trying to understand.
Then I realized what’s happening. And then the next thing I knew, I couldn’t go back. So I flew to Geneva, which is where my wife is from and where we have a place. I was supposed to be in Washington, D.C., [on June 17]. So I just flew out from Geneva to Washington and was there for two days. Now I’m in New York.
It wasn’t an easy week. My wife’s amazing. We have a great safe room. Kids are great, but you want to be there for them emotionally. And rockets are falling 500 yards from our house, already three times, quite significant blasts. It’s an emotional toll above and beyond everything else. And you want to be there for your life partner, for my parents, for my brother, my nephews, my kids.
It’s a nightmare. Michal, you’re here in the Bay Area, but you have loved ones in Israel. Your phone must be going off quite a lot with alerts.
Michal: A lot of checking in with loved ones back in Israel. I have a sister who’s there with her family, and then almost all of the extended family is there and a lot of friends, of course. So just a lot of checking in on people. I’m in Palo Alto. This is my home. I literally landed at SFO an hour and a half ago from Charleston because some of my husband’s family is there, and they had a mini reunion, which was very weird with everything going on. Honestly, we almost canceled the trip. It just didn’t feel right to me. But we went, and I’m glad we went.
The reason I bring it up is because what was striking to me being there — I was walking around a little downtown area on one of the beaches there in Charleston, and there are storefronts there that have “We stand with Israel” signs and Israeli flags. And we walked by a wall of one restaurant where they had all the pictures of all the hostages. And I was almost brought to tears seeing this because in the Bay Area, you don’t see that, and it’s just inviting vandalism at the very best, right? It was really, really, especially this week, so heartwarming and so encouraging.
Diving into the work you two are doing with “What’s Your Number?” — how do you both know each other?
Michal: Funny enough, Yonatan and I were connected several years back because Fortune was looking at potentially trying to do a tech conference in Israel. It never came to fruition, but the two of us were both very much invested in trying to make it happen. And then we were reconnected by Ark Media, which is the producer and distributor for our podcast. So it’s very serendipitous.
Where did the idea for “What’s Your Number?” come from?
Yonatan: I got a call from Ilan [Benatar], the producer, saying, no one’s telling the [Israeli] economic story in an effective, podcast-worthy kind of dynamic. The producer and the team there are so adept, and they’re so experienced in how to do this. We figured out the sound, the music, the whole thing took its own shape. And we had great support from the team to build it as our own.
I think we managed to create something that’s very organic and rings true to both of us. It fills a void of people wanting to understand the Israeli economy, not just startups and not just the “cool” stories, but in depth, in a way that is presented by someone like Michal, who’s known the scene for so long and has the ability to pitch it to the American ear. I think my responsibility here is to bring more of the Israeli angle and some of the stuff that I’ve done before and try to come up with numbers that tell a story.
Michal: The idea for this podcast was to look at the Israeli economy through a global lens, and that’s a really critical part of what we’re trying to do. There’s so much that’s going on now, politically, geopolitically, that feels like Israel is more and more isolated, at least according to certain stories you read. And I think that looking at the economic story, the opposite is true.
There’s so much more than tech also, but at its core, the innovation story, the cyber story, the defense tech story — increasingly, Israel is a really, really critical, integral part of a global economy, including a growing economy in parts of the Middle East. And I think we’re really trying to tell that story, and there are hurdles there too, for sure, but that’s the trajectory.
It’s a topic that both of us are obviously super passionate about. So I think it’s pretty easy and natural for us to be ourselves because it’s where our heart is. I think the fact that our brains can be in the same place as our heart is amazing. And it’s exactly what I want to be doing right now.