The Spiro Circle

I often reference in my episodes how I used to spend four hours transcribing my interviews. Hours of my day were spent sitting at my desk, listening to a few seconds, pausing, typing, and playing the next few. It was slow and repetitive until AI helped me produce transcripts within seconds. Initially, they were unreliable, but over the years they have become a formative part of my workflow. Consid...

Susanne Senoff recalls a time early in her security career when a former colleague would insist that meetings take place in his office. But the office was papered with lewd materials. HR let it stand, she recalled, because he was so good. “That would never happen now,” said Senoff, now CISO at Conga. Her point wasn't that the problem was solved. Senoff was speaking alongside two founders, Shahar B...

Building The Spiro Circle has made me think differently about what gives a media business its value. When Omri Hurwitz returned to the show, we discussed a reversal I find fascinating: how institutions that once dismissed podcasting are now investing heavily in it. Major media companies and investors are buying themselves into the studio. Traditional outlets are embracing the format on their own s...

Arona Maskil told me about a client whose chatbot could answer in 27 languages. Despite this, she recalled the client saying it still had not figured out “how to give feedback to our team in India without causing offense.” It captures a gap I suspect many of us have fallen into: translating a message is not the same as understanding how it will land. Maskil has spent more than 25 years in cross-cu...

In Greek mythology, a mortal king of Corinth, Sisyphus, was condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down each time. For eternity. The punishment was not the labor itself, but the absence of an end point. No finish line, endgame, or closure. Jonathan Langer, co-founder and CEO of Act Security, argues that the image fits much of modern cloud security. Security t...

Three years after October 7, the conversation about antisemitism reaches far beyond the immediate aftermath of the attacks. It touches universities, political movements, foreign funding, and the everyday decisions Jews make about belonging. This week, I spoke with Charles Asher Small about how those all connect, and what he believes institutions and Jewish communities should do next. Small leads t...

There was a moment in my latest conversation with startup psychologist Yael Daniely that surprised me. She described someone who walked into her clinic and asked to keep his laptop open so that Claude could run live for the entire session. “He came with Claude to the room and asked to keep Claude open because he must be in contact with Claude and give him [updates]… because Claude is working and h...

I recorded a conversation yesterday with Alexander Piskunov, a government AI advisor and founding partner at KAAN Ventures, at a strange little intersection of timing. UN Secretary-General António Guterres had just used his address to call for a multilateral AI risk framework. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei were preparing to appear before the Security Council. And President Trump, predictably, was te...

Uzi Krieger has jumped from planes, descended into underwater caves, and skied slopes steep enough to unsettle most people’s stomachs. When I asked what draws him to it, he put it down to a philosophy he lives by. “I think it’s a theme in life of being a little bit of an explorer,” he told me. “I don’t want to say ‘living on the edge’, but trying to see how far you can go, how hard you can push, a...

Well, here it is: Episode 100 of The Spiro Circle. When I recorded the first episode 18 months ago, I had a rough idea of what this show could be. I wanted it to be a place where long-form conversations about Israeli tech, geopolitics, or society could get broader attention. Now, with a growing audience across 20 countries and partnerships with international media channels like Forbes, I am proud...

For two decades, the winning formula in consumer tech was simple: maximize time on screen. Last month that formula got a multibillion-dollar price tag attached to it when Meta agreed to pay roughly $17 billion to settle a multistate lawsuit alleging Facebook and Instagram were deliberately engineered to be addictive to teenagers. Now, one Israeli investor thinks the backlash could create an openin...

Guy Katsovich and I sat across from each other in our shared studio a few weeks ago, discussing what happens when podcasting moves from the media ecosystem into the campaign trail. Let’s set the scene: We are both former journalists, now running separate podcast operations (one in English, one in Hebrew), and talking about what happens when an interview format becomes part of an election strategy....

America’s fight over data centers is becoming a mainstream political staple. Seven in ten Americans say they don’t want a data center near their home, and more people now believe these facilities harm their community than help it, according to recent polling cited by industry trackers. Opposition has more than doubled across 49 states over the past year, and in the first quarter of 2026 alone, an...

I’ll admit it upfront: I’ve tried alternative meat on my own barbecue, and they’ve never been exactly a slam dunk for me. So when I sat down with the Chunk Foods founder and CEO Amos Golan for this latest episode, I wasn’t chasing a hype piece on the wonders of foodtech. I’ve written those stories before. What I wanted to know was whether the economics of fake meat had finally changed. Turns out t...

Glilot Capital’s internal AI agent has a name and a full-time job - Elliot. It reads deal memos, surfaces founder meeting summaries, coordinates diligence advisors, and routes work across one of Israel’s most prominent VC funds. Amit Spitzer, Glilot’s CTO and CISO, built it largely on his own, without a dedicated budget, while running the fund’s security operations in parallel. “We need some super...

The week Gal Ordo joined Amazon Web Services as the Product Leader for AWS Security Hub, he did something his colleagues thought was unnecessary. Instead of using the internal templates that AWS provided to get the product up and running, he insisted on installing it from scratch the way a customer would - no shortcuts or help from the team that built it. But then he said it took him four to five...

Most VCs will tell you they invest in people . Push them further, and you’ll hear the same formula of exceptional team, large market, and right timing. It is recited so often it has become meaningless. But Yuval Ariav, Founder and Managing Partner of Symbol, doesn’t give me that answer. Ask him what he looks for in a founder, and he’ll acknowledge that integrity and grit matter, but then he sets t...

In cybersecurity, hesitation can be the most expensive decision a company makes. Shahaf Galili knows this not as a management theory, but as a lived operational reality forged across 22 years running offensive cyber units inside the Israeli military. “You always need to make decisions when you don’t have all the information,” says Galili, co-founder and CEO of Mars Security, a Tel Aviv-based threa...

While I was recording an episode with Toni Samson, co-founder and CEO of Arte Security, she told me it was important for companies and CISOs to “find your Mona Lisas.” It made me remember how a few thousand kilometers away, the actual home of the actual Mona Lisa had learned that exact lesson the hard way. Last October, thieves walked out of the Louvre with crown jewels worth more than $100 millio...

Israel’s cyber numbers from 2025 were staggering. We all know the big ones: Google acquired Wiz for $32 billion. Palo Alto Networks spent $25 billion to absorb CyberArk. ServiceNow bought Armis for $7.8 billion. When the final tally was complete, strategic mergers and acquisitions in the cybersecurity sector had reached $81 billion - more than four times the volume of the prior year, according to...

Israel isn't fighting one information war. It's fighting three. At least, that’s the takeaway I had when I read Digital Warrior : Inside Israel’s Battle for the Narrative After October 7 by Rachel Lester this week. Rachel served in the International Branch of the IDF Spokesperson's Unit, first on active duty, then in reserves from October 8th, 2023, editing and shaping video content for accounts w...

On July 8, the head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration sent a letter to the autonomous vehicle industry saying that AV developers had shown a “clear pattern” of driverless cars blocking ambulances and fire trucks, ignoring flares and flashing lights, and in some cases driving directly into active emergency scenes. While not technically naming Waymo, it was undeniably a focal pla...

Every day, billions of dollars move through the global payments system as people buy things online. And every day, a portion of those transactions gets reversed. Not through fraud in the traditional sense, but through disputes: a cardholder tells their bank they don’t recognize a charge, or that a service wasn’t as described, and the money often comes back to them almost immediately. Multiplied ac...

Days before Tal Shoham announced that his AI monetization startup Velocity had closed a $27 million Seed round, an independent tracker put a number on something the industry had only been speculating about: ChatGPT ads were showing up in roughly 26.5% of all replies globally, and 49% of replies in the United States . For Shoham, that timing is the proof of concept for his newest company and a sign...

Manny Marotta has a theory about why America’s 250th birthday felt subdued. It isn’t purely politics, though politics is tangled up in it. It’s the structure. There are simply too many feeds now, and not enough shared ones. And the ones that do break through to the masses get read as political, whether they mean to be or not. I sat down this weekend with Manny for the second time. He’s the creator...