VoIP to Brain Scanning: Lior Haramaty

When people are asking me how do I define myself, I say I'm a problem solver. By defining yourself as a problem solver, you're already defining that you have problems. But if you go completely unknown and you have no idea until it's too late, then it's just too late. Testing your brain or assessing your brain or detecting anything wrong with your brain should be as simple as taking your blood pressure.

Someone who came on the show said fear is a part of their pathway to peak performance. So the fear of the initial failure stops a lot of people. I don't see it that way. I see if I don't experience it, maybe I'll never get good at it, but at least I want to experience it and see what it is.

In this episode of Pathway to Peak Performance, Lior Haramaty, tech innovator extraordinaire, sound card, voice over IP innovator, as well as his latest work which is going to blow your mind. On top of that, he's got a great charity in the Gary Sinise Foundation. So, please, you're going to enjoy this one.

Welcome to the show, Lior Haramaty. It's so good to see you, my friend.

Welcome, John. Thank you very much for having me.

Oh, it's my pleasure. If there's anybody that I could ever think of that was really on the pathway to peak performance, it is you, my friend.

Thank you.

You know, the show talks about your story and your insights into the pathway to peak performance. So, let's take it all the way back. Share as much as you like. We'll kind of go back to your childhood all the way through your career and where you are today.

All right. So childhood... I don't know how much... I mean if we have a couple of days now for this. I have a lot of stories, but I'll try to be brief, at least on the first part. I was born in Tel Aviv, grew up in Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan, which is a city just by Tel Aviv. My mom was a Holocaust survivor. My father was a first generation in Israel. Mom was from Poland, from Lviv originally. Tough childhood, was smuggled from a ghetto when she was a year old, lost all her family. A long story by itself.

In any case, I grew up as a normal kid in Israel. Pretty free to do whatever. Both parents working, not much money. To shorten it, my parents got divorced when I was about 12 years old. My mom left the house. About a year later, my father had a girlfriend, left the house. My sister was 18, drafted to the Israeli army, left the house. So I was living by myself, pretty much by myself since I was 13, which gave me a lot of independence. And survival is the best way to learn how to do things. So I cooked for myself. I cleaned and did everything for myself. I was a kind of a nerdy boy in a way because I went to school every day. But it gave me... it really created me as an independent person, which worked great.

When I was about 13, I started programming. A very good friend of mine that I later recruited to my first company, he and his group had a Sinclair computer. I'm talking late 70s, early 80s, probably circa 1980. And I started programming Sinclair computers, machine language, BASIC, whatever was there. I started working for the agency. First, I was building audio amplifiers for them for all the beeps and sounds in the computer, which relates to what I did later. Then I started programming and started selling my own software when I was 15 for these computers.

To fast-forward in the timeline a little, I was drafted to the Israeli army like everyone else when I was 18 and two weeks. They actually made me go to the air force when I started, and I was flying some prop planes in flight school and then small jets. I dropped from the flight school because I did not want to be a pilot, but it was fun to do it, and they forced me, so why not. After a short few months, I went to research and development where I met my first business partner, Alon Cohen. We talked and we both said we were really interested in doing sound on computers. PCs just started, definitely in Israel, and we started developing a sound card. There were really no sound cards. I don't know if it was the first sound card or one of the first, but it was definitely very early on.

We very fast developed a sound card which, because Alon is an amazing engineer and a really bright guy—we're still friends, he lives a few minutes from me—was very efficient at what it did. But also because we both had a background in electronics and sound, it sounded very good, even though it wasn't hi-fi. We recorded music and it sounded great. So people were saying, "This is great, you can record sound, but why do you need it on computers?" This is what we faced. We faced being way too early for the marketplace and the technology. So we said, "Why do you need it? We'll show you." And we started building applications and connecting with applications, making drivers, and we did a lot of innovative things. Even though for us it was just finding solutions and finding things to do with it. We were just doing it. We didn't think about it as something innovative or special.

So for instance, my mom worked for the office of defense in Israel, and through that she was working with a lot of handicapped families. So we built a system for the blind that enabled them to work with the computer without seeing the screen. Eventually, it was using my voice in text-to-speech. We had to develop text-to-speech both in English and Hebrew because nothing existed, and eventually, it was my voice used for both. People calling for tech support and talking to me were saying, "Oh, this is your voice."

We had multimedia presentations when the term wasn't coined yet. There was a program from IBM called Storyboard that was doing slideshows, but it didn't have any sound. We created drivers that were actually under DOS, which is not a multiprocessing operating system. We actually made drivers that played audio in the background while another application was running on the computer. We did integration with Storyboard, and people were using it back then. We're talking mid- to late-80s, people were using our card and showing multimedia presentations when nobody knew that audio even existed on computers. A zillion different things. All the ice cream trucks in Israel were playing with our devices.

That is an interesting story though. You have to tell that story.

Okay. So, we were approached by a guy that was supplying ice cream trucks with a mechanical music box he was buying from England that was playing music. It was a mechanical music box that had a pickup, like a guitar pickup, that was connected to an amplifier in the truck. They had to wind it, and it was playing. It was excellent sound quality, but the problem is it was very expensive. It was like, back then, 400 British pounds. And he was saying the truck drivers, because it was so expensive, at night were locking it in the freezer together with the ice, and the temperature changes were killing the mechanical music box. After a few months, they had to replace it. And he said, "We need a solution that plays music and they can put it in the ice box but it's not going to break."

So we built them a mil-spec, military-grade, all-digital playback device. We recorded the music, we put it on the electronics, everything was solid-state, mil-spec circuitry, and all of the ice cream trucks in Israel were playing two types of music with our electronics. This was the first time actually that we outsourced something. So, we had a guy that was doing the soldering because there were too many circuits. We were still working from a room in my apartment that later on we were kicked out of when my first son was born in '92.

Anyway, that was another application. We had billboards, when they were still red and black, big billboards with LEDs. For a customer, we made them talk, we made them play music. So he was having advertisements on them and there was audio in connection with them.

Anyway, from having a sound card inside the computer, we actually created an audio device that was external because laptops didn't have a place to plug cards in. IBM was coming out with their own technology for PCs that wasn't compatible with the regular cards, PS/2. And what we did is, all the computers back then had a printer port. So we used that printer port as a bus and created an audio device that was plugged into the printer port. You didn't need anything else. So we had an external audio device now, and we wrote the drivers for it so it was exactly the same as our regular card in terms of software integration.

By the way, already in those years, we had full digital editing software for audio on the computer with graphic representation of the waves, with selecting a range, creating echo, fading in, fading out, connecting stuff. We first did it because we had to edit sound for the text-to-speech that we were developing, but then we sold it as part of the product. So you're talking probably '86. We already had digital audio editing software under DOS on PCs with full graphic editing capabilities. Zoom in, zoom out, two markers, copy and paste, all the functions that now are taken for granted, we had to develop it from scratch.

Anyway, we had the external audio device. IBM in Israel was very excited because they had PS/2 machines and there were no sound cards. We gave them a solution. In '87, Alon and I were like, "You know, there's this thing called computer networks. Maybe we can transfer audio on computer networks. Let's see what we can do with it." But we didn't have a network. So I borrowed two network cards from the brother of my current partner, who I've known since I was about six years old, Ariel Hazai. From his brother Yoram, I took on loan two network cards and we started playing with audio over local area networks. It was working. It was a prototype, but nobody had networks. So we said, "This is great, but we don't have a market to sell it to." So we put it on the back burner.

But in the early '90s, when networks were more common inside the office, especially Novell networks, we developed the first product that was doing voice over local area networks. We called it VocalChat. It was used as an intercom and for voicemail inside the office, and we were selling it internationally, not just in Israel, which is obviously a limited market. I was doing all the support. Still a startup, small company. I'm getting a call from a guy from London and he's saying, "Listen, I'm using your software and I'm having breaks in the audio." So I'm starting to troubleshoot, and I'm asking him what's the configuration. They say, "I have a wide area network line between London and New York, and it's 64k in bandwidth, and I'm trying to talk to the New York office and I'm getting breaks." So I said, "This is not meant for it." But then I said, "But that's a great application."

I mean, phone calls, just to remind people that were not aware of it at that time, were seven or eight dollars a minute between Europe and New York or Israel and the States. So I said, "This is a great application. Let me see what we can do." So we developed a product called VocalChat WAN for wide area networks, and that was a big seller already because that was a real money-saver. It was a no-brainer. You already have a dedicated line, why not use it for phone calls? There's no additional cost. You buy the product, you're talking.

Then the internet started. People started talking about the internet. One step before that though, computer networks have two modes of operation. One is very reliable, so if information is not getting to the other side, you can resend it, and the network protocol takes care of it. But when you're talking about real-time voice, you can't wait for it to resend the information. Everything has to flow and stream continuously, especially when you have a two-way conversation. If you're streaming one way, you can buffer. So, you have a delay of five seconds in the buffering, but you still see a continuous stream. But if you have to conduct a conversation, you want minimal delay between the two sides. Otherwise, you saw it up until a couple of years ago, the delay is actually affecting the conversation.

Right. You had to compress the latency.

Right. Exactly. So we were looking at it, Alon my partner and I, and saying we cannot afford to have latency. We have to minimize the latency, but we don't know the network condition, and the network condition is changing. Even on a local area network, definitely on a wide area network. The internet is probably the worst-case scenario. So we actually, and we had a patent on that, came up with a solution that was doing dynamic buffering. You cannot rely on information to be sent about the network condition. All you have is the receiving side getting information, looking at it, and trying to figure out what's the best buffer it can use in order to maintain a continuous stream of audio while minimizing the latency as much as possible. So we actually developed an algorithm that was looking at: did we lose packets? Was the packet latency changing? What was the longest packet latency? And by that, figuring out the optimal buffering or the optimal delay that we artificially create in order to maintain a continuous stream of audio but the minimum latency possible. And this was the first patent for the company. The very basic of what later on would be called Voice over IP, which is something that we coined. So VoIP was actually all based on that algorithm.

Anyway, back to the timeline. In late '94, we started working on an internet version of what we did. We called it Vocaltec Internet Phone, or iPhone for short. And we did a lot of beta testing with a lot of users that were very excited. One of them is Jeff Pulver that later on became the guy that was doing all the trade shows for Voice over IP and a good friend. My father was an amateur radio operator, by the way, and for him, talking to the whole world for free in something that was that easy was very intriguing. He was in Long Island. We were in northern Jersey. So we were pretty close to each other, and he had a T1 line to his house, which was unthinkable for anyone, even companies. But he said, "Yeah, my kids want to have a good connection."

Anyway, in February '95, we announced with an exclusive for the Wall Street Journal on a Friday. The official announcement was on Monday, and all other newspapers came out with an announcement on Monday. We had a two-week press tour all over the US presenting Internet Phone. Everybody called it iPhone, that was the nickname. So we were schlepping around with a desktop under my arm, demonstrating Internet Phone to everyone. And this was a huge splash. The two weeks we announced in February '95, as you can imagine, was a pretty cold winter. You know, me standing with the desktop under my armpit in Logan airport in Boston, freezing as an Israeli not having the right clothes. I mean, it was very memorable to say the least.

But it was also very successful. First of all, the splash with the Wall Street Journal on Friday. Then on Monday, all other newspapers and everyone picked it up. It was so intriguing that phone calls suddenly are free. We had literally thousands of media clips. Back then it was still fax and Xerox. So, we had bound books with thousands of media clips a month that the PR agency was giving us. I still have a couple of them. And it was amazing. We were interviewed everywhere. I was on CNN. It was great. For us, the PR side of it was something that we didn't like, we didn't want, but we saw it as a necessary evil. You have to do it.

In a lot of the interviews, they were asking me how it is to be an overnight success. And I used to say, "Oh it's great, only the night was about 10 years long." It's like you think it's just out of the blue. We were working on stuff like that for 10 years. We started the company in '85. This is '95. Overnight success... people see only the last 24 hours. And for us, it was a lot of sleepless nights, definitely before the release and during the release.

Now to give some perspective of the timing and the era that we're talking about, nobody was selling stuff online. We had to explain what the internet was. There was no e-commerce really other than Amazon selling books, and maybe 1-800-FLOWERS I think was back then available, but there was no way to charge a credit card. So how did we charge credit cards for the software we were selling only online? Jeff Pulver was reselling for us and probably it was the first affiliate program on the internet because he was getting a cut of whatever was sold through him. I don't think the term "affiliate program" existed yet, but we were doing it.

Anyway, to charge credit cards, there was no way to do it online. So we had on our web server people that were naive enough to put in their credit card information. But where does it go? We can't charge online. So we collected all the information on a secured server, and then we had temps coming in, downloading it, and typing it into a Verifone and charging the credit cards and releasing the license to the user. So there was no instant gratification on getting the license code immediately because we needed a human to type in the credit card information. That was the era.

And on the flip side, we had users that were saying, "I'm not putting my credit card on the internet. That's not safe." So, we had calls from people from Australia giving us their credit card over the phone, thinking it's way more secure. Okay. We didn't say no to anybody.

So this was the big break for the company. We became very well known worldwide. That of course created some friction with phone companies that were having such huge margins and got used to them, and we were a huge threat. So they started fighting us, trying to regulate Voice over IP and the internet.

By the way, "Voice over IP" was not a term that was just invented. That was an evolution. My role in the company many times was to explain what we do to the layman, to try to simplify things. So, I was always looking for terms. Specifically on what we did, we started by saying that we're doing "voice over packetized networks," which wasn't a dedicated line. So we started with "voice over packetized networks." Then we switched to just say "voice over networks" because "packetized" is too technical. So the naming went through evolutions: voice over network, voice over wide area network. Eventually, it became "Voice over IP" because also when we started, it was different protocols, because Novell networks for local area networks at that time was working with IPX, which was their own flavor of protocol. We had compatibility with some other networks. So "Voice over IP" was an evolution.

Anyway, the company became very successful and in February '96—the same browser, Netscape, if you remember—we had our IPO. We went public on NASDAQ the same day as Netscape. So one of the very first internet IPOs. The company evolved since then, became a big company. I think the top was over half a billion dollars in valuation. Back then it was considered huge. 350 employees in multiple offices all over the world. We acquired a few companies. But we had products that today are even considered advanced. We had not just audio, we had video conferencing, we had audio streaming with a product called Internet Wave or iWave for short. We had application sharing, whiteboarding. I mean, really a suite of different applications. It was too early for the marketplace in many ways, too early for the technology. People were still connecting with modems. There was a whole line of reasons why it didn't become immediately... we were usually too early for the market. Too innovative in many ways. Not that I'm complaining. We were very successful, and it was definitely a fun ride.

It's interesting because I just want to stop for a second and first of all, thank you. You disrupted the entire world. And I'm sitting here with a technology legend, which for me is a true honor. I mean, VoIP, that changed the world. And by the way, the sound card before that, developing all of that, that's a huge accomplishment that didn't exist. I can remember sitting at computers back in the day when there wasn't any sound. It was just... and then the notion of creating something that was that disruptive to the entire telecommunications industry. You've got to imagine that fight had to be a really tough fight.

It was, but I can tell you when you're developing something innovative, you don't always realize that you're doing something innovative. Especially when we were young, we were just doing it because we didn't know it can't be done. And this is actually... I'll tell a funny story here. After we announced Internet Phone and it was a big buzz everywhere, I was giving lectures and presentations wherever. I went to an IETF event, which is a big standards body, and I was at an event together with Vint Cerf, which is one of the internet gurus and early inventors. For me, I didn't know what I was doing in the situation. But anyway, I gave a speech about what we do and Internet Phone.

And after I did it, a guy called Daniel Berninger approached me and he said, "Can we meet? I really want to work for you." And I said, "Of course. We don't have time now, but let's set a meeting." We set a meeting, he came to northern New Jersey, we met at a Mexican restaurant that I still frequently go to 30 years later. And he said, "Did you get a big order for Internet Phone a few days after you announced from Bell Labs?" And I said, "Yes, we got, I think it was like 36 copies of Internet Phone." And I said, "We actually made fun of Bell Labs because why order 36 copies? Why?" And he said, "I worked on a project in Bell Labs that the goal was to check if voice over packetized networks, which is the internet, is something feasible that people can develop and use. And we closed that project about two months before you announced, figuring out it can't be done."

To make a very long story short, Daniel Berninger worked for me soon after. Amazing guy, was doing a lot of the consulting work that we did when we started doing exchange servers that connected the internet with regular telephony. That became a big business for us at one point. He helped me recruit for a project. I had to upgrade our servers. We had servers all over the world and we had to do upgrades, and I didn't know how to do it. It was like you needed project management for that. And Daniel said, "You know what, I have a solution for you." He said, "I know this guy, Larry Seager. He works for Bell Labs also and he did small projects like rewiring the Pentagon and other handy projects."

Anyway, I'm interviewing Larry Seager and he was an amazing guy, professional project manager. Bell Labs spent a lot of time educating him and training him, and I actually recruited him as well, paid him more than I was getting at the time. But he really taught me how to do project management, which maybe we'll get to soon in terms of what I think about project management, because I think it's a huge aspect of everything that you have to do.

So, anyway, VocalTec, I have a zillion stories, but that was the gist of it. It was an amazing experience. People are still recognizing me from that time. And a lot of people, by the way... the guy that I started programming with, his name is Ofer Shamtov, who was a childhood friend and I started programming with him since we were about 13. I recruited him to VocalTec when the OS was switching from DOS to Windows because I was a DOS programmer, but when the switchover was done, I was already doing more sales, marketing, and business than the programming side. So, I was still maintaining the old systems, especially the system for the blind because that was a feel-good, amazing project, but I didn't have the time even to learn, and we were growing and we needed to scale up. So, he had a group of five guys that was doing programming. So he was the second employee. We recruited the whole group.

I recruited another childhood friend before him, Rami Hadar, that actually stayed the longest in the company, way after we all left, and he became the CTO. I recruited him. He was the first employee in VocalTec. And then we recruited the whole group of five people, which was Ofer Shamtov and the rest of them, that were doing all the programming for us on Windows and later on. Amazing group of guys. One unfortunately passed away, Elad Sharon, in a car accident while he was working for us. A real genius. But they definitely did a huge amount of innovative and inventive development over the years. So just mentioning their names is very important. And the fact that I knew them and they were my childhood friends has to do with a lot of what I think we're going to talk about next, which is my take on how to get an organization or anything run efficiently and optimally.

So if you want to switch over, I have more stories, but let's take it where you want to go.

Okay. So I think that it's very important in any organization or in any environment, how you set the culture of that organization or that body of people. And if the culture is set from the get-go as people who really care about what they do and are having fun with what they do and are being respected for what they do... I don't want to sound philosophical because I'm actually translating things that I did probably mostly by instinct. I never studied it. It's not something that I studied officially anywhere. But if it's fun and if a manager sees their goal as serving the people that he's managing and not trying to give them commands... it's not saying that you don't build a "the last word is mine" organization, but the process of "the last word is mine" is not "I'm just commanding you and I'm not even listening to what you're saying." There's always an interaction. There should always be respect. You should always think about the people that work with you, not just for you. Their motivation and their mindset.

If you build a culture that is based on that, you're getting... I don't know what the multiplier is, but in terms of productivity, you're getting a multiplier that you can't even quantify. Because if people want to do it, it means that they go home, and on the way home, they're thinking about what they can improve. In the middle of the night, they're coming up with an idea that the next morning they're coding and saves you or makes you millions of dollars maybe within a couple of years. If you build the culture right, that's the foundation of everything. If for whatever reason, the culture is wrong, you get resistance. People are leaving. They're always looking for something else. They get home, they complain to whoever they talk to about the company. You're dividing their productivity. And it's not even productivity you can call it; it's what you get out of them. Because what you get out of them is not just being efficient, is being caring and creating things from nothing. When you create things from nothing, you can't measure efficiency because you start from zero. It's an add-on. It's something that you suddenly create from nothing. So, I think culture and the relationship within the company or an organization, that's the foundation for everything. That's the very big prerequisite to make a group of people work in the most beneficial way for whatever you're trying to achieve.

I have a question about that. So certainly, selection of people who have passion for what they do and enthusiasm, that's also a key ingredient in that happening.

Absolutely. So here you have Ofer and the group of five, and from there you're creating this culture, but there's also this sort of flow state that you all are in and you're really moving towards doing something that's super exciting, right? Talk more about that.

Okay, so first of all, you were touching on something that has to do with recruiting. So how do you bring the right people to the organization so there's no disruption for the culture that I was talking about? So I was doing interviews and people were saying I'm crazy, but I was doing interviews for an hour and a half. I was talking to the person and I wasn't really focusing only on the technical side. Sometimes I wasn't focusing on the technical side at all. I was taking my time first to tell them about myself so they know who they're talking to. They get comfortable because I need to learn from them about them, and if they don't feel comfortable, I'm getting either partial information or skewed information. I want to bring them to talk about their dog. I want to bring them to talk about what their hobbies are. I want them, once they're talking about something which has nothing to do with what I'm interviewing them for, I can read the person way better.

So the first step in recruiting, if you don't have a referral from someone else or it's someone that you knew for years before, if you're really interviewing someone who's out of the blue, you have to bring them to a comfortable position, a comfortable situation, and get them to talk about things that have nothing to do with what they thought they were going to talk about. And then you're usually getting the real person. For me, that's the first step. If I'm getting bad vibes while doing that, I already have... my gut is telling me either they're not honest or they're trying to impress me too much. Why do they try? They're not confident enough with what they do. I mean, what's the reasoning behind it? Now, I can't say that there's a formula to it. You have to play it by ear with the person that you're talking to. It's a dynamic situation. But the goal is to make them talk about something they're very, very comfortable talking about, and then you'll get the real person and not someone who is in an interview trying to impress you or under pressure.

Sometimes it helps because a lot of amazing people with amazing capabilities are so nervous at a job interview that you get a completely wrong picture from them and you're missing a huge opportunity. Because somebody who is insecure or for whatever reason is having anxiety in a situation like this, if he's a really good person for what you need for the company, sometimes you're getting a huge multiplier if you are accepting them and you are working with them in a culture which is very supportive and fun. You're suddenly getting a person who's so appreciative that they're working for you that the multiplier is even bigger of what you get, and the loyalty. I mean, we see so much turnover with jobs now, it kills companies. Every time you have to re-recruit someone, you know the process. So if you're creating that type of loyalty and culture, you're gaining so much that it's amazing. So I always take time in doing interviews. I'm always trying to create the personal relationship from the get-go and I'm not... you know, "We have half an hour for the interview." I always try to let it go.

Exactly. Yeah. That culture is... the ability to actually find the right person. Those are sage pieces right there. The ability to actually drop the veneer and get to the true person and know if it's really a great fit or not is so important.

Correct. Now when you think about it, oversimplifying it, yeah, it's a simple concept, but when you look at the actuals, if you don't do it, it costs you so much. When you do it right—and you're not always successful, right? It's not a 100% success rate here—but it raises the chances of getting the right person and having that multiplier of what you're getting out of the person and the whole organization. Because it's not just the one person; you're creating a culture. You're making them comfortable and then he or she communicates with the rest of the organization. So you're getting things that you're not directly interacting with, but you get that interaction within the organization.

That's a great point because also at some point in time, you're distanced from the people that are downstream.

Exactly. And you need to make sure that the things that are important to you are being conveyed or that that culture is pulling all the way down into all aspects of the business.

Exactly. And it does trickle down because once you create that culture, everybody is talking to everybody, and it is very important that you reduce as much as possible—I shouldn't say eliminate, but you reduce as much as possible—the internal competition. People understand if the company succeeds, everybody succeeds. You don't create that thing where, "I don't want to talk to that person because maybe he'll think about something I'm thinking and he'll go to the boss." You have to reduce as much as possible the friction between people and increase as much as possible the communication and the collaboration between people. Which is, by the way, a little more important now that a lot of people are working from home, but that's a whole different can of worms.

Tough one. So, this is the first thing. Another thing which is very important in anything I do, if it's business or not, is trying to make things as efficient as possible. So if you have to do whatever task more than twice, try to automate it. Try to make it as seamless as possible and as little manual as possible. Always very important. And my first partner, Alon Cohen, my co-founder for VocalTec, always said he's finding simple solutions because he's very lazy. That was always his thing. I think that actually one of his resumes even had it on it, which he's a very funny guy. So you really want to make sure that you're not spinning your wheels on anything in what you do. If you need to do something which is repetitive, try to automate it. It makes a huge difference, and once you've automated it, if you have to tweak it, you go back and tweak it. But suddenly it frees so much of your time to do other stuff. I think this is a concept which again, saying it in three sentences is very simple, but if you really think about it, think about what you do every day and you're figuring out, "Oh, maybe I can really save an hour a day." If the invoices are being produced and sent automatically and I don't have to put in the lines myself for each one, it's a different world. It's a way different way of doing it.

Absolutely. And now we're at a whole another level. That capability for automation is going to a whole another level.

It's so exciting, right?

It's exciting but also dangerous because AI still needs to be monitored. We can't rely on it. But there are things that AI is saving us a lot of time. We can chat about AI just for fun maybe later. But AI is definitely a huge part of helping... it can help anyone to be more efficient if used correctly and if monitored, because AI can produce a lot of nonsense as well, at least for now from my own experience. So that's a very important thing in an organization. Maybe switch a little bit to what I do now because I think this is very exciting by itself.

Well, we're shooting this episode in August, and I'm just going to go out on a limb and say... so we have the sound card, we have Voice over IP, but for where we are in the world today, I'm going to say what you're working on right now is going to be the biggest game-changer. It is absolutely unbelievably cool and valuable at this time, and it's going to solve a major problem. So, I can't wait for you to tell everyone about it.

Thank you. And actually that's a big reason why I do it. But the trigger for what I do was actually a medical issue that I had with one of my kids that had a seizure a couple of years ago. He calls me on the phone and says, "Can you go check on my cat?" And I said, "It's 5:00 a.m. What are you talking about? Where are you?" He said, "I'm in the ER. I had a seizure." I said, "What are you talking about?" So in two minutes, I was in the ER. He had a serious seizure out of the blue. He was 27.

What do I know about seizures and neurology? Nothing at this point. So I started interrogating the doctors in the ER. Luckily, one of them used to be a client of mine; I had a fitness studio and a spin studio. So I'm asking questions and I'm learning fast, which I do with anything I face that I don't know about. And I see first of all, they don't do anything when someone with a seizure goes to the hospital. They see that they're stabilized, they give them a medication with a dosage, there's a protocol, and send them home and see what happens. I said, "No way you're doing that with my son." First of all, do a CT scan, see that there's nothing wrong with him. CT scan came back clean. And then I said, "What about EEG? You're not measuring his brain, tell me what's going on." They said, "No, the protocol is we don't do EEG." I said, "I want an EEG."

Then I also found out that insurance doesn't cover an extensive EEG if you don't do the first EEG, which is a simple, over an hour procedure. So I forced them to do an EEG on the spot in the ER. It takes a couple of hours until the EEG technician... they have one EEG machine. They're rolling it in the hospital. It's a big hospital in New Jersey. The guy comes and I'm starting to interview him. I'm asking him, "How long have you been doing that?" He said, "Well, for like over 20 years. I started in southern India and then I moved here, and I'm doing it here for about 12 years now." So I asked him, "Anything in the technology changed since you started doing it?" He said, "Not really. The presentation on the computer is a little nicer now, but everything else is pretty much exactly the same." And I was like, so this technology is at least 20 years old. With the acceleration of everything, this has not changed.

Then I'm looking, I mean I have my technical background, so I'm looking at how he is doing it. It's 23 electrodes, two electrodes on the chest, everything is very long wires which are not shielded. For anyone who is a little familiar, I'm saying, "How do they measure the brain signals that are really weak signals when you measure them with such long wires, all the interference?" I'm looking and I took some pictures. And then I'm talking to my sister and she said, "Do you remember that our friend Ariel Hazai is dealing with something like this?" I said, "With all the turmoil, I didn't even think about it." Because I spoke to him about it in the past, we're good friends. I've known Ariel since I was about six years old. So there's no problem with trust, and he's an amazing guy and very bright.

So I'm calling Ariel and I'm asking him, "Ariel, this is what happened. I'm here in the ER." He said, "Of course, the founder of the company, Nathan, is in New York. He can come and run the test on your son and we can see what's going on." So I already exchanged some pictures with him. I saw the disposable electrodes and all the information from the EEG in the ER, which was surprisingly primitive to me. Anyway, they send my son home with the protocol medication. "Let's see what happens." I was talking to the neurologist's assistant and the neurologist, and they said this is the protocol. They give him medication, they see if it helps. If it helps, he keeps taking the medication. If he doesn't have any seizures, if he has a seizure, they're changing either the medication or the dosage. So, it's a complete trial and error, usually takes time. Those medications have side effects. So, they're really flying blind. There's no real indication of what's going on.

Anyway, a couple of days later, Nathan, the founder of Neurosteer, is coming to New Jersey. I asked him to run the test on me first, because before you run it on my son... and I see how simple it is. It's one sticker going on your forehead. Simple, tiny device. You put it on your neck. A 15-minute test, which is an audio-guided stimulation. So, you're listening to audio, you're using a clicker to answer some questions with music. "If you hear the violin, please click. If you hear the trumpet, please click." A very pleasant way of doing it. There's nothing really intimidating, and it's so simple with a single sticker on your forehead. You wipe with a little alcohol, you put the sticker, and that's it. And I was impressed.

We'll talk about my results for a second. Then he did the same assessment on my son, and it definitely showed that he had post-seizure activities in his brain. He just started taking the medication, so probably it wasn't as much effective yet because those take time to really work. In any case, we looked at the results of my assessment and my responses, and everything cognitive-ability-wise was pretty good. But what he did see is that my brain at rest, which the activity should be really low—I'm oversimplifying—but the activity at rest was relatively high. So I asked why. He said, "You're thinking about your son. You're worried about your son. So, you're not at rest. You have this pressure." Even though maybe I was maintaining... I mean, outside I wasn't looking... I'm a very calm person and I can control how I look. But he said, "Your brain is saying that you're worried about your son. Your brain is working overtime because of the situation."

Since then, I've of course done the assessment multiple times as part of being curious but also as part of working with the system. And on future tests, it was perfect. I was already at rest. I wasn't worried. The results showed it very clearly. In any case, so I'm looking at what they have and I say, "Okay, my son... I need to start studying neurology." I did a two-week crash course in neurology and what they do. And after two weeks, Ariel, my friend, is saying, "Why don't you join the company? Drop everything you do." I did a zillion different things. "Drop everything you do and join the company." I said, "That's intriguing. Let me learn a little bit more about it. I need you to give me a lot of information." I did my due diligence for another few weeks. And I joined the company because I saw that this is a platform that is really a quantum leap compared to anything that exists on the market.

The only thing that measures... I mean, there are other ways to measure the brain. They have blood tests, MRI, CT scans, all kinds of things that are measuring not the brain activity directly but proxies of the brain, which gives you some indication of the condition of the brain but doesn't measure directly the functionality of the brain. When you look at EEG, it's actually not a 20-year-old technology. It's over 100 years old. The only real difference between what it was in the 1920s and now is that instead of ink on paper, it's showing it on a computer. But the technology behind it is pretty much the same. They have some ways to analyze the information a little better, but overall it's the same information. A neurologist that was trained to read EEG, which is completely subjective and tons of information, tons of data... actually, it's not tons of information because it's really raw data that they're looking at. It takes a neurologist at least two years to be somewhat proficient in reading an EEG signal. It's really very difficult to read. So the tool that is provided for the neurologist is very limited in what it can show.

On top of that, if you look at what EEG is measuring, it's measuring a very low bandwidth. The bandwidth that they're measuring is between 40 and 70 Hertz. That's it. What our device is measuring is up to 1,500 Hertz. So it's just a huge difference. Orders of magnitude difference. The common knowledge was saying the brain doesn't produce signals that are higher than 40 or 70 Hertz, so we don't have to look at them. What we found out is that first of all, there might be signals that are higher than that, but more than that, the interaction between the hundreds of signals in our brain creates the higher frequencies because of the mix of them. So if you take two sine waves in different frequencies and you mix them, you're getting harmonics which can be very high, and not just the base signals. You see it also in graphics; if you have Moiré effects and you move them, you see a lot of different patterns created. That's like a noise, but it's actually information that is created from the original signal. If you want to sample the signal and recreate the original base signals out of it, if you don't have all those harmonics, you cannot recreate the original signal accurately because you're missing a lot of data that was created by it.

So, we're sampling first of all at a much higher bandwidth and second at a much higher dynamic range, meaning we can read a very small signal level and a very high signal. If you do an analogy for this, if you're using a microphone and you're whispering into the microphone or you're shouting into the microphone, if both signals are clear, you're not missing the whispering or getting clips or distortions on the shouting, it means that you have a high dynamic range. And again, in the dynamic range, our system, because of the topology and the electronics, the dynamic range that we can look at is orders of magnitude higher than a traditional EEG. So we start with a very rich signal that we measure with a very simple device that is only on your forehead.

Now, if you're looking at EEG, it's always with wet gel, multiple electrodes, a helmet. I mean, it takes probably over half an hour to just set it up. Our system, you just put the sticker on the forehead and turn it on. It's literally within a minute you start recording brain signals.

Yeah. Going back to what you're talking about with efficiency, right? I mean, exactly.

So, I joined the company in order to productize and commercialize what they did. So they did the heavy lifting of research and statistics and developing the basic technology, and I joined in order to make a product which is friendly, usable, and to start selling it. So that was my role, and I said I want to touch everything in the company in order to be able to get it to that point because it has to do with development, training, pricing, business model. I needed to be able to do everything, and they let me.

So first of all, we're collecting a very rich signal out of the brain, but we're collecting it with basically one channel. We have three electrodes that are actually on that strip that we put on, but the three electrodes are only to reduce noise and make the signal very clean. And it's a differential sampling of the signal to reduce the noise. Very short cables to the analog part that is sampling it. So we're doing it in a very clean way. It gives us a really, really clean, rich signal with tons of information. If you compare it to regular EEG, it's like looking at an ultra-high-definition television. We're looking at it directly, seeing every detail. Regular EEG is looking at it through a bedsheet. So you see spots of colors moving around, but you don't see the details. We're looking directly at the picture and sampling all the really fine details of the signal from the brain.

But we're doing it with one electrode and one signal. And it sends all the information to our servers over an internet connection. This is where... so we had that first part, which is a prerequisite to really sample what the brain is doing, but then you have to do interpretation for it. So a research that was done mostly by our founder, Nathan Intrator, is taking that signal and breaking it into what we call brain activity features. And brain activity features are functional networks within the brain. So we're not looking at where a function is being done. The brain has amazing plasticity. So if a part of the brain is damaged or there are some genetic differences between people, the brain can take over and create the same functions in different parts of the brain. We're not looking where the function occurs. We're looking at the function itself.

So with heavy mathematics algorithms, the one signal that we're measuring is broken into, right now, over 100 components that represent functional networks. Probably in the future, we can break it to even 300 or 400 brain activity functions like this. Again, to use an analogy, if you're in a restaurant and you have 20 people talking around you and you're concentrating only on the person you want to listen to, you're actually getting one signal with that cacophony of multiple people talking at the same time. But your brain is amazing at doing signal processing. It's taking that mix of different people talking and it can identify from it the harmonic buildup of the voice you want to listen to and block everything else, and you're listening only to that person. Or if you're in a symphony orchestra listening and you have multiple instruments playing the same tune, you can close your eyes, focus, and listen only to the trumpet or only to the violin because your brain is doing that amazing signal processing of making you capable of concentrating only on that by the signature of that specific instrument.

So we're doing a similar thing with the brain. We're breaking the one signal that we're sampling into the different activities in the brain which are like different instruments that are playing. So that's the first step in what we do in the analysis. Then we're taking that and we're looking at the relationship between them, how they work in concert, how they relate to each other. And what we found out doing, up until now, I think over 10,000 samples of healthy and brains with some disorders, is that the healthy brain has a very specific fingerprint. You see it across people with healthy brains. You see that those basic network functions in the brain are working very similarly in a healthy brain. And in a brain with specific disorders, you can find different fingerprints.

So we showed in a clinical study that we did with people who have Parkinson's—that were known to have Parkinson's using the golden method of doing it with what's called FDOPA PET-CT, which is a CT scan with injecting radioactive tracers and so on. We used the gold standard as a reference and we showed that we can identify people with Parkinson's at least as good as the gold standard with our 15-minute test. And probably we can identify people with Parkinson's very early on—and I'm saying this with a disclaimer because this is still a small group—but even before symptoms occur, which is critical to any way we look at it.

This is where it gets so big because by the time you figure out that you have any neurodegenerative disease, it's kind of too late. There's limited what you can actually do. But if you can detect it early, that's where the magic is. This is why this is so powerful.

I talked about efficiency and access. If you try to go have a CT scan, you go try to have any of these scans anywhere, first of all, it's almost impossible to do, super costly, time, all that kind of stuff, if you could even figure that out. But what you've done is you've brought it to the world in a way where the average citizen can get access to this information. It is an absolute game-changer at a point in time when neurodegenerative issues are on the rise in an exponential way. It's crazy.

Absolutely. And I'll expand on that. So CT scans are actually more common than MRI machines. Some of the conditions need an MRI machine in order to diagnose it, or even an fMRI machine for Alzheimer's, for instance. MRI machines are not available in 90% of the counties in the US. People have to drive 50 to 100 miles even to get an MRI scan. That's one aspect of this which is crucial. But another aspect of what you mentioned about early detection, how do you test or even develop a drug for treating pre-symptomatic people with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's if you don't know they have it before they have symptoms? If you don't have a way to gauge, you can't even start the process.

Now, let's assume you start the process. You need some longitudinal way to measure it. You do a baseline. How do you know if the drug is effective if you don't have a way to test it over time at different time points? How do you know if it's effective? If you don't have the tool, you're flying blind. And I can't blame the physicians because they don't have the tools to use.

So let me give a real-time example. This is one of the concepts that I didn't talk about that I'm always thinking from the user point of view. If you don't think from the user point of view, you're developing something which is not for the user.

Amen.

Yeah. So this is a huge thing in everything that I'm doing. I always go and talk to users, and that's why I'm flying to clinics and talking to everyone I can about anything. And I'm always asking to get the bad, not just the good. I need to know everything. Anyway, if you don't have that longitudinal way of measuring things, you can't do anything.

So, from the real world, when do people with Alzheimer's get to the doctor these days? When they realize that they're not just forgetting their car keys, but suddenly there's a whole barrage of symptoms. You tend to ignore the symptoms because it's like the story about the frog. You're turning on the heat and it's going slowly and slowly and the frog doesn't jump out until it's cooked because it doesn't feel it.

Yes. So I started... we're rationalizing the symptoms.

Yes. So, "What was her name? I'm just... I didn't have enough coffee. I woke up early." You find excuses why you're not performing the way you used to. And you get to the doctor and usually there's irreparable damage that is already done to your brain by the time you're getting into the neurologist that was referred by the psychologist that was referred by the GP. You got there late already. You go through the process. They send you for an MRI that you'll get in two months that will check if you have something which is not necessarily indicative of the condition that you had. And the tools are not there. So you get to the physician only when it's way too late, there's irreversible damage most probably already done. And again, you can't blame the physicians because what tools do they have?

Now imagine you go to the physician for your annual test. As of today, what do they do to test your brain? Nothing. They tap your knee to see that you have reflexes. They maybe put a finger or a light and see if you follow them with your eyes, but there's really no way for the physician to test your brain health. So, imagine you go to the physician for your annual and he says, "Okay, now we're testing your brain." Puts a sticker on your forehead. You're listening to something and reacting, and after 15 minutes, the system can tell you there's something there that we suspect is an issue. "You better go check it because you might have the beginning of Parkinson's." This is a game-changer because treatment can start early, medication can be developed early, treatments can be developed early for early conditions, even before symptoms. It will make it a real quantum leap in what is being done today.

Yeah. As a person who saw a close family friend degenerate, it is one of the scariest things ever. I remember the day that this is a person I've known my entire life said to me, "Who are you?" And I was like, "Wow." He literally had no idea who I was. And at that point, it just got... it's a terrible... as it goes, it just gets so bad.

I agree. Both my parents... my dad didn't get to a situation which is that bad, but he was very aware that he was declining. He passed away before that, and luckily he passed away just before COVID so I could still travel to Israel for his funeral. With my mom, it was a long process. Both my parents were very intelligent. They were bright people. My mom, we couldn't tell that she had the decline because she was intelligent, so she was making up for the fact that she couldn't remember with all kinds of tricks.

To give you an example, she broke her hip at one point, as it happens with a lot of elderly women, and she was in the hospital. My sister and I immediately... my sister is also in New Jersey by chance... we both flew to Israel immediately. We're in the hospital. We're talking to them. We're going home at night, to my mom's apartment. And we're getting a call from the doctor from the ER and he said, "I need a few more details here. I spoke to your mom and she gave me most of it, but let me verify with you." And he's starting to tell us things that my mom told him about where she lives, what floor, what her condition, who's treating her. Everything was made up. All the information was wrong. And we told him, and he said, "No way. She was so confident. She speaks so clearly." He didn't realize that she had severe amnesia, severe cognitive decline because she was still bright enough to make it up. Appearance was very important to her always. Her Hebrew, even though she was an immigrant from Poland, her Hebrew was perfect, like a narrator. She was always dressed up, makeup, everything. So she was talking to him, and she was completely in control of all the information.

So I know that eventually she passed away. She couldn't recognize us. So I'm very... that's part of what motivates me. I'm very aware of that from firsthand experience. This platform... part of the reason I joined the company is I saw the versatility of this platform. We have studies in Mount Sinai for the ICU. We can check sedation level. We can show seizures when a person is sedated or has no motor indicators of a seizure. There are so many things that can be done with this platform. Of course, it needs FDA approval. I'm saying things that are not... the studies were not big enough in order to get it approved. So there's money and time involved in all of that. But the versatility of this platform and the difference between it and anything else that is currently available is really day and night.

The same as we did with Voice over IP where we took phone calls from seven or eight dollars a minute to practically zero, and everybody now... for us it was a process, but everything now is accepted like something that was always there. We want it to be the same as you measure your blood pressure now at the GP office. Testing your brain or assessing your brain or detecting anything wrong with your brain should be as simple as taking your blood pressure. Look at cardio, right? ECG or EKG. It used to be that the doctor sent you to the cardiologist in order to do the test. Now, you're going to your annual and within 15 minutes he did the test. The machine gives him an indication of your heart condition. We need all of that to be fully automated. We're trying to make it efficient. We're trying to make it as friendly as possible. So go to the doctor, 15 minutes, listen to something pleasant, click a few clicks, and you know if there's something that you should be worried about or something that you should... and treatment can be... it all depends on what's needed, but treatment can be lifestyle, can be whatever your doctor decides. But the first step is to know that there's something that needs to be treated, right?

And then how do you do it without... to quantify it is really the key, right? Is the discovery. And then from there, what happens after that... but I mean, if you go completely unknown and you have no idea until it's too late, then it's just too late.

Exactly. So, I mean, this is a phenomenal thing. We're going to talk a lot more about it. I'm going to ask you to come back at some point in time and spend some more time with me, and I always love to see you.

I'd love that. And you'll be one of the most helpful people. I'm really appreciative of everything that you've done for us and I love talking to you. We met not long ago, but immediately it clicked and we became friends. And I would love to join you anytime.

Yeah. I want to go back to a thought process. I mean, a lot of things that you say are sort of like, "Hey, I just did it. I didn't know that I couldn't do it, so I just did it." But do you feel like, in your pathway to peak performance, is there some sort of formula? I don't know if you're really willing to talk about the martial arts side of things, but...

Sure. You know, maybe we can go there a little bit.

Well, first of all, I always wanted as a kid to learn judo. My mom wouldn't allow me. Actually, a family friend was one of the top judo guys in Israel. And so, I had the opportunity, but my mom wouldn't allow me. She sent me to play tennis, and I'm not playing tennis. But when I was 35, I decided that I'll go and learn... I pretty much retired when I was 35, and I decided I want to go and learn martial arts. And I had an amazing karate dojo in the town I lived in in New Jersey by sheer chance. Unfortunately, I didn't meet the Japanese guy that started the style of karate. It's called Shukokai Karate. But his main student and someone he called "my skin" because he could do everything that he could do, Gavin Armstrong, was there. And I started training with him, and I was training five, six days a week because I could, and I was very happy about it. I'm a second-degree black belt in Shukokai Karate.

To get to what you're talking about, a few things that stop people from doing something. Sometimes it's just the capability, the time. People are saying, "You can always make the time." No, you can't always make the time. So sometimes there are objective reasons. If you have to bring food to your family and you have to work 12 hours a day and then take care of the kids, you really don't have the time to do anything else. But a lot of time, it's not that thing that actually limits you in what you want to do. The thing that stops people is fear. They think, "I'm not good at it, so I'm not going to do it." That's why you do it. If you're not good at something and you want to do it, that's the way to be good at it. You have to just do it.

So the fear of the initial failure stops a lot of people. I don't see it that way. I see if I don't experience it, maybe I'll never get good at it, but at least I want to experience it and see what it is. So I'm not facing anything thinking I might fail. I'm facing everything, and I want to see what it is. If I see that it's beneficial for me, even if I'm not good at it to start with, I'm still pushing forward because I want to learn it. I want to see what it is. If I don't get good at it, at least I know what to ask someone else to do, and I know what to ask for because I'm already familiar with what it is. So fear of failure is I think the biggest thing in slowing people down. They don't want to even start because they are afraid of what will happen if they're not good. Maybe they're ashamed that if it's in a group, they're ashamed of how they look initially. So what? Prove them wrong. But I think this is a very big showstopper for many people. I think that's the biggest thing.

Yeah. Isn't that interesting, fear? Someone who came on the show said fear is a part of their pathway to peak performance, that fear actually helps propel them forward.

If you channel it right, right? You can use it in a very powerful way.

Absolutely. Yeah. Well, it's just amazing to sit here and talk to you.

Thank you. And listen, I was never officially educated. I went to high school, then I went to the army. I've never went to... I have no academic degree. I did one course for a couple of days in Massachusetts for business, but that really didn't give me much. Just do things. Everything that I do now is out of experience by doing it. If you're stopping yourself from doing things, you're limiting what you know. Every time you do something that you don't know, you're expanding your arsenal of things that you can do. And do a variety of things. Don't get stuck with, "That's the only thing I know, that's what I do," because a multidisciplinary way of knowing things gives you so much more leverage.

I had a fitness studio. I got tons of experience with subscription models, how it works, what's the profitability and so on. And I applied it now to what we do with the brain. So our business model is based on subscription. It makes it very easy for the clinics to start. There's no barrier to entry really. I tell them, "Use it as much as you want. If you don't want to use it, just stop and we're fine." So the barrier of entry is very easy. It's very addictive in a way. I mean, we're giving tons of benefits, of course. Everything... so I took it from the fitness world. But also in the fitness world, I was always very big on compensation which is related to performance. Even for a programmer, even for tech support people, once you measure someone, you're actually getting way better results. And if you compensate them in correlation with the results or the performance... it doesn't have to be draconian, but it's a simple way to do it. Suddenly they get so much better. I used to say that if I pay a bonus to myself on performance, I'm performing better even though it's me doing it to myself. The psychology is working like a placebo.

I'm going to have to try that.

Yeah. So I did that. We opened our spin studio in the beginning of 2015. By the way, project management with this was... I project-managed a renovation to a space which was completely broken down, concrete floor, everything. Within... I did project management with all the professionals that were working on the renovation. Within six weeks, we had our first class with a studio that was the most high-end that you can ever think of, with changing lights, colors, everything. Computerized, full audio system, performance tracking, music video, projection, 30 high-end spin bikes, and so on. So, six weeks. Project management with timing. I told all the subcontractors, "If you're not doing it at the time frames I specified, you're not getting paid." Everything was with a Gantt chart. Everything was timed.

Anyway, when we opened our fitness class, the compensation for all the instructors was something they never witnessed. Definitely nothing I heard of before. We didn't pay them a flat fee for a class. We didn't pay them for their time. We paid them by the amount of people that they got to their class. So, we had it structured very well. Initially, you have a kickstart period where you get compensated a little more to help them. But if you're not bringing people to the class, which is how we get paid, you're not getting paid. And I called it self-adjusting. The compensation is by what the motivation of everybody is. I need them to bring more people to classes. If they bring more people to class, they're getting paid more. I'm getting paid more. Everything is aligned.

So you have to take concepts from other areas and bring them to the areas you're currently facing. And if you know a range of different disciplines, again, it's a multiplier. It's not one-on-one time equals two. It's much more than that. So learn as much as you can about a variety of things. Don't limit yourself. When I see a book, I'm opening and reading it. When I see a History Channel program, I'm not flipping over to a stupid game show. I'm listening to that program. Don't waste your time on Instagram or Facebook, which is highly addictive. Even if I'm looking at it... and again, maybe it's a little against a podcast that is online, but flipping through images is such a time-waster.

I personally would agree. And for this, this is educational in nature. So, someone listening to this can learn quite a bit and can follow you. I think one of the things that's really cool about your story is just this progression, even when you hit challenges. Anybody who's an entrepreneur, like you said, it was 10 years, there are many sleepless nights in that. And people who don't live the life that we live, they don't understand how stressful it can actually be. One of the things that's really cool about you, and I got that right away, is that you have learned to regulate that and manage that in a way that allows you to continue to climb, which is really powerful.

Thank you. So maybe one more concept. When people ask me how do I define myself, I say I'm a problem solver. And that's the way I look at myself. So, by defining yourself as a problem solver, you're already defining that you have problems. You're facing a problem. You're trying to solve it. So you're not panicking because there's a problem. There are always problems. Who didn't face 10 problems a day at least with everything they do? The light is red and I'm late. There's always a problem. There's always an issue. Solve it.

Well, I have a question for you about that. Okay. Because what happens, and this is the pathway to peak performance, this is really critical. What happens when you get to a saturation point where the problems have added up, there's so much pressure on you that you feel like you just are sort of like, "I can't take anymore." What do you do then?

I try to share it with someone that can help with what I do. So, if you surround yourself with people that you can talk to, first of all, you can explain to them. I'll tell my girlfriend, "We can't go to dinner tonight because I have to work two more hours because I'm overloaded with work." And if you have the right person with you, they understand that you have a problem. That's my partner, Ariel. I'm telling him, "Listen, Ariel, I can't do that. Can you cover for me for this?"

So, you can always get yourself into a saturated spot where you're overloaded. But you need the people around you that can help you with that. And this is... working and recruiting people that know more than you is a very important aspect. So I spoke about Daniel Berninger, Larry Seager, who were both from Bell Labs, highly educated, tons of experienced people. They both knew things that I didn't know. They were teaching me. As I said, I paid them more than I was taking, but they served such an important function that it was taking the load off me. So, work with people that are smart. Don't work with people that you have to teach. Work with people that will teach you, and then you can rely on them to solve problems when you're getting overwhelmed.

But the trick with getting overwhelmed is to prevent it. I was talking about it a couple of days ago, actually. You have to stop and look at the big picture, and you have to do it as frequently as the process requires. It can be once a week. It can be once a month. It can be once a day. But look at the tasks that you're doing or look at the tasks that the group you're managing is doing. And it can be not direct management because a project manager is managing people he's not officially managing a lot of times. Look at the tasks that are being done and think about what the situation is now. What will be the situation in a week, in a month? It all depends again on the nature of the beast, what company are you working for, what is the frequency of different tasks, and so on. And see where we stand now. "I have one programmer that is the bottleneck and needs to do 15 different tasks. It's inhumane to even ask him to do it. So I need another programmer. How do I get that programmer? Can I recruit someone fast enough? Can I outsource this?" And put some of the tasks... let's see what tasks are there.

So trying to prevent the saturation, that's the key. But you always get... because you have unexpected issues... you always get to a point where at one point in time you have 16 different things that have suddenly appeared. It can be champagne problems. It can be five clients at the same time that you have to serve and you don't have the people to support them. Or it can be bugs, errors, IRS, I don't know. So it happens. So look at it, prioritize, and give whatever you can or ask for help with whatever you can. And if you have the right relationship with people, it's a give and take. They ask you, you ask them. "I currently have to fix my roof. So, Lior, can you help me with that client that needs help until I'm done?" So, once it's a give and take situation and the culture, which I talked about at the beginning, is good and everybody thinks positive, not negative, they want to help. You're creating an environment which answers your question. It actually fulfills that task of not being overwhelmed or being able to release that pressure of being oversaturated.

Is that the answer?

That's perfect. It's perfect. It was so great to have you in. Thank you so much. And I look forward to seeing you and having you back and learning more about all the great success that is to come.

Awesome. Thank you very much for having me.

Pleasure. My pleasure.

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