#145 Emi Gal, Founder & CEO of Ezra | Tracking 150 Biomarkers, Annual Challenges, Peak Health by 40, Becoming More Disciplined, and More

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About the Guest

Emi Gal started his first company, Brainient, when he was just 19. He spent 10 years building Brainient into one of the leading ad-tech companies in Europe before it was acquired by Teads—one of the largest advertising platforms in Europe, with 1.8-billion impressions per month.

After working with Hospices for Hope, a non-profit in Romania that builds and operates hospices for terminally ill cancer patients, Emi realized that one of the biggest problems with cancer is the lack of a fast, accurate, affordable way to screen for cancer everywhere in the body. He founded Ezra in 2018 to solve this problem using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Artificial Intelligence. To date, he’s reduced the cost of getting a full-body cancer screening by 80% and reduced the time required to get screened by 66%.

‍Emigal.com | Twitter | Ezra | Yearly Challenges

Chapters

(00:00:00) - Introduction
(00:01:27) - Why and How Emi Gal Tracks 150 Different Biomarkers
(00:05:50) - How Emi Gal is Reaching Peak Health by The Age of 40
(00:08:54) - The Relationship Between Bone Density and Exercise
(00:10:27) - Why Emi Gal Has Done a Yearly Challenge Every Year Since 2008
(00:18:16) - Lessons Learned Studying and Becoming Antifragile
(00:22:23) - Lessons Learned from Studying with a World Memory Champion
(00:26:56) - Lessons Learned from Interviewing Elderly Americans
(00:31:31) - Why People Would Be Surprised at Emi Gal’s Discipline
(00:34:06) - How to Become More Disciplined
(00:39:05) - Emi Gal’s Favorite Books: Antifragile and The Patient Will See You Now
(00:42:57) - Emi’s Advice for His Younger Self: Embrace Optionality Early On

Episode Guide

Emi Gal shares the lessons he’s learned building Ezra, why he tracks 150 different biomarkers, what he’s learned doing a Yearly Challenge for the last 14 years, and why he’s focused on achieving peak health by 40, and more. As well as the origin story behind his extreme discipline and his advice for others that want to become more disciplined.

“To make progress in anything, but especially your health, you just need to nudge behavior a little bit every day. I find that tracking 150 different biomarkers does that quite well for me.” — Emi Gal

Emi Gals’ Favorite Books

Emi shared his all-time favorite books including:

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Antifragile builds upon ideas from Nassim Taleb’s previous works including Fooled by Randomness (2001), The Black Swan (2007–2010), and The Bed of Procrustes (2010–2016). It’s the fourth book in the five-volume philosophical treatise on uncertainty titled Incerto. The core premise of the book: "Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better." Emi Gal has read the book multiple times and credits Antifragile with helping him think about risk—which he engages in daily as entrepreneur—differently by layering in the concept of expected value.
Buy it now: Print | Ebook | Audiobook

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol MD

A trip to the doctor is almost a guarantee of misery. You'll make an appointment months in advance. You'll probably wait for several hours until you hear "the doctor will see you now"-but only for fifteen minutes! Then you'll wait even longer for lab tests, the results of which you'll likely never see, unless they indicate further (and more invasive) tests, most of which will probably prove unnecessary (much like physicals themselves). And your bill will be astronomical. In The Patient Will See You Now, Eric Topol, one of the nation's top physicians, shows why medicine does not have to be that way. Instead, you could use your smartphone to get rapid test results from one drop of blood, monitor your vital signs both day and night, and use an artificially intelligent algorithm to receive a diagnosis without having to see a doctor, all at a small fraction of the cost imposed by our modern healthcare system. Emi Gal loves the book and considers the shift in power from doctors to patients essential for the future of healthcare.‍
Buy it now: Print | Ebook | Audiobook