I live near my office in Boston, and I either walk or take the subway. Occasionally I use Uber. The Metro line into Boston is crowded but efficient and I always take a book or listen to a radio programme. I love it when the train crosses the river, the water seems to add calm to the journey.
It takes between 20 and 40 minutes in rush hour, and I use the time to go through emails; my inbox is full in the morning. It is also a good time to catch up on news.
I have been based in Boston for the past five years, but I travel a lot because our biggest office is in Tel Aviv. We also have an office in London.
We work with three of the big-four banks in the UK, and are active in North America and Latin America.
News
The ride to the office in Boston gives me a chance to read feeds and alerts about cyber security, investments and venture capital.
I follow the industry in Israel to keep in touch with its cyber security ecosystem, as well as finance.
One newsletter I read is from Geektime, an international tech blog. I like IVC, which provides detailed insight into Israel’s VC industry, and Finextra, which covers financial technology.
Music
I am a musician and play the bass in a rock band called Lo Dubim in Israel. We are recording remotely for a new album. It is a long process so flights are an ideal time to listen to the stuff we record and send to one another. Then we meet up and record together.
Once in a while we perform concerts.
Fiction
I enjoy literature rather than professional stuff related to my job — it takes me out of it and gives my mind a rest from daily concerns.
Recently I read Tai-Pan by James Clavell. It is about when Britain took control of Hong Kong in the 19th century, and the battles around that — basically how the British got it.
Non-fiction
A book I go back to every once in a while is Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. It is an intensive book about the philosophy of AI, and how eventually you will not be able to separate real AI and humans. It explores whether this is possible or not from a logic perspective and a philosophical perspective.
This is the most fundamental book on the topic, even though it was written in 1979. The discussion started in the 1950s when Alan Turing, the computer scientist, came up with the Turing Test. But this was maybe the first popular book to be written about this subject.
Television
I prefer television series’ to film, especially stuff related to my previous job, which was in the intelligence service in Israel. So I like action TV shows that deal with intelligence because it takes me back to those days — such as 24, which has a new series, and Homeland.
I watch Westworld, a science-fiction western thriller — it is clear that the writers read Douglas Hofstadter’s book because there are so many things from it you can see in the show.
Podcasts
I listen to This American Life. Each episode has a different theme and I like the different stories. And my wife listens to it and likes to discuss it with me.
