Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi everyone, this is Binny Krause. Welcome to the opening up podcast of SAR Academy. It is great to be here. Today we are gearing up for the 2023, 2024 school year. We have about 200 teachers in the building this pre Labor Day week for our in service. Lots of different programming time for class setup and getting ready for the day after Labor Day when our kids will be coming back to school. Our theme of the year this year is reaching out.
We're thinking about how to connect to people who we might not naturally connect with, which I think we can all relate to and we all believe is valuable.
And in order to do that or to frame that for our teachers and now for our community, I asked a friend, a new friend, somebody who I met, had the honor and privilege to meet this this past summer really kind of randomly because we reached out and connected with him when we were away. And you'll hear the context in a couple of minutes that reaching out led to a really powerful encounter for my family. And I wanted to share that with our community and with our teachers. So Sam Herod was our guest at the opening in service program for our SAR teachers for this year. He spoke to our teachers the other day and. And I wanted to share that conversation with our community and with our listeners. And this is just to give you a little bit of context for that conversation which is coming next.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: We hope to be able to continue.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: To connect with Sam. I think that the feedback. I know that the feedback that I've received from our teachers has been very, very positive and they were inspired by what he had to say. He is a remarkable person and I will allow him to speak for himself. We did this in interview style to make the conversation flow better. There were some slides, but I do not think they are central to being able to get the gist of the conversation. And I hope that you will enjoy that conversation as much as we did and learn from it like our teachers did and like I did. Thank you very, very much.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: I am going to bring up a guest, Sam Herrod. I'd like to tell you who Sam is.
Please welcome Sam Herrod.
[00:02:11] Speaker B: Let's see here while I introduce you. Maybe Emily, could we get him that? Just make sure he's comfortable.
I've been sitting here for like two hours.
You have whatever's comfortable for you. I'll get you a mic.
So I want to tell you what happened to me, to us.
It was only three or four weeks ago, maybe three weeks ago, our family went to the Jersey Shore for The weekend, there's a shul in Bradley beach at the Jersey shore. There's a shulem. We've been there a couple of times before. It's not easy to find a place that has both a beach and a shul. There's someone here.
Where's Tova Fick, who was the.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: Rebbetsen at the shul? On the beach in Venice, California. But for the most part, usually shules and beaches don't go together, but on the Jersey shore, if you go to Bradley beach, you can. It's an Ashkenazi shul that's near the beach.
Ruthie Stavsky and Eliezer Stavsky, who many of you know have a house. Yeah.
[00:03:16] Speaker B: They have a home in Bradley. And we just had an Airbnb. And after Shula, we're talking to Ruthie, Eliezer. And Eliezer introduced us to Sam, and it was basically like, sam's a really nice guy, which continues to be true.
Sam's a really nice guy. He's been in this community for a little while.
[00:03:36] Speaker B: And then we started talking to him, and my wife Shauna was talking to him and said, why don't you come. Come with us for lunch? So we invited Sam for lunch, and then we spent the whole summer Shabbos afternoon. We spent the whole afternoon pretty much together. We had lunch together. We walked around a little bit, and everybody that was there, it was my family, some friends.
We were remarkably blown away by this person.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: And you'll soon see, I think, I'm sure, actually you'll soon see what was remarkable about that encounter.
[00:04:15] Speaker B: But then I was thinking about, like, wow, maybe that's what reaching out means. It means that if you just, like.
[00:04:20] Speaker B: Reach out and, like, talk to somebody who you don't otherwise know or you wouldn't necessarily naturally talk to, that's what community is about.
And then you can have meaningful relationships and form, create meaningful experiences and hopefully lasting experiences. And that's what, again, to say lasting. I mean, I know you for three weeks, so this is like, I got called the guy up. I'm like, could you come speak to our 200 teachers.
[00:04:43] Speaker B: Before labor Day? He's like, sure. Which is, first of all, really nice of you. Thank you for coming.
And let's get into it, because I've been talking too much. Okay, so, Sam, I think we have a picture out here. You are from Fairbanks, Alaska. Anybody here from Fairbanks, Alaska?
Okay, good. So you're from Fairbanks, Alaska. Tell us about that.
[00:05:09] Speaker C: Well, hi, welcome. Thank you for having me.
Yeah. Growing up in Fairbanks, it's in the heart of Alaska. The closest town town is the major city is Anchorage which is the, the star. And it's six hour drive in the summer and so.
[00:05:30] Speaker C: It'S, it's quite remote but there's also, there's a city and there's a university and there's a symphony. So there's sort of like you're living within society.
It's like the last outpost of normal life before you're in truly in the Arctic Circle.
[00:05:46] Speaker B: So that's like regular Alaska. Yeah.
[00:05:49] Speaker C: Yes, yes, yes. And so in my childhood it's kind of surprising because people don't go to Alaska without a purpose.
There's obviously a wilderness aspect, there's oil and gas, there's military.
But it's also sort of a melting pot for people that just don't fit into what we call the lower 48. So these like the black sheep of your family might one day end up in Fairbanks and they'll love it there because the rest of the black sheep are there. And then the further go away from Fairbanks, there's the black sheep and the black sheep.
[00:06:21] Speaker B: We talk about people, we talk about people out of New York as being out of town. So you're like the lower 48. Same idea. Exactly. Upstate.
[00:06:27] Speaker C: Upstate. Lower 48.
But. So I was kind of one of these kids that grew up inside of this environment.
And.
[00:06:38] Speaker C: Surprisingly I lived without really experiencing the state that I had grown up in. Thank you.
[00:06:47] Speaker C: And so I had a bit of a difficult upbringing.
My dad wasn't really around much. Since I was 10, my parents divorced. My mother had.
[00:07:01] Speaker C: An infection in her brain and had like probably I was told that she wouldn't survive, but she did, but was very handicapped. And I became a carer through high school. It was a whole thing. Like my childhood was a bit intense. Grew up a bit poor and so needless to say I didn't really experience the place that I live, lived in. And so when I finally was independent and on my own in my late teens, early 20s, then I started to explore the state and experience it and started to run and climb and. Really?
[00:07:38] Speaker C: Yes. See, go ahead.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: You went to school?
[00:07:43] Speaker C: I went to school. I went to public school. So yeah, I mean you can imagine like your elementary school classroom, it's like maybe 2/3 school, one third closet for all the winter gear because we had so like recess happened regardless of the weather so we would be out playing and these like little frozen little children and you'd have like little frost nipped noses and it was. And yeah, just.
[00:08:11] Speaker C: We didn't slow down for the weather. It was kind of a unifying aspect of living there. Is that everyone's sort of suffering.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: You told me that you weren't. When we were talking and preparing for this. And also that shovel said. You told me that you weren't a great student, but you also told me that you have a PhD in glaciology or something. So how's like how do you become a poor student and then get just like pick up a PhD in glaciology?
[00:08:36] Speaker C: Yeah. And I mean. And this is maybe something that a lot of you teachers can relate to, which is sort of. Sort of. I mean now you can use labels like neurodiversity. At the time it was just. I was. I felt very inadequate academically. I had a brother and a sister that cruised through school. No, no trouble whatsoever. And then I was a bit more difficult and then just struggled deeply through school. I think there's.
[00:09:06] Speaker C: I went on. I get some. At some point they sent me in my. In high school, they sent me to trade school because I was just not clever enough to survive in regular school. And I was learning how to weld and fix things, which is. Which I enjoyed. But I also. It didn't really fulfill.
[00:09:23] Speaker C: What I wanted to do. And so.
[00:09:27] Speaker C: I continued on into university. And there was a kind of a telling moment in my. In my career as a scientist where I was taking. I started university, but I was so far behind. I was taking like remedial class. I was basically taking high school again in colleges like you pay for it, but it's. It's like.
And it doesn't count as credit.
[00:09:47] Speaker B: It was.
[00:09:47] Speaker C: It's rough, you know, and. And so I was taking high school trigonometry in college as a college student. But I was sim. Spontaneously, like I said, I was running and climbing. I was in the mountains and I. And I started to just do something that was life changing to me, which was I just started to see the whole world around me in terms of questions, not just in terms of. This is a chair and we're standing in a. You know, the Palisades are behind us. It's like, why are the Palisades behind us? Likely start to just question every single thing around you. And once I started to see the world as questions, as a climber, I was seeing glaciers and mountains and I wanted to know where did the mountains come from? Where did the glaciers come from? What will the glaciers look like if we can figure out what they'll look like in 10 years? What will they look like in 100 years? And so I started to think along these questions and start to go to the university and put myself around people that were also studying them. So I was this. I was technically an undergraduate. I was taking high school, and I was sitting with.
[00:10:51] Speaker C: PhD students, master students, postdocs and professors. That's where I was. That's where my brain space was. And so it was a telling moment where I was sitting at the table in the geophysical department where all the scientists were, and.
[00:11:08] Speaker C: I was trying to solve for some kind of phenomenon in glaciology that's not understood. And I was trying to predict how this glacier would behave in 100 years. And a professor came over and looked over my shoulder and said, hey, Sam.
[00:11:22] Speaker C: What are you doing right there? And I was like, oh, I'm using the diffusion equation to predict this quantity about this glacier. And he's like, you realize that's a partial differential equation. I was like, well, yeah, I guess. I mean, it's doing what I need to do, right? It's functional. It's like, what math are you? And I was like, oh, I'm in trigonometry.
[00:11:41] Speaker C: He said, maybe you're in the wrong math class.
And I appreciated that being seen in that way. But, yeah, I've lived in this very sort of a dichotomy of some things I can do with great ease, and I'm able to see the solutions to problems. And in other spaces, it's like almost complete deficiency. And I've lived in that space my whole life.
[00:12:04] Speaker B: Are you now working for the University of Ohio remotely? Doing what?
[00:12:10] Speaker C: Writing a deep learning model to predict where reservoirs of free hydrogen might exist so that we could sort of.
[00:12:18] Speaker B: Oh, everyone's doing that. Yeah. Wow. That's pretty. Wow. And how long you been doing that?
[00:12:24] Speaker C: Three months.
[00:12:25] Speaker B: Just at the job?
Yeah. Yeah.
[00:12:27] Speaker C: Most of my work is in glaciology.
[00:12:29] Speaker B: Now, so you can imagine we're having this conversation over Shabbos. And they're like, but there's more.
So.
[00:12:37] Speaker B: I like to think, and my family often tells me otherwise, I like to think that I'm a runner.
[00:12:43] Speaker B: I'm not going to go running with a rabbi. Doesn't exist anymore. I ran the San Diego Half Marathon, and then I.
[00:12:52] Speaker B: Participated in the Jerusalem Full Marathon. And it took a long time and it was a mistake.
[00:13:01] Speaker B: But I did it. And one of the things I actually remember coming back to this group, speaking to them after the half marathon and.
[00:13:08] Speaker A: Saying.
[00:13:11] Speaker B: Amazing things that you learn when you do these things is like, we Finished the half marathon we worked dead.
And you're like, all these people are doing that again now, like they're doing double that.
And it was like a remarkable and humbling kind of feeling to experience. And then sometimes you meet people who are like, yeah, you know, right. You know, half marathons and marathons and there are people in the world who run ultra marathons. Do you know what an Ultra Marathon is?
100. That's 100. So if you look on the board, I think.
[00:13:44] Speaker B: What we have over here. And I'll just read it to you because I found this on your website afterwards. So sorry. After Shabbos, we just looked you up, we went to.
[00:13:54] Speaker C: I actually thought I was inflating my resume, right.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: I was like, come on, you know. So you ran the MidState Massive Ultra October 2022. You didn't win.
[00:14:08] Speaker B: 156Km in 23 hours, 32 minutes and 40 seconds. Tell us about that a little bit.
That's only one, by the way. There's a whole list.
The Crimea. Some of these things I think you shouldn't put here. Like the fact that you ran the 27k is not impressive. The 50 miles, whatever, but I mean the hundred mile ones are impressive.
So there are a few of them over here. How many ultramarathons have you run?
[00:14:37] Speaker B: Who's counting?
I don't know how many marathons I ran either. Okay, good.
What, what's up with that?
[00:14:46] Speaker C: I mean.
[00:14:48] Speaker C: You run a marathon and you say, let's keep going, let's keep it going. I don't know, it's just, it's, it's. To me, it's an, it's very, it's liberating to see where your legs can, can transport your, your, your body to. And it's meditative and, and it's a community and, and it's these accomplishments and this sort of solving systems you have, you have, your body is.
There's no way you'll run 100 front to back and have just the most cheerful body. Just happily letting you do this. Like there's all, there's always something.
Uh, I think that's kind of what I started, why I started running. It's like to me, it was a very clear path of being a. Not a very interesting person to being a very interesting person. If you just move your legs a lot, like, there's no way you're not gonna see something incredible. If you start somewhere and just move your body for 100 miles, I promise you you will see some things. So you just start Repeating that over and over again.
[00:15:53] Speaker B: So, yeah, so, I mean, you run every day right after shopping, she's like, I'm gonna go for a short run, which was seven. Like, seven miles. That was the short run. And. And that's just what you do. And you talk about. It was like. When I talk about. Think about going for, like, a run, I'm dreading it. Like, you. You look forward to this.
[00:16:08] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's like. I mean, it's like. I don't know, it's sort of factored into mental health. It's factored into just routine and time with yourself and time to process.
[00:16:18] Speaker B: Incredible. And then, you know, their hobbies.
So your hobbies again, you could look this all up.
So you. You play music. You play. This is you playing piano and drum at the same time. Is that accurate?
[00:16:33] Speaker B: Why do you have to play both at the same time?
[00:16:35] Speaker C: I'm not very good with social skills.
[00:16:39] Speaker B: Can you talk about all of that?
[00:16:44] Speaker C: I.
[00:16:46] Speaker C: I wasn't. When I was picking my instrument to play, my sister had already chose percussion. She was more like classically minded. And I just loved the moment I heard. I grew up around a lot of classical music, so hearing a beat behind some music was just.
[00:17:00] Speaker C: Perfection in my ears.
But since my sister was playing the drums, I had to play the saxophone.
[00:17:06] Speaker B: And.
[00:17:09] Speaker C: I was in jazz band in middle school, and.
And the drummer was playing very poorly, and I just couldn't handle it. And it was against the rules to touch the drums. But I just threw down my saxophone and I sat behind the drums and I could just play. Like, I just. I wish I could say that there was something more to it, but I could just play. And so the.
[00:17:27] Speaker B: The.
[00:17:28] Speaker C: The.
The band teacher said, why don't you borrow the drum set and come back a real drummer next year? So I did that. But the problem is, we also had a piano in our house, and while I was playing bas drums to myself, I was wanting to hear the music, the melody. And so I thought, wait a minute. This is just like a problem of coordination. Like, kind of, what can you get away with with the limbs you have? Why not see if you can subdivide your brain and play more than one instrument with more than one.
With half drums, half. Like, you just. I mean, you have basically, how many notes can you hear at one time and be overwhelmed? Like, if you hear more than four notes at one time, it's kind of mush. So I have four hands. Why don't I just subdivide some of the limbs to be Drums, some of the limbs to be pianos. Do a little of both. And that's kind of where the idea came from.
Basically. I made some recordings as a teenager, young, like 13, 14 years old, on a cassette tape. And honestly, the quality is not much different than what I can do today. I didn't get any better. I just could do it.
[00:18:25] Speaker B: So just to be clear, I have a piano in my house too, and it never has yelled out at me quite.
[00:18:32] Speaker B: Like that. You actually wrote an article which, again, you could look up, can an observant Jewish.
Oh, you want to play it? It's up to you. We got all day.
[00:18:57] Speaker B: J.
[00:19:37] Speaker B: So, like you said, not that. Not that good.
That's amazing. That's incredible. Wow.
That is incredible.
You wrote an article. Can an observant. Can an observant Jewish.
That's okay. Can an observant Jewish runner run. Did you say this was in the Jewish link?
[00:19:54] Speaker C: Actually, no, it wasn't in the Jewish link.
[00:19:57] Speaker B: I'll make that up. Okay. Can an observant Jewish runner run an ultra. I was again, I encourage you to read it. That was the first thing we looked up after Shabbos, and you talked. Now, the reason why you wrote that is because you're studying.
You're in a process of geor. Of conversion. Can you talk about that? Yeah, of course.
Yeah.
[00:20:17] Speaker C: So it's kind of a bizarre. Everyone asked me, where does this desire come from? And it was kind of a strange origin because it happened in Alaska, in Fairbanks, where there's no observant Jews anywhere in all of Alaska. Well, in Anchorage there is, but in Fairbanks, there's plenty of secular Jews and a Reform.
[00:20:38] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:20:39] Speaker C: But it doesn't really exist there. But I started to already read books on Orthodoxy and conversion already then.
[00:20:48] Speaker C: And so that was 10 years ago. And sort of as I've gone through, I lived in Europe for some time.
[00:20:57] Speaker C: And mostly where I lived was a function of my school and degrees and.
[00:21:04] Speaker C: Science. But everywhere I ended up, there was always a Jewish community that I sort of influenced, infiltrated, and learned from. And I've kind of known. I was. I've known since probably about 10 years ago that this would happen. I just wasn't quite sure when and where in the process and finding the right community. And that's. It's basically at the very tail end of it now. I think that's probably quite imminent now.
But so in the process of learning all the mitzvot and.
[00:21:31] Speaker C: How to observe Shabbat, I started to wonder how this life that I've been living as an ultra runner would coexist with.
[00:21:40] Speaker C: Orthodoxy, observance to Judaism, because.
[00:21:45] Speaker C: As you well know, any sport, you'll find Jews that are quite talented in it. But ultra running is quite unique in the sense that if someone's davening in the morning, in the afternoon, you can easily fit a 5k, even a marathon in between.
[00:22:02] Speaker B: Between.
[00:22:03] Speaker C: But if you have an event that spans 23, 26 hours, like pretty much every. Every, every element of Judaism that occupies an observant Jew's life throughout the day will have to take place simultaneously with. With this sport.
[00:22:18] Speaker B: And I thought, why I decided not to run ultras.
[00:22:21] Speaker C: Yes. Yeah.
[00:22:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:22] Speaker C: But now there's a. There's a guide. So maybe there's a maybe if we can train you up for one.
[00:22:28] Speaker C: But so I thought. I thought there was some room for comedy, and I wanted to sort of just paint the picture of what it would be like to be observant and also participate in a sport like this. And so I wrote an article about it and published it.
[00:22:45] Speaker B: How can.
How can.
[00:22:47] Speaker C: Well, so the hardest thing is that a lot of the races are.
[00:22:52] Speaker C: Will have some overlap with Shabbat. And so.
[00:22:57] Speaker C: I went through, I think, 50 races from the US and also like a global series of ultra races.
And I found two that you can do and avoid Shabbat. They're both in Europe, one in Switzerland, one in France.
But I mean, two is not none, so that's nice.
[00:23:18] Speaker C: And so, yeah, I just talk about how you would need to make a bracha over your running snacks and over the beautiful mountains in front of you and the strange people all around you.
[00:23:32] Speaker C: And how you might bring Tefillin if you're a man.
[00:23:40] Speaker C: But mostly I focused on going through a lot of the laws of Shabbat and making jokes about how your race director could build an aruv so that you could carry a granola bar for 100 miles. You know.
[00:23:56] Speaker B: So we had a great Shabbos afternoon.
[00:24:03] Speaker B: And like, I admitted. And I admitted this to Sam and we met the next morning.
We did. We did after Shabbat, kind of start looking this guy up.
[00:24:12] Speaker A: And.
[00:24:14] Speaker B: We were really curious about. About so much. And I have to tell you, and I'm sorry to do it this way, but I have Sam's permission.
[00:24:22] Speaker B: We ended up on your Instagram account, not on your Instagram account, like, whatever you do, looking at someone's posts on Instagram.
[00:24:33] Speaker B: And we found the post from May 2022, which is a post of your dad.
And there's a picture again, if you can't See, it's a picture of your dad. My preferred Instagram posts are latte art, which you also know how to do. You told us about that run science and music. These are my life, so it seems personal enough. But with this post, there's a few bits of more deeply personal information I'd like to share with my friends, in part because it will save me from having to remember who I've told Two weeks ago, my dad, Walt, died in Anchorage from Huntington's Disease. Huntington's disease is a rare, relentlessly brutal, terminal, hereditary, neurodegenerative disease where a set of CAG CAG CAG repeats on the fourth chromosome cross a threshold from perfectly normal to unsustainable. Symptoms of hocus's usually begin between 30 and 50. The decline to death is variable in pace but unavoidable. There is a 50% chance of inheriting the mutated gene from a hunting disease. Positive parent and while there's currently no treatment, there's definitive genetic testing at 9.30am on a partly sunny Thursday in May 2016, I left Whitley Bay beach in northeast England and walked alone into the Newcastle center for Life to learn the broad reality of the rest of my life. With a worn empathic expression, my Jedi castle told me I had 41 CAG repeats and will develop Huntington's disease. I slumped in my chair for a moment, experiencing how my mental preparation had been oddly inadequate, straightened back up and said, I okay, if you scroll back to my first Instagram post, one is a Whitley Bay and the second is donating spinal fluid for Huntington's research. I fall into a tiny set of humans who are known to be Huntington's positive but not yet symptomatic, making my body useful for developing it. Possible future therapy as soon as I was diagnosed, I volunteered for every study I could and plan to give more spinal fluid in London this fall.
It can be extremely problematic to disclose this sort of information for work, living abroad, relationships. But it's in the fabric of who I am and I would like to be open about it. While I still have the ability to articulate myself. I'm not in any way looking for sympathy. And at 40 I will still be able to crush the out of you.
[00:26:44] Speaker B: In a footrace. But now you know a little bit more about the world that I live in.
[00:26:51] Speaker C: So.
[00:26:53] Speaker B: You can imagine how it felt well.
[00:26:58] Speaker B: To people that met you a few hours before to read that incredibly, incredibly sad and incredibly bold.
[00:27:08] Speaker B: Expression that's not that old. It's only a year old for you. It's about seven years old, the information.
[00:27:14] Speaker B: And then we invited you back to talk to us the next morning because we needed to be consoled, because we were pretty shaken up, to be honest.
And he came back and we spoke for a few more hours.
[00:27:27] Speaker B: And one of the things that you said was that you are hoping to be able to share all of it, like all of you and all of your story with people in the hope of kind of the practical things that you mentioned, and then just so many of the potential lessons that you might.
[00:27:46] Speaker A: Be able to share.
[00:27:46] Speaker B: So I wanted to give you that opportunity to reflect on that.
[00:27:53] Speaker C: There's just.
[00:27:55] Speaker C: A lot of people that have this.
[00:27:58] Speaker C: Condition that feel silenced or unable to speak out about it just because it's so devastating. It can really have repercussions on, obviously, relationships and children, but also things like immigration and.
And maybe employment. If an employer gets this information, they might elect to not hire you if they know what the future holds for you.
But I thought that.
[00:28:25] Speaker C: I'm on a unique enough trajectory that I'm not beholden to these constraints, and if I.
[00:28:33] Speaker C: Sort of suffer some consequences from this, that I'm willing to take them on just for the ability to speak out. Out about it while I have the ability to be articulate. And I feel like I can be, in some ways, a spokesperson for disability, because.
[00:28:48] Speaker C: Many people that live with disability will never be able to stand before you and articulate what they're feeling. And I can't say that I can understand what it will be like for me in the future, what it is like for other people, but I do have the ability to.
[00:29:05] Speaker C: Comprehend the immensity of it and how even in the preparation for getting a diagnosis like this, it took a year. They want you to go through a lot of psychological evaluation because there's a high frequency with suicide from learning this information. And so they are quite careful with giving it to you, the information.
It was interesting that in that process you prepare yourself for either outcome, but when you get the outcome, it's still devastating.
[00:29:40] Speaker C: In a way that you couldn't anticipate. But what that has given me is an ability to have an understanding about.
[00:29:49] Speaker C: Our mortality and life and.
[00:29:54] Speaker C: What you prioritize in it. Especially when, I mean, in a simplest sense, we're all sort of in the same trajectory. Mine's just slightly better understood and probably a lot shorter.
So.
[00:30:09] Speaker C: I've sort of been able to connect with people in a very unique way that.
[00:30:20] Speaker C: I have the.
The counterpoint and the sort of authenticity to be able to share with people.
Who are maybe going through a dark period in their life or experiencing hard things that I can share with them, how I keep myself doing these things and occupied and fulfilled and positive and forward looking, even with a grim future. So it's been sort of a blessing in disguise in that sense.
[00:30:51] Speaker B: As you know, as we all know, the time period that we're in, the weeks leading up to Rosh Hashanah are for everybody, times of reflection. Reflection.
[00:31:09] Speaker B: Simply means that we do what we call a cheshbone hanefesh. Cheshbon hanefesh. You know, maybe when you're young, you think it's like, okay, let me think about all the mistakes I made and then how to fix them, which is maybe part of it. Cheshbon hanefesh, I think as you grow up means what matters. You think about what is important, who am I, what's important, what matters, and what should I do with that?
[00:31:37] Speaker B: I've often said here, my father, Allah Shalom used to wake up on Rosh Chodesh Elul and say mitar chuvatin. You got to start. You got to start reflecting. You got to start reflecting. And that's something that we sometimes are successful at doing and sometimes less successful. I know that when I and my family, when we met you.
[00:32:00] Speaker B: That allowed us to reflect not in the. And you were incredibly powerful to us because it was obviously hard in many ways, but you made it positive. And you had such a.
[00:32:13] Speaker B: Incredibly, incredibly strong.
[00:32:18] Speaker B: Way of articulating all of this like you just did for us now.
[00:32:24] Speaker B: And we are very, very grateful to you for sharing that with us. Of course, I think I know that we all join in wishing you well, wishing you aktivava chatima tovah in every sense of the word that you should. Your conversion process should continue successfully and the things that you care about and that you commit yourself to should continue to be successful. And you should have strength to do all the things that you do and that matter to you and make a difference in the world, because it's pretty remarkable. So thank you.
[00:33:05] Speaker B: A little bit over time, but for any, any questions or comments. I'd love to not just break.
[00:33:19] Speaker B: So thank you for sharing.
[00:33:20] Speaker D: This is. This is not a joke. It may sound like one, but time management.
Can you explain how you.
[00:33:29] Speaker D: Can do these things? Like, how do you.
[00:33:31] Speaker E: I don't know.
[00:33:32] Speaker D: It seems like you do everything possible.
[00:33:35] Speaker D: How do you do this?
[00:33:38] Speaker C: I don't have any friends.
[00:33:41] Speaker C: No, I just, I try to be very. I have. I also, my brain is always in different directions. It's quite hard to Focus it on one thing. But when it does focus on one thing, it's quite, quite capable. And so it's just been kind of a constant process of how can I figure out how to optimize, get into these sort of focus states. And then if I'm not in one to do something else. And so if I have basically like four things that I'm quite passionate about and very interested in. And so I just try to, if I'm not being functional in one area, I'll do hard shift to a second and I try to get up, I start, usually start running, I don't know. So in the winter it's 4:20 on the, on the dot because I run with the teacher. And so we run before school, but so yeah, so I try to run early.
I wake up very early and just try to be as efficient as I can. And.
[00:34:39] Speaker C: Sometimes I don't, I'm like, not always crushing it, but.
[00:34:44] Speaker C: If you, if you have these things that you're extremely passionate about or that you want to accomplish to get to as high a level as you possibly can, you'll find a way.
You'll be able to maybe do two things at once. Take phone calls while you're on a run, or.
[00:35:03] Speaker C: Be more efficient with meals and things so that you can do your science, do your running, be creative. And then I'm just always on my phone, I'm always writing notes and.
[00:35:16] Speaker C: Always taking notes.
And while the thoughts come, I'm constantly jotting down and I have in all these different areas.
[00:35:25] Speaker C: Constantly log. When the moments of creativity come, I make sure it gets into a note on my phone.
[00:35:31] Speaker D: The second part is.
[00:35:34] Speaker E: I don't know.
[00:35:34] Speaker D: If you can express this, but how do you believe like you see something so sort of like big.
I'm sure you break down into small steps, but how do you actually believe that you're capable to be.
[00:35:47] Speaker C: I love that question.
[00:35:52] Speaker C: My whole, I got a PhD in glaciology, but the entire project that I took up to, to this, this high degree and I published in, in a nature journal, in a well respected journal and the whole project could be sort of funneled back to an instant where I was standing on a glacier in a graduate student LED field course and they were trying to explain to me something about the mass balance of a point of a glacier. And I was too preoccupied with something around me that I didn't understand. And I asked questions like don't think about that, don't think about that. And I just in that moment could just see the entire project from start to finish, I didn't have all the intermediate steps, but I knew exactly where it could go and almost to the T, from that point when I was 20 to when I finished my PhD, it was really just following that trajectory. And so it's just a matter of.
[00:36:48] Speaker C: Seeing questions, seeing the problems, seeing the holes, and then trying to think, do you have the tools and the knowledge to fill them?
[00:37:00] Speaker B: Heidi, go ahead.
[00:37:01] Speaker C: What Jewish community have you decided is.
[00:37:03] Speaker B: The approach is the right one for you?
[00:37:05] Speaker C: It sounded like that was something you determined.
Yeah, it's a good question. So my. My first kind of exposure was Chabad in Southern California, and I found that really a moving environment from there. I went to a very Haredi community in Gateshead in Northeast England. I lived there for three years, and now I'm sort of in a more modern Orthodox community. But there's not a daily minion at this shul on the beach. So I've been spending a lot of time davening with the Syrian community. So I've kind of had a nice smorgasbord of all the varieties. Yeah. So I think I'll probably land in the modern Orthodox.
[00:37:49] Speaker C: Just to. Sorry, can you play chef? I assume that's, you know, when I would climb with.
We would spend sometimes in these big Alaskan mountains. The trips could span weeks, and if a storm comes in, you'll be trapped in a tent with another guy for a really long time. And that's the only time in my life when I studied openings.
But otherwise, I don't think it's. I think there's. I'd rather, I don't know, write code or.
[00:38:24] Speaker C: Learn a language as my brain teaser. So I'm not that good at chess. What I'm trying to say.
No one here is good at jail.
[00:38:30] Speaker B: Oh, good.
[00:38:35] Speaker E: First of all, thank you so much for sharing. Super interesting. And firing ands.
[00:38:41] Speaker E: When I was getting my master's, my focus was on how movement impacts learning and the connection between moving your body and then the learning that can happen or that can blossom from there. And I heard in your story, and I'm not sure if I'm making it up, that.
[00:38:58] Speaker E: You had a hard time in school, and then you started running, and then you started climbing and moving, and then things are opened from there.
Would that. Was that a connection for you? Was that something that. That aided your.
[00:39:16] Speaker E: I couldn't say learning, but, you know, even development or your. Your sense of self or anything along those lines.
[00:39:24] Speaker C: I mean, it definitely helped with the sense of self, helped me make friends. Who then were smarter than me and could help me.
There was a classic moment where one of my classes, climbing partner, sat me down. I was failing a class in my undergrad. And he said, pull out every test you've taken. Let's go through it together. And we go through every question. It's like, you got it wrong, got it wrong, got it wrong. And he starts to read the answers.
You wrote clever things. They just didn't answer the question. That was on the day. You just need to learn how to read the question a few times and actually answer it. Don't just say the things that come to mind.
I would say honestly no, though, that the running, I mean, it was. Yeah. So it was great for community, it was great for mental clarity. But I think the struggle that I've experienced as a kid and in school, it's not gone away at all. I think I still live completely with it.
[00:40:15] Speaker C: I skipped a master's because I published a couple papers in my undergrad and a professor invited me, a European professor, saw the work I did at a conference and invited me to do a PhD with her.
And I said, no, no, no, I need to do this master's first. It's like very course heavy in the U.S. she's like, look, you're obviously terrible at this. Why don't you just do what you're good at and do science, Just write the papers. And so that's what I did for three years then. So I think it was just a matter of like, running was. Movement was definitely a massive advantage for all parts of my life. It's like a tide that rose all the ships. But I wouldn't say there was a one to one as far as my brain working a little better.
[00:40:58] Speaker B: Okay, I think we're going to break and say thank you again.
