Interviewing Zeyda in Philadelphia

00:01 Hello, I'm Jake gould. I am 17 years old. Today's November 26th, and I'm speaking with Zeta. He's my grandfather. Say hello, Zeta.

00:12 Hello, Zeta.

00:17 What is the worst thing that my dad has ever done?

00:21 The worst thing that your dad has ever done? Well, if he hasn't told you, I'm not going to.

00:28 He told me about that keg thing one time.

00:31 I told you about the keg, and I told you about the fact that, you know, when he was. It tended to be kind of obnoxious when he was about your age. But other than that, you know, by and large, not bad. You know, it's interesting. You asked me earlier about what I thought were happy things, and then so while we're waiting for you to figure out the app, I thought of a couple more. Being, you know, when I was synagogue president, essentially presiding at his confirmation was one of the high spots of that particular thing. And what I took out a great deal of pleasure from. The other things that I got great deal of pleasure from was. Was visiting you and, you know, your dad and your mother at that, when you were very young. So that, you know, I can remember when you were. I remember the vividly because. Because it was. You know, it might be embarrassing to you, but I remember vividly is that when you were about four, so four or five, when I would come visiting, you'd be jumping on the couch, being very happy, saying, zeta, Zeta, Zeta.

01:36 Yeah, that was pretty fun.

01:39 So, yeah, I mean, there are little bits and pieces that surface from the depths as we're going on doing the things that your dad. The funny thing is, try not to dwell on them, in fact.

01:51 Yeah.

01:52 It's not that I. Not that I consciously suppress them. It's just that they're not part of my memory of what things are going on because I can't change the past. They're not fun to remember. So I don't. Things that were pleasures to remember, happiness. These I remember. But there's no point in dwelling on the other stuff because I can't change any of it.

02:11 Oh, yeah. What was. What was dad like growing up, besides throwing some keggers?

02:19 Well, you know, he was a bad kid. I mean. Yeah. Tended like. Like kids often do to have to be somewhat dilatory and less than totally dedicated to what is what he should be doing. But other than that, you know, very involved with sports. I like that very much. And he did. Other than that, not bad. I mean, you know, he did what a lot of kids did in terms of his going through his education he went through, he had his bar mitzvah, which of course was expected. And then he continued on to confirmation, which I thought was important because quite frankly, on his cohort he was the only one that did so. Yeah. And so what gives me pleasure out of that is that as time has marched on, he has become very involved with a lot of the stuff at your synagogue and that says, okay, I must have done the right thing.

03:16 What was his bar mitzvah like? Was he like really prepared?

03:22 Was he prepared? You know, like. I guess so. I mean, I'm not. Again, I don't dwell on it. I remember that we went through it, he was prepared, he got through it okay, and that was fine. And then after that, I didn't really, I didn't dwell on it. It was necessary to go through the exercise. And the thing that's important to remember is that bar Mitzvah is actually sort of a formal ceremony that's sort of marking a transition from childhood to adulthood. But in fact, by Jewish law, that transition happens whether you have any kind of ceremony or not. When you become 13, you are an adult by Jewish law, and therefore that means you are, you are subject to the obligations of an adult, religious objections of an adult, and to the religious prerogative so that you can come up and read the Torah. That's really what it means. It becomes, it's a transition from childhood to adulthood. And whether there's any formal ceremony that happens to make that happen doesn't really matter. It's nice if it does and very often it does happen, but it's not necessary.

04:28 Yeah. Who were your parents and can you tell me about them?

04:36 Good Lord. Well, okay. Well, I will, you know, my parents or my parents are very dedicated. My mother was, you know, just, she was basically, basically a housewife. Could be very, be a very tough one, but, you know, loving and okay. My dad was a very hard working guy and very creative, very handy. Did not, did not have a lot of education. This being at a time when he grew up and he went to high school and he was high school during the depression. So we're talking about almost 100 years ago. And so that, you know, his family couldn't afford to send him to school. So it wound up, his brother wound up going to, going to school, medical school and became a psychiatrist. My dad did a number of things. I was a salesman, ran up, ran a, ran a clothing store, was a commercial artist. Incredibly creative about doing things, incredibly able to build things and make things. So. Yeah. And my mother was Very creative and, you know, keeping house and making sure that, you know, things went smoothly in the house. Yeah, that's not, you know, the. One of the things that they used to do, of course, that they used to like to speak Yiddish when they were talking to each other so that I wouldn't understand neither I nor my brother. And that was the one thing that my mother said that she had actually, in later years come to regret that she wished she. That when her father died, now that would be my great. My grandfather. Yeah, she had. I had stayed some time, but this was when I was like seven or eight. Six. Seven, eight, something like that. And I had stayed with my grandmother in Canada for a little bit. She wished I'd stayed there a little bit longer. Kind of picked up the language a little more. It didn't happen that way. And there's no regrets in all of this thing. They took great pride in what. What I had accomplished and. And made it. And that was. That was a source of pride to me too. So, yeah, they were, you know, they were. They were, you know, good, solid people, good loving parents and very devoted to each other.

06:43 Who were your grandparents and how much.

06:46 Oh, boy.

06:47 How much do you remember about them?

06:48 Well, my grandparents. Well, I had two grandparents. Well, my grandfather's. My mother's father, I knew at best only briefly. He passed away when I was very young, so I didn't really know him at all. And my father's mother, she had been married a number of times, so I'm not sure which one would have been my grandfather, my maternal grandmother. Very old country. They lived up in northern Canada, which is to where they had immigrated. And, you know, they. They. They lived, you know, that was a community up there. She was my Bobby, and she was very much, you know, very much old country, and that was fine. And my. My father's mother had come to this country in like, 07 or something like that. 08. 19. 08. And she was. She was a tough cookie, but, you know, also kind of old country. She come to the US when she was 12, I think. So, yeah, this was. She.

07:57 That's pretty young.

07:58 I knew her. She lived upstairs with us when I was a kid. So, yeah, I mean, she was kind of a tough cookie, but she was my grandmother. I was a kid. And what attention did I pay to any of them? Who knows? How much attention do you pay, for example, to the real behavior of your grandparents?

08:17 Not. Not too much.

08:18 Okay, well, you get the idea.

08:20 Yeah. Can you tell me about your, like, childhood and do you like Remember any specific stories that your parents would tell you or.

08:33 No, I don't. None comes to mind. It may later. But my childhood, yeah, I lived. I lived on the street with, you know, I had the usual sorts of things. It was a fair number of Jewish families on that particular street in the city, in Cleveland, not in downtown Cleveland, you know, one of the outlying areas, but not by any means the suburbs. And yeah, I went to head of school, went to junior high school and to wound up getting going to high school up in suburbs where we ultimately moved. But other than that, yeah, I, you know, would go to. I think when I went. When I was a kid, I'd go to Hebrew school, but I take the bus and it was like two, twice, three times a week or something like that. And, you know, not at all what kids do today. And, you know, I remember some of my Hebrew school teachers, of course, I do remember that I was in something called the Cantor's Club when I was a kid and, you know, which was basically a kid's choir. The synagogue we belonged to was pretty large, so they actually had a substantial congregation for just service for quite a few kids, a couple of services going on at the same time on holidays and whatnot. So in that particular experience, I learned an awful lot of liturgy because we choir learned it, which turned out to be very useful later in life, as it happens. But other than that, as a kid, you know, we would play. We'd play in the street. We'd have games that if you can picture now, this is not. You'd have to go into older neighborhoods to see this, but you'd see houses and there would be steps going up to a porch and then entry into the house itself. And what we used to do is we used to play something we called up against where the idea was you took a tennis ball and you bounced it off the steps. And then you could, you know, depending upon how you hit it, you could. It could go not very far into the street or across the street, and if you caught it, you were out. And if not, you know, you. It was like baseball kind of. Yeah, yeah, we used to play that and we used to get things like that. But it was kids things. And that's kind of what we did. I know I could ride my bike around for all around in the neighborhood in areas that I don't think I would be very happy or comfortable with the kids riding today. But then it seemed to be okay, or at least we didn't know any better.

10:48 Yeah, that reminded me of a game I used to play in elementary school called wall ball. It's like the same exact thing, except you throw it at like a wall.

11:00 Yeah. But there was. There were these steps and usually there was. They were stone or something like that. So, you know, you bounce the ball and you know, and you try to catch it. You made it interesting. If there was a car parked in the street, I mean, it was. We never thought about it actually. It was. We did the things that kids kid things that kids do. And so, yeah, I would walk to school several blocks to my school when I was in elementary school. Elementary school is no longer there. And then when I was in junior high school, I could walk a couple of blocks to junior high school in the other direction. And you know, and part of it was I got into the junior high orchestra and learned to play badly a viola. But the advantage to that was that you got exposed to some good music and a very much of an appreciation of good music. Continue that through high school. I have not done it since. But that was part of the education that says, okay, these are things that are formative and they come back and they sort of be value to you later in your life. You know, there's a lot of things like that. I can remember teachers and people who were demanding. I remember some teachers. My English teacher, I think had two outfits, green and red. But she was a very good English teacher. I remember that somebody had written on the blackboard. I remember this very vividly in junior high school when people were trying to impress upon kids the nature of example and behavior. And that thing was very much the point. The point was if gold rusts, what shall irons say? Think about that one for a bit.

12:38 Yeah. Can you tell me the story about how dad was born or. Or. Or tell me the story that was.

12:53 That was kind of interesting. Or your father, as you know, was adopted.

12:57 Yeah.

12:58 And the. Well, I'll tell you the story of that. I know that. That your mother. His. His mother and I were really. And we. And mother was diabetic and therefore cautioned against getting pregnant. Now, nowadays that wouldn't be a caution, but, you know, you know, 50 years ago that was a caution, you know, as we're talking about the early 70s, 50 years ago. So we were interested in adopting and trying to figure out how to go about doing this and had talked about this with, you know, obviously your father's uncle Stan, who passed away recently, knew about this. You know, your. Your grandmother's brother. And so he was working for a law firm in Delaware county at the time. And so somewhere along the line, some young girl had come in pregnant. And the family, being Catholic, I presume, did not want to do an abortion, want to put the baby up for adoption and needed to have the legal, legal help in doing so. And so when they were discussing this, I'll call him Uncle Stan, because that's what your father would refer him as. Uncle Stan said, say anymore is, you know, my sister and brother in law would like to adopt. And so I can't be part of this, but I'd like to see what I can do to arrange for the adoption. And so that actually worked through fairly easily. And your father was born in Booth Memorial Hospital and on City Line Avenue in Philadelphia. And we got him when he was three days old. And remember being at his grandparents, your grandmother's mother's apartment at that time. So, yeah, that's. And then after that it was just a matter of, okay, now you've got a baby and you raise the baby and go through everything you need to go through. And so other than the fact of having physically given birth, you know, as we have told. Had told your father this, you know, you know, you're not my parents. We pointed out to him by the accident of. Not by the accident having physically given birth to you, perhaps, but in every other way of having seen to your growth, your development, your education, and every other part of your. Of who you are. We are very much your parents and more so than any other people on the earth, even your biological mother, to make that clear to him.

15:26 Yeah.

15:26 And so that was. That's basically the story of how that all happened. It sounds, you know, saying in a very few words. It was also obviously very meaningful for your grandmother and myself.

15:38 Yeah. What is something you're very grateful for in life?

15:45 Grateful for in life? Yeah, I am grateful for in life. The love that I have had, in short, and been able to experience and have shown to me and shared with the people in my life. I have been extremely fortunate, as with the women in my life. Your grandmother Marla and now Ida, have been three truly remarkable women, each in their own way and variant, from whom I gained an enormous lot and learned enormous lot.

16:14 Yeah. Nice. Can you tell me what you do for a living?

16:22 You want the short answer, the long answer? Short answer?

16:25 Totally up.

16:25 Short answer. Short answer is I solve problems.

16:28 Yeah.

16:29 Long answer. Longer answer is that in the course of various courses that arise, various activities that take place on the course of development of pharmaceutical products, there are any number of areas where one needs to Obtain data, understand what's going on, be able to draw legitimate inferences and drive correct and effective decisions. This requires understanding, knowing, sometimes creative statistical methods. Not creative in the sense of, you know, creative accounting, you know, what would you like the books to say? But rather creative and trying to draw insight from data that really is useful to people who need to make use of the information. So what I do is try to figure out how to do that. And there's, I'll tell you one story on that, and that's to kind of give you an idea. About 30 years ago, now, you're probably familiar with the fact that people take statins to confer for controlling high cholesterol. You can see ads for TV on that, for TV all the time. Now, about 30 years ago, in the early 90s, this was about the time when the very first statins were coming out on the market. And as new drugs are, they were kind of expensive, but not in the context of ways that new drugs are these days. Now, what happened was that people wanted to be able, you know, wanted to get the insurance company, or what we call third party payers or health technology associations to pay for it so that people, you know, like insurance for the medicines, and they were reluctant to do so. Well, why were they reluctant to do so? Well, it was very clear that these new classes of drugs, they're called statins, were very effective in lowering cholesterol, so much so that they very significantly reduced the risk people had of dying of heart disease. If you had a high cholesterol, instead of dying at 50, you might die at 80. That's adding in many, many years of life. Now, the problem was that nobody could demonstrate that this really affected overall death rate because if all you were doing was changing the cause of death from, let's say heart disease to cancer, and you weren't gaining any additional years of, or useful years of life, what was the point? Why bother paying for it? You weren't. There wasn't any net benefit to society in all this. And there were a number of studies that actually tried to do this and failed to do so. So, and we took all of these studies. I had a couple of collaborators on this, we took the studies and I was the one that wound up doing the analyses. We looked at the studies, looked at the data and tried to put it together and figure out could we estimate what the effect was on reducing overall mortality. And two things out of that, one, we could not. Well, that was the same as everybody else. And secondly, even if you tried to do that, what you would predict based upon the observations you had and the statistical methods you used were a lot, were lousy. Wouldn't even predict what was going on in truth, didn't fit the data at all. Well, yeah, so we had, I'd like to tell the story because it's really funny. So, so we had gone through all of this and we went down to figure we had to talk to wise head. So we went down to Washington to talk to people at NIH and so Sheriff's. You got any ideas about any of this? And we talked to them for a while and they, you know, they didn't have any ideas either. Now this turned out this was a summer day and it was very hot and it was very humid. So we drove down in this air conditioned Lincoln and drove down to the mayor, had the meeting with the NIH people and on the way back we stopped on, this is on Route 95 between Washington and Philadelphia. So we stopped at a place along the line, 95 at a rest stop and got something to eat. And my boss at the time got himself a soda. He was sitting in the front seat. That's fine. As we're driving back, the light came on. Oh, what mattered. You see, the ideal theory was is that lowering cholesterol would be we would reduce incidence of heart disease and total mortality. And the fact of the matter is that what was important was not that the study was intended to reduce cholesterol, but did it actually? I mean, did the intervention really do it? And there were different interventions, different drugs, diets, that sort of thing. And so the light came on and said, well, what mattered as I was driving along. Oh, what matters is not whether you intend to lower cholesterol, but whether you actually do lower cholesterol. Because if you don't lower cholesterol because the stuff doesn't work, you cannot expect that you're going to see any results. But if you can figure out the relationship between a cholesterol lowering and lowered risk, maybe that works. Well, we got back and when we got back, so we got out of the car, it's hot as can be. I love the story because boss gets out of the car and he's, he's been sitting there holding this cold can of soda on a hot human day in his lap. Okay, so they get back and you know, get out of the car and everybody's out of there. I take one look. You know, his name was George. George. You know, you're going to walk in there and people will say, we heard stories about Larry's robbing. But we had no idea. Now you think about what that for a little bit at any rate, went back in and worked, sat down, said, okay, what do I have to do to analyze it this way? I did. And it turned out, you know, oh, incredibly, that was really the right idea because not only could we demonstrate very convincingly that lowering cholesterol lowered heart risk, lowered cholesterol, lowered heart disease risk so profoundly that it did lower overall mortality in others significantly. So this is just being a statistical issue. That was, that was the first demonstration of that fact. Now, it turned out what was very interesting at the same time was that there was a big study conducted in Scandinavia at the time on another statin and it was conducted in for secondary prevention, that is to say, people who had had a heart attack or who had high cholesterol or were at risk of having a heart attack. And what they found in there is that in fact, yes, they did. The statin, which was effective, of course, did lower reduce a heart attack, total mortality. But here comes the spooky part. So when we had done the analysis on the data we had in hand, we could say, okay, given this much lowering of cholesterol, how much lowering of heart disease or overall mortality risk could you reduce? By how much would you reduce the probability somebody would die in the next year? Yeah, and we could predict that. So we look at the figure, say, okay, we're not going to include the data from this study in this, in this particular analysis, at least for the purpose of the conclusion. But it might be interesting to see to what extent this we were validated. And so I looked at the data from this other study and what happened was that, okay, I can see how much cholesterol lowering they got and how much reduction in mortality they got. And I looked at that. Where did that fall from? The results that we had had in the analysis that I had done, and it turned out to be exactly what it was predicted. I mean, it was spooky because it wasn't close. It was exactly what one would want to predicted. That was, you know, that was one of these moments that you say, okay, yeah, that really matters. And so we got, we finished the paper, got the paper published a number of years later, about three years later, did the study when there had been some additional clinical trials involving statins and redid. The analysis found exactly the same results. So I got a call and apparently the American Heart association was so impressed with this that they issued a bulletin to the effect that it said that this finding actually more people to be treated with statins that would present prevent about 10,000 cardiovascular deaths a year. That's kind of exciting, you know, when you, when you. It still gives me chills to think about that.

24:35 Yeah.

24:36 That particular thing prevented so many premature deaths. That's quite remarkable.

24:42 It's very cool. Yeah.

24:43 Yeah. So anyway, and so I do other things. There's a lot of other things that I've done that, you know, publications of one kind or another and stuff that I'm working on. I think that one thing is probably a good example of how the effective use of statistics and effectively thinking about what the real questions are that need to be answered actually in and of itself can lead to very substantially significant public health benefits. That's the real. That's the real payoff.

25:12 Yeah. Yeah, definitely. What do you think you're going to be when you grow up? Or like, what was something you'd wanted.

25:20 To do at this point? Retired? What am I going to think? Okay, now I will. I will tell you. When I was a kid.

25:30 Yeah.

25:30 One of the things. What did you want to do? Okay, this is another interesting story. Like every other Jewish boy, you know, want to be a lawyer, want to be a doctor, you know, something like that.

25:40 Yeah.

25:40 And like everybody else, I thought, I want to be a physician. Well, okay, so when I was in school. Here's the other interesting story. When I was in school and I need, you know, was looking forward to needing some money for tuition for college. You know, my parents were not wealthy.

25:57 Yep.

25:58 And so what I did. Now this was early on, I mean, later on I had a job as a, you know, a graduate assistant job and paid some money. And that was a different story. But this was undergraduate, so where was I used to my. So anyway, what I needed to do was to get some money. Couldn't figure out how to do it. My father, may rest in peace, was a commercial artist and did silk screen printing for various kinds. So what he did was he printed for me up a bunch of business our size plastic. They took tacky now, but they weren't tacky then. And what they would were, was plastic printed on plastic. And I would go to various stores around, say, business hours sign and it would be the business hour and the hours that you would put on when they were open any day, any day, sipping on their door. And people could see that they didn't usually have those. And so I went all around, northern Ohio, northeastern Ohio, selling these things in the city of Cleveland, around here and there, taking the bus, going out to, you know, when my dad was going out to do some work in one of the local towns. I'd go out there and sell it around, but I had to go in and I had to do cold calling in all of these places, which for me at the time was a terror. But, you know, I had to do it. So I did it. And after I did it that summer, not that I earned a great deal of money, but what I did do was that I wound up having enough guts to go to the college administration and say, what can I do to earn some money? And so they got me a job with a behavioral psychologist as a statistical clerk. And I was, I was. Well, the other thing was, is that I was a math major. And why was I a math major? Well, I wanted to go to medical school. And the. Everybody was a chem major or a bio major, especially pre med chem or bio major. And I figured, you know, that isn't going to look very good when you're applying to medical school, especially if they're looking for people who bring unique talents to medical school. Which at the time was true of the medical school at Western Reserve University, which is where I wanted to go.

28:07 Yes.

28:08 So they said, okay, I'm a math major. That's different. And so, but that turned out to say, well, okay, I could get a job with, as a statistical clerk for this behavioral psychologist, which basically entering data and punching up numbers and doing analyses. Now I didn't know anything about statistics. I said, fine, we'll send you to Iowa State per summer and you'll take your math major. Shouldn't be a problem. And take a course in statistical methods. And take a course of statistical theory. Okay. So they, but at the time, by then, before then though, they got me a book, said here's the, here's a book, Statistical methods. Why don't you work your way through it and you'll know what to do. And so I did. So when I went that summer to Iowa State from the methods course was easy because I'd already done the first semester of the methods course on my own. The method, the theory course, this was relementary statistics theory, but I was a math major, so there wasn't anything in there that was going to be and terrible. I said, you know what? This is easy. I can do this. So I finished up, that came back and still worked with them and then got in. They say, okay, now we've got you. I think I did another summer of that, but at that point I was ready for graduate school. So they said, well, fine, I Got into the graduate program at Western Reserve which was a combined MD, PhD program. Oh, that's great. So I went the first year to Iowa State and as I said, I took the courses there but I'd already done a lot of this. This was not particularly difficult and my background is a math major so this is fine, I can do that. Came back and did the first year medical school and the only thing I didn't do was that since I wasn't a medical student as such, didn't look at patients in the early baby clinic, which the medical students did. Other than that, did everything else. So you know, through that, that was fine. It was, there were parts of it that were emotionally trying because you know, when you have seen a kid with phenylketonuria. Now what is phenylketon area? Phenylketonuria is a genetic problem where a child is unable to metabolize certain amino acids and they accumulate in the body. And what they cause ultimately is a certain degree of mental retardation. And if you see it early, you can check it because you just change the kids diet so that you don't get the accumulation of these amino acids. But if you don't see it early, it progresses. And that's terrible because you know, we've seen these as, we would see these as clinical correlation conferences and the, you know, you see the kid who's very retarded and you would feel for the parents, I mean, could they have another child, you know, what would the risk be of that? You know, you just felt so terrible about this. So I didn't really feel that I was at that time psychologically suited to making these serious medical decisions. And if I was going to be a physician at all, I was going to be an internist or a surgeon. I mean that was, you know, nothing, nothing minor. Just go for the gold here.

31:19 Yeah.

31:20 And when we, we would have these lab things, anatomy labs, whatnot, physiology labs, which at the time were done with dogs that were going to be euthanized anyway. They're into the pound and they're killed. So they would be brought to the medical school labs. Youth anesthetized, seriously anesthetized. Medical students would go in and we would, the first thing we had to do was do a cut down and cannulate the dog so we could keep the anesthesia going. And then we would do whatever physiologic experiments we were going to do. And I do recall that there was in our group of four, there were two medical students, another graduate student and myself. And what we found out was that, you know, I was. I was really good as a cut down surgeon. I was good at this. Yeah. And it turned. But to me, you know, we let them. We figure, well, hell, we gotta let the medical students do it. You know, God forbid they're gonna do this to real people someday. We let the medical students do it and they botched it. Okay, get out of here. You guys are gonna learn to do it somewhere else. But, you know, we got no, no patience with this. So we did that. And the thing that I like to do is I like to drop a name. So the name that I like to drop is the name of the other graduate student in our group, followed by the name of David Thatcher. Now why does that matter? Well, for what it's worth, David Thatcher is a former Surgeon General in the United States. So you want all the good, better things anyway. So that was. So that was the sort of theory of how I got into statistics by virtue of having been a statistician for a while. Oh, by the way, the other thing that the guy that hired me let me do, he let me take, in addition to the book so I could work through the programs, problems in the book. He let me take home an Olivetti Tetrakis calculator. Now that was. This thing cost about the same as an Oldsmobile.

33:16 As much as what?

33:18 As an Oldsmobile? A car, you know, you take it home. But you know, we didn't have computers in those days.

33:25 Yeah.

33:26 And so that's been. So between one thing and another, that's what I learned to do. I decided I did not want to continue as a physician because that was not something I wanted to do if I was going to do. I didn't really want to practice medicine. I didn't think I was suitable for it. And if I was going to do research, I like statistics better than medicine. Turns out that's what I've been doing. Medical research is what I've been doing for almost all of my life. But anyway, that's, that's how it worked. And then I wound up going to. I think I worked in North Carolina for three years and then I wound up going to Merck. And I have been there ever since. And that's. That has worked. That has been a great, great job.

34:07 Yeah.

34:07 Great position.

34:09 Well, thank you. Sounds.

34:12 It's pretty cool.

34:14 Are there any lessons that your work life has taught you?

34:22 You work to live, you don't live to work. Okay, something. Because that sounds very glib, but, you know, I know of at least one circumstance where that. Where that. Where somebody actually killed themselves a buck because of that. They may have had other mental issues. But you have to realize you will be here. You will make interesting contributions, you will do useful stuff, and it will be benefit to yourself and your employer, and that will be great. And you can do other good things in the words and other good things, even when you're not at work. So, yeah, I've done other good things. I've been a synagogue president and a school committee chair. I have been a master in the Masonic watch. I've done a lot of stuff there, and it's good. But the thing you have to remember is that here or there, you do what you can, contribute what you can, but nothing is forever. And at some point, you will pass on in your life or out, and somebody else will not take it. And you cannot. You cannot think this is all that is ever going to be in your life. So live a life. Remember, the life is a gift. You never get a day back. And so think, what can you do in this day that will be the best thing that you can do? And recognize that work is something you do in order to be able to live, to be able to have a life that's important to you. And the life with. Having this life is with other people and being and enjoying, enjoying the experiences of life and being able to contribute and do things worthwhile in your life is stuff you can look back on and feel that you've done well. And nobody gives you a medal if they have to carry you out of your workplace. Remember that you. You work to live. You don't live to work.

36:16 Yep, I will remember that. Well, thank you, Zeta, for interviewing me with me today.

36:24 Any more questions?

36:26 Nope, not that I could think of.

36:29 Okay. I hope it's been helpful to you. I mean, I do know there's a lot of things that I can go on and on about this sort of thing, but the thing that's important is that is feeling that you have done something worthwhile and have earned to a great deal. What's meaningful is the respect of your colleagues and the people you work with and the love of the people who are important to you in your life. These are the truly important things. And that's, you know, that's. That's the way. That's the way it is. I don't know what you will wind up doing as you go forward in your life. Now, I can tell you what I think your good college choice would be, but you wouldn't listen to me anymore and you listen to your father but go forward, think just think in terms, try to think that realize what long term things are, what long term objectives and goals are. But just keep in mind you don't live in the long term, you live now and so don't abandon necessarily in the short term simply to be sacrificed for the long term. Sometimes you have to do that because that's the way it is. But keep in mind that this day you ain't ever going to get back. So enjoy this day, make the best of it and at the end of it all go forward and saying you do not regret anything you did on this particular day. If you can say that you'll be very fortunate and very happy.

37:54 Yeah. All right. Thank you very much.

37:59 Okay. You're welcome and good luck with all of that and I'm glad you're feeling better.

38:05 Yes, thank you.

38:07 Stay well.

38:08 You too.

38:09 Bye.