The Hobbyist #2: Sami Reiss & Learning Languages

Mr. Snake America and Super Health talks Hebrew, Arabic, and working for himself

I first encountered Sami Reiss via his Snake America newsletter, a deep dive into vintage furniture, eBay scores, and all things cool. I think my brother sent me the link after I bothered him one too many times about camo pants or something. Details of the origin story are hazy; we got script doctors on retainer to spiff it up.

Sami is just one of those dudes that knows cool shit, has seemingly impeccable taste, and is always a few years ahead of the kids smoking cigs downtown who loudly proclaim how ahead of the curve they are.

Reiss is also the proprietor of a newly-founded operation entitled Super Health, a bodily off-shoot of the Snake America brand. His expertise and interest in all sorts of esoteric and functional health practices has led me to treat him as a holistic advisor of sorts, shooting off barrages of texts regarding premium broths, efficient workouts, and creatine intake. I am dabbling in the dark arts of getting healthy as hell — after all, I am a Hobbyist. Who better to bring me to the dark (bright?) side than Snake himself? Raw milk, however, remains the border I shall not cross (for now!). For starters? Walk every day, avoid foods that come from boxes, and do push-ups. A Super Health trademark if I’ve ever seen one.

I thought Sami would be a great subject for The Hobbyist because he A) is very knowledgeable about a lot of things, including the machinations of turning a Substack into a money machine and B) has turned hobbies into full-time opportunities. He is a platonic Hobbiyst (a tremendous honor, if I do say so myself) precisely because he sees how passionate pursuits can fundamentally become professional ones, but also the importance of having pursuits that are entirely devoid of financial benefits. He explained during our chat, “…there is something edifying in having things of your own that are not for money, that are effectively existing in a money free space.” Having free time to pursue joy unrelated to anything career-oriented is important as hell, especially when you have dedicated your life (and financial stability) to chronicling activities most others participate in during free time. You know that music album MP3 that you enjoy listening to? You have no idea what it’s like to treat it as a COMMODITY! Feel my pain. You hear Frank Ocean and all I can see are dollar signs. Cursed as I am.

For Reiss, that joyous pursuit is continuing to learn the Hebrew language and getting stronger as an Arabic speaker and reader. A lot of this passion is related to Reiss’ roots and current POV — which I won’t summarize because we discuss them below — and the way his relationship to place, family, and language has evolved.

Remember to follow The Hobbyist on Instagram and tell a friend to subscribe. More housekeeping: Tuesday’s mid-week Hobbyist snack will include some amazing Middle Eastern music recommended by Sami.

As someone who works for themselves and is in an industry that they’re passionate about, how do you give yourself time to do things that bring you joy outside of work?

SR: Well, I’m decent about work-life balance only in the sense that there would be periods of time where I would get stressed out about work. It would usually happen during the winter when I would start working at 11 AM and then I would stop working at 11 PM and that would just be the way it was for six weeks. Because it was freelancing, the money would show up in April and I put up a wall. Some of it is about setting expectations and saying, “This is how much work I’m able to deliver this week.” If you work for yourself, you can take a little time off here and there. When I had time off, and this is something I’m still trying to figure out, I always had to be productive.

Even talking to you now, it’s different because Super Health is a newsletter that I charge for. When I would finish doing Snake and all the freelance stuff that I was doing, I would read an ebook or watch some sort of YouTube thing about weightlifters. I would go off the deep end and I would enjoy it. Now that I do that regularly and charge for it, I have to ask myself, “What's going to fill that void?”

Is that where language study comes in?

SR: I grew up speaking Hebrew, so I’m working on getting better at that and figuring out religious stuff. I’m inhaling a lot of that. I’m also learning Arabic, which is a little bit of work. Back to your first question, though, one reason why people maybe work long hours is because some of us have found a way to do things for a living that we like in some capacity. That just makes you be like, “It’s Tuesday. What am I going to do, watch another movie?” We’re not at a frat house, let’s get it together.

If you're freelancing, I think one weekday off a month is necessary. Just a day off where you, I dunno, go into the city, you do something, or you just totally veg out. It recalibrates you and it reminds you that you work for yourself. This is the way it is. More often than not, I’ll always find myself just working away on Sunday afternoon starting a draft. That’s the tradeoff. One weekday a month should be enshrined by law if you’re a freelancer.

Obviously, you don’t dislike bodybuilding and weightlifting and health, but do you have a different relationship to it now that you are monetizing your expertise of it?

SR: It’s a little bit different. I will also say, I wrote a column about lifting for INVERSE during the pandemic. I started it in 2020 and it ran for a couple years. For the first year or something it was either weekly or every other week. It was a bit of a lift, finding new things to write about. I remember being like, “What now? What now?” But one thing that’s really special or insane about this world is that it really goes on forever. All this stuff with health and bodybuilding and working out and everything like that, you can really, really get into the weeds in an insane way.

But at the same time, it’s all very simple and intuitive: eat food that doesn’t come in a box, do pushups every day, and walk. You’ll be good. There’s a formal question which is, “How can I get the details across in a simple way, and how can I actually explain something?” If you’re a lifter, there are a lot of things you understand intuitively and there are a lot of truths that disprove other truths, but only on a conditional basis. Sometimes I’m just like, “Oh man, am I going to do another one of these things?” But it’s also early enough in the Super Health cycle that I’m still writing about very simple and basic things. When I’m talking to people, it’s not just about raw dairy or methylene blue. They’re speaking to their peers and trying to one up each other with more esoteric and deeper research, which is awesome.

When did this desire to get back to your Hebrew roots and learn Arabic bubble up?

SR: I always spoke Hebrew growing up in Ottawa. My mom’s from Jerusalem and we grew up speaking Hebrew in the house and my dad learned Hebrew when they were together. That’s just the language that was spoken. When my mom got an iPhone she started texting us in Hebrew. I said I would take an L and respond to her in Hebrew, which at the time would take me literally two minutes to type like, “Hey, I’ll call you tonight” or something. My Hebrew got a lot better just texting, and I was able to read it pretty well eventually, too. For those that may not know, the vowels are inflections, which are dots under the letters, but in newspapers and in texts they don’t have the vowels. You’d think it would be impossible to read, but the way our language capabilities go, you eventually understand.

The only words that are really hard to read are the ones that are transliterations of English. So you’ll look and you’re like, “What the fuck is this word?,” and it’ll be “Wikipedia,” but spelled out in Hebrew or something.

October 7th happened and a lot of people here were preliminarily appalled by what we knew was about to happen in Gaza. I wanted to figure out what was actually going on there since I lived over there and worked over there, but never really interacted with the Hebrew speaking identity, Mizrahi identity as an adult. I just stayed away. So I started watching YouTube videos of academics from over there, giving lectures and speaking in this really rich, beautiful Hebrew. It was a way of immersing myself in parts of my childhood, the language specifically. This is what it sounded like in my house growing up.

I lived over there when I was 24. When I left, I didn't go back and I was turned off by the idea of living there. I couldn’t put it into words, but I just couldn’t do it. Recently, I was like, “I've been running away from this thing for a number of years. I need to face it and look at it.” Let’s see why...I did that by reading a lot, reading about the difference between a state and a city…working people like my family who spoke Hebrew with Arabic accents and I don’t know, the people from Vienna or whatever who ran the country. People say it’s complicated. I really don’t think it’s very complicated. What the Israeli army and state is doing is not okay. To understate it severely. It’s pretty simple. But it made me ask questions about my identity, language. One thing led to another, and along with listening to these professors and rabbis I started listening to a lot of Mizrahi music, which comes from Moroccan, Iraqi, and Egyptian Jews, folks from other places, the Mashriq and the Maghreb. One singer I remember, an Iraqi guy, my mom said his dad sold watermelons at the market near where she grew up. They’re singing in Arabic, so I was listening to Arab music as well and I wanted to learn more about that language, too.

I would be watching these interviews and they would speak in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. I was watching one that was a Nakba documentary from Al Jazeera that was on YouTube. They had this one professor speaking, and his name was Hillel Cohen. He spoke this beautiful kind of Arabic, and he looked kind of Mizrahi. I was like, “What’s the deal with him?” Some of his books are pretty key texts, he’s from Jerusalem; there’s this video I found in which he discusses how Abbas, in the 70s, saw Mizrahi Jews, then a severe underclass (now still one by the numbers) as a fifth column…how Arab nationalism in the early 1920s included Mizrahi Jews. There’s always a danger of falling into idpol here or becoming blind to reality but there is really something here.

But anyways, Hebrew grammar is in many ways identical to Arabic grammar, so I’ve started learning it through Hebrew. If I had a nine to five and I was off work every day at six, I would put in an hour or something and my language would’ve gone through the roof. But I work for myself. For a few months I was really on top of it, doing it three times a week. I would like to keep getting better. I don’t know, my fam is from Jerusalem, I should know it. It’s a bilingual city.

Outside of getting better, how do you see this hobby progressing?

SR: Now I’m reading stuff in Hebrew. I was able to do that before, but it would be a newspaper article and it would take me a while. Now I’m reading books. In a sense, it’s only just begun. With Arabic, it would be really rewarding to be able to speak it, read it too. I’m at this fork in the road and I know what I have to do. I’ve squeezed out as much knowledge as I can from free sources. I don’t want to take a class through English because it’s intuitive if you know Hebrew.

I did start writing, too. I was inhaling all this stuff: the Arabic language, music, religious stuff, Mizrahi identity things. One night I just started writing a longer piece about it, which is drafts and drafts away. It’s still a hobby, but I was disappointed in myself. I was like, “Am I turning this into something too?”

It’s the freelancers impulse, to try to flip things we learn into a way to get paid.

SR: You’ll hang out with writers and they’re just like, “Oh, that's a piece.” Then they’ll write it down and that stuff will come out organically. But there is something edifying in having things of your own that are not for money, that are effectively existing in a money free space. Money doesn’t matter in a library, money shouldn’t really matter to your hobby. It does because you need time and most of these things need equipment, but it’s always a continuum.

SR: You’ll see cyclists and they'll go out twice a summer and they have the $10,000 bike and that’s all good. That's probably the best two days they have all year. God bless ’em, their job that pays ’em a lot of money is probably a very difficult job and that’s why they bought the nice bike and stuff. But there is something good about having a non-monetary thing you’re passionate about.

But it does suggest a pure sort of passion if you invest a lot of money into something you know will not bring any monetary value in return.

SR: It’s true. That’s the way I operated until I was freelance. When I had a day job, I always had a hobby or other things going on. There were things that didn’t really make me any money. When I started Snake America, people didn’t make money off newsletters. People didn’t tell other people they had newsletters. It was the lowest rung on the totem pole. It was kind of my hobby, and it became my life. It started as a way to get better at writing. Every night for three years, that’s what I did. You leave a lot of money on the table when you do that, but luckily it worked out. Something that’s happened more recently is that people have turned their hobbies into jobs and that’s the dream, but it got corrupted so quickly and now there are people who are like, “Well, let me pick the right hobby so that I can be the person with a YouTube channel who tells people, ‘Hey, this is how you cut Bonsai and you make 400K year or whatever.’”

Are you pretty routine oriented with your work and passions?

SR: I’m very good with routine when it comes to work, but then with my free time it’s more random. I will finish working, I will get my steps in, I will make something to eat, and I will finish doing my personal projects — whatever they may be. By then it would be 10 or 11. I’d read the alphabet five times, quiz myself on a bunch of words, watch three YouTubes of really boring grammar lessons, and then I would reward myself by watching an interview with someone in Arabic with subtitles. My language is poor. It got to the point where I was able to read some of the Arabic and the subtitles and I was able to understand and guess what words were and things like that. It was rewarding. The short and long of it is, you do half an hour a day of this stuff and, six or seven days a week, and that’s way better than three hours once a week. That’s the way it works. Because I enjoy it so much and it takes up so much brain juice, by necessity it has to be the last thing I do every day.

I found this rabbi in Brooklyn. He has a synagogue in Grave’s End or something. It’s a Lebanese synagogue and he does these d’var Torah sessions. He has an hour long video about an explanation of a certain part of the Torah each week. He grew up in Damascus and he moved here and he speaks Arabic, so the lessons are in Arabic. I sent it to my mom because I thought she’d find it interesting. It turns out that from growing up in Jerusalem, she’s fluent. Now she watches it every week.

That’s awesome.

SR: It was the coolest thing. I didn’t know she had it like that. I think the goal is to be able to watch one of these videos and maybe understand it to the extent that I understood Hebrew a year ago, which was only understanding three out of five words.

With language, if you put time into it and it’s at the forefront of your mind, the gears are always going to turn. You don’t have to be perfect with grammar and vocabulary as long as you have either a lack of shame or lack self-awareness — basically, the willingness to embarrass yourself. I spend time in France for work a couple months out of the year, and my French has gotten better, but during the first three trips I’d open my mouth and people would correct me. My accent is still abominable, but I can get by. What I realized, though, is that you just have to yap away. You talk and you listen and you make mistakes and you don’t think about it. Then you blink and a few years have passed and your skills have improved.