High school studies

Good week Rabbi
Two questions occurred to me following the article you published about the documentary on the Midrashiya.
You talked there about how walking around Tel Aviv with a kippah was once considered a daring act, and that seems downright crazy to me. My question is how much have you experienced anti-religious sentiment in your interactions with secular people (if you could perhaps share anecdotes?), and what do you think has caused the attitude (which is admittedly still very suspicious and dismissive in many quarters) to become more moderate (or even what caused this sentiment in the first place)?
The second thing that interested me in what you wrote is that you say that you were there and not exactly studied there. My question is how did you manage to study for years in yeshiva, get a doctorate in physics, and dedicate your entire life to study and contemplation, if in high school you would run away to Tiberias every week? Would you study in between? Or do the high school years not make that much of a difference in terms of developing learning skills for the rest of your life? This is a question that interests me because I am not that invested in my studies and want to know how possible/easy it is to overcome these bad study habits and from there become a scholar and scientist?