Belonging to the World: Turning Grief Into a Global Quest to Visit Every Country with Barry Hoffner

The Bourse Jackie Scholarship Fund

Jason: Barry Hoffner, welcome to the Zero to Travel podcast, my friend, and good morning. Thank God you’re an early bird.

Barry: Good morning, Jason. Yeah, as long as I have my coffee, I’m good. Whatever time, it doesn’t really matter.

Jason: Nice. We’re going to talk about the book, Belonging to the World, A Journey from Grief to Connection in Every Country on Earth, which, by the way, this is awesome. 100% of the profits go to your scholarship fund. I just want you to share a bit about that right off the bat, the scholarship fund and where all the proceeds from the book are going, because people should know when they get this awesome book, which it is incredible and has your incredible life journey. Just so people know after this conversation, if they want to pick up the book, let them know about the organization and where the money’s going.

Barry: Yeah, sure. Well, thank you for having me, Jason, first of all. I definitely hope people will enjoy the book. I think they will. But aside from that, a big benefit is all the proceeds go to scholarships for young women all across West Africa, and not just to scholarships, but for leadership, development, and empowerment. We have three separate programs, and we cover all the countries in West Africa, including French and English speaking. And that’s under my foundation, Caravan to Class dot org. This particular program is called our Bourse Jackie initiative, the Jackie scholarship, named in honor of my late wife. So it’s a program very dear to me.

Jason: It’s really incredible to see some of the things that have come out of this tragedy for you in your life, with the passing of Jackie, which we’re going to talk about. I want to get your advice on working through grief and travel as healing. Those are some big themes I know in the book and in your life as well. But I want to start where your wanderlust began, because it seems like to me it began with a coin flip in some ways, with your buddy Steve. Can you boil this life of travel down to a coin flip?

The Coin Flip That Started It All

Barry: Yeah. You know, it’s funny when you get to be my age, 66, you kind of have the time and reflection to look back on your life and understand where certain themes came from. And certainly travel did come from a coin flip. I grew up in a very middle class background in Southern California, although my parents, I’m a first generation immigrant. My mother was born in Baghdad, Iraq. But still, travel wasn’t a big part of our life. A buddy of mine, Steve, and I had been working all through our high school years. We decided we were going to take a trip before we went off to college. I was going to college at UC Irvine, which is near Newport Beach, California, the big waves of Newport Beach. I wanted to get better at surfing. He wanted to travel through Europe and backpack. We couldn’t agree on which direction we’d go. So we flipped a coin, and he won. I say that coin flip changed my life for sure, in all the good ways.

Jason: That’s kind of one of those coin flips where you really can’t lose either in some ways.

Barry: Yeah. I mean, I guess I’d be out surfing now, more regularly or whatever, which would be okay, but I would have missed a lot. So I’ll take the world over the waves, I guess, is what I’d say.

Jason: Yeah, nice. It’s one of those sliding door moments in many ways, right? Like, you could have been a surf bum somewhere. I was reading through your book, and you started talking about your journey through Europe. Early on, right in the trip, you had this situation on Las Ramblas in Barcelona, where you got scammed a bit. If you want to share that story, it’s a good one. But it was funny because I felt a kinship to you, because my first big trip that really got me hooked on travel was a solo backpacking trip through Europe, and my second stop was Barcelona. I also got into a situation there as well, which kind of woke me up and made me realize, yeah, I almost got jumped and robbed and all this stuff. Anyway, it’s a separate story. But it made me realize, oh yeah, I kind of got to be on my toes a bit with this travel thing. I was out till four in the morning, on a notoriously dodgy time for this area of town. So I better get my wits about me here. But yeah, do you want to share that story?

Getting Scammed in Barcelona

Barry: Yeah. So we were planning to travel for three months. We had a thousand bucks to our name, and that was it, which was a little bit more than $10 a day, including everything. We had our year rail pass, and the first two places we hit, London and Paris, were just budget busting. We said, we better get our asses out of here, otherwise we’re only going to be able to spend about 30 days in Europe. We went to Spain, which was in those days much cheaper. I’m talking 10 cents for a beer. We were walking around in Barcelona, on Las Ramblas, at night, and this man comes up to us. I spoke some Spanish, but not necessarily good enough to get ourselves out of a problem. I was trying to show Steve my Spanish skills. He’s like, I want to take you to a bar and buy you a drink, because I’m getting married. We’re like, sure. I mean, what 18 year old doesn’t say yes to a free drink? We get inside the bar and we order a drink, we have another. Then all of a sudden the guy’s not around anymore. After a while, we were ready to leave. Hey, can we have the bill? We’re thinking, I don’t know, 40, 50 cents for a few beers. It was, I guess, the equivalent of about twenty dollars or twenty five dollars, which these days is not that much, but in those days that was a couple days of traveling. When we said, no, we only had a couple beers, they said, no, you bought drinks for the whole bar. That’s when we knew we were scammed. We negotiated down a little bit, but put our tails between our legs and walked out of there, really realizing we needed to learn a few things.

Jason: Well, what did that trip teach you overall?

Barry: I was so naive. I didn’t even understand, when I got there, the idea of different, how to change currencies and stuff like that. This was really my first trip overseas, and all the different languages and places you could travel to, and cultures and sites you only heard about. It’s definitely mind blowing at that age, and either you kind of reject it, which I don’t think many people do, or it’s just something that takes over, and you kind of have this voice in your head saying, I want more of that. I think that was the case for me. So I went to college with this idea, like, I want more of that, both in the courses that I took and in the idea for what I wanted to do in future summers, but also to build a career out of being able to get back overseas somehow.

Jason: Yeah. I mean, you managed to do that. I think you’re speaking to the right crowd here, the “I want more of that” crowd. It’s interesting how in this podcast community, at least I feel like that extra calling of, yeah, okay, this could be like a multi-month journey or whatever, trip of a lifetime. But this is more of, I want to create a lifestyle around travel. That’s a deep need for it. You certainly did that. I know that you started working abroad pretty early on as well. Your first experience working abroad, in Buenos Aires, sounded like another sort of transformative time for you in terms of your travel journey. What was that like?

Working Abroad in Buenos Aires and Wall Street

Barry: Yeah, sure. So after undergrad, I went off to business school. Big move for me, to go from Newport Beach to New York City, especially where Columbia was located, up in northern Manhattan. I started to do a little bit of traveling. But after I graduated, I decided I didn’t even attend graduation. I had gotten a job with J.P. Morgan. Before starting work, I was going to head down to Argentina, where I have some relatives, and then just do this overland trip. While I was down there, I ended up hooking up with the head of the J.P. Morgan office, and he offered me a job to work there before even I was starting employment in New York City. I took that. It was supposed to be three months, turned into six months. But what it did, it gave me a lens for how I wanted to live my life very early on, right at the start of my career, working overseas and conducting business in a different language, and just learning a lot that set the stage for what I wanted to do.

So when I finally got through my training program in New York and ended up on the trading floor at JP Morgan, foreign currencies, I kept bugging my boss, I want to go to Paris. I’d been to Paris before, and that was my dream. Eventually, just a year into my career, I was transferred to the Paris office. That started a run of 16 years straight overseas, in, I think, seven different countries over that period of time.

Jason: Of course, in corporate America and finance, there are these opportunities to work overseas, but not everybody is able to take advantage of them, or takes advantage of them, or is offered them. It feels like to me, in some ways, you were just destined for life on the road. I don’t know if you believe in destiny or fate or anything like that. What do you believe in when it comes to that kind of stuff?

Barry: I don’t know. I think there are a lot of forks in the road, and opportunities kind of come in front of you, and some of those we grab and some we don’t. But definitely that first trip set the stage for what really interested me. Of course, you want to build your career and stuff, but we all have these side interests, whether it’s music or some kind of sport, and mine really was just this sort of curiosity, I guess, about the world. So I think it’s a marriage of your deep interests with opportunities that come in front of you.

Jason: Were you passionate about the career, or was it more that you could do it, make a good living, and also travel? Maybe I’m fishing a little bit for advice for anybody looking for a travel-based career like that.

Barry: I was excited to work on Wall Street, no question about it. When you stand on your first trading floor and see all these different currencies, in those days there was no such thing as a euro, so being shouted out and traded, and understanding what’s behind the movements, that was exciting for me, no question about it. But I don’t think I would have survived 16 years in finance in New York, on Wall Street or in London. So it was that first move overseas, marrying the idea of, I really did like what I did, but I also love living overseas. It was a marriage of those two things. Quite honestly, the more senior I got, the less I enjoyed it, only because then I was further away from the actual action, and my focus was really more on being in that country. My last four years were in Russia, in Moscow, 98 through 2002, and that was an incredibly exciting time to be there. If it was just for the work, I don’t think I would have been there. I wanted to stay four years, but I really did enjoy being there.

Jason: Yeah. Okay. So the travel aspect kind of helped you extend the career, perhaps, in some ways. Seven different countries, you must have had some pretty incredible experiences. What were some of the standout moments for you in terms of the career abroad?

Career Highlights: Japan and Russia

Barry: Just from a career standpoint, well, for sure being in Japan in the late 80s, at the peak of Japan’s economic power. As we talk about today, China sort of bypassing us at some point economically, those days it was Japan, the miracle place where my boss used to say, look at that building in front of us, in Ginza. He said, well, that building’s worth the state of Wyoming or something like that. Prices were just astronomical. That was certainly an exciting time to be in Japan. The culture was so strong, you felt like you were in a foreign place. That was the first real experience I had where, wow, this is just completely different. That was exciting, and the business with the Japanese, being an economic power, was exciting.

But I would say Russia was my best assignment. Four years in one place, I hadn’t been four years in one place in my career, building relationships in a country where we just didn’t know which way it was going to go, leading up to the elections in 2000, where Yeltsin, before Yeltsin stepped down in favor of Putin, who’s still there, we weren’t sure whether it was going to go back to communism or not, and we didn’t know whether the whole business was going to implode. Those were just really cowboy days in finance in Russia. It was a very exciting time, seeing them introduce a stock market and a bond market, and being part of that was certainly exciting.

Growing Up as an Iraqi Jew

Jason: You mentioned your mom being from Iraq, born in Baghdad. You have a really unique background. I’m just curious, were you exposed to Iraqi culture early on? I’m not sure where your dad was from, but were you exposed to these different cultures growing up, or was it, you know, you hear different stories from somebody raised in an immigrant family, sometimes it’s really just trying to fit into the culture they’re in, and not so much the culture they came from, versus, of course you have the whole spectrum, but full immersion and just trying to hold onto that. Were you exposed to that culture?

Barry: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think definitely I carry a lot of pride from my background of being an Iraqi Jew. But I would say I grew up pretty much middle America with a slice of culture. I say that because my mom was the only one, and she moved to the States when she was about seven. She was the only one of her siblings at that point to not marry an Iraqi Jew. She married an Eastern European Jew. She was also the only one to get a divorce, relatively early on. So while I had a lot of culture, it wasn’t the same as all my first cousins, who were 100% Iraqi Jew. But I carried a lot of pride with that culture. My grandmother didn’t speak English, she spoke Arabic and Hebrew. So it’s in me, I guess, that culture, but it’s not that I lived it.

Jason: What is the percentage roughly of the Jewish population in Iraq? Do you have any idea?

Barry: Oh, today?

Jason: Yeah, or even at that time.

Barry: Oh, at that time, I think Baghdad was the second largest Jewish city in the entire world.

Jason: Oh, really? Okay.

Barry: Yeah.

Jason: So it’s interesting, because you’ve traveled a lot in the Middle East, which, I’m speaking in generalities here, of course, but I’d probably imagine the average traveler with a Jewish background may avoid certain countries for certain reasons and perceptions. How has it been for you, bringing that background into all of these places, making these connections? I know you wrote an article for People Magazine about your time in Iran. You’ve been all over the Middle East, and I’m sure you’ve had a lot of really incredible conversations and cultural exchanges. What’s been the experience for you, traveling through that part of the world?

Returning to Iraq and the Middle East

Barry: I mean, the biggest thing for me, for travel, really, if we let it, it helps us explore our narratives. I don’t know, as you get older, you search, at least I do, a lot more for the truth, and I think travel exposes you to that. For me, growing up as an Iraqi Jew without really experience in the Middle East, I definitely had one narrative. Jews had to leave Iraq in those days, so it wasn’t necessarily a departing for them, just like it’s not these days for a lot of people in, let’s say, the West Bank, living in difficulties.

I had only been in Egypt, in Cairo, and maybe one night in Dubai, before I decided to travel to every country in the world. I didn’t really have any exposure. But if that’s what I was going to do, I needed to dip my toe into that part of the world. To be honest, I wasn’t necessarily scared to go to Iraq, and that was in April of 2022. But I was more worried about how I’d be received, because my identity was so tied to Iraq in such a weird way, a place I didn’t even know anything about, that if I were to be received poorly, I think it would kind of shake my identity a little bit. But just the opposite happened. That kind of led me to really want to explore more of the narratives that I’d been brought up with. Honestly, the Middle East turned out to be one of my favorite places. I’ve been studying Arabic for the last seven years. I’ve been to obviously every Middle Eastern, every Muslim country. The work we do with our foundation is on behalf of basically mostly Muslim cultures in West Africa. So that’s something that travel does. It just sort of helps dissolve a lot of the narratives that we have built up in our minds, if we let it, and see places and people for who they really are.

Surviving a Plane Hijacking

Jason: You were in a hijacking at one point. I was kind of surprised to read that story.

Barry: Yeah, it’s that kind of idea where something happens and you just have no idea how you’re going to react. Your brain just takes over. It was an old girlfriend of mine, she was going with me to a wedding. I was living in Switzerland then, in Zurich, working at JP Morgan, and going to a wedding of a French friend in Marrakesh. Flying there, and I remember looking out of the plane as it crossed into the Mediterranean, and normally it’d be just due south, but it started veering east. I kind of thought that was a little weird, but didn’t really think much of it. When the plane landed, it landed on a dark terminal, a dark runway. There were no lights, and we didn’t taxi. All of a sudden I hear this voice in the back, after the plane stopped, this stewardess. I hear this guy speaking in a very harsh voice, and I knew it was Arabic, just from my mom’s background, that the steward has translated: all people of Arab nationality are free to leave, everybody else remain on board. I kind of saw he was holding a gun to her neck. Fortunately we were sitting in the front of the plane, and I told my girlfriend, we are not staying on this plane, and grabbed her and pushed her, and we ran off down the stairs, which had been unfolded on the tarmac.

As we were going down the stairs, all these military people with guns and camouflage were storming the plane. We were walking right past them. We still didn’t even know where we were. We weren’t sure, we thought maybe we were in Libya. It turned out we were actually in Casablanca, and the pilot made some kind of maneuver to make the hijacker think we were heading east, probably to Libya, I guess. But anyway, yeah, that really did happen. Again, like I say, you just react. You don’t really know what you’re doing.

Jason: What happened? Do you know what happened? Did they get those people off safely?

Barry: Those were the days of no internet, and we were so excited the next day, after getting through that experience, looking forward to finding out what happened, looking in the newspaper, and there was nothing. Nothing. We were taken to this room, this holding cell, for like an hour. There were a bunch of Moroccan police, and we asked a gentleman what happened. He said he thinks that there was a Moroccan citizen who was being deported by Switzerland, who didn’t want to go to Morocco for some reason.

Jason: Yeah. Okay. That’s wild, man.

Barry: Yeah. As they say in travel, afterwards it’s just a good story.

Jason: That’s true. The best is when you can say that in the middle of when it’s all hitting the fan. If you’re able to step out and be like, this is going to make a good story one day.

Barry: Well, the biggest disappointment was we couldn’t find anything about it, the next day.

Jason: Right. Yeah. I don’t think in the middle of a hijacking, though, I can, you know, it’s one thing to be waiting hours for a late bus or something. It’s another thing to be in a plane hijacking.

Barry: Yeah. Oh man.

Year Zero: Losing Jackie

Jason: You have a wonderful love story in the book, of course, with Jackie, and you can share where your first kiss was and kind of where all that happened, that’s pretty incredible. I wanted to get into the topic of grief and healing, and how you’re sort of, I don’t know what chapter you would call this in your life of travel, but certainly travel played a huge part in your recovery from the loss of your wife. I know you called that year zero. Maybe that’s a good place to start. You can give some people context and explain what that means and where you were at, at that point, so we can hear a little bit more about your experience. Also, there are a lot of different ways to heal, I guess, and a lot of reasons why us here in this community might choose travel. I think that’s something that probably resonates with a lot of people listening. So I think this is a very important topic for everybody listening. We’ve all used travel in some ways, I wouldn’t say to heal us, but just, you know, it can be used in different ways. It can be a tool, I guess, it can be an intentional tool. I just wanted to dive into that part of the conversation. Is it hard for you to talk about that? Now you’ve written the book, I guess you know you’re going to put yourself out there to sell this book and, you know, so you can promote your work. That all goes hand in hand, like you said, 100% of the profits going to your foundation. But in some ways you have to keep showing up and not reliving this time in your life, but keep revisiting it. Is it hard?

Barry: Yeah, I think these days, no, to be honest. Five years ago, yes. I think when you decide to write a book, you know that you’re putting yourself into that realm, and writing a book itself just intensifies the experiences that happened. Obviously, I continue to think about Jackie and have love for her every day, but that event is sort of in the past, in terms of stirring up the emotions that it stirred up back then. So which shows me, I guess, that I’ve healed. You go through different phases. In my case, no loss is a good loss. My loss was with so much shock, that even before, normally people lose someone, they grieve, then they start to heal, then they are healed. In my case, it was shock, which took a long time before I could even start really grieving in a way, and then sort of the pathway towards healing.

So now I feel like I really am healed, and I put that whole experience in the past, and feel like, when I say that, I mean it just allows me to move on and continue with my life. I feel like I’m at that point. Certainly the travel helped, and writing the book helped a lot.

Jason: Yeah, you’ve done the work and you’ve processed it, of course. What a wonderful thing to be able to say, you know, I feel like I’m healed to the point where I can talk about this and you’ve kind of moved on. That’s a beautiful thing. I think everybody grieves their own way for sure, and I don’t think there’s really any blueprint, because sure, different people recommend different things, but inside us, we carry our own way to do it, if we really look deep inside.

Barry: Mine was just really

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