Surviving a Car Bomb at Age 7: My Childhood in Jerusalem - Barak Swarttz | DSH #1614

I feel safer in Israel than I do in the United States of America. Wow.
And I'm white Caucasian, saying if you're in a good neighborhood, you feel pretty safe just walking out and about.

It's crazy that, like, even you asked me that, but I think a lot of people share that same sentiment.

But when I would go back to Israel, there would be people who would hit me up on Facebook or Instagram and be like, You good? Now I live there in a very complicated place.

But when I step outside of Tel Aviv, my house, people have this idea that like I'm ducking from like bullets.

okay, guys. We got a guest.
He's been traveling a lot lately. So, thank you for making the time to make it to Vegas, Barack.
Good to see you, man.

I saw you on social media, and I thought you had a really important message to share. So, thanks for hopping on.
Thank you for having me, man.

This is the tail end of my trip, but we're going to grind through this one. Yeah, you've been all over.
Is that for basketball or business, or what are you traveling so much for?

I was on Roseanne Barr's podcast in Texas.

I was in LA to see a few friends, some work stuff, and then my family's in Boston.

So, I've been Boston, Texas, New York, you.

Wow. Head back to Israel on Sunday.
Let's go. You grew up in Boston, right? Born in Boston, yeah.
Suburbs in Newton.

Both of my parents come from the rabbinical background. So when I was six years old, we went to Israel.
I was in Jerusalem for 2001, 2002, 2003. It was during

the second intifada, so it was just like a really difficult time in terms of tension within the Middle East. So I got exposed to a very different reality at like six, seven, eight years old.
Wow.

And car bomb went off on my street when I was walking to school with my brother. Holy crap.
You get introduced to what sirens are and you just, you get thrown into the ocean.

And it's like very different from Newton, Massachusetts, where like jaywalking might be one of the worst things.

So I, I, part of my childhood is very much woven into in those really early childhood experiences are to Israel. And I started playing basketball there when I was a kid.

She picked up a basketball, fell in love with the game. We came back to the States after my dad's program after two years.
My dream was to be an an NBA basketball player.

And I think I learned really on that as a white Ashkenazi Jew from Boston, I was not going to the league. So like I accepted that pretty early.

But I really, my, my aspirations were just to be a hooper. And my environment, my life was always basketball.
We talked a little bit offline about this. Like my environment, my friends, my routine.

I would even neglect sometimes homework or dinner just to, just to shoot. So

I played at two high schools and two colleges in the States.

I studied marketing and never really found

my path, my passion through the corporate world in America. I had a bunch of experiences with internships and I worked for corporate companies, startups, all this stuff.

But my mind and my passion were always really connected to my Judaism,

Israel, somehow actually after being in a war and basketball.

And now I live there. I live there full-time.

My parents and my family are still in the States, but I've been sort of kind of like going back and forth my whole life since for me, home is quite multi-dimensional.

The fact that my family's in the States, I'm very close with them, and I'm kind of solo dolo on the other side of the ocean in the most controversial place on earth right now.

Yeah, especially these days, right? Especially these days. What a journey.
You think seeing that stuff at that young age would turn you away from living there, right?

You want to know what's interesting.

How spiritual are you? I'd say very spiritual. Very spiritual.
Are you into like astrology? Are you? Yeah. Numerology, astrology.
Amazing.

So in early childhood development, the ages of like six, seven, and eight, six to nine are some of the most important years of all of our lives. Mine, yours, hers.

We have experiences that our subconscious is still beginning to retain information. And these experiences, just at six, seven, and eight, we're kids.

We don't understand the imprints that they're going to have on who we are later in life. I was in Israel during six, seven, eight.
That's when I was thrown into the Middle East.

And it's really interesting looking at how a seven-year-old kid who didn't speak Hebrew, who was in this place called Israel, knew nothing about Israel.

I didn't want to go to some really like foreign country across the ocean. I wanted to continue to play baseball with my brother in the street and just hang out with my friends.

And I saw some, some really like,

I was in a war.

And you would think, just like you said, you would think that those experiences would create dissonance between that kid later in life from wanting to bind himself closer to the same place he has trauma from.

And I've experienced the complete opposite. I live there now.
And so I

lately have also really done begun working with an incredible woman who is not only an astrologist, she's a Reiki master. She studied Kabbalah and converted to Judaism.

And she has allowed me to understand more about going through our past experiences in life, the things that we go through.

And it actually weaves beautifully into like a lot of the stuff that I do today in terms of

talking about the Middle East, trying to share a different perspective on the Middle East as this basketball player, which

I think is a really interesting angle to humanize things and have difficult conversations. Very,

very interesting angle because a lot of athletes, not just basketball, are a little scared to speak out on this topic, right? You see that a lot.

They don't want to jeopardize their sponsors or whatever. It makes sense from a business point of view.
It makes sense from a business point of view.

And I'll tell you, Sean, like in the beginning, when

when

after October 7th and

the I word, I call it Israel became like the headlines in the world.

It was easy when I look back at how I was acting in the beginning of like anger, fear,

you know, having this like revenge attitude and frequency in my life and how that's evolved almost two years now into this into this epidemic. But I used to not have like

empathy as to why people weren't saying anything, right?

Because to me in the beginning, it was so quote unquote obvious, which is an unfair thing to do because people have way more more baggage than what you see at face value on social media that might be keeping them tied down from speaking up on something that they actually don't have the right access to the information for.

So, like, I don't really necessarily go into that blaming situation anymore. Just because somebody hasn't said anything doesn't mean that they don't care.
Yeah. Right.

Because there's so many other things happening across the world that maybe I haven't. posted yet about on my social media.
I just don't know enough about it. So it doesn't feel right for me.

So that could be them about Israel-Palestine. You know what I mean? No, it makes sense.
There's a lot of stuff going on throughout the world. Too much.
Yeah.

This war, though, is definitely getting the main focus, I feel like, in America, at least, right? I can't stroll on Twitter without seeing it. Without seeing it, like every tweet is about it.

You are your algorithm.

You are your timeline. And the timelines that we have now, I mean, look, when you bought that iPhone and I got this iPhone and we...
downloaded iOS and we pressed the agree button.

It's listening to you. It's understanding you.
It's understanding your patterns. It's understanding the conversation.
It's listening to us right now.

And so your timeline is essentially a reflection of like the things it's going to give you based on what you like to do, what you like to talk about.

That's a reflection too of what we're seeing on the internet. And

there's a lot of other things that have been like kind of sidelined given all the chatter on what's going on in the Middle East, which,

and it's intentionally doing that. It's trying to, because your timeline is essentially going to dictate possibly, likely how you think about the conflict or any conflict in the world.
Right.

These echo chambers people live in, right? The echo chambers. Yeah, the echo chambers people live in.

I think the reason I love hoops and basketball is because when I look at those four lines that I've been in my whole life, the court for me is really a sanctuary.

So my three closest friends,

one's family is from Nigeria, one is from Haiti, and one is from Jamaica.

My closest friends are not Jewish. None of them are Jewish.

When I moved to Israel in 2001, I told you that my parents come from a rabbinical background. So we have this concept in Judaism called Tikkun Olam.
Tikkun means to repair, and olam means the world.

So it's this concept of how do we repair the world in the ways that we can, given who we are as people.

Charity, volunteer, making the world a better place is really an integral part of the Jewish tradition and also me.

I, by default, when I came out with the womb, got it because both of my parents are rabbis, actually. My mom's a Reformed rabbi, my dad's a reconstructionist rabbi.

And the reason this has been an incredibly

big gift in my life, and again, I'm going to go back to those two years I was in Israel. In the most fundamental years of growing up as a child, I got not just Israel.

My parents took my brother and I down to the Negev, which is the desert in southern Israel.

And we went down there because

there are many Bedouin communities down there,

Arab Bedouins who don't necessarily have, they're nomadic groups of people that travel a lot. They pick up their bags, they travel, they put them down, and they move because they're kind of on the go.

They don't necessarily have the same access to resources as other people do. And they actually, there was a village that had dirty drinking water in southern Israel.

And my family at six years old, they say, we're going to go down there. We're going to live in a tent for two weeks.

And we're going to help build them a medical facility out of haystacks and clay so that they can have clean drinking water. These are Arab children speaking Arabic.
I don't speak Hebrew.

They don't speak English. I'm communicating with Arab kids at six years old and I don't see ethnicity.
I don't see religion. I don't see language.
I don't see these barriers. I see them as a kid.

I'm a six-year-old too and they're six years old and we're playing soccer and I'm making like sounds just playing with them because we didn't even speak the same language.

That six-year-old Barack got exposed to the concept of bridging communities. being around other people who don't necessarily share the same belief in God or whatever it is tradition.

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As a six-year-old, I didn't understand that.

Later in life, I did.

That concept of being around different groups of people and then just came to life and flourished on the basketball court. She's always around.
My best friend from high school was Muslim.

And like, I've been inside of his family's mosque when his cousin was getting married. I've broken Ramadan with him.
He's been at my house for Passover.

He's been at my house for Shabbat, wearing a kippah. This is the Jewish house that I grew up in, which I'm so grateful for because, again, it's the environment I was put in with my parents.

And then basketball allowed me to just like embrace this idea of bridging communities.

And I see sports as basketball, for example, for me, as a really good vehicle to try and form a different model of how we can navigate these really difficult conversations.

That's kind of my, that's my North Star right now. That's my thesis.
I love that. It definitely connects people.
Look at the NBA now. There's so many international talent in there.
Right. Yeah.

And that's how they connect that's they they they connect on food they connect on music they connect on either language they connect on traveling

i'm lucky that the earliest time i ever left the united states was in first grade and

the more you travel the more you are acculturated with other people agreed and i'll tell you one thing i mean you you live in the states here

born american proud american always will be i i love so much about me being an american i really do um

i do think that there's a sheltered life within certain societies inside of the United States.

And I'm saying that as somebody, not from like a judgment perspective, I'm saying that from collecting data.

Like every state I go to, if I'm speaking to the person at the hotel, the Uber driver, my friends from college or high school, I know friends from high school that haven't left Massachusetts and they're 30.

Wow. And that, you know, I think that's crazy.

And

I think it's not good. I think it's not good.
I also think

it's not going to help, like you said, a lot of the people here on this side of the world, at least get a little bit more of an understanding

of what other parts of the world are and how they work. For example, the Middle East, or for example, the East, just the code of conduct and

Western values compared to what's going on in that part of the world. It's just when you travel, you then begin to meet people and understand a little bit more.

So I'm, I would say, just like you said, like basketball, it could be any professional sport, it could be football, it could be soccer. Like, that's how these guys connect.
Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you've got an impressive resume when it comes to basketball. You've trained over 20 NBA and W NBA players now.
Yeah, that's unreal, right? Yeah.

I, when I came to Israel in 2019 after I graduated college, I landed a really cool internship that I sort of opened up for myself at Maccabi Tel Aviv, which is like the premier club in Israel.

And that year, 2019, we had Denny Avdia, Omri Caspi, Amari Stoddemeyer, Quincy Acey, Scotty Wilberkin, Tyler Dorsey, Elijah Bryant, several, excuse me, Elijah has a ring.

So I got exposed to some really high-caliber players. Denny, of course, is, in my opinion, a future all-star right now in the NBA.

So I started training them when I was with Maccabi, and then I ended up

landing a head strength and conditioning coach job at Nestion, which is another first division team in Israel. Wow.
And those four years, I was around.

a lot of guys who had been in the league before, guys who played with Chris Paul, guys who played with Kobe, Tariq Black.

And then in the offseason, for the WNBA players here, they go overseas to earn a higher salary and just grow their stock. And Israel is a nice platform for them.
So I would start training

Benaijalaney and Tiffany Mitchell and like some really high-caliber WNBA players. So I was this liaison between the states and Israel.
Just training Hoopers. That was my life for like four years.

That's a super goal, man. Yeah.
How's the team looking? Olympics are coming up. Are they in the Olympics this year? Coming up? Yeah.
Israel?

Well,

the national team. Yeah.
They got knocked off. Oh, they got knocked off.
Yeah, yeah. But they're good.
Yeah. I mean, all those guys can hoop.
Those guys can hoop. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.

It's a smaller country, I guess, right?

We don't.

The thing is, is like when you and so we were just talking about lifetime fitness. Yeah.
Lifetime fitness is a would you call that like a premier club? Like a gym. Yeah, yeah.
Premier gym. Yeah.

That's not 24-hour, like that's a premier gym. It's, yeah.
We don't have anything like that in Israel. And when I was working at Nessiona,

our gym was the school. This is a first division team.
Wow. Some of these guys are like former NBA players.

I'm drawing a blank on his name, but there's a former Phoenix Suns player right now who just sounded Nessiona.

Our locker room was probably the size of this room. Like our access to facilities and resources is a little bit limited.
And I think as a result of that, we don't have...

We don't have enough eyes on the sport facility machine. Like you have IMG Academy in Florida, they just like turn over players because they have a campus for these people.

Duke University, you get a Division I scholarship. Your dorm is your basketball team and in your lobby is your gym.
So these things don't exist in Israel.

The cool thing about someone like Denny Avdia and Omri is they, I think, put Israel on the map. And Pat Beverly, who came from the NBA and we were just talking about it, played

a little bit less than a year at Apollo Tel Aviv last year. A guy who gets to come on and go overseas and talk about his experience, I think is really, is really important.
Yeah, I just had him on.

He spoke really highly of his experience in Israel. I was like asking him, did you feel safe? And all these questions.

He said he did. He said he was at the beach half the time.

He talked about on his podcast how, like, I'm paraphrasing, how, like, the sun was pink on the sunset, and he was like eating his watermelon and everything. Yeah.
Yeah.

I mean, he, he also played for a really good club in arguably one of the best metropolitan cities in the world. You can speak to any of the guys.

We have five leagues in Israel, first to fifth division. First, second, and third division is usually where those leagues are holding a lot of the premier players.

You can really kind of go across the board. The far, far majority will tell you a lot of what Pat said.

And some of those players who are playing in the north or the south on weekends will purposely make a 90-minute drive just to spend the five, six-hour Saturday in Tel Aviv. Wow.
It's really,

it's paradise in many ways. I live there.
I live like four minutes from the beach.

So when Pat talks about that stuff,

he also filmed it, like he vlogged his time in Israel on his YouTube channel, like on our podcast. So, yeah,

that's that's in my opinion. I don't want to call it advocacy because Pat wasn't doing advocacy for Israel.

Pat was, if he had been playing in Turkey and he had the same experience in Turkey, he'd share the same thing.

He was just sharing what his boots on the ground reality was.

So, you're in a good neighborhood, you feel pretty safe just walking out and about.

Yeah, it's crazy that, like, even

you asked me that, you know, like that, that to me is a really interesting example of like the disconnect.

Not that, not that like you don't know, but I think a lot of people share that same sentiment.

When I go back to, when I would go back to Israel, there would be people who would hit me up on Facebook or Instagram and be like, you good?

Like, you sure you good, bro? Yeah. And it's like,

this is why I believe in storytelling. So I'm, I'm, again, I'm this like basketball coach who has this really deep connection to Israel from childhood.
Now I live there in a very complicated place.

But when I step outside of Tel Aviv, it's like

my house. People have this idea that I'm ducking from bullets and that there's,

I feel safer in Israel than I do in the United States of America. Wow.
And

I'm a white Caucasian saying that, right? So I walk around with like...

you know, this white privilege that I don't necessarily love because a lot of people don't have the same experience that I do in the United States of America. And I for sure,

by the way, ask Pat this next time you talk to him. Ask him where he feels safer.

I've seen so many Hoopers, so many basketball players come into Israel and they all say that Jewish, Christian, it doesn't even matter who you are.

There is an energy there that

has a protection field that I think a lot of people are integrated into when they step off the plane. And none of that.

is seen on social media. None of that is seen in this conversation about Israel-Palestine.
By the way, I'm not trying to paint a perfect picture of Israel.

Israel has a very long list of imperfections, and I actually talk about them on my platform a lot.

So I don't come onto the podcasts and make it seem like this is a very black and white conversation because nothing, no conflict in the world is black and white.

I really believe in basketball, creating the dialogue to be able to speak to people that don't necessarily agree with me.

But I can only share my experience, like what I'm living. For sure.
Well, respect for acknowledging the imperfections too.

A a ton of them yeah some people won't even do that you know they won't and you know i sean i've actually called some of this out the past couple years on my platform

internally in the jewish pro-iswell community

i'll be the bad guy like i'm i'm really fine with that because i'm gonna live and die my own sword and and when people play the game of like

everything is a clean slate on one side and everything is a dirty slate on the other

i don't think that that builds authority I think that that creates dissonance. I think that you've already lost a lot of people when that's your angle.

I have my own opinions, but my opinions come from my objective, like living in Israel. It's not my subjective opinion observing what's going on in the Middle East from Idaho.
I live there.

Like I was in Israel on October 7th. My friend got killed at the Nova Festival.
Like,

I'm in it. I'm the one.
So I think that's important. I think it's important when it comes to these conflicts too, that

we lean into a lot of the people that you might not necessarily agree with, but like they do have, they do have lived experience that I think builds authority to talk about these things.

You know, I came back from a speaking tour in Spain, Morocco, and South Africa,

I want to say two months ago.

I had never really talked about either of those places in my life, ever. And the reason I never really spoke about them is because I'd never been there.
And I spent the most time in South Africa.

I spent basically a month there. I drove across the entire country by myself for three and a half weeks.

And I am not an expert on South Africa, but I've integrated myself into so many different communities there from Joannesburg to up in Kruger to the Karoo, which is the desert region, all the way down to the Garden Route, which is the southern coast of Africa, all the way to Cape Town.

I went to an area called Soweto in Joannesburg, Johannesburg, which is one of the coolest places in the world.

In the midst of real, real poverty for individuals, families who don't have water for two weeks or electricity, and their pavement, their roads are just dug up dirt.

And you go there and it just really changes your perspective on like, there's a lot of that, a lot of other people in the world that have their own stuff that you just don't even know about.

And that's why I like to go travel.

And my concept of my advocacy for Israel is quite the opposite of Israel. And this is one of the big imperfections that I'm always happy to talk about with them.

Because, and you know this because you open your feet every single day.

The perception of Israel globally right now is very low. The international community, we can both agree on that.

And that's, there's a lot of reasons. One of the main ones is because they have no idea how to do any meteor PR or tell a story.
They really don't. True.

And

they struggle with that because I think there's a lot of ego. There's an incredible amount of ego with leadership across the board.

And

I saw this in other different realms and aspects of Israeli society, sometimes including the sports industry. And

it's like my way or the highway sometimes with Israel when it comes to how they want to talk about their story. Now, I'm an American who grew up in the States, who lived in Israel as a kid, went back.

Then I started going back and forth. I didn't include it, but I started going back and forth when I was in college.
So I've had the perspective of both.

And to me, when you talk about advocacy to the international community, it probably makes a lot of sense to lean into people like me who are not from there, who come from parts of the world that you're actually trying to speak to.

I have native English. I'm from Boston.
I'm a Bostonian. I know the neighborhood.
I know the city. I know the slang.
I know the culture.

I should be speaking and deploying like information, storytelling to the Boston, Massachusetts community as an Israeli, because the Israelis don't know it the way I do. And this goes for any state.

This goes for anywhere.

So

my concept for advocacy is not what Israel does, which is, come, come, come to Israel. We show you the truth.

It's like it doesn't work because you're inviting somebody to a dinner that doesn't have an appetite to begin with. It's not going to work.
I'm bringing Israel to the people.

So when I go and I travel and I go to Spain and Morocco and South Africa and Canada and the United States, I'm going to Australia in October. I'm trying to,

you have to humanize the conversation that is very, very polarizing right now. And it starts, in my opinion, I'm not a genius or this isn't like my background.

It just seems like the right psychology is to try to find a safe space to talk about the complexities of the Middle East. That's what you have to do.
You have to create a safe space with somebody.

And my way of doing that is basketball or going to travel.

Because when I travel, I like to really think about myself as just like a really good dude, a really good person who came from like a house with really good values and morals.

And my life and my friend group and who I've spent time with, given the fact that they're from all parts of the world, has built that in me.

I feel very much like a poster child to be able to do this work because I'm not that Israeli who's spent 24 years of his life in Israel, confined in Israel, not really leaving. And that is a...

a little bit of a confined tunnel vision when you're when then you want to talk about the story in the PR I also have the native English which a lot of them don't and that you know that goes a long way wouldn't you agree like the language barrier thing goes a long way it does people want to be able to feel like they can relate to you yeah so when they see you speak English this well it's like comforting right it's comforting yeah like if you an accent is the first you know I mean first of all language is the first one of the first barriers to culture I also think that if more Israelis were taught Arabic and spoke Arabic, I think we'd have a different Middle East.

And that's just because we don't even communicate.

We have a translator in the middle half the time right that's a really easy way to get things miscommunicated oh yeah easily you know what i mean yeah so i'm i'm personally uh along with the other like nine balls that i'm juggling that's one of the things that i am aspiring to be able to do is add that into my life yeah just imagine being able to speak speak arabic or speak spanish when i go to spain and speak you know what i mean 100 so when you see netanyahu go on these podcasts like what's your have you watched any of those first of all is it his depends which one you're talking about i mean he's been on milk Boys, he's been on, um, I think Dinesh D'Souza show, a couple other big ones.

What do you take away from those appearances? Like, do you think that's actually helping Israel and the way people perceive Israel?

I think it depends who you're asking.

If you're asking

the student at Columbia who's been at the encampment for 19, 20, 21 months, probably not.

And if you're asking any of the other people who are

in that frequency of

anger,

probably not.

If you are somebody who

has like a passion for the state of Israel,

the defense of the state of Israel, and which I, by the way, have both,

but I also don't like government in general. I really don't like politics.
You can tell by this point in the conversation, having you brought politics up. Yeah.
I just don't like it.

Then you're going to be somebody who likes the,

likes the, the, the very heavy like defense approach to everything that's going on. Um

I don't really share my, I don't really have like a dense amount of opinions on when Trump comes on the screen, when BB comes on the screen, when any of the politicians come on the screen.

unless it's like rightfully calling out like

the blunt violence, like like directing the violence towards somebody, meaning like asking for more violence, I think is one thing where even if you go on X, like I think X is a really good place until things become violent.

Yeah. You know? And when it turns violent, that's so what I'm saying is I think we should be listening to leadership the second it ever does become something that you're perceiving as like, oh.

This individual is trying to instigate more violence.

And I'll go back to the first thing I said, that group that already thinks he's just like Hitler, every time that you see his face on a screen, your energetic field is going to go to

Hitler, or it's going to go to violence, or it's going to go to evil, or it's going to go to corrupt and all those things.

If you're on the opposite spectrum and you're living your life from a different perspective, where you see what he's doing is actually really important for a lot of the communities on the border, then you would say, no, we need more of that.

Two things can be true at once.

And I really don't think we have a lot of that empathy. I don't.
I don't see it.

The discourse in every comment section is a bunch of noise and it's just regurgitated noise and it's on steroids. And

it's going to continue until the bubble bursts. And it's inevitable for the bubble to burst because if the bubble doesn't burst, then we basically are talking about war.
Yeah. And I um

like I'm saying war amongst each other. Right, like a a civil war.
Sure.

That's not me, by the way. I'm not trying to scare people.
I'm just saying, like, that, that's just how things work.

Like, we are, as a collective on, on the, the, the internet, the, the world right now, we are really operating at a very low frequency. Um,

I want to show you something. Yeah.
If, if that's cool. I think, I think this might blow you on.
Maybe. Let me throw it up on the screen.
Sure. I'll show it to you here.

Um,

so this is, you said, I asked you in the beginning of this podcast if you're spiritual. Yeah.
So I think you're going to like this. This is the map of consciousness.

This was created by David Hawkins, who is a researcher on

spirit and consciousness and evolving and elevating the human, the human body through energy.

The map that you're looking at is essentially the levels of consciousness that human beings have every single day of their life. I have a consciousness that I operate on.
You have one.

Your team has one. And every single person in the world combined is the collective consciousness of the world.

So

if you start with yourself and who you are, where you are in the world, and you have many people in that same frequency, collectively as human society, we're going to be pulled down.

And right now, as I'm having this conversation with you,

we are in this lower part.

of the frequency of consciousness. And what does that mean?

You have these words that are attributed to different frequencies. Up here, for example, would be love and bliss and peace and joy.

This is, think about a Buddhist or a monk, somebody who has done deep, deep, deep inner work on their being and their soul to achieve a high level of frequency.

Down here, where it's red, and you can see the contrast. By the way, purple, blue, like these colors are going to probably make you feel happy or light.

And then red is obviously the number one color on social media because it instills negativity, violence, fear, red, evil. That's where humiliation, blame, destruction, evil live.

Now,

I'm going to give you like a very practical example of how this has been playing out in the world right now.

To understand that

anti-Semitism, racism, all the isms that are created in the world,

it's not

what is the thing that we need to do to fix anti-Semitism or racism or all these things. The wars that we have in the world, it's a war on consciousness.

We have a war with ourselves, because we're just people, on the consciousness that we are.

And a lot of people have been driven down into these lower fear-based states for many reasons, like the news and social media and propaganda.

and the violence and the access to the videos and the negativity and the hating. And you see it in ICE and LA, you see it in Israel, Palestine, you see it in Russia, Ukraine.

We can go down the list here of where all of these things, these tables have been turning.

And in order for the collective consciousness, and when I say collective consciousness, I'm talking to you about humans, people.

In order for us to get out of that, We unfortunately, because this is where we are right now, this is a live snapshot of where we are right now.

In these, and I'm going to give you two examples in a second that I think will really resonate with you. We have to weed this out.

That's what war is.

Like fighting in war and all the noise that we have on social media, this comment going back and forth, putting each other down, sending death threats, you know, killing people in the name of religion, whatever it is.

This is all behavior that actually starts with each individual. and the fact that they haven't figured out what their own low frequencies are in their own life.
And that goes back to childhood. Wow.

That goes back to early childhood development of what are the things that you experience as a kid when your subconscious is open, your brain is kind of split into two, the conscious and the subconscious, and your subconscious is open where you're starting to get these experiences young.

What was the first way that you experienced love?

Every single human being, unless they don't have one growing up, the first woman in their life is their mother.

And what was your first experience with love? What was your first experience going to school? What was your first experience? Have you ever seen someone beat up in the street?

Did you ever see a homeless person? Did you have one parent? Was there a death in the family? All these things. And the trauma that people experience in the world is deep.

And these traumas are embedded into us since such a young age. You're looking at a very good example because

I have worked through a pretty good amount of like anxiety in my life.

And the anxiety is very closely traced to like those three years growing up in Israel where my environment was war, my environment was car bombs, like sometimes going off on the street.

My environment was the Middle East. The frequency of the Middle East is always by default very tense.
Anyone will tell you that because you

can't take anything for granted. That is just what it is.

And

right now, we are in a battle of consciousness. This, I'm going to give you these two examples.
This isn't taught to people. Like, we're not taught.

how to increase, how to increase Sean's consciousness. There's a lot of different ways in order to do something like that.
And it starts with what I would categorize as inner work.

In 2024, Scooter Braun followed me on Instagram. He saw my work and he said, I love what you do.
I love your energy.

If you're ever in LA, I'd like to have you over at the Nova exhibition in Los Angeles. The Nova exhibition was,

basically, they brought over like cars and parts from the Nova Festival from October 7th in Kibbutz Berry, and they brought them over to the United States in Toronto.

And they put on like a walk-through exhibit of a replica of what the Nova. You have the sounds that are the recordings of the gunfire.

You have the video footage taken from all the people who were there. Holy crap! You have the actual tents, the actual toothbrushes, the actual water bottles.
They cargo shipped all this stuff over.

Wow. Scooter really pioneered this.
And I was there

to go see him and meet him and then witness it.

They also brought in Nova survivors. These were people who were at the Nova Festival, my age,

younger, older, who were there to come and be a part of the exhibition to meet with people who would go through, to talk to them after in the healing center, to talk about the traumas and talk about what that morning was like for them.

They brought in a Reiki master. to treat them.
Do you know what Reiki is? Yeah, I've done it. Oh, you've done Reiki? Yeah.
Okay.

For those who don't know, in the simplest way, it's a form of energy healing.

Both of my parents are actually trained in Reiki, and they've been giving it to me my whole life.

So I do come from this really spiritual sphere. You guys did Reiki.
Yeah. You can also give it to animals, by the way.
Really?

So my dog, who's no longer alive, my mom used to give him Reiki when he was sick. Wow.

And then when I would come home from high school and I'd have a headache after like a really long day at school, I'd just lie on my mom's lap in the living room and she'd put her hands here and you could just feel the heat radiate.

And I'm, I'm receptive to this. And the headache was gone in 10 minutes.
So So I've always been like

open to this.

So they brought in a Reiki master to treat the Nova survivors.

Her name is Heather.

She

is

an expert in astrology.

She's an expert in energy healing. She's a Reiki master.
She studied Kabbalah and converted to Judaism. This is who she is.
And she has

spent the majority of the past 10 10 to 12 years of her life building out a model for how to raise consciousness on the earth for people.

I started working with her right after I was at the Nova exhibition. She gave me a Reiki treatment upstairs in her clinic and my lower limbs went numb and I started crying during the treatment because

she

really brought a lot of tension and stress out of me. She actually started choking during the treatment and that's when she has that reaction.

It's because the person she's giving Reiki to, the stress and tension goes through her body, actually into her thyroid, and then she starts choking.

So it was a moment of realization for me to realize that that six-year-old, seven-year-old, and eight-year-old from Israel has been carrying a lot of stress and trauma with him without even realizing it.

And that's what energy healing does. Energy and that and Reiki, by the way, is just one way to think about how to heal somebody.

There's breath work, there's yoga, there's therapy, there's a lot of modalities. I'm not saying Reiki is for everyone.
Actually, I I would say Reiki is for everyone. The reason I'm saying this to you

is because

I want to give you now two real examples of people that are based on this model of higher consciousness that, in my opinion,

are beautiful examples of how we should be leaning into more of doing this inner work as people.

Heather

met, I'm not going to mention her name for privacy reasons, met a survivor

in LA from the Nova Festival. And

she put her on the table. And

she had a healing partner in the room. So there were two people giving this girl Reiki.

All Heather knew about this girl was that she survived the festival. She knew her name and a little bit about her background, but didn't really know a lot about the morning.

So she puts her on the table. She's giving her Reiki.
Heather closes her eyes. And she begins to have a vision.
Heather is very spiritual. She actually is an alien.

So she believes her soul like really actually isn't from here. She believes that she was.

Yeah. I mean, she's in,

I was just with her last night. Like, she's, she just gave me Reiki.

She's really special. She had a vision when she was putting her hands above this girl's head.
And what she saw in her mind was a rabbi with...

Some sort of a jacket or a cloak protecting the girl she's giving Reiki to. That's the vision that just came to her mind.
She finishes the Reiki treatment.

She gets off the table and after the treatment, you kind of talk, what happened, what happened? No. She says to the girl,

I had a vision when I was giving you Reiki.

And she said,

it felt like to me, I saw a rabbi with this cloak protecting you while I was giving you Reiki.

The girl looked at Heather. and said,

on October 7th, when Hamas came into the festival and started shooting at everybody, me and my friends sprinted to the bomb shelter. And inside the bomb shelter, there were like 40 people.

There's videos of like Hamas terrorists throwing grenades in, then they come out. Then they throw a grenade in, then they come out.
They'll spray it with a gun and they'll come out.

And it's just a really hard video to watch. And you're listening and you're seeing what's going on.

These are just like a bunch of 25 to 35-year-old people who are on like psychedelics, just like enjoying life. They were at bliss.
They were here. This is where they were.

And when she was inside of the bomb shelter, there were bodies flying everywhere. And then some of them were just like, they were just killed.

She took a body that was next to her. She put it on top of her to hide.
And then she started saying her grandfather's name out loud over and over and over. Please protect us.
Please protect us. Over.

She was literally saying it out loud in the middle of grenades being thrown into her with her friends there. She had, I think, four or five friends.

Her grandfather is a Sephardic rabbi from Spain. And when she was saying his name out loud in the bomb shelter, he was protecting her and her friends.

They're the only six people that survived in the bomb shelter. Oh my gosh.

Heather saw that. Heather saw that vision.
And she didn't even know that before they did the Reiki treatment.

Her healing partner, Aida, who was in the room

and you and the listeners can take this however you want.

But while they were in the Reiki room, Aida saw a man

come out of her body, the girl's body, and it was her grandfather. And he was in the room and he left because they relieved her of that.
Wow. She saw the rabbi.
Heather saw the vision.

Neither one of them communicated that during the treatment, and it only came out after.

Her name, which I'm going to leave out, she reached a very high frequency of consciousness. Spiritual,

bliss, love. She surrendered.
She surrendered. She was in a bomb shelter.

Down here in this bottom part of frequency are all the isms, racism, terrorism. This is a Nova Festival partygoer.
This is a Hamas terrorist. October 7th is when those two frequencies met.

And the individuals, and I have one more story for you, the individuals who meet this frequency, who are able to raise their consciousness, because you and I, man, we're all energy.

When you meet this and achieve this,

love and bliss will always, always beat the lowest frequencies possible. Her, the girl who was in the bomb shelter, is an example of it.
Heather has 44 of these stories.

I'm going to tell you one other one because I don't want to take too much of the thing, but she treated another girl who was at the festival. The Hamas terrorists came.

She sprinted, ended up being on her own. She found an open field and a massive tree.

She had nowhere to hide. So she stood behind the tree.

12.31 o'clock comes around. She's still just by herself.
And at this point, she's talking to herself because she's alone. She's probably surrendered at this point.

She's in an open field, doesn't know where the help is. Hamas terrorists are going everywhere.
And at 12.31,

she looks over and she sees from like 50 yards away a Hamas terrorist with a rifle. And he looks right at her in the eye.

And he stops what he's doing and he starts beelining towards her. And you can just imagine at this point, open field by themselves, she's alone, beautiful girl.

You just imagine like what could happen.

As he's approaching 30 yards, 20 yards, 15 yards away from her, she's just standing at this tree. She takes two steps away from the tree.
She takes a really, really deep breath.

She exhales and she gives the Hamas terrorist the biggest smile she's ever given to anybody in the world. She looked at him and just surrendered and gave him nothing but peace, love, and happiness.

The terrorist stutter stepped.

He's eight feet away from her, a little further away from the distance between you and me right now.

He stops and he starts backpedaling. He backpedals.

He turns around and he runs away. She survived October 7th.
Wow.

There are an incredible amount of these stories of

people like me and you who were able to achieve.

Again, I'm going to keep going back to it: higher frequency.

You live in a higher frequency. You don't live in a fierce state.
You don't live in a violent state. You aren't blaming.
You aren't all these things.

And a lot of those survivors were miraculously either a little bit spiritually before or they achieved. Some of it is luck for sure.
But

I even look at my experience with anti-Semitism. Okay.
And this is a zinger. It's going going to be a zinger for you and everyone else listening.

I've been to five countries now. Okay.

I have this necklace on. It says Amis Achai.
This is repurposed rocket shrapnel from Ahamas rocket.

So there's a company called Rockets to Roses that takes shrapnel and they repurpose them into light, taking something dark, putting it into something light. My name also means lightning in Hebrew.

So I wear this lightning bolt because I do feel very much a calling to be a light to people. And I think that this is a beautiful story of this.

When October 7th happened, and I have no idea how far you scrolled, probably not too far. When I started making content, just talking about my experience, you can go back and you can see

that I was here.

I was like really pissed off. I was screaming at the camera.
I was angry. I was basically contributing to more noise.
Right. That's what most of the people are doing right now.

And then you sit there and you watch critically, critically thinking, like,

what are we doing? Like,

what, what are we achieving by arguing, shouting, fighting, killing, debating, commenting, the whole nine yards? What are we doing? Really?

Like, if we could measure and thread the needle, what needle has been thread? Because the state of the union right now is really bad. It's really, really bad.
So I'm thinking.

What I'm doing is not helping. What other people are doing are not helping.
And this is where Heather came into my life. Since I've been working with her,

I've worked on, we're working on my astrological chart, the things that I've been through, the traumas I've been through, and working through how to elevate my consciousness.

And I'm going to give you a perfect example of this is the zinger.

You look at the people talking about anti-Semitism online right now, and you have families who are having dinner with, you know, in Greece or in Italy, and this thing's happening in New York City.

And all of it is real. All of it is bad.

I don't dismiss any of it. And a lot of it is unfortunately as a result of people living in this really fear-based law of attraction.

You're going to think positively, you're going to get positive stuff. You're going to think negatively, you're going to get negative stuff.

The law of attraction is a real thing, just like the law of gravity is a real thing. If I drop this paper, gravity is going to pull it down.

Law of attraction is the same thing that's happening all the time.

Jewish people and anti-Semitism, we've unfortunately, due to a lot of trauma, have been thrusted into operating into the fear-based state. Wow.

So when we see, see, and it's a, it's a prison that we've unfortunately really put ourselves into as a result of being on the receiving end of going through a lot of persecution and trauma. Yeah.

And when you thrust more and more people down into this, you create a perpetual cycle of all the things that you're seeing on social media, which is like anti-Semitism and all this stuff.

And it's really bad.

Me,

who has really worked on raising his consciousness the past half year of my life, And I'm telling you, I am on a mission because I, at this point, after working with Heather and understanding more about me, I do think that I'm a superhuman.

And I do think that when I'm seeing myself now rise up,

Canada, US, Spain, Morocco, which is a Muslim country in South Africa, which is arguably one of the countries of the biggest anti-Semitic hotspots in the world. Really? Yeah,

in the beginning of the war, like they tried to put

Bibi on trial for everything and tried to put him through court. And basically, the government of South Africa really doesn't like the state of Israel.

That does not mean that all of the people don't. And that is where I think a lot of people are lost.
Agreed.

The government of Israel is not perfect, but that doesn't mean that I'm the same bad person that you're claiming the government to be. Government and people are two different things.

I think you can agree with me. Yeah, 100%.

Sorry, I'm ranting here. Oh, this is all really fascinating.
But I want to just tell you about me.

Spain, walking around with this necklace,

higher consciousness, thinking positively, not showing vulnerability, not being guilty, not being humiliated, not blaming, not looking for it, not caving in the way I was in the beginning of the war.

When you look at some of the content that I was making, when I remember going around New York City, tucking my necklace in, I was on the receiving end of this, thrusted down into this negative frequency.

I've started working on myself with somebody who really understands consciousness on a level that I haven't seen before. And now I go around the world.
I was just in Greece.

I was met with incredible hospitality, with love.

Yeah, I saw signs and I saw no Jews and all this stuff.

Those are concentrated. Like when you see a sign that says free Palestine or you see a sign that says no Jews allowed

in Athens, it doesn't mean that Greece hate Jews. It means that whoever put that there and those who agree with that line of thinking don't.
But that doesn't mean the majority don't. And South Africa,

jumping off the Bolcran Bridge, the largest bridge in Africa, I bungee jumped off of it.

They started speaking to me in Hebrew when they found out that I was in Israel. This is South Africa.

Going to Morocco, going into Medina, the old city in Marrakesh, on the busiest night of the week, one of the only Jews there with this necklace, everybody around me, pretty much for the most part is Muslim.

You go to the old, I go to the flea market.

They have a tradition in Morocco when the tourists come, you go to this juice stand, you stand up, they give you a hat, you sing some fun song and they give you juice and it's in front of everyone.

I was called up. He just picked me.
We locked eyes. He bring me up, ask him where I'm from.
I'm from Israel. He says to me, Manish Ma'akshali, which means how are you, brother in Hebrew? In Morocco.

I go to Spain, same thing.

I've personally raised my personal consciousness to the point. where my actual law of attraction, like how I carry myself, where I'm trying to operate on, has a real effect of in my life.

And I'm not saying that the negative fear, anti-Semitic, like the things that we're seeing, they're all real.

The question that we need to be asking,

what is the consciousness of those involved?

And when you un when you understand that, and by the way, the way to get there is by understanding who you are since you were born, going through your life, your experiences, your trauma.

I had a really incredible experience yesterday going through a lot of this on a deep level. And I have a difficult time with safety.
I have a difficult time.

I think that's where my anxiety comes from that I'm really, you know, I've, I've relieved a lot of it from my body, but

the,

for the lack of a better word, the unsafeness in Israel, just being in the Middle East.

By the way, when I said it was the safest place in the, that I've ever felt, I do feel like it's the safest place that I've ever felt ever. I still, still mean that.

What I mean unsafe is the fact that you can go get coffee and then we get an alert that there's a siren and you have 90 seconds to go to your bomb shelter. Like it's a different lifestyle than Vegas.

Being in that at six, seven, eight years old has created a lot of baggage and lack of safety in my consciousness, in my energetic field that I now have been trying to work on to not carry that baggage anymore so that I can rise and go up the stairs.

There's a way to do this. Most human beings right now, none of us have awareness that you can climb up the stairs.

And the only way to understand that there's a stair set to be able to climb, that's just an analogy for being able to level up your consciousness as a human being, is by understanding who you are, why you are the way you are.

This is why astrology is really cool. People will say astrology is not rational.

Sure, astrology is just sort of a time stamp when you look at your astrological chart, when you were born, the time you were born, and where you were born.

It gives you insight and information as to your personality. where the planets were, where the sun was, where the moon was, has a lot to do with how you deal with emotions.

It'll show you a lot about some of the things you may be meant to do while you're alive. My astrological chart, still sitting in front of you today, everything that we've gone over is spot on.

It has not failed once. So it's just a tool to be able to understand more about who you are so that you can start doing the work.

And the work is digging down into a lot of the things of what are the traumas people go through.

What you're seeing in the comments section, the person who says, F you, the person who says, I want to kill you, the person who says, jump off, whatever the thing is, that's coming from their own trauma

that's coming from their own insecurity their own humility it's that's what it is they're projecting they're projecting

and i think you that resonates with you because yeah i'm glad i realized it i used to really take these comments to heart when i was younger really yeah yeah like i got bullied growing up a lot you know i used to really like feed into it huh believe it okay but as i've uh

I guess they call it thick skin, you know. What, what do you think gave you that? Because in the the beginning of the podcast, I asked you if you're spiritual and you said, yeah.
Yeah, I am.

Now I think it's just who I've met and like the advice I've gotten is like really only value opinions of people you care about.

So when you hear that cliche quote, it's like hate only comes from those beneath you. Can I take a guess at you? Yeah.

Do you have a very small circle of friends? Very.

I'm not surprised by that. Yeah.
That's because, so I do too.

I could tell that you were spiritual when I met you an hour ago.

And I could tell that you have a small group of friends because of what you just said.

And

the law of attraction is you are a product of your environment. You have a small group of friends, the people who you love and care about the most.

It's going to have a really deep impact on who you are.

And

that self-awareness that you got comes from somewhere. And that's a gift, dude.

Like, especially someone like you has a large platform and an incredible amount of influence. So I tip my hat off for you being able to do that.

I also think it's really important that you said that on this because more people need to hear that.

More people need to and will hear this the more I

unravel this journey because I think it's really fascinating. And I

got a lot of pushback from followers in the Jewish community when I traveled around those countries I was telling you about. Really? Just for visiting those countries.

Not just for visiting them, sharing my nice, fun experiences. And I don't do it to make people feel like I'm neglecting what's really happening.
I'm not naive.

I live in a war like I've seen it.

I'm doing it because two things can be true at once. I can also have a different experience than you, vice versa.
And I'm not trying to replace an angle that exists.

I'm trying to offer a different one.

And people conflate those two things. They think I'm trying to like

say, you know, say that what is unfolding, unfortunately, different parts of the world, maybe while we're sitting at this table is happening

but the fact that i'm maybe not going through those things and experiencing it on the same level has a lot to do with the fact that i've begun a lot of this work a lot of this work i'm not taking drugs i'm not drinking anything like i'm not doing like there's no like magic pill it's like the really deep inner work scooter braun by the way who has

really gotten into the inner work space in his life. He talks about this publicly all the time.
He talked about it.

I recommend anybody listening to this episode right now who haven't already tuned out just because I'm from Israel.

Listen to him on, listen to him on DOAC, Diar of a C.

Man, I got chills listening to that, bro. That's like really important stuff.

Great episode because he was painted very negatively in the media with the whole Taylor Swift breakup. So people form one opinion on him, right? Correct.
Correct.

I, you know, I was at Roseanne Barr's house on a podcast the other day and the, the,

things people have painted about her are also like, but then, then

I go, no cameras, we're not on the podcast. I go offline and I speak to her.
I'm like with her outside on her deck and patio, just shooting it and just like with her son and her family.

And we're for hours. Like,

that's how you get to know somebody, man. Like, that's, that, that's how you raise your consciousness because you're in.
And

I think it's, I think it's really important you said that because we, I say we as like the, the, the viewers of content,

we know nothing. Like, Sean has a big platform.
Sean also has a life outside of his platform. I'm assuming it's a big life.

And, like, you don't necessarily have to share all the things that you do outside this office. I don't think that you would want to.

Just because you don't share it doesn't mean it exists. So, the hate and the judgment that you get is a reflection of other people with their own stuff and their own baggage, right?

And we just do that every single day, bro. That's all we do.

And the reason I'm very bullish on this, not just because I think that I'm a living example, is because I'm waiting for some other genius to come along with a better plan. Nothing is working.

Anti-Semitism is higher. People are more Islamophobic.
People are hating more. There are people in the streets getting killed in the name of religion.
Like, tell me how we've progressed, really.

Like, tell me.

I'm not trying to paint a picture that everything is terrible and bad, but

you can't show me one negative outcome of literally digging into your own life as an individual, as a human being, understanding understanding who you are spiritually, energetically, physiologically, emotionally, getting a cheat code to understanding where those things came from, weeding out those things that you're carrying that you don't even realize, like this big backpack on me of trauma and being in the Middle East as a kid, because as a six-year-old, you don't realize that the Middle East and sirens and war, that's actually in me.

Yep.

And understanding how to maybe work through those, that is what elevating to becoming the highest possible version of yourself is.

And if we, me, you, her, everyone, start to do this work, it's going to go to the same thing I told you about in the beginning of this. It changes the collective.

And our collective right now around the world is really low. It is.
Thank you for sharing that, man. We'll throw up that chart on the screen.
Anything else you want to close off with here, man?

Where could people find you and all that? Yeah, I'm

other Barack, O-T-H-E-R-B-A-R-A-K on everything.

And

I really,

I really hope people gave me a chance to listen to this. And

I really do think that I have a lot of the elements needed to maybe formulate a different model for people to think about how we work through conflict and hate.

This isn't just about Israel and Palestine. I've shared with you the past hour who I grew up with, my friend groups, being around different religions from the age of six, mosques, like basketball.

I think it's a really important thing for people to pocket. And I encourage maybe the ones that tuned out at nine seconds to

not encourage. I hope that they go past nine seconds in the future and maybe take a listen because I think that I'm trying to come

to this. And I hope you feel this too for me that I'm really about doing as much good as possible.
That's like really like, if you slice open my chest right now, that's what you would see.

I'm just like trying to shine light. Because I don't see a lot of it.
You can see that. And when you're in the dark, this is the last time I'll pull this up, I promise.
When you're in the dark,

it's really hard to see light. Yeah, you just don't see it.
That's why our comment sections.

But when you're in the light, I'm being going up the stairs, and you begin to see the dark, and you're like, Hold on a second,

there might be something here to this.

Um, and so I'm gonna

continue to simmer on this. I hope it was interesting if you know different angle for your ball.
Sometimes you tell me about it. So, I'll be following your journey, man.
Thanks for your time today.

Thank you, Rob, y'all. Appreciate it, Malcolm.
And I'll see you next time.

I hope you guys are enjoying the show. Please don't forget to like and subscribe.
It helps the show a lot with the algorithm. Thank you.