https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=9PIi299JAdk
Hello everyone. I’m pleased to announce my new tour for 2024. Beginning in early February and running through June, Tammy and I and an assortment of special guests are going to visit 51 cities in the U.S. You can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information. I’m going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I’ve been working on. My forthcoming book out November 2024, We Who Wrestle with God. I’m looking forward to this. I’m thrilled to be able to do it again and I’ll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye. In my eighth year of being in the United States as an illegal, I was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, the second highest decoration of the Soviet Union that had to be approved by the Central Committee of the party. And you know with that came a monetary award of 10,000, not rubles, but dollars. So there was an intellectual discrepancy there. I was being given an award in the currency of the country that we were trying to destroy. Hello everyone. I had the privilege today to speak with one Jack Barsky, guy about my age, born in East Germany, raised in the depths of the communist catastrophe, swallowed the propaganda as young man hook, line and sinker, and was recruited as, while he was pursuing his degree in chemistry, recruited by the KGB to act as a spy in the West. And he recounted his tale in a book called Deep Undercover, which was published in 2017, and shared all that with me today. His double life in the US, his eventual abandonment of the communist utopian intellectual project, his conversion as it turns out as a consequence of the love of his infant daughter, his work for the FBI, and his current enterprise now serving as a mentor to the young people, to young people who might be attracted, say, by the utopian schemes of the intellectual ideologues. And so we walked through all of that. And that’s very interesting. Welcome aboard. Mr. Barsky, I think what came to my mind as the first mystery when I went through your book was the conditions of your upbringing. Now, one of the things that’s very mysterious, thankfully, to people in the West is how it was that young people in particular were enticed to swallow hook, line and sinker, the propaganda coming into Eastern Europe from Russia, especially because, and I don’t know how much of this you knew when you were a child, but especially when the there was such a stark difference between the material conditions in the West and compared to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. And there was some knowledge of that. So why don’t you start by telling everyone what you experienced as a child and how you saw the world, you know, up to the point where you entered, say entered university? First of all, the communism didn’t originate in Russia, as you know, it was a German invention, Karl Marx, right. And Lenin was the one who actually put this into practice. So there was still communist thinking, residual communist thinking in East Germany. And there were a lot of refugees when Hitler took over that went to the Soviet Union and then came back and sort of took over rather quickly. So how did we buy what they were selling? There was nothing else on the market. There was no free market of ideas. It was a massive, massive brainwashing from from kindergarten on. And, you know, I tell people then if you if everybody, you know, that family, teachers, friends of friends, relatives, tell you that the moon is made out of cheese, that becomes like part of, you know, part of the foundational knowledge of how the world operates. There was no God. There was just, you know, there was just the idea, the romantic idea of communism becoming the force that will free all the suppressed nations in the world. And by the way, that is very easy, easy to buy into. And I was 100% by the time I left college, I was still 100% a communist. So and a lot of my generation too, the what the the communists in East Germany did very well, they focused on the next generation, us, and particularly focused on the ones that had a really reasonably high level of intellect because we were going to be the leaders, the leaders of the future. And one more thing about the wealth of the West. Well, we weren’t allowed to travel to the West. We sort of knew that, you know, they had a higher standard of living, but this was rationalized very quickly and easily because the, you know, the NATO countries, imperialist countries were stealing the wealth from the Third World, like the United States stole the bananas from Guatemala and so on. Right. Okay, so let me ask you some more specific questions about that. One of the things that you alluded to was that the idea that you were working for freedom of the oppressed was actually a powerful motivator. And so I want to unpack that a little bit. I mean, it’s obvious when we look at the world, wherever we sit, that some people are more favored than others along any dimension of comparison you can possibly imagine. Now, Marx made the economic comparison primary, pointing out that, well, I suppose that the poor will be with us always, so to speak, but that, and it is definitely the case that that difference in in economic security and opportunity exists and is somewhat painful to all observers. I mean, I suppose there are some successful people who pride themselves on the fact that they have plenty while others have none and are pleased at that status differential. But my experience with decent prosperous people is that even, and most particularly the decent prosperous people are still unhappy that there is poverty and suffering anywhere in the world, that there is even relative privation. And I would say it’s part of the moral striving that’s part and parcel of the human psychological landscape to want to remediate that. And so if the communists are offering some future vision where suffering is a thing of the past, then in some ways they’re capitalizing on that longing in the human soul for suffering as such to be dispensed with. And so that makes it perfectly understandable. I’ve been writing about this a little bit. The pathological part of it is that it seems to me, and I want to know what you think about this, is that as soon as you make the assumption that anybody who is more talented or who owns more is more talented or owns more because that’s, and that that can only occur as a consequence of injustice and oppression and exploitation, then you’re setting up a situation where anyone who has any success whatsoever can be hated and, what would you say, persecuted with a good conscience? And so I’m wondering, you must have thought about this a fair bit, how do you think it’s possible for people to separate their moral impulse to aid the oppressed from their immoral impulse to damn the successful? All right, so you raised a highly complex issue, and I can only address as much as I have lived through it, through the situation. First of all, I grew up in the country. We were all equally poor. So I didn’t really understand the concept of poverty as a young child, and even when I went to high school, because there were no wealthy people around us. And with regard to wealth of the West, it was just, you know, it wasn’t tangible. So there was nobody to hate, actually, at that point. We started hating, all of us, when the war in Vietnam got really bad. I mean, I would have signed up and fought on behalf of the Vietnamese, but here’s an interesting shift. So I did really, really well in high school, and I did so well in college that I received a national scholarship that was limited to 100 concurrent users, holders in the country. 100. I joined the elite. The scholarship paid me as much as my salary when I was an assistant professor. I was a rich student, and I was, you know, it’s probably quite understandable that I was really full of myself, and then everybody admired me. And so I became intellectually the kind of a person who will help all the people who need help, the stupid people. You know, this is the condescending attitude that, you know, the elite has a lot, let’s put it this way. We have it in this country, we have it in Western Europe. You know, if we are up there, like we look down at the little people, I said, well, they can’t take care of themselves, we got to do it for them. And then it starts with goodwill, and then very often degrades into not so good, simply because the elite needs to stay where it is to fulfill its mission. There’s a rationalization, okay? And we live better, and we make more money and all this because we deserve it. So I never had a chance to hate the capitalists with a vengeance because I didn’t know them well enough. It was more theoretical, the exploitation of man. Well, I think your comments on that intellectual presumption are extremely interesting. I mean, I’ve been trying to work through that dynamic theoretically, because there’s an association between that intellectual pride and utopian presumption. You know, when you just laid out a psychological dynamic, you said you were young, you were celebrated for your intellectual prowess. And you can see that intellectual prowess is valuable, personally and socially. And so you can understand that it being valued is appropriate. But then you pointed to the fact that if it’s celebrated inappropriately, it tends to produce a kind of intellectual pride and condescension. And then that works in sync. See, it works oddly in sync with the utopian presumptions of communism. Communism is a very intellectual system. And it was designed by someone who had very deep intellectual pretensions, Marx himself. And it’s that unholy combination of intellectual pride and the proposition that you’re acting in that pride on behalf of people who are too foolish or stupid or ignorant or blind or otherwise incapable of taking care of themselves, right? And then you could say, well, you’re doing that for all the good reasons. But you pointed out right away that there was an element of overweening pride in that that was attractive to you because you were celebrated for your intellect when you were young. Absolutely. And one other thing, if your frame of reference is mankind, it’s very difficult to not be full of pride. If you get to a point where you realize that there’s this big universe that was created by some power, whatever you want to call it, then that arrogance shrinks very quickly. So do you think that it’s possible to not suffer from that arrogance, especially if you’re an intellectual or intelligent, if you don’t have a reference point outside yourself or outside or even outside of mankind as such? Because you can imagine someone trying to make a moral case that the appropriate level of analysis for a properly morally oriented young person is the good of mankind as such. But you could counter that by saying, well, look, what the hell do you know when you’re 18? And maybe you should take care of your own local concerns like someone who’s properly humble, instead of attributing to yourself the ability at such a young age to understand everything that needs to be understood about all the economic and social systems of the world and to bring about with your own efforts and to your own credit this hypothetical utopia. Yes, but here’s the thing. I want to just contribute to this. I’m not necessarily chiming in with what you just brought up. When you are as well-meaning as you are to help the downtrodden and the less gifted, you become a member of the elite and some people will kiss up to you and then you rationalize. I remember the CEO of a company that I worked for, he had a chauffeur chauffeuring him around all the time and the rationalization was his time is too valuable. That is why elite also needs to have private airplanes, right? And you get used to this. You get used to being adored and being celebrated and it’s fundamentally impossible to not become full of yourself. I bet you there are some people who are humble by nature, but the majority of us are not. Yeah, okay. So the pathway there is that as soon as you have pretensions to operating on behalf of something approximating universal salvation brought into being in consequence of your own intellectual efforts and your beliefs is that the probability that you’re going to suffer from inflation of ego is virtually certain at that point. I am 100% certain of that. It’s not just because I went through that. There’s a lot of my colleagues and other gifted people that joined the cause, the party, the government. And in East Germany, the government, the party was the elite and the way communism is constructed, the working class is supposed to rule, but the working class needs a spokesperson or an organization that speaks on its behalf and those people weren’t working class. They were the intellectual elite. Some of them were pretty dumb, but a lot of them were at least clever. Right. So one of the things you’re pointing to two things there too, you’re also making the case, I would say that even in a society that purports to hope to eradicate the economic elite, elites are likely to arise regardless. And in the country that you grew up in, in East Germany, the economic elites were rapidly replaced by the intellectually pretentious elites, let’s say. And then that’s like a codicil of the argument you’re making, but there’s something else that’s interesting there too, because you opened up your argument in two ways. You pointed out that the Soviet propaganda was the water, communist propaganda was the water in which you swam when you were young and it was everywhere and that there was really no escaping it. But then you made a secondary argument, which was, yeah, but at the same time, swallowing that propaganda and then operating successfully within that system was something that appealed to your pride. And so that you had a reason, a personal reason for buying into it. It reminds me, no, I’ve been thinking about the doctrines of power, like the communist and the postmodern doctrines. I’ve been thinking them in relationship to the story of Cain and Abel, because in the story of Cain and Abel, you have Cain, who’s at least regards himself as downtrodden and unfairly oppressed by Abel and by God. He goes to complain to God and he attributes his failure to the injustice of the world. And God says in response to him that his failure is actually at his feet and that the thing that’s tempting and possessing him, making him bitter and resentful, sat on his door and tempted him, but he invited it in. Right? That’s a crucial thing. So there’s a, what would you say, there’s a metaphorical equivalence there that I’m trying to tease out. On the one hand, you said you were fed a nonstop diet of propaganda. And I think increasingly that’s the case for young people in the West. But on the other hand, you said, well, that also redounded to your advantage, right? Because it put you in a position of elite status and appealed to your pride. And so would you say, is it reasonable to say that it was the combination of those two things? Absolutely. Allow me to illustrate. When I was asked by the KGB, after like 18 months of them checking me out, they asked me, so are you going to join us? And I was really torn because I knew I was going to have to take some inordinate risk. I knew I would have to say goodbye to my life that I was very comfortable with and on and on and on. I knew that I would have to stop playing basketball. It was a passion of mine. But the combination of knowing that I was going to be a hero for the cause and that I would be able to partake of the wealth in the West. Okay? I would be able to travel and I knew I would have a good life. As a matter of fact, they sold me this way. They said, well, you’re going to live in big houses and drive fancy cars. My God, that combination, that actually made me say yes. Okay. So now you’re bringing an additional element into the equation. So, you know, I was just rereading Goethe’s Faust the other day. And Faust is intellectually pretentious and also, and sick of life. And Mephistopheles, the bargain Mephistopheles offers him is a combination of worldly pleasure and intellectual dominance. Right? And so that’s why he makes a deal with the devil, so to speak. And so it’s interesting that you also bring up the fact that you were being offered the fruit that was forbidden under communism, which was that pathway to an elevated, what would you say, material life in the West. And okay, so when, so this speaks to you being recruited as a university student. Okay. So you’re swimming in propaganda. May I interrupt you? I want to take it one step further because it gets bizarre. In my eighth year of being in the United States as an illegal, I was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, the second highest declaration of the Soviet Union that had to be approved by the Central Committee of the party. And you know, with that came a monetary award of 10,000, not rubles, but dollars. So there was an intellectual discrepancy there. I was being given an award in the currency of the country that we were trying to destroy. So the entire KGB was sort of infused with that dichotomy. Well, I wanted to ask you about moral conundrums, but let’s walk through your recruitment. Okay. So you’re a young guy. You’re smart. Now you’re actually being offered a pretty interesting combination of adventures. So you get the material luxury and the excitement of traveling to the West. You get the excitement of acting as a double agent. You can tell yourself and you’re being told that you’re acting only on behalf of the world’s oppressed. Right. And you get to join the elite on the intellectual side. Right. That’s a pretty heady offer. You know, one of the things I do think about in relationship to what young people are being offered in the West is, and this is something the radical leftists are really good at, is that they have this vision of adventure as one of their offerings. You know, the conservatives tend to push back against the utopian presumptions of the left, but they don’t offer as well developed a vision of, let’s say, romantic adventure. And so I think they let the young people languish. Well, you know, you’re making the case that you were being offered something that was pretty heady. Right. I mean, you got to leave your country. You got to be an adventurer. You got to work for the poor. At least you got to tell yourself that. And that all redounded to your intellectual advantage and to your status. When you were, let’s walk through the stages of your recruitment when you were in college and university. And I’m also interested, were you racked with moral conundrums while you were making the decision to work for the KGB? You know, you just told me what they put on offer. Now, had you bought the propagandistic line completely, there wouldn’t have been any moral conundrum because of course you would have been working for nothing but the good. But you already told me that you, I don’t know if you became aware of this later or at the time, that your motives were contaminated by your own pride and also by your own, say, consumeristic desires. So what did you have to wrestle with morally when you were being recruited? Nothing. And I tell you, had I had a girlfriend, a steady girlfriend or a wife at the time, that would have been something to really wrestle with. I did not wrestle with lying to my mother because my mother was a very domineering disciplinarian and I did not grow up in a loving family. The words, the German words, ich liebe dich, I never heard as a child spoken at one adult to another or one adult to me. So it was all very tough discipline. So I had no emotional tie to my mother and that would have been the only moral quandary I would have stepped into. Everything were just friendships and relationships. So, and that was easy to deal with. Okay, so why was that easy to deal with? Why were you willing, was the offer that was on at hand clearly attractive enough so that the price you paid in terms of friendships and so forth, leaving your interest in basketball, that all paled in comparison to this potential adventure? Well, it didn’t pale, but I, you know, when we’re talking about a moral quandary, I didn’t betray anybody. I mean, had they known where I’m going, they would have cheered me on. So I betrayed somebody down the road, but at that point, that came not into play. Okay, so tell me, what did you study when you were in university and I believe it was in university when you joined, you decided to join the Communist Party. And it was partly because you also knew at that time, like everyone knew, that if you didn’t become a member of the Communist Party, your career ambitions were going to be severely truncated. So walk us through that and then also through your training. Not severely truncated, but limited. And I did join the party because that was like the right thing to do. Pretty much all the smart, ambitious individuals joined the party. By the way, the party at university wasn’t as dumb as, you know, the front page of the Communist Party newspaper. You know, we were pretty open with one another and there were people complaining about that our leaders really weren’t the right leaders. So there was some openness and some camaraderie that wasn’t so bad. And there was some tolerance of things that were forbidden such as listening to western radio stations. So the party was not a bad thing. And so, but the funny thing is, you know, I studied chemistry, but here’s another piece of irony. We had one course in philosophy, it was called Scientific Marxism-Leninism. And so the thing is we bought into this idea that Marxism-Leninism was a science just like on par with physics because Marx discovered the laws that govern the evolution of human society. And we were just like helping out to bring about the end state, which is, you know, the communist paradise on earth. So, you know, this was all very consistent. And I had no reason to question because, again, because of the elite status I had, why would I want to question the system that really treated me very well? Whether you’re feeling stressed, anxious, or simply seeking a moment of peace and tranquility, the Halo app has something for you. 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Halo.com slash Jordan for an exclusive three-month free trial of all 10,000-plus prayers and meditations. Okay, so you joined the party when you were in college and you were studying sciences and you accepted the rationale that Marxism was a scientific discipline and that its outcome in some ways was not only desirable but inevitable. You were speeding that along. You had your moral rationales for that. Lots of people believed that that was the case and certainly almost everyone at least made that claim in public. How did it come that you started to work specifically for the KGB? How did they find their potential partners and allies in Eastern Germany? For the life of me, I cannot trace back who actually suggested to the KGB or what suggested to the KGB to get in touch with me. My guess is that they had access to the files that the SCRAG kept on every adult in the country and they did the same thing that the CIA has been doing for a long time. They recruited students that were at universities, quality universities. So, you know, that’s a targeted search and they come up to my record and say, wow, not only is he academically outstanding, he also is a party member. He plays basketball and he’s a student leader who leads the groups of students playing the guitar. So there was something there that said, we’ve got to take a look at this guy. And so one day they knocked on the door. You could not reply, by the way, to… I wouldn’t even know where the KGB was situated. There was no phone number. There was no address. So they sought out who they would want to talk to. And one day that happened that somebody came to visit me in a dorm room. I don’t want to make the story too long. It was a German and I thought it was Stasi, but it was not because, you know, after some talk, he asked me just like one question, whether I would imagine, could imagine that one day after I graduate, I would work for the government. And I read between the lines and I gave him the answer he was looking for. I said, yeah, absolutely, but not as a chemist. So then he invited me to have lunch or, you know, that’s a big meal in Germany at the number one restaurant in town. And as I see him sitting there, I walk into the restaurant, there’s another person at the table. And I was a little bit hesitant, but he came, my first contact came up to me and led me to the table. And he said, oh, by the way, I would like to introduce Herman. We are cooperating with our Soviet comrades. And then he said goodbye. And that’s how I landed with the KGB because Herman was a Russian. So do you want to tell everybody who’s watching and listening the difference between and the similarities between the Stasi and the KGB and also why you ended up working specifically for the KGB rather than the Stasi? Well, I think the KGB got first dibs on candidates that they really wanted. KGB and Stasi were like big brother and little brother. They operated the same way. The KGB was more radical with regard to how they dealt with dissidents. I mean, you know, the Gulags, there were millions in Gulags. There were thousands and maybe a couple of hundred thousand dissidents in East German jails, but it wasn’t quite as oppressive. And obviously the KGB was much, much, much bigger in terms of numbers, raw numbers. The Stasi was pretty big, but as far as when you take into consideration how many people were full-time employees and how many people actually cooperated. And you’re familiar with the lives of others that movie. Yes. You know, where family members spied on other family members. It was a rotten system and it was a rotten society and I never had a hint. It didn’t happen in my family and I never had a friend who would talk about something like this. So I had no reason to question that. Well, I was actually curious about that because I was wondering, we know now that about one in three people in East Germany were informing for the Stasi and they were often informing on family members and friends. And my sense is I can’t see how that could possibly be the case without corrupting the culture to a massive degree. You mentioned earlier that you had a rather cold relationship with your mother. And so I was wondering, you know, to what degree were family relationships in East Germany in general fragmented? How much of that had to do with the culture of informing? And were you unaware of the fact that this culture of informing was so deep and had a corrupting influence on the culture at large? I was totally unaware. I lived in a bubble. How do you think it was that you had been protected from that? Well, I wasn’t the only one. My best friend who I still have a relationship with, he lived in the same bubble. Somehow, you see, but now something comes to mind. We had amongst the student population, there were about 80 of us, we had a couple of guys that didn’t fit in. And they weren’t academically that great, but they were like, they were just like a pain in the neck. And they were eventually eliminated. And nobody would have had a problem reporting on those because they weren’t in the way and they could become enemies. So there’s a rationalization going on. So there was some, I actually had some exposure to particularly the fate of this one fellow who was expelled from university. But I tell you the opposite. I had a roommate, a dorm roommate, who was one of the few people that openly confessed that he was a believing Catholic. And he was a good student. And when it, when, and I was a leader of the Communist, the section of the Communist Party for the section chemistry. And when it came to a point where the decision was made, who would go on for a doctorate? I thought he was a good guy. He was a smart guy and ask him one question. I said, if you had to take up arms to defend the East German Democratic Republic, would you do it? And he said, yes, he has a doctorate. So there were some things, you know, that you could move in the right direction. You have to be in the right environment. And university was not as stiff and not as, you know, dogmatic with regard to communism. So once you had this interview at the cafe, and you how, first of all, what was offered to you at the cafe? And then how did you start working with the KGB? Oh, no, no, no. Oh, sorry. Nothing was offered to me other than let’s let’s meet. So then I would meet I would meet Herman for like at least six months, just in his vehicle. And we would just talk a little bit. And, and he, you know, he opened the curtain a little wider, a little wider. And I understand that now that I have some, you know, in hindsight, he would go back after a meeting and he would take notes because there was a KGB archivist who saw the files on me. There were like several binders, big binders. So after six months, he must have decided that I was worth pursuing further. And so we then met in an apartment. Okay. And that’s where he gave me some Western literature to read. And that’s where we talked a little a little more about about what it would be like to go to West Germany as an illegal Oh, just one thing that was very important for him to find out. And my, my situation in life really made that possible. He became an Arsat’s father. He was about 10 years older than me. And my dad was a weak link. You know, he was he was six years younger than my mother. She was the domineering, the smart one. And, you know, he couldn’t play with me. He had polio and he we never had a father son talk. And eventually he he got out of that marriage and, and disappeared from my life. So, so I was grateful that I could talk to an older person and older man. And I shared everything with him. I still remember, you know what I said, I’m so shy amongst the girls. And, you know, I don’t know, I just can’t talk to the girls. He said, you keep one thing in mind, I still remember that they are looking for men the same way you’re looking for a woman. It didn’t help much at the time. But, but, but, you know, we had this relationship. And eventually he got to a point after 18 months, that he had discussed, interviewed me enough and studied me enough that he suggested to headquarters to make me an offer. That’s when it happened. It took 18 months. And one other thing, you being a psychologist, you’d be surprised that I never met a psychologist or somebody who studied people who work for the KGB. The only thing with regard to people skills and understanding people that was handed to me one day was the book by Dale Carnegie, How to Make Friends and Influence People. It’s ironic, isn’t it? Yeah, yeah, that’s for sure. Yeah. So do you think that your relationship with him, to what degree was your relationship with him a genuine relationship of caring and mentorship? Yes, it was absolutely. If I met only one individual that I interacted with in the KGB, who I absolutely didn’t like, he was an agent in Moscow, and he became my liaison for a while. If that person was Herman, or, you know, played the role of Herman, I may have thought about the whole situation twice. This guy was a really wonderful guy. Were you excited about the fact that you were having these clandestine meetings in, first of all, a car, and why in a car, and then later in the apartment? Like, was that part of the adventure and intrigue that was an attractive element of what was unfolding? No, that part wasn’t that exciting. No, you know, what was really good for me that I had a secret, so I was even elevated higher than everybody else knew. So the pride increases, right? But what Herman gave me some things to do, and they were not necessarily things that I comfortably did, such as, you know, ringing a doorbell and under some pretense, talk with the person who answers the bell to find out something about a relative of theirs in West Germany. That was hard, but my ambition didn’t allow me to fail. I pulled it off. But that was unpleasant. It became much more interesting the first time I had the ability to go to West Berlin and look around. You know, the Germans have something in their DNA, it’s called Wanderlust, the desire to travel. And that was a big desire. I wanted to see, you know, Rome and Paris. I had read about these cities. And West Berlin, that was my first adventure. And then my second adventure was in Canada, believe it or not. It was a test trip to where I spent a lot of time in Montreal. All right. So what happened at 18 months? What kind of offer were you made? And how did that, how was that transformed into this trip to West Berlin? Yeah, so that was very interesting. Herman sent me to Berlin. He didn’t tell me, by the way, the KGB almost never gave me any background why they make a decision this, that or the other. There was nothing, there was no schedule, no planning, nothing they shared with me. It was ad hoc. They probably knew what they were doing. I didn’t. So he sent me to Berlin for some additional training. So that’s when I had my first clandestine meeting. When you go, that was a little bit of an adventure. When you go to a certain spot, meet somebody who you don’t know, you don’t know what they look like, and you have, you exchange keywords. So you know, you’re talking to the right person. And so he gave me some things to do. He gave me Western magazine, West German magazines to read. And the day before my departure back to where I studied, he took me to the Soviet headquarters, the Soviet Army headquarters in East Berlin, which was also the KGB headquarters. And he took me to an office and there was this small man sitting behind the desk, and very unimpressive was the moment he opened his mouth and he spoke only Russian. There was phenomenal amount of psychological energy coming at me. You know, he did a little bit of small talk about, you know, how we need to do our best to defeat the evil capitalists and Nazis and so forth. And then he, 180, out of the blue, asked me the question, so are you in or not? I didn’t expect that. And I think this was deliberately arranged that way. So I said, well, I don’t know if I qualify and, you know, I don’t have any training. I didn’t want to give an answer. I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t thought about it. And he said, you qualify and we will train you. But there’s one thing, there’s one requirement that we only work with people who can make big decisions very quickly. You have until tomorrow noon to give me an answer. That made for an interesting sleepless night. Right. Well, that’s also an appeal to Pryday because he’s giving you the opportunity to demonstrate that you’re one of those decisive people. So yeah, the good point. But you know, decision or not, I was an academic and I was learned how to operate with logic and I tried the logical arguments of this and that. And it came out about 50-50. So this is when it started that in my life, my subconscious, my gut made the decision. And I said, oh yeah, there was no forcing argument that says I got to go because there was so much good development ahead of me in staying in East Germany. Unfortunately, I would have wound up in the government and I would have eventually become a miserable old communist. So I’m very glad I made that decision. And that’s when I became officially not an employee, but a sort of a cooperating agent, so to speak, because the employees had to have Soviet citizenship. Starting a business can be tough, especially knowing how to run your online storefront. 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So how long after they took you on board did you go to West Berlin and what did they have you do there apart from these clandestine meetings and what did you think when you got to West Berlin? Yeah let me tell you something first of all. When I thought I was in, so you know I packed my bags and wound up in Berlin. I wasn’t in yet. They were still testing me. So I meet my new handler, a different guy and I’m in his car and I expected that I’m going to have a really really nice apartment because it was the KGB. I had lived in a dorm for the previous seven years and and we sit down and Nikolai was his name. He turned to me and says I already have a task for you. I said what really? And then he said you got to find a place to live. That is in a place where there was a shortage of living space and all living space was controlled by the government. There was an impossible task. All right so that was a test. I didn’t know it was a test but you know I responded the right way. I didn’t make a face. I didn’t make the argument that this is impossible. I just went about and found something. I found the worst place I’ve ever lived in is like a one room in a concrete structure that had running cold water, a chair and a bed. And I didn’t tell this guy and I think that impressed him greatly. So if I fail this, I’m out. At that point, if you’re out, your career is over too. I couldn’t have gone back to the university. So I had no idea that I was an endangered species and West Berlin was the final test. And so they had me go there twice within East German passport and the first time they just said just walk around, have a beer, look at the stores, just get a feel for the place. So as I show up and I emerged from the subway and I look around and the first impression was oh, I tell people nowadays to make it clear what the difference was between the East and the West. The West was a movie that was made in color. In the East it was all black and white because almost our buildings were brown or gray. It was ugly. And I was like, oh, I’m going to die. Or brown or gray. It was ugly. And there were a couple of nice buildings, but generally it was ugly. So that was very interesting. And I looked through the display windows of the department stores. The beer was better. The sausage was better. But you know, this all, yeah, on the one hand, you rationalize it away. On the other hand, it says, hey, that’s going to be a good life, right? So the second visit, I had to pass yet another test. I had to ring the doorbell in an apartment building and make friends out of the people that answered the door. And I did good. And the reason I knew for sure that was another test and that if I failed that test, my career would have been at an end before it started. I met accidentally a classmate of mine from high school who was going to be an illegal for the Stasi. And he had to pass the same test and he pooped in his pants and he came back and told him, I can’t do this. And guess what? He had a degree in engineering. He never worked as an engineer for the rest of his life. So endangered species, indeed, I had no idea more more endangered than the entire time I operated in the US. So why do you think you were wise or canny enough to accept the task of finding an apartment under impossible circumstances and then to accept the apartment you did accept without complaint and with good grace? Okay, triple answer. First of all, failure was not an option because of the way my mother raised me. I would come home with a B and I would tell her there was the best grade in the entire class. She would answer, well, did they have A’s available? Failure was not an option, number one. Number two, it was instinct. I found out many years later when I came to when I was confronted with that concept, I’m wired to be very stoic. So I didn’t show any emotions when he made that ridiculous order, so to speak. And thirdly, I accepted this because I was used to having lived in miserable conditions, not too good, the college dorms were pretty crummy, there was no privacy. And so it was worse than the dorm, but it wasn’t something I couldn’t handle. And again, this was an authority figure, even though I was anti-authoritarian, but I had learned to play with the authority or else, because at one time when my anti-authoritarian self ran away with me in high school, I got very close to being kicked out of high school, severe reprimand in front of the student body. And I realized you got to play ball and you keep your feelings to yourself. Right. Okay. Okay. So how long after that did you end up in Montreal and how did you establish yourself in North America? And also I’m curious about, you mentioned that you did observe that life in West Berlin was in color and of a higher quality, but did you depend on that rationalization that all that had been accomplished through oppression and theft essentially, or did you just, how did you deal with that? The rationalization became part of my, what I call foundational knowledge about the world. I didn’t think about this repeatedly. I took it in and I owned it. Okay. So there was no, so with regard to the other thing, the other question, I was supposed to go to West Germany, make sense, right? And no cultural differences, no language differences and so forth. But I also was required to study another language. They told me everybody asked you and I picked English and I was really good at it. And one day I had a visitor from Moscow. At this point I had an apartment already, but when I got a key to the apartment, I was actually officially in. Finally, it took about six months. So, and he just wanted to know how I’m doing with English. And I showed him a book on a shelf and I said, I can read that without the help of a dictionary. And then a light bulb went on. And within a week I had a tape recorder and I was asked to say something in English, whatever. And once they had to tape within a week later, I was on a plane to Moscow where I was interviewed by a college professor who taught English or Russian and an American citizen who had wound up, she fell in love with a Russian somehow and wound up living in Moscow. And they were asked specifically, is he good enough? Can we teach him English so well that he can pretend to have been born in the United States? The Russian said no, the American said, yeah, I can teach him, American optimism. And so I spent two years in Moscow where I worked with her, did a lot of phonetic exercises. I worked like a maniac. You’re remarkably accent free. I hear my own accent when I listen to tapes, but certainly I don’t talk like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Right, right, right. So I had this rare talent to acquire another language without a strong accent in my adulthood. And at one point it was determined that I was ready to go and that’s when they sent me to Canada to do two things, just figure out what it’s like to live in the United States. We thought Canada was like a mini version of the US, not quite true, but they didn’t know any better. And I was supposed to get a birth certificate of an individual, of a young man who’d passed away at an early age in the US. And that was an interesting situation. I can talk all day and I want to be careful not to go too far because I want to make sure that we cover all the topics that are important to you. So bottom line is I failed to get that birth certificate. And interestingly enough, you know, here’s a dead person who is asking through the mail to get his birth certificate. I should have been captured right then and there. I got lucky. And so after close to a year, and a diplomat, a KGB diplomat in Washington DC found the birth certificate, no, the gravestone of Jack Barsky, who died at an early age, at the age of 11, and he was able to procure the birth certificate. At that point, I was ready to go. And that was in 1978. 1978. Okay, so I was in Montreal not long after that. I moved there in 1984. It was a wonderful place to live. I thought I really enjoyed Montreal. What was it like for you in Canada there in Montreal? And how did you set up your North American life? You got your ID, obviously that was necessary. And what did the KGB have you do at this point? I mean, they were setting you up so you had a life in North America and that was working successfully. Well, that, you know, just to answer to what it was like in Canada, you know, mostly I was a tourist, and I had a bar that I visited a lot so I could talk with people. And I made some friends, a couple of friends, I had a French Canadian girlfriend. And one thing I got to tell you, I was at the forum when Guy Lafleur broke the record of most goals scored in a home game at the forum in one season. And the forum broke out in spontaneous applause. There was like 15 minutes, there was no game anymore. So that was great. And especially since I had learned to appreciate ice hockey while I lived in Moscow. But anyway, I came to the United States in the fall of 78. And my primary task was to take that birth certificate that I had to parley that into bona fide document American documentation, primarily a driver’s license and a social security card so you could live and work like a born American. I had a backstory that was yay long that had me live on a farm for a long time and then eventually come to New York. It took close to a year for me to get these documents because the instructions that I got from the KGB did not work. They didn’t have a clue how to do this. But you know, the reason that they picked somebody like me, I, you know, I was creative, I was able to improvise, don’t want to get too much into details because it gets too long. And so then and then since I couldn’t take my resume with me and I, and my backstory had me like grow up, you know, work on a farm for many years. The best job I could find was bike messenger. I spent four years riding a bike and carrying packages in Manhattan. Well, that must have been exciting. You know, it wasn’t that bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, by biking in Manhattan, that’s no that’s no trivial operation. I’m sure you know the city real well. I got to know the city like the palm of my hand and that’s I also became a street urchin. You know, I you know, I knocked ice cream cones out of pedestrians that were in my way. And and you know, I interacted with a lot of like very ordinary Americans that gave me an opportunity to actually become an American because theoretically learning the language and talking to somebody who had lived in the United States doesn’t make you an American. You have to watch them. You have to you know what they talk about, what’s important and facial expressions and you know body language and all that. Without that messenger job, I probably would have been busted too. It was it was lucky was not but it was by accident. And interestingly enough, I made enough money because I was not an employee. I didn’t get minimum wage as a bike messenger. I got got commission and I had I made enough money to go get an apartment and you know, hang out with people and so forth. And and then without getting into detail, I was supposed to get a passport and then go back to Europe and create establish a company. And the KGB was going to and she knew they knew how to do this, move money into that company so that within two or three years, I would go back to the United States with a few million dollars and repatriated money and immediately become upper middle class and then become a really really dangerous agent. Okay, so what were they that well, so there’s a lot of investment of time that you’re putting into this. I mean, obviously, and the KGB is actually showing possibly a certain degree of patience. What exactly were they setting you up to accomplish? You said they were going to put you in an upper middle class position now that you’d established yourself as American. What were they hoping that you could do for the for the Soviet Union? And they told me that my final finally my task was to operate in the realm of foreign policy, getting to know people who make foreign policy or at least influence foreign policy. That was only the partial truth. I found out much later there was a bit because there were the heads of the illegals, two of them after the KGB was disbanded, gave interviews. And the number one value that the KGB ascribed to my being in the U.S. was my being in the U.S. And I tell you why that makes sense. Towards the end of the Cold War, there was this battle between the CIA and the KGB and it was constant and all the agents were, except for us, the illegals were diplomats. So and diplomats were expelled and then there was retaliation and they were worried that at one point diplomatic relations would be completely interrupted and the only ones left behind enemy lines would have been us illegals. And guess what? Who would have run Alder James and I forgot his first name Hanson, the most dangerous molds in the history of the United States and the most successful spies for the KGB. So they never told me any of that. But so I knew it was like I was going to get to know members of conservative think tanks and the trilateral commission. I don’t know why they were so obsessed with the trilateral commission and they were very much obsessed with Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Columbia Institute for Foreign Relations or whatever that’s called. As a bike messenger and student and junior computer programmer, I had no ability to befriend people like that. But I would have had that ability if I had been able to rise into the upper middle class very quickly. Right and so they were willing to spend the time and put in the energy to give you that very well-developed backstory in the hope that you would be positioned maybe in a decade or something that was long-term game. Yeah they were not impatient. They actually were very very appreciative of the fact that I improvised a lot and overcame obstacles and you know you don’t get the order of the red banner if you weren’t doing really well. Right, right. So they okay so they were regarding all your maneuvering and your problem solving in North America is exactly what you should be doing. Now you said thank God that those plans didn’t materialize. Now so how did your career develop after that and why are you pleased that the goal that was in mind for you didn’t make itself manifest? Because I’m able to talk to one Dr. Jordan Peterson today. My life changed so radically for the best. God forbid I’m a successful KGB agent the wall comes down I’m saying well what’s going on here and then the Soviet Union falls apart. Now I’m stuck. I would not have notified the FBI of my existence. I would have gone back to Russia and I would now live a very miserable life in Russia because I never served Russia. I served not even the Soviet Union. I served the communist cause. So and you know and I learned the truth and as they say the truth shall set you free. I’m a free citizen to the extent you still have all the freedoms that we supposed to have. Right right okay so let’s jump ahead now you start working as a coder if I remember correctly. Yes sir I did. Okay and at some point you come to the attention of the FBI. How do you start that new career and how do you come to the attention of the FBI? Well I came to the attention of the FBI because of a betrayal and this is in another situation where I would if the person was still alive I would thank him on my knees for his betrayal. He was an archivist by the name of Vasily Mitrokin. He was an archivist in the KGB and he had access to all the records because he managed the records and he started reading those records and he found out like what an evil organization the KGB was. So he developed a severe hatred of the Soviet system and the KGB and he figured out the only way to do damage is to copy some information and over many years he took handwritten small pieces of paper with handwritten notes on them in his underwear and in his shoes and his socks and then transcribed them and and piled it all up and buried the material in the dacha. In 1992 he wound up in Estonia at one of the British embassies at the British embassy and told MI6 what he had and they were able to dig this stuff up and took it to England and eventually shared some of the information. It took a while with the FBI and amongst that enormous amount of data there was a couple of sentences. There’s a fellow named Jack Barsky who is an illegal KGB undercover agent. He lives in the northeast of the United States and it didn’t take the FBI very long to find me because you know they looked at social security data and there was only one Jack Barsky they found who got his social security card at the age of like 35 or something. Right okay so when did you what year did you move to Manhattan? I arrived in New York in 78 and I was in Manhattan in 78. I stayed one year in a hotel. Okay so you were successfully undercover for at least 15 years and so you spent a bunch of… Oh successfully undercover and not detected was 19 years. Nineteen years okay. In the service of the KGB only 10 years. I resigned after 10 years. Oh okay so how did the resignation come about and why? So and you will understand that I’m given to understand that you have a great relationship with your daughter. So this is what happened. I had a girlfriend in the U.S. who I married without getting again too much into detail and she decided to become pregnant and I watched this little girl grow up and when she turned 18 months I knew I was in love with this girl and it was I was so much in love with her that I could not imagine leaving her and I tell people this is when the arrogant adventurer joined the human race. Oh yes. Because this was an attack of unconditional love and at that time the KGB got spooked and they thought I was about to be arrested by the FBI and they we had an emergency procedure that was we both know knew what to do if there’s an emergency and they activated that procedure with a with a signal on on a signal spot and I and I walked by that spot every day and all of a sudden one day I see this red dot and that said danger get out of here immediately and the I’m sorry for that bad word but the only I have to say it because this is what popped into my head oh shit what do I do now? I want to take care I had no idea how to how to take care of this child and and I knew that if I leave her she would grow up in in poverty because her mother had only four years of schooling okay and so I went back and forth back and forth I played for time but it got to a point where um they were checking on me they what’s going on and they found me and uh this a man came up to me I was waiting for a subway train and he sidled up to me and he whispered with a clear Russian accent he said you got to come home or else you’re dead now the point was that they knew that I knew that they knew uh because before that they could I could have been in a hospital my my radio could have been broken and a lot of things could have been happening to me and I was not able to comply well so uh now I had to make a decision the the do you know what a dead drop operation is? No. It’s uh it’s an operation where you hand over not information but uh something that has weight and dimensions such as a passport money and so forth okay and you put it in you put it in a container and you drop it someplace where somebody else would pick it up so they uh through shortwave radio they uh told me to go to a dead drop operation this one day and at that point I went because I knew there would be money and a passport so I at minimum I would just pocket the money right I had not made a decision and it was really interesting because when I went the dead drop operation has a couple of signals involved so the first signal is the person who deposits the container says I go and get it okay I put it there so I saw the signal and I went to the place and that place was impossible to to miss because I had found it myself it was a tree with a hollow bottom and there was no container there was no crushed oil can and I just I did a double take I walked around walked around wasn’t there I walked out of the out of the park and my subconscious again made a decision and it said I’m staying that was that was an irrational decision because everything I knew at the time that was good for me was over there in the east I would have gone back as a conquering hero I was married in Germany too and and even if I managed to stay in the FBI doesn’t arrest me if they do arrest me I’m no good for this child either so I should have rationalized look I got to go I have no choice my subconscious overrode any of that logical thinking and it obviously it was a tremendous risk but I had no choice it was it’s the power of unconditional love yeah well that’s that’s a very interesting issue so it sounds to me and correct me if I’m wrong that what you’re relating is that the love that you developed for your daughter so I would I would hazard a guess that that was perhaps the first genuine love that you had in your life and that that was enough to break the grip of your intellectual hubris it’s something like that is that correct 100 correct because there was a there was a point when this girl she was about five years old and she she was she couldn’t she wasn’t admitted to kindergarten because she was uh behind in her ability to speak and I told my I told my colleagues I said I think my daughter is a little dummy but I love her anyway so so intellect to me was not important anymore so you’re right about that and uh yeah the the other times I was in love there was it was passion and there was obviously sex involved there’s no sex involved and unconditional means you can’t get anything back but a smile so how did you actually manage to get out I mean that must have been with its I mean I can’t I can’t understand why they let you out and then well and then let’s let’s discuss how you ended up working for the FBI as so yeah they uh um uh they hired themselves a brilliant guy with a uh with a brilliant subconscious and it popped into my head and said oh wait a minute I’ll just tell him I can’t come because I have HIV AIDS and since I knew to be have been brutally honest with everything and since they didn’t know that I had a child I was certain of that they couldn’t think of a reason why I was lying to them it worked okay okay and so how do you how did you come to the eventual attention of the FBI and what did it mean that you worked for them okay so uh you know first of all I spent another nine years working on my version of the American dream you know I moved to the suburbs we had another child I moved to another house and eventually wound up in a in a Mac mansion so yeah I had checked out of uh out of the political thinking philosophical thinking I was more into consumerism and and doing good things for the family uh and uh that was disrupted when one day an FBI agent showed up and uh again I’m shortening this and told told him you know FBI we want to have a chat with you I had forgotten at that point I had put this in the way back and uh in memory never to be accessed again that I once was an agent so that no that came right back bam uh so you would fall right into life as an American at that point and to this new identity oh yeah absolutely yeah and I knew I would never go see Germany again I would never apply for a passport again I would I didn’t want to risk that so I would you know live a decent life have a great great career I was making more and more money and uh and retire play golf right so you joined the upper middle class in any case yes I did and so the FBI how did the FBI find you and then what did what did they want from you well what they wanted for me that wasn’t quite clear initially uh but they they knew uh that they couldn’t wait a minute did they know that I was already declared dead and I can’t but I in our first interview I told them that I don’t exist in Germany anymore so they couldn’t turn me okay that would have been a great but and they also no they now I remember they found out after observing me for two years that I wasn’t active anymore so I was not I was not a target to be turned but I was a target to be debriefed in the greatest of detail we I spent hours and hours talking with the agent who interviewed me about every single detail in my life and apparently that is very useful because even you know the successors of the of the KGB you know who were they trained by KGB agent you know there’s a DNA that uh organizational DNA that’s handed down it was the information that I gave them was considered very very useful and one other thing uh at the time when they caught up with me Hanson and Ames were still operational and no they had been caught I’m sorry but there were concerns that there were other moles and that I might be running one of them so sometimes finding out a negative is actually a really good thing the fact of the matter the FBI leadership was so uh impressed with what the the FBI team did that by the the lead agent got a commendation by the FBI by the head of the FBI so it is what it is you know I I’m not making that up you ask them they will tell you it was that was really good information that I was able to give them so what do you think it was that you provided to them that they found so useful uh what what what makes foreign illegal what kinds of people the uh the the KGB was recruiting turns out that CIA is recruiting the same type of people right right well that makes sense I have I have friends in the CIA and and it’s almost identical you know there’s a list of character traits that uh you know things that you’re born with rather than you acquire not skills yeah that uh the KGB was looking for and I shared that list with a with a retired CIA agent and he said well that’s that we have the same list but you know this confirmationism is important for for counterintelligence and to what to what extent you know that that is specifically useful you know as far as the psychology is concerned I don’t know I don’t I don’t uh I don’t know the details I was also given uh a uh a test by two eminent psychologists and uh on a contract with the FBI they gave me two two days of test and I uh the lady who gave me the war shark test uh her claim to fame was that she also analyzed the Unabomber and when she was done she said when she was done she said I have never interviewed somebody who had that many stories to tell about these damn inkblots right so this creativity right I had to be creative to to to be successful when you when you look back over your career I’ve got two questions for you I want to know when you look back over your the course of your life um what do you regret and what are you thankful for and I’m also interested now you you had immersed yourself in this value and belief system that characterized communism you obviously abandoned your allegiance to that in favor of at least in part in favor of the relationship with your daughter but you also make allusions in your book to starting to study other philosophical matters and religious matters and so first question is what when you look back on your life and your career how do you evaluate what you did and where you ended up ethically and morally and second how did you when you abandoned your allegiance to the utopian vision of the communists and you started inquiring philosophically and theologically into other domains what did you conclude no good very good question the one thing I regret is that the woman I loved in Germany when I when when I decided not to go back to my German family it was because of the love for a child but I abandoned that woman and I loved her and I broke my promise that that I that can’t be undone and and that’s really what the most regret I have I don’t regret anything that I did as a as an illegal agent simply because I was never told whether let’s say some of the people that I’ve appointed to for possible recruits were recruited what happened to them I have I have no knowledge of what I should regret if there was something else so what I really regret so there’s no specific guilt that you carry for the things that you because partly because you don’t know what the consequences of them were yes they they they never once congratulated me on a on a tip that I gave them I never got any feedback period okay that that’s one of the weaknesses of the KGB by the way because if you have to make decisions on on your own all the time and you don’t have a proper frame of reference you wind up making bad decisions right right right without the broad yeah well that’s the problem with not informing people right is you have no context to guide you when you’re making decisions yeah and and that secrecy was rooted in in the revolutionary background of the of the KGB you know the cell structure you know you okay so uh and what I’m grateful for first of all I’m grateful for uh living in the greatest country that ever existed on this earth particularly the country as it was constructed by the uh by the founders simply because I I’m a student of history and I am convinced that one one of the uh one of the biggest flaws that that left-wing thinking has is the idea that man is fundamentally good and all we have to do is and that communism was the same thing we have to take the shackles away from them it’s the circumstances and I know for a fact you know you look at history and you just there’s so much anecdotal evidence that man we all have uh the seed of evil in us many of us and the majority of us deal with it very well but it turns out in history uh the the the ruling people were mostly evil you know and so and so the constitution is constructed in such a way to to manage that evil not eradicated manage it by you know the separation of powers and and the whole idea that all men created are created evil and have these inalienable inalienable rights that appeals to me to to my and appeals to my anti authoritarianism and uh and my absolute disgust with collectivism we are not getting the rights from the buff we are not getting the rights from from the law the the law actually can take rights away from us some of them are necessary to be taken away such as you know uh you know to get the funds to to defend the country and so forth but most of the laws that we have in this country are taking rights away from us so uh that is what it is but how did you come to the conclusion or what convinced you of the validity and utility of the doctrine of inalienable rights so that’s certainly that’s certainly not a hypothesis associated with communist utopianism for example what why did you come to that conclusion that’s that’s a good leading question because because i became a christian and uh the it was a pretty uh slow progress i became a deist first because i after i started thinking about and and getting exposed to like thinkers like theus louis i realized when my atheism was an idiotic belief system you know to to just believe that the universe just exploded out of nothing and then ordered itself in a way that we have all this complexity that that makes perfectly no sense and let’s let’s assume even it was already there you know it it violates the the third law of thermodynamics when a closed system which the universe is ultimately a closed system uh will tend towards disorder so where where does the order come from so there was a logic behind me becoming a deist and then the love word came into play again i was evangelized by a woman that i hired but i didn’t become a christian because i wanted to marry her she she she opened my eyes to the bible and we and i started the first time she quoted me something out of the bible i said wait a minute and this is the most i knew that the most widely read book in in the history of mankind with no close second and i don’t know anything about it so we did some bible study and then she invited me to church and at that time the love word came came back into play i wasn’t a really really bad divorce with the the the woman that i had married and that had the daughter that i was in love with she she went mentally ill and it was a lengthy divorce and i was the only time in my life i was actually depressed and uh and this young lady who i secretly courted i was i was in love with her she didn’t know that she invited me to the church and as it happens so often when you go to church and you listen to the pastor you know he was talking to you because he was talking about the love of god so why why do you think okay so what do you make of love then you know you said that the first time it really transformed you was a consequence of whatever manifested itself to you and your daughter and this the effect of love on your life was what would you say it was outside of the domain of mere rationality and so what do you make of the transforming power of that love and how do you how does that fit into your intellectual apprehension love to me is uh the strongest emotion that that humans can have and we are ultimately emotional beings so when they say love conquers all i i have proof and and and as i’m as i embrace the faith and as i realized what what god did for us uh i i’ve become a real loving person loving even the ones that you that you don’t like because the love is something that says something about yourself if you can love the unlikable that that makes you whole so to speak and and you know what and and you know the love of the the life of jesus uh is so so phenomenal the way i would like to like be living and be seen at least i’m trying to get to that point and i think i’ve i’ve traveled a long way and and and one of the things that uh uh made a huge difference in in my life the last year coming to texas and being being around a lot of loving wonderful people and great churches that are not afraid to talk about what’s going on in society these days not cowardly like many others that uh that i’ve visited so let me let me i’m going to talk for everybody watching and listening i’m i’m i’m going to talk um for another half an hour with jack on the daily wire side and i think we’ll probably go deeper into this issue of faith because we’ve covered a fair bit of his autobiography which is what i often do um and so maybe we’ll close with this i mean as you know um the power of left-wing utopianism has made itself manifest once again in the west i mean i spent a lot of time traveling in eastern europe in the last few years and one of the questions that i was constantly bombarded with in eastern europe was how is it that the west could come under the sway of the ideas that were so destructive to us for so long and and what could we do about it what i would like to ask you is for the people who are watching and listening like you outlined in some detail what you found attractive about the utopianism that was being offered to you as a purpose for life what message would you have to young people who were now attracted by that vision of helping the world’s oppressed and poor identifying the oppressors and and having the adventure that goes along with that pathway to redemption i mean that was offered to you you followed it for a long time you eventually rejected it you found a religious calling instead but you understand why that vision was so attractive so what what what can you say that’s that might be of some utility to young people who are attracted by those utopian ideas well if uh i would say if you respect yourself you don’t want to be a fool do you i’m talking to a young person now you don’t want to be a fool so you’re being fooled all the time i’ll tell you that you need to go check out the truth and not just take it in as it’s being presented to you the same way i took it in uh but the difference is we didn’t have a marketplace of opportunities there there is a marketplace of opportunities you can find out the undeniable truth you’re being lied to all the time and that makes you a puppet and that that takes it you’re the individual individuality out of who you are you think that’s going to make for a happy fulfilled life you’re meant to be an individual and not a member of a crowd so what what is it that you how old are you now and first let’s start with that how i’m 73 and what do you what do you occupy your time with now oh you know i i am so lucky that uh i don’t have to use the phrase thank god it’s friday anymore i get to create i write i do public speaking and i just uh uh developed a master class that i call applied psychology that is primarily going to be talking to young people mostly men i think and i i think you know another voice uh like like that that is sort of uh side by side next to you is probably not not competition i think it’s a it’s a good thing to have and uh with regard to that um i am i’m offering uh the the audience um so something extra i’m i’m assuming there’s going to be questions and and we we have a we developed a website where we can where people can get to the website and ask the questions and i will answer every one of them personally the website is called uh kgbspychology.com and we’ll have a little bonus uh there’s a there’s a document that i can share as a freebie that uh points out how the how the kgb are uh operated in in the realm of persuasion uh that is not necessarily evil right because when you look at what dale carnegie taught it can be used for good and for evil so so so that’s where i’m at and this is this is my i i have a i have a dual mission in life mission number one is taking care of my 13 year old i have a young daughter young daughter uh and and mission number two is uh to uh do what i’m planning to do is work with whoever wants to listen to me but primarily young people to help them evade a a destiny that when they become useful idiots that the useful idiots will be thrown away as you know yeah yes i’m aware of that yeah yeah so what do you think that the people that you’re trying to reach will learn as a consequence of taking your course and and and you you’re making allusions to psychology what are you trying to persuade them of convince them of teach them about yeah so so this this is going to be more or less uh infotainment you know i’m going to share some things uh that that uh are not necessarily in the book you know that had to do with my operating as a spy and then uh draw some conclusions where i say well this is what helped me get out of this mess you know by the way you can acquire some of these skills yourself such as uh for instance like develop your subconscious you know i studied people all my life i can read people like this right now and it’s it’s it’s it’s coming from my subconscious i’m not you know and and there’s a few other things and also you know i wasn’t taught people skills but i acquired them and again i i can talk about those and coming from me uh with the with the with the background i have and the fact that i’m still talking to you and i managed to get through all this nonsense that i was in uh i think it may add value i’m you know i absolutely respect you as an academic mission i have admired you since i found you uh you you know having a scientific background uh it’s it’s great to you know have almost synergy with uh you know with what i’m coming up up with instinctively with what you come up with uh through science so um yeah well it sounds to me like you’re trying to offer at least to the degree that that can be done in a virtual environment some of the mentorship even that you found yes sir yeah well young people you need you need you know you even referred to this with regards to the first contact you had at the kgb the fact that he offered himself as a mentor filled a void in your life and and that is absolutely necessary as people need an apprenticeship and a mentor definitely especially if they don’t have it at home and the other thing that they need is uh uh accountability partners if they if they want to make changes happen they need to have an accountability partner right right right right yeah yeah all right well good is there is there anything else that you’d like to bring to the attention of this this audience in particular this more general audience before we go to the other interview just just let me let me just tell you tell you one thing and and i’m going out on a limb here when i got the the email from your producer sir i got emotional i’m not going to go any further this this was this was so important to me to be able to talk to you and i’m i’m so so glad that that happened well thank you very much sir um i appreciate also the opportunity to have heard your story and to have the privilege too of bringing it to the attention of all the people that will be watching listening i’m going to talk to jack barsky for another half an hour on the daily wire side i think we’ll delve into the philosophical and theological in some more detail on that in that half an hour and i’d like thank you sir very much for your forthright comments today and for walking us through the strange transformations of your life and for shedding some light on well how one person was pulled into this terrible ideological battle that’s been going on for well the greater part of the last century and and i’d like to thank everybody watching and listening for their time and attention and for the daily wire plus folks for making this conversation possible thank you very much sir you’re most welcome thank you