YouSaid · the spoken record

Jack Barsky

lines on the record: 235
first: 2022-07-09
most recent: 2022-07-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yes, sir. There's a short sentence in the Bible that says, God is love. And the other thing I want to say, the Christian morality is I can sign that with my blood.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I once read a book written by a medical doctor. He said most people, when they're becoming mature, the rest of their life is a slow downward move. And the”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the other hand, I know that this is how I approach the last years of my life. I will not. I will not mentally or physically get the crepid I will do everything I can do to be alert and fit I still run I run four or five times a week and I'm going to start lifting weights again”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a hope I have a hope. You know There's a lot of Christianity, which is quite logical. A lot of Christianity, which is also the life of Christ has a lot of proof. But, you know, I became a Christian starting. And I was already Quite old and I When you don't get this faith very early, it's tougher to buy into everything. There are some things that are difficult for me to understand and believe. But there's many, many other things that I can't explain only with the existence of a God, but whether he lets us go again for in eternity, I just hope. I won't convince somebody else at this point, which doesn't make me a really, really good Christian because I'm supposed to evangelize.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, oh, it was passionate love for sure. And I would have. I would have thrown myself under the bus if I could save her. It was that strong, and just as strong as the love for my two girls.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and you know, I was actually when she said I made a mistake and I was thinking to myself, No, you didn't. There was none. There was nothing left. Was nothing left. And also, the person that you became Personality wise wasn't as attractive as I remembered her. You know, it's puppy love.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, we actually met. So there's two elderly people in their 60s who meet each other after so many years. And the one that ended the relationship started the conversation by saying, you know what, I made a really bad mistake. And the tears came down her cheeks. I wasn't asking for that. I wasn't happy about it, but it did feel good. Now, a while later I knew why she said she made a mistake. I met her husband.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Intercosmos, something, something, and I had a piece of paper that invited me to start there, and it was a forgery, the Intercosmos never existed. But people know that in Kazakhstan there were super secret facilities. One of my classmates, old classmates from high school, started the rumor that I died in a rocket accident. And everybody knew that. So when I came back to Germany. went back to Germany I found the telephone number of this girl that had dumped me. I called her. And I said I said, so guess who this is? Maybe you hold on to your chair. She says, yes, I said. This is Al”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She was looking for me until the day she died, she wrote a letter to President Gorbachev, asking him for help to locate me. She checked with Astasi. She just was like... Hell bent on finding me and couldn't find me, so she passed away without knowing. What happened to me? Now there was this rumor that was flying around and she possibly may have bought into that rumor because my cover for when I went to the United States was that I changed careers again and I joined an institution in Kazakhstan that did space research.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no other choice. I tell you what I don't regret, and that may be, you probably understand it now because you have enough background about me. I don't regret having lied to my mother. Because I had no really strong emotional relationship with her. She took care of me. She was proud of me, but we didn't hug? We didn't interact emotionally whatsoever.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I could have, then I would have a different regret. I betrayed the wife, the German wife that I loved. I really did love her. And I betrayed her. But if I don't betray her then I cannot I betray the child”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now that I'm pretty mature, to put it mildly, I'm also more loving towards many more people. Know these things like random acts of kindness for strangers? I do them. I'm looking for them now. And you know what? It's good for me.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could say that. Yeah, but if you can't afford somebody like that, that's good. Anyway. She questioned and answered. She raised her hand and she asked me, All the things that you have done and you have experienced, what's the number one lesson you've taken away from your life? That was a new question for me. Never been asked that question. And I thought about it for 20 seconds, and then I came up with this phrase that we all know love conquers all. Because in my life it did in the end. And it's the strongest human emotion, and that is what makes us human, really.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that's not a love story. And then so there's this beautiful young lady sitting in the back and she's paying a lot of attention, found out later that her... Her job at Microsoft to job title was storyteller. It's soft marketing, right?”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think I must be part I wish to. Yeah, so it's been an interesting ride. I'm just still shaking my head about all the stuff that happened”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you happen to know this one person who happened, happened to know one of the star reporters of Despiegel. And after she did some research and determined that I was real, she was on my case. And she happened to know Steve Croft, the guy from 60 Minutes. You see all these connections? I had nothing to do with it.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the last thing that changed my life again, and I don't want to get into details because it's a little complicated story. I never wanted to be a public person. And then I was discovered through a number of dots that were unlikely to be connected. It had to do with a relative, with a half-brother of my wife who lives in Germany, was taken to Germany by his mother, who came to visit somebody, not us, but that somebody that he came to visit lived 50 miles from our house. And that my wife and this half-brother never met in person before. They knew about each other through social media. And when he found out my background, he was a conductor of the German railroad at the time. He said, Oh, this is a big story and one that's going to be big, big, big.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it took quite a while. And when I finally got the call from the Office of Homeland Security, The lady says, this is agent so-and-so from Homeland Security. Can you comment to the office tomorrow? And I said, let me look at my calendar. And then, wait a minute, what am I talking about? What time do you want me to be there? Because I had waited for that moment for a long time and I was sworn in right then and there It was a good feeling to walk out of there because I had a country again. You know, and I love this country just as much as you said you love it with all its warts and its problems that we're going through right now.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite recent. The bureaucracy took a long time to figure out how to. How to make me real and also not put me in these witness protection program to keep my name and then just make everything official. So for instance, I had to change my birth year. Simply because Jack Barsky was born in 1944, if I kept 1944, the FBI would have helped me commit a crime because I would have collected Social Security four years sooner. So anyway.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't say anything, but I had no thought of running. And that was the beginning of another phase of my life where I was cooperating with the FBI for quite a while and living still undercover for several years until I had real good documentation and became an American citizen seven years ago.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I volunteered. I made the following statement before we even started the interview. I said, I know there's only one way for me to and my family to have a chance to get through here without much damages if I'm completely 100% cooperative. And it is my intent to do exactly that. All right, so we spend about two hours in the interview. They allowed me to call my wife, tell her that I'm going to be late. That indicated to me already that they would let me go. And after two hours they let me go. But they had the area covered with a whole bunch of people, and the head of that team talked to me and he said, if you think of running, we got every intersection in this area covered. You can't.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, and when they took me to a motel, which they had rented, there was two wings at a right angle. They bought all the rooms in one wing, and they had a guard at each end of that wing, and they took me in the middle. And there were some props there, some binders with labels. And I immediately thought this is really silly because what I noticed is that the labels all referred back to my early years. I knew that they didn't know much else. So I told Joe that afterwards, and that was not the great idea. But anyway,”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is my now friend Joe Riley, who actually is the godfather of Trinity, my last child. But anyway, he told me later that when I heard that phrase, all the blood left my face became totally white. But I recovered very quickly, and he said it himself. So, you know, they took me to a vehicle? And there was another agent in the vehicle and he had a gun strapped to his ankle. So it was pretty real. First question I had so am I under arrest? And the answer was no. And then my instinct kicked in in my ability to operate very well under high pressure situations. And I asked them, so what took you so long? You know, the intent of that was to to defuse any kind of tension. And I saw a smile.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so one day it was a Friday evening. I'm driving back home from the office and I'm being stopped by a state police as I'm going through the bridge over the Hudson and they had to pay a toll. And he waved me. He got me right where I stopped and he said, could you please move over here? It's a routine traffic stop. Thought nothing of it. I had forgotten at that point that I once was a spy. It was gone. And then he said, could you please step out of the car? That should have aroused my suspicion. That's unusual, right? Routine traffic stop. Y did it, no problem. And then again, somebody came from the right, came into my view, and he flipped this ID and I said, FBI, we would like to have a talk with you.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm supporting her if something doesn't quite fit it is not because I don't love the both of them. Cheltian and Penelope. So when I said that, the listening device was active, so the FBI was hearing my confession. I was once a KGB agent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I quit because of stayed here because of you and Chelsea That also made it clear to the FBI that I wasn't active anymore. They had both of that. Now they knew an attempt to turn me would have been useless because you turned somebody who's active. But they figured they was enough reason to treat me nicely because I had a lot of information that was as aged as it was, but it was still important for the FBI to get to know.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were very careful. They pretty much watched me. And at one point I had a house in the country with one neighbor. At one point that house was for sale, so the FBI bought it. And they put a couple of agents there and just keep a closer eye on me. There was no indication that I was still active, but they were still cautious. But at one point they were able to plant a bug in my kitchen, a listening device And My wife and I didn't get along very well. There was a lot of friction and she was constantly complaining about things and I got sick and tired of it and one day we had an argument in the kitchen And I chose to deploy the nuclear option. And that is telling her what I sacrificed to be with her so she would understand that I am there on her side.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think almost three years to investigate me, watch me from a distance because if I was still active, I would have found out that somebody is investigating here.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so they managed to get this stuff out of the dacha and get it to England. And eventually MI6 shared it with the FBI. And there wasn't a whole lot of information about me. It was very, very little. It was like there's a person by the name of Jack Barsky who is an illegal operating in the northeast of the United States. Now, if it was Jim Miller, they wouldn't have found me, Jack Barsky was easy to find. So they checked Social Security, and Jack Barsky had gotten his Social Security card at the age of 33. Bingo, okay? All they knew though was that I wasn't illegal, that I was still living there. They didn't know whether I was active, inactive. And the other thing that they knew, and I was a really, really well-trained agent because I was still there, right? So they took...”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over the years, and then he transcribed them with a typewriter and then put the pieces of paper into some kind of a container and bury this in its dacha. It was, I believe, in 1992 when he showed up. That was already the Soviet Union was gone. So he showed up at the US embassy in Moscow and told him what he had. And it was on a weekend and apparently there was a junior person in charge. And he said, you know what, what you got, we are not interested in. It's really old. That's a career limiting move, right? Because Vasily Mitrokin then made his way to one of the Baltic republics and contacted MI6. And they said, come on in, old fellow, have a cup of tea”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And how did they know about me? If it hadn't been for this defector, Basili Mitrokin, who was an archivist in the KGB archives, he was actually pretty high level. He was in charge of the relocation of the archive from Lubianca to Yasinovo. And he really hated he had reason to believe he hated the Soviet system. I think I remember that his son was quite ill and he could have gotten treatment in England and he was not allowed to travel to England with his son. His hatred, he tried to figure out what to do and how to do damage to that system. So he started copying notes. Little slips of paper handwritten that he smuggled out in his underwear and his socks.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And obviously after I sent the letter, I threw the shortwave radio in the Hudson River, destroyed the one-time pads that I still had. So I was now... Ready to For new life and live out my life as an American undiscovered, but starting to work on my version of the American dream. The first action was telling my wife, the mother of this child, you know, she always wanted to have a house and said, you know what, we should buy a house And a year later, we moved into the suburbs, and then I said we should have another child, and we had another child. And I had a career where I did pretty well. I moved a couple of times, wound up in a McMansion. But before that, my second house was actually in Pennsylvania, in rural Pennsylvania. And this is where I was discovered by the FBI.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. No, and I was convincing enough. I even traced it back to. A girlfriend I had once that I actually reported on that I interacted with this lady who had a boyfriend at one point who was a drug addict and she was infected and she infected me. So they believed it they sent, and I asked him to give my dollar savings to my German family. They gave them some, but they told my family that I already passed away, that I'm dead. They believed it, 100%. And I guess the agent who took the money and took half of it for himself. So that was it. And the next three months I made sure that I wasn't reliably at the same spot in the same time frame. So I went to work on different paths at different times just to see safety measure, so to speak, and not huge. But it kept me allowed me to keep my sanity.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was it. Was it? And so what I did to, well, first of all, divine intervention helped me to find a good explanation. I sent him my last letter with secret writing. I communicated to them. I said, I wish I could come, but I can't because I have contracted HIV AIDS. That was the best lie ever because nobody wanted to have eight in their country those days it was a death sentence, right? And I knew we had conversations when I was back in Moscow how they were snickering about what's going on in the United States, that depraved culture. And you see They're killing each other”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just doesn't make a lot of sense. So as I'm walking away from this, like sort of numb emotionally. I said to myself, I'm staying.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the person who hands over something puts at a spot not too far from the spot itself. That means I would go in and just pick it up. The reason I actually went to pick up this container because there was money in it. So I didn't have to make it a decision yet. I could throw away the passport. It was like I was still trying to figure out what to do, what to do, what to do. So I get to the spot. I get to the tree and I had a flashlight with me, the park that was nowhere in the park. Even during the day, this park was not almost like a little forest. I don't see the container. I wasn't supposed to be a crushed oil can. Pretty sizable, not hard to And I do a double take, and I look again and I look around and I look around a little more, see if they misplaced it. I can't find it. It's the only one that one of those operations failed.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was in a park on Staten Island. There was a location that I found and I described. And I was always praised for my ability to describe spots that are easy to find. So that was a given. And the only thing that was different for this operation, they scheduled it for the dark. All right. It was still no problem because it was in a park and a couple of about 100 yards in next to a fallen tree would be hard to miss. I go to Staten Island and I read the signal that said I put the container in the drop. That was the protocol as a signal.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That obviously raised the stakes a little bit, but I just talk myself into believing this was just a bad phrasing. But at this point I knew and they knew that we both know, right? So there was no more guessing. He found me, he talked to me, I know. So now I had to act. So in the next radiogram I was asked to execute a dead drop operation where they would give me money and passport.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They forced my hand. This is the only time that a Soviet agent was anywhere near me on the territory of the United States. So I'm waiting for the A-train on a dark morning still in Queens. And there's this man, the short man in a black trench coat comes up to me from my right and he whispers into my ears You gotta come back or else you're dead I can't imitate the Russian accent that was a Russian accent so now and it wasn't a pretty strong accent The you're dead phrase can have two meanings and an American would have said or else you bust it or else you get arrested or else you're dead is very strong So Have to take it seriously to some degree because I know that they had a history of assassinating or at least trying to assassinate defector.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Three weeks. So I just did nothing. That was on a Monday, on a Thursday was my regular short wave transmission. I listened and they explained a little in a few sentences. We have reason to believe that the FBI is on your case. You need to execute the emergency procedure, come home right away I still had some time because the radio could be broken or the transmission was bad or I still could be in hospital, right? So I gave myself some more time And then Something happened”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's a lot of fathers who understand, particularly fathers of girls who understand what happened there. And I still thought I need to go back because there was probably some danger. But I hadn't figured out how to take care of the girl. I leave her. But maybe she need to have a good life and grow up and have a chance. Her mother was from South America. She had a fourth grade education. That would have not worked very well. So I played for time. I obviously I could be sick, I couldn't be in a hospital. There was a precedent where I was sick where I couldn't communicate for about a week.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I just like ignore this thing. I mean, I couldn't ignore it, but I went on to work, got on the A train, went to work, and then went to my cubicle and stared at the computer screen all day because I couldn't think. I could think only about what to do, what to do, what to do. The reason for this indecisiveness was that I was a father at the time. little girl by the name of Chelsea was 18 months old. And Was there when she was born? I took her to a Toward the home I watch her grow up I watched her take the first steps. And always look at me with these big eyes, lovingly look at me. That is when I started my re-entry into the human race when I Because I just fell in love with this girl. That's when love came back, and it was completely unexpected.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And since you have done it already, I think I can curse in this moment because it's the only way I can really indicate how I felt, oh shit. Because that was the danger signal. There was like you must you are in severe danger of you need to get out of the country as soon as possible. There was a protocol that I was supposed to follow. I wasn't even supposed to go home. I just needed to, was supposed to get my reserve documents that I had hidden in a park in the Bronx and make a beeline to the Canadian border.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To give a little background, it was 1988. And I thought my time in the US would soon end because, you know, I thought 10 to 12 years, it was already past ten years. There was no indication that they indicated, that they said, you're done. But in December of 1988, I got this one thing that I never wanted to see. So we had a system of signals. that either one of those diplomat agents could sit at a spot that I pass by every day, or I could set where they would pass by, like on their way from where they live to the United Nations, for instance, who would just drive. So mine was the signal spot for me was on a support beam for the elevated atrien in Queens. And it was Morning in December that I walked by there and routinely looked at it and never expected anything and there was this red dot that was about the size of my fist with a red pain”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Uh I think you know very well how to communicate in both countries. You've shown this in this interaction that you have a lot of empathy for the people you'll be talking with. And empathy means good understanding where they're coming from. And then there are lines that you can't cross Like the question that I was going to ask Zelensky, who not going to ask, good for you.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If there is a, you know that these kinds of operations to assassination in another country are very difficult to plan and implement. And if there's a list of people that they don't like, I may not be at the very top. Having said that, if I wind up, say, in Moscow or even in countries like Turkey where there's a lot of lawlessness, accidents can easily be arranged. And that's just sending another message. We can do a lot of things.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number of reasons. First of all, When my story became public, that was six years ago I was pretty old, right? And so the folks that may have a personal interest or may have had a personal interest in doing me harm, most of them don't live anymore. That's number one. Number two, I did not... I wasn't a hired hand, a German, I did not betray the motherland. That's a crime that is punished by death. You betray the motherland. And And the other thing”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I have to admit in that respect I'm a bit of a coward. I could not do what Zelensky has been doing. I would sort of try to find a way to Carve out something that I can live with, however, if that force, that evil force gets to my family.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One other thing is if I were to get a chat with the Ukrainian president, I would ask him How many What is the equation between giving up some land and how many lives are worth this land?”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I believe that he has a strong conviction that I don't know if he's religious who carries the cross now, but I don't know what that means. Somehow, but that it's the destiny of the Russian nation to be great. And that is sort of, whether it's determined by God or some higher power, that is very important for him.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so this is where Putin all of a sudden, you know, he was at one point a member of the greatest, the most powerful intelligence organization in the world. And all of a sudden he was powerless and he had to watch This was a defeat, big one”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source