From KGB Spy to Corporate Success with Jack Barsky

In this episode of the Entropy podcast, host Francis Gorman speaks with Jack Barsky, a former KGB sleeper agent who shares his extraordinary life story. From his recruitment by the KGB in East Germany to his eventual defection and life in America, Jack discusses the complexities of living a double life, the emotional challenges of his decisions, and his journey into corporate America. He emphasizes the importance of emotional intelligence, authenticity, and storytelling in both personal and professional realms, offering valuable insights for listeners.

Takeaways

• Jack Barsky's journey from KGB sleeper agent to American citizen is extraordinary.
• He was initially recruited by the KGB due to his curiosity and intelligence.
• Barsky's decision to defect was driven by his love for his daughter.
• He emphasizes the importance of emotional intelligence in leadership.
• Authenticity is crucial in corporate environments, yet often lacking.
• Barsky's experience in crisis management shaped his corporate career.
• He believes in the power of storytelling to engage audiences.
• Public speaking can be learned through practice and resilience.
• Trusting one's instincts is vital in decision-making.
• Barsky's life illustrates the complexities of identity and belonging.

Sound Bites

• "This is something of the movies, but you've lived it."
• "I was going to be a college professor."
• "I had to make a decision and it wasn't that easy."
• "I became fully Americanized."
• "I had a daughter living with me and her mother."
• "I told them I had contracted HIV AIDS."
• "Love conquers all."
• "Trust your gut and verify."
• "I was a breath of fresh air because I wasn't playing."

Transcript

Francis Gorman (00:12.014)
Hi everyone, welcome to the Entropy podcast. I'm your host, Francis Gorman, and this is episode 10. If you're enjoying our content, I'd really appreciate it you can like and follow the show wherever it is you get your podcasts from. Today's guest has one of the most unusual and true life stories you'll ever hear. Jack Barsky, born Albrecht Dittrich in East Germany in 1949, was a KGB sleeper agent sent to operate deep undercover in the United States during the Cold War. His journey is a powerful story of espionage, dual identities, and ultimately defection.

Today, he's gone from a secret life as a Soviet spy to mentoring Fortune 500 executives. Jack is a renowned keynote speaker and also ordered his memoir on 2017, Deep Undercover. Jack, it's my absolute pleasure to have you on the show.

Jack Barsky (00:54.508)
Well, I'm delighted to be talking with you again and I know it's going to be good as long as my throat holds up.

Francis Gorman (01:04.043)
Don't worry about it, Jack. think after after all these years, your troll is doing perfectly, perfectly fine. Jack, could you bring to life maybe some of your backstory when when when when I heard about it first, I was like, this is this is something of the of the movies, but you've lived it.

Jack Barsky (01:04.366)
Thank

Jack Barsky (01:18.222)
Yeah, People and you know, my book has been read by thousands of like several couple of 200, 300,000 people. And I get this feedback a lot that reads like a movie. Okay, well, it isn't I lived it. And I clearly did not design it. never never even wanted. I never had a thought that I would one day become a spy. I was going to be here.

College professor, okay? That's in my blood teaching. My parents were both teachers. And then people made a suggestion. came to me, the KGB came to me and they just said hello. And I'm curious as I am, that's part of one of my character traits. I'm infinitely curious about everything and everybody. So I was, you know, in there.

They were just talking and like wanted to have a relationship with me. That was not a recruitment mind you, that was getting to know me. It took him 18 months to actually make the offer. And up until that point, went up until the offer came, I was just toying with the idea. I didn't take it seriously. And I said, that sounds really interesting, know, adventurers and I get to go to the West and you know, take advantage of Western

the Western standard of living. And also we had our own version of James Bond. Every Christmas there was an episode of a series called The Invisible Visor. And it was about an East German spy who went to West Germany undercover as a Nazi hunter. And he also lived a good life.

You know, he drove the fancy cars, he lived in great homes, and most importantly, he got the girl. So that's all I know about espionage and a little bit of what the East German news media let out because we had our heroes of like communist spies. And the biggest hero that we had in East Germany was Richard Zorger, who was a

Jack Barsky (03:43.394)
working for the KGB as a German journalist who was had connected connection with the Nazis, but he worked in Japan and got a phenomenal amount of really valuable intelligence to Stalin who idiotically rejected it. So I'm going to stop right here. So anyway, I got to a point where I was recruited in a

At that point I had to make a decision and it wasn't that easy. I had this great career ahead of me. I was going to join the intellectual elite in the town where the university was. And I was going to get paid pretty well. I was arrogant as hell in those days because I aced everything that I pretty much got aced in every subject that I took. And I also got a national scholarship.

that was, and I kid you not, I double checked that information, that was limited to 100 concurrent holders in the entire country. So man, I was so full of myself and I was gonna live the great life in East Germany. And I was a communist, but you know, the adventure and a good life. And then maybe all the girls that were waiting for me. And fundamentally, when I say fundamentally,

This, the yes that I said had to have a foundation in ideology. And I was a 100 % communist because I knew this would be dangerous. I knew I was a good chance that I was going to wind up in jail. And you don't sign up for something like this on like that unless you know that you're serving.

higher cause and not just selfish pursuit. So I say yes and I got altogether five years of training and five years after I said yes I was deployed to the United States, spent 10 years in the U.S. as primarily as a sleeper, became fully Americanized, maybe not fully but good enough in New York City to pass for a born American.

Jack Barsky (06:06.571)
because the Jack Barsky identity was stolen from a young boy who passed away at the age of 11. So yeah, 10 years, went to college again, got a degree in business with a concentration on computer technology. And then I joined the workforce and I was still, while I joined the workforce as a professional, I was still reporting back to the KGB.

And that stopped in 1988. I got to tell you why, because some people might, there's people who don't know it. I don't want to be arrogant enough that everybody knows my story. It wasn't because I quit the KGB in 1988. They wanted me back home because they had reason to believe that I was going to be arrested soon. So, and they communicated that to me and they said, you got to come home, emergency.

big danger and what they didn't know was that at the time I had a daughter living with me and her mother. It gets too much, this backstory gets too long. Anybody's interested how that all happened, they need to read the book. So anyway, I had this daughter and I was just so deeply in love with this child. There's something, an emotion I'd never felt before.

I mean, was this unconditional love where you give and you don't want anything back. The only thing that she could give me back was a smile. And I hadn't found a way to support her once I'm back on the other side of the Iron Curtain. I couldn't ask the KGB to help me. They would have put me in jail for disobeying orders, right? And I couldn't have asked any of my American friends to help out.

I would have given myself away, so I had no clue what to do. Well, again, go to the book, back and forth, back and forth. Eventually, I decided to stay and told him so. Now I can, this is a spoiler alert. People ask, how do you quit the KGB? Normally you don't, but if you are a really good liar, you get away with it because I told him I had contracted HIV AIDS.

Jack Barsky (08:34.539)
That, the moment I guarantee you, I didn't know it then, but now I know it in hindsight, I guarantee you the moment they read this passage in my letter in secret writing, they immediately said, we don't want him back. Cause it was a very infectious incurable disease at the time. So they told my German family that I had passed away. That was a lie, but they just told, they, they wiped me out, gave,

gave them a little bit of my dollar savings. I guarantee you not everything. My son knows that his mother got some money, but he forgot how much. I guarantee you the courier took some for himself because it's all done in cash and in espionage. so my German name Albrecht Dittrich is listed as having passed away in 1988 in the German.

personnel register, whatever it's called. So that's my backstory and ever since then, the FBI caught up with me. I cooperated, I became a citizen and I worked on my version of the American dream, I had a great career in corporate America, great career, starting as a programmer going all the way to chief information officer and all of these jobs were in altogether six

companies, six Fortune 500 companies that operated in six different cities and three different industries. So I got to know a lot and had to just gather a lot of experience, what it's like to operate in corporate, all the characters that operating in corporate. And I learned from everybody else because I, as you may have concluded already, I'm an extrovert.

I can also listen very well, but right now you asked me to talk, so shut me up please.

Francis Gorman (10:36.653)
I was, I was letting you run Jack, cause it's, it's, it's all fascinating stuff. I have to ask when, when you made that decision to come clean to the FBI, et cetera, you were announced deceased in your own country. that hard that that part of your identity therefore no longer existed, but you, but you still walked the earth. Was that a hard decision to make? You've left your homeland behind. What,

Jack Barsky (11:01.333)
No, the decision that I made had nothing to do with the FBI. The FBI contacted me nine years later. And at that point, there was only one decision. Hey, I'm all yours. The hard decision was when I told the KGB, I'm not coming. There was no FBI involved. There was no counterintelligence involved. The driving force was...

Francis Gorman (11:11.042)
Huh?

Jack Barsky (11:29.825)
was my daughter Chelsea. And this is why I tell people whether they want to hear it or not. I think it sounds like such a trait sentence, three words, love conquers all. Will I live through it? Because everything that was good for me personally was on the other side of the Iron Curtain. If I had not lied to them, had gone back.

I would have been welcome as a hero. I got a decoration called the Order of the Red Banner two years before. That was the second highest decoration of the Soviet Union that was only awarded to highly regarded spies. And I met two of them personally, the Coens, Lana and Morris Coens, who were members of the Rosenberg spy ring.

So apparently I did well enough impersonating an American and doing what I had to do to be a functioning American just in case. I had to be woken up as a sleeper. And apparently also that's a guess that a lot of the others that they sent out failed at that task. So I would have gone back and I had dollar savings in the East that would have been

They wouldn't have me a wealthy man. They promised me a house.

Everything that was good for me was over there. The only thing that was good for me staying was Chelsea. That's it. And then there was the danger of being arrested by the FBI or the KGB interpreting my resignation as a defection. And that added more danger. And guess what? You look at the equation, there's only one possible reasonable decision to make.

Francis Gorman (13:12.397)
So.

Jack Barsky (13:38.242)
You gotta leave. You gotta leave. And on top of it, I had an excuse I could have rationalized. If I stay and the FBI catches me, I'm no good for my kids anyway. So love conquers all and I can't take credit for it. It attacked me. Okay.

Francis Gorman (13:58.958)
It made it made the decision for you. Jack, in terms of that, so as you've just disclosed, you basically had a nine year window. Where did you live a normal life? Were you always looking over your shoulder? Was there fear there of?

Jack Barsky (14:10.863)
yeah, yeah, no, I took surveillance detection measures and some other measures to figure out whether the FBI was observing, watching me. And I did that for about three months. That was not a sign. And I got confirmation that they didn't have a clue I existed.

And I also made sure for the same period of time that I was not reliably found at the same time at the same spot. And I tell you why, and it makes a lot of sense even to lay people, know, an assassination has to be planned. You can't just go follow somebody and shoot them.

you need to do it where you have an escape for yourself. So you gotta check where the person reliably shows up and find the best spot to do that. And I didn't give him, if they had planned something like that, I didn't give him that chance. And this is not training, this is just a lot of logic and thinking about and putting yourself, it's called empathy, putting yourself into the shoes.

of the would-be assassin, right? So anyway, after three months, I said to the mother of Chelsea, my daughter, all right, get ready. I'm gonna save money now and within a year, we're gonna buy a home in the suburbs. And that's what we did. And that is when I started my version of the American dream. I bought property that made me a capitalist, right?

And then I had this really focused on my career. We had another child, son. We went from one house to another house to what I call the Mac Mansion with a pool and a $10,000 chandelier. I mean, I was doing exceedingly well and it became sort of normal, except at one point the FBI showed up. That sort of shook me at the moment when they said hello.

Jack Barsky (16:33.645)
It was like, and I can't say the word, it's the S word. shoot. Because immediately when the agent came up to me, it was at a bridge crossing over the Delaware where you had to, it was a toll bridge, had to put slow down, stop, put some coin in a slot so the gate would open.

Francis Gorman (16:41.517)
you

Jack Barsky (17:01.887)
And then they had a policeman stationed who told me to move over to the side, routine traffic stop, and asked me to get out of the car. At that point, I should have already, if I was still suspicious and watchful, I would have known he was lying. There's no such thing as routine traffic stop with asking somebody to get out of the car. Anyway, I just got out and the agents came.

The agent came for me in civilian clothes from the right back from the right and flipped an ID and I know exactly what that meant. Boom.

Francis Gorman (17:40.311)
that moment shatter Chelsea's mother's world or did she know that you were a sleeper agent and you had broken away?

Jack Barsky (17:45.965)
She had no... Oh, she did. This is part of the...

Francis Gorman (17:52.473)
Were you in big trouble Jack? you in big trouble when it happened or was she aware?

Jack Barsky (17:57.134)
This is another one of those delicious parts of my story that I nothing to do with engineering other than some of my actions resulted in interesting situations. So my wife, Chelsea's mother and I had a hard time getting along. She was very jealous. She thought I had affairs all over the place, which I didn't. And she was...

She got angry and argumentative. And at one point, I just figured, you know, I used what I call the nuclear option. And I told her, hey, listen, this is my background. This is what I risk to stay with you and Chelsea. You think I wanna have an affair with another woman? I love you. We are on the same team. Well, A, it didn't work.

because now she knew that I was a consummate liar. She didn't believe me at all. And then B, the FBI had a bug in my kitchen. And while I was telling her about my background, there was somebody in an FBI office listening to my confession. And that's when they tried, when they introduced themselves a couple of weeks later.

Francis Gorman (19:01.485)
You

Francis Gorman (19:24.589)
Okay, caught in a domestic argument. That's after all, all of the due diligence. Jack, you talked a lot about you were obviously a very intelligent young man and you were studying chemistry and you could have pursued a different career path. But how much does emotional intelligence have to play into this? And what role did that play in your success then when you moved into the world of technology?

Jack Barsky (19:30.561)
Yeah!

Jack Barsky (19:47.982)
That's a really, really good question. And I know now that I had a very high emotional IQ. I used to, I just used the word empathy. I'm not, don't necessarily feel people's pain, but I sense it. And I can, to the extent I can do something.

to help him, I can. I can understand what makes other people tick. When I was young, I didn't know any of that, but I tell you, the KGB was looking for people like that, and that's why they studied me for 18 months. They had a list of character traits that they were looking for. just the ability to understand others, to read people.

and take advantage of that read was absolutely critical. So I was never aware of it until I say maybe three years ago, two and a half years ago when I found myself single again. Unfortunately, my beloved ex-wife, Shauna, I still love and she loves me back, but she told me she

She can't stand living with me anymore, so here I am all by myself. But that gave me an opportunity to, first of all, I got on a lot more podcasts because I had the time, got a lot of questions, and then I also wrote a master class. I wrote everything that I learned in my life. I wrote this down, which required me to do a lot of introspection.

and a lot of this with this situation and that situation. And I realized that, yeah, I do have a very high emotional IQ. And that was confirmed recently by a neurologist, by a scientist. And if you don't mind, can name the personality test that he developed.

Francis Gorman (22:09.037)
Sure, yep.

Jack Barsky (22:12.183)
His first name is Antoine, but the personality test is called Meet Yourself. And that is the only personality test in existence today that includes genetic analysis. And I scored very high in empathy. Not a surprise anymore, but I have evidence that I'm not deluded, okay?

Francis Gorman (22:39.565)
That's really interesting genetic ties as well there. So Jack, in terms of all of those facets, you've lived multiple lives in your lifespan to date. Then you enter the corporate world. Technology is your preference. And I've seen on your posts and different podcasts where you talk about the power of silence and

Jack Barsky (22:43.488)
Yeah.

Jack Barsky (22:57.409)
Yeah.

Jack Barsky (23:07.799)
Yeah.

Francis Gorman (23:08.685)
There's always this concept of the loudest voice in the room is the weakest voice in the room. Can you talk a bit about the importance of silence in owning an audience or owning an argument?

Jack Barsky (23:16.575)
Yeah, well, first of all, you know, I was a really good technologist. I was a top-notch programmer. But again, my curiosity, my empathy, my number one love language is to serve. So how can I help you? And all of that helped me manage information technology.

without being a technologist. And I tell you how that happened. My very first real rock solid important job was to fix an infrastructure team at United Healthcare that was in a phenomenal crisis. In those days, United Healthcare was top notch. They used the most advanced technology. And in Minneapolis, there were other technology companies and they were raiding

that team, that was the infrastructure team. If that fails, the company goes belly up. And now a good friend of mine by the initials of the JP, somehow he found me as a manager in MetLife when we were gobbled up, part of MetLife was gobbled up by United Healthcare. found me and he had the...

the knowledge, the sixth sense that I could fix that team. So I went over there naked. All I had was my personality, nothing else. The technology, none of the technology that they were working with, I had ever been even close to. I didn't know their business model.

I didn't know anybody there. So I had to like to create relationships with the folks that are that were working there. I had to figure out the evil forces that that I was dealing with because they were there were senior executives who actually didn't mind. They didn't understand the value that this infrastructure team had and they were treating treating them like like

Jack Barsky (25:41.368)
garbage, okay? And so I had to deal with hostility. I had to deal with senior staff meetings. I once interrupted a senior staff meeting because I thought it was the right thing to do to give the corporate CIO, I mean, this was a big shot. And in understanding of the urgency, I asked him to sign a

requisition for something. and that job I learned how to manage using my people skills and I actually made sure that I learned that I improved my people skills. I can now read people within and no matter what

What we're talking about is a stranger that I meet and it takes about maybe a minute, no matter the subject, I can come up with at least a thumbs up or a thumbs down. I don't read minds, but I can determine whether it's a quality person or not. Am I 100 %? No, but 95 % is pretty darn good and I have proof of that as well because in my last three years as an executive,

I interviewed a lot of job applicants and my interviews were non-traditional. They were fundamentally just talks. So, you know, you have a dog, what kind of a dog it is. We talk a little bit about, you know, a bunch of things, never about the job and what you think of this job and why did you leave. None of that.

And my instincts hired about close to 100 people based and they all worked out with the exceptional one. Everyone worked out and I'm not lying to myself. I had a phenomenal record with regard to the interviewing process. At one point I had a boss who required me to interview all the candidates that were supposed to.

Jack Barsky (28:06.273)
report to her that also would have been peers of mine. So, and I said it worked out except for one case when I allowed my logical mind and my wishful thinking override my gut. There's this guy who came, you know, I talked with and my gut said within 30 seconds, I don't like him because he was just unpleasant.

I don't like him, that was it. But he had a skill set that was sorely needed. I rationalized that he was just one of those nerds who has no manners. So what I did is I hired him and I let him do what he does best and I shielded him from senior management because I knew he just wasn't likable. Well...

He became employee of the year because of me helping him and shielding him from exposure. And then a few months later he demanded he went to the CEO, who was my direct boss, and made a case that I should be fired.

Francis Gorman (29:25.953)
Well that was nice of him wasn't it?

Jack Barsky (29:28.373)
So that gives you an idea how logic, and I say this in some of my posts, logic very often misfires because there are circumstances that you're not aware of that play into the logic that you apply based on what you know. I'm not against logic, I'm a logical thinker.

But I have learned to trust my gut, my instincts, because you know, your nervous system is learning all the time, particularly your subconscious. As you are consciously and deliberately interacting with other people and study them, the subconscious builds a database of avatars, of people that you can recognize.

without even thinking about it. Okay? And again, this is not my, this is my amateurish approach to it. I came up with this idea until I had the chance to talk with psychologists and neurologists and they agreed with me with that thinking. if you have lived a reasonably long, deliberate life,

and have been very observant. If that's you, I will tell you, trust your gut and verify. Eventually, I've made a couple of gut-based decisions that went haywire and I should have had a contract with the individual who stabbed me in the back. But some people are really, really good liars. Sociopaths and psychopaths, they...

they can defeat lie detector tests and they will defeat me as well. you gotta trust your gut but still verify.

Francis Gorman (31:31.605)
Trust, Trust but Verify, a key zero trust principle from Fadi Daoud on my last episode. So we'll take that one as a principle for life as well as technology. Jack, you're now helping Fortune 500 CEOs deal with the problems of today. Is there a pattern you see emerging from that space through high pressure environments? Those men and women, they're leading large companies.

Jack Barsky (31:54.098)
Yeah, it's not just CEOs. I'm talking about the senior management team. Well, the pattern is number one.

Francis Gorman (32:00.108)
senior managers across the board.

Jack Barsky (32:07.605)
Nobody, there are exceptions. Let me take that back. I have to be careful with absolutes that may well be okay in marketing, but not in our conversation. But the majority of corporate players that I have witnessed were inauthentic. They played a role. And the role that they played had to do with a, preserving what they have.

You know, not because, you know, there's always politics in hierarchies, right? So if you are at the top or near the top, you know that you could lose it all. So, you know, you play the role that you think that will allow you to keep what you got or the opposite, the flip side of the coin, go up the ladder. you know, there's this S, you know, this behind.

kissing going on and all kinds of... So true friendships that like human to human friendships within the corporate hierarchy are next to impossible because nobody will open themselves up to somebody that they most likely know that they can't trust.

And you throw into this behavior and this attitude, you throw in the fear factor. I have been in the presence of so many senior executives who actually exuded that fear that they have. And fear is a really, really bad foundation for decision making. Now,

Not bragging again, as I told you, I operated and I was hired by altogether six companies into management positions and I was a new guy, right? And the pattern never changed. When I first started, everybody called me a breath of fresh air because I wasn't playing, I was being me.

Jack Barsky (34:34.853)
And over time, so particularly I was hired to fix something. So they let me do what I do best, which is crisis management. I also do good project management, but what I do best was crisis management and I enjoyed it. So they let me do what I do best and also

Since I wasn't stepping on their toes, I was the breath of fresh air and the one who was fixing things, the big problem. And then when the things were fixed and we went into steady state management, the air got a little stale because now I didn't change my behavior. I now was suggesting improvements with regard to how we operate it.

to do better, make more money, you know, and make people happy, but that stepped on people's toes. So the air got stale and eventually it became a stink. And at that point, I was laid off a couple of times because I was a misfit. I didn't play the role that I was supposed to play. what was I gonna say? I got.

laid off a couple of times and I quit proactively a couple of other times. I'm just, you know, I can't step out of myself. It makes me uncomfortable. so authenticity is a huge, very powerful tool, but you need to understand the culture of the company in which you can be authentic. There are, I've,

I've served under authentic or totally authentic CEOs. That shows, gives a message to the layers in the pyramid down the layers that doesn't necessarily make everybody else authentic. Okay, so it's just really something.

Jack Barsky (37:00.205)
These are situations that you cannot apply where you cannot apply pre-canned solutions. Every situation is different. Every human being is his own or her own character. Every situation is different. So that is why what I do is when I talk about mentoring, I talk about

situational mentoring. Deal with the situation as it arises. Analyze the situation and then make the right decisions. Analyze and include your gut in the analysis. And you know again there's science behind that. This is learning while doing. You know there's a type of learning that's called experiential learning.

That is one of the most known schools that practices that is the Waldorf School. And I wanted to have my child to enter that school, but it just didn't work out. But experiential learning is proven in all matters to be more effective than school class based learning.

So in other words, and I'm learning while I'm teaching as well. So I learned as a student while I learned while teaching. But again, I'm practicing like a subsection of experiential learning. We deal with the situation as it arises. And as you maneuver through that situation with talents and skills that you have, you keep that for your future. And that helps you mature and become

overall much more aligned with yourself. You get to know yourself really well. That makes you more certain of yourself, which is, it's an upward spiral and your life, your business life, and even, even your personal life will be more fulfilling. I'm not a magic man, but I tell you, I got there fundamentally that way. And I thank the KGB that didn't teach me how to be.

Jack Barsky (39:29.687)
They threw me in the water and told me, figure it out. Figure out how to swim.

Francis Gorman (39:35.714)
Figure out a swim. Jack, that's really insightful. And I've just one last question to finish on. You do a lot of keynote speaking. For anyone starting out in that space, it's always a daunting experience to stand in front of a crowd, to talk your experiences, to bring across insights and to own the room. What advice have you got for people who are maybe thinking of standing on that stage or who are on that stage already but struggling with owning the audience?

Jack Barsky (39:51.553)
Yah!

Jack Barsky (40:01.26)
Okay.

Right. First of all, again, learn by doing. If you're totally new to this and you're not a natural talent, and most of us are not, stage fright is the, I think, the number two fear that people have right after dying. So you've got to start simple. You know, the first time I spoke to an audience was in middle...

school class. Okay. And I, and I talked to them in a language that they understood. I used a video game, the Mario Brothers video game to teach a lesson. And that worked really well. And then I talked to an audience of about 50. And more than half of them I knew by first name.

And I thought it was terrible, except my story that carried me. But I looked at a tape and it was just horrible. And I hated it. But then I got invitations to speak someplace else and I just, I'm not a giver-upper. Persistence and resilience is part of my genetic makeup.

I accepted those and I have a tape of my first paid engagement and that was pretty bad too. But here's the thing.

Jack Barsky (41:45.838)
What carried me was my story. Storytelling is absolutely key. People will always listen to a story. Everybody has a story. People just, and a lot of people that I meet, they just want to know about mine. I want to know about theirs because people aren't aware that they have a story, they have something to talk about. And very important is you talk to the audience.

You just like almost think you're talking to only about a bunch of family members and use emotions. Don't lecture. I started lecturing too much, like a college professor. Nowadays, I've learned to embrace my own emotions and I have quite a few every which way except for anger.

I banned anger from my repertoire of emotions. But you know, that's all I can tell you. Practice makes better. I was not a talented speaker. The first time I gave a presentation in a corporate setting, my boss took me aside and it was all about technical stuff. It was about a project that I was the technical lead of. And she took me into her office and I...

quote from memory and this memory will stick with me forever. She said, Jack, you sucked. So she sent me to a Carnegie course where there's a little bit of public speaking is being taught. so, and this is when I had the courage to speak to the students in my daughter's middle school class. It's you can learn this.

Francis Gorman (43:20.941)
You

Jack Barsky (43:41.89)
There's some things you can't learn, because it's certain inborn traits, but speaking is not necessarily just a talent. Some people are are talented to speak, but I was not, and I'm doing really well. I have a halting speech pattern, and occasionally some words I have to fish for them, but it's okay. As long as you...

when you feel that you made a mistake, as long as you just sort of then dig yourself a hole and lose the physical presence and become a shrinking violet. embrace your mistake, make a joke if you can, or by the way, make them laugh. The first thing that I do these days, I always tell a joke and it's not a joke, you know,

a rabbi and a priest, that kind of a joke. It's something that actually the audience might be able to appreciate. my favorite was, I gave a talk at the national symposium of Mensa. Okay, that was a keynote. So I get on stage and I addressed him, hello smart people.

For them it was a joke, everybody laughed.

Francis Gorman (45:11.949)
It is is meant to

Jack Barsky (45:17.929)
And it was a compliment and it was done lightheartedly, you know, it wasn't kissing but.

Francis Gorman (45:26.807)
Jack, that is, stay true to yourself, basically. Own the stage, own your mistakes and learn from them. I think there's a lot of messages there that everyone can take away. It's, be yourself.

Jack Barsky (45:32.023)
Yeah.

Yes.

Jack Barsky (45:38.795)
Yeah, don't play a role, be yourself. And if you're naturally not funny at all, then don't do the joke thing because there's nothing worse than crickets.

Francis Gorman (45:49.837)
Or do the joke and then you'll have the whole. That's totally the way to dig yourself back out again.

Jack Barsky (45:53.088)
Okay.

But again, the point I'm trying to make, a lot of things can be learned if you're persistent and it can be really, really depressing and make you wanting to give up. There's points in life where you know that you have to give up, but most people give up way too soon because success is just around the corner.

And, you know, I'm the reason that I can state that and not be a hollow, empty motivational speaker is that I went through that. I just gave you the example of speaking and the same thing had to do with a lot of other things. There's a lot of things you can you can learn. And I also talked about learning how to read people rather quickly. That takes time. Anyway, where's my

turn off button, I don't have it.

Francis Gorman (46:58.125)
Turn Jack off. Look Jack, it's been an absolute pleasure to speak to you. think we're up on time. There's really valuable insights there for the listeners to chew back on and let percolate in their mind, but it was a personal pleasure to have you on.

Jack Barsky (47:15.661)
And thank you for a lot of questions that I had never been asked and they're not necessarily just about, you know, what's the transition from, you know, agent to normal life? And most people just don't touch that because as I mentioned, I learned a lot from quote unquote normal life too. And so that is how it relates to others.

because I can't, not too many people can become undercover intelligence agents.

Francis Gorman (47:55.277)
Surely not and I think it's getting more complex in the world we live in today, but

Jack Barsky (47:59.041)
yeah, absolutely.

Francis Gorman (48:02.081)
Look, Jack, it was an absolute pleasure having you on. Thanks a million for coming on the entry podcast and maybe we'll chat again soon. I'm sure you have another book in the hopper. You seem to be a stickster.

Jack Barsky (48:10.317)
I gotta come visit your country again. My favorite, favorite non-U.S.

Francis Gorman (48:17.738)
I will commit to buying the beers the next time you're over.

Jack Barsky (48:20.573)
Okay, all right. All right, Jameson, please.

Francis Gorman (48:25.24)
Jemisin, we can do Jemisin. We can do the factory tour. Perfect. Thank you, Jack. Thank you very much.

Jack Barsky (48:27.659)
Okay, well, that was great. Thank you. Take care.