REACTING to CIA Torture Session, Waterboarding & Sociopathic Spy | Julian Dorey • 316
Julian Dorey · 7 Jul 2025 · 2h 1m
Host: Joey Def, Julian Dorey
Julian Dorey and his co-host Joey D revisit and react to raw footage from a documentary shoot in which Julian and fellow creator Tommy G volunteered to be staged-kidnapped and put through a recreation of CIA enhanced interrogation techniques. The people running the exercise were Andy Bamonte, a self-described current CIA operative who runs a spy-training business and has appeared on Dorey's show before, and a former Navy dive team member with a Blackwater background. Julian walks through the entire day in sequence: the cover story they invented, being zip-tied and hooded, driven around in a windowless van, and taken to an abandoned Milwaukee brewery for hours of stress positions, ice water dousing, and a partial simulation of waterboarding tied to simple questions like naming the capital of the United States. He describes the physical sensations in detail — the wet hood restricting breathing, the pain of the sear position, the disorientation and shivering — and contrasts his own compliant strategy with Tommy G's resistance. Along the way he recounts the crew's reactions, the unplanned cinematic touches like a passing freight train, and moments of dark humor amid genuine distress. The conversation closes with Julian's reflections on what the exercise did and didn't teach him about whether torture produces reliable intelligence, and how it compares to his prior conversations with CIA and intelligence guests on his show.
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What comes up
Timestamps link into the episode on YouTube.
- Origins of the torture shoot
- Inventing the cover story
- Meeting the crew at the warehouse
- Filming liability waivers
- The staged street abduction
- Stress positions and questioning begin
- Tommy's ice-water interrogation
- History of CIA waterboarding protocol
- Julian's own waterboarding experience
- Reflecting on whether torture works
Said on this episode
Quoted from the auto-generated transcript, which mishears names and technical terms. podcite.com reports what a show said; it does not endorse or fact-check it.
“It felt like sadistic. It felt completely sociopathic.”
“When you go to pull in air, you will pull in the mask. It will go into your mouth. You cannot stop it.”
“I ain't dying for this”
“I have strong opinions against the use of enhanced interrogation techniques in large part because they are so shocking, they are so damaging, they are so uh difficult physiologically that they don't yield consistent results.”