EverydaySpy Podcast - Human Beings Are Horrible—This Broke Me Even After Years at CIA

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

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I mean, it's hard to say a worse thing. In my subjective opinion, crimes against children, abuses against children, is the absolute worst. And some of the worst abuses against children, like, you feel it in your guts, it's so fucking horrible, is in Africa. And I was operating in a zone where there were child soldiers. and child soldiers are fed this concoction of gunpowder and cocaine to energize them

and to focus them gunpowder yeah and then there it's split between the two like it's a combination of the two that splits horrible for the body but it immediately jazes you up it's a way of splitting and extending you know a certain amount of cocaine

And they're subjected to sexual abuses by senior ranking officers to humiliate and break their spirit and make them loyal to the senior officer. A very similar way of Munchausen syndrome, right? And that's how these children are cultivated to become dedicated, lethal children in cross-border fucking wars between warlords and Africa. It's a horrible, horrible thing. Did you have to witness this from afar as a part of an op or were you also in a situation where you had to act where you're undercover and stand by and watch this and act like nothing's wrong? No, this is a big part of the difference between CIA and law enforcement, right? CIA, you must always view it from afar.

It's second or third ring, right? You're meeting with the general who's surrounded by dedicated child soldiers and you're having like, roasted pig with that guy or roasted beef or roasted lamb with that guy and he's telling you about what he did to that kid and how that kid was hard to break and how that kid was easy to break and you know and you have to sit there and listen you got to sit there and listen to it but you don't have to witness it right we're law enforcement and this is why I have such incredible respect for your FBI your your detectives even your beat cops right they see they have to actually witness horrible shit review the footage

Review the audio tapes. Look at the pictures to build a case that goes to court. I don't know how they sleep at night with what they've seen human beings do to each other. CIA is blessed beyond words that we don't ever have to witness it. We just have to take advantage of the fact that the person of access is showing us what their access is in the process of bragging about the atrocities they've carried out. Sometimes you do witness it, though, because you're putting yourself. into the right, I mean, it's a strange way to say, but into the right places to get information. Yeah, it's true. You witness some things that are, that you don't want to witness,

but you're also given the skills to be able to, like, to be able to bow out, to be able to make an excuse that's viable. Like, you're given social skills so we can, we can get out of the situation. Like when the guy has, you know, too many bumps of cocaine and he calls his kids over and they start kissing on his arms and you're like, you know what, man, I'm going to make a, I'm going to take a break. I'm going to go make a call, talk to so and so and So do this other thing, like, I'm going to give you your space to enjoy yourself and I'll be back in two hours. Right. And then he gets it.

And he's like, yeah, I'll see you in two hours, brother, maybe three. And you're just like, oh, I'm fucking out of here. Right. We can do that. Whereas law enforcement, that's when the evidence begins. So they don't have that benefit. When it comes to shit that humans do to other adults, like adult to adult, I have a higher tolerance for. You know, advanced interrogation techniques.

seeing people who are malnourished or seeing people who are diseased or seeing like seeing dark things I can tolerate to a certain extent. But for me, it's it's when it bleeds into children that it becomes too much. Did that take a while for you to be able to tolerate it at the adult level? Yes. So I specifically remember, I specifically remember seeing people doing horrible things. Like I, this is a stupid example, but I'll start there. I remember in college. maybe 19 years old. You weren't even a dirty thought, I think, when I was in college. Nope.

You met my parents, relax. There was this video that went out. It was a donkey show. It was a woman having sex with a donkey. And it went out viral. This was probably 99, 2000. Was this on like Run the Gwantlet? It wasn't even, there weren't even necessarily like porn websites.

It was an email attachment that went everywhere. A woman fucking a donkey. Yeah, yeah. A woman getting fucked by a donkey. And that was like when the whole term donkey show, which is now like, you know, people talk about it movies, it really, in my world,

it started with that attachment that went out by email in circa 2000. And there's lots, drop it in the comments if this is how you found out about this shit too, right? And I remember being in the Air Force Academy and I remember having seven or 10 guy friends who were all in the same room

and we were all talking about whatever the fuck and somebody saw the attachment and was like, whole shit, you guys got to see this. This is a lady fucking a donkey. Because for real, this is the joke about donkey shows. You can't not watch, right? So they double click on this and we watch this thing play out.

And I'm like, holy shit. I had nightmares. I couldn't shake that from my mental, like I couldn't buffer it out of my mental visual cortex for days, dude. For days I couldn't sleep right. For days I, like, it was like, haunting me. I ain't going to sleep right from the image alone. And I've learned that I've learned from that moment that there are, that I am visually sensitive. There are, there are things that I see

visually that haunt me. And being part of the agency, I was able to talk about that with a psychologist. I was able to have like outlets for it. But I was also able to tell them that up front, like, hey guys, horrible shit upsets me. Did you learn to turn it off? No. No, I just learned how to, cope with it, to help process it faster, right? That was the main thing that came across for me. And going through operations and going through the process of, you know, seeing what I've seen, it helps to have an outlet that you already know exists. It helps to have a way of processing it at night. It helps to have a way of processing it with a therapist, with other officers. You had to develop some ability to at least compartmentalize, though.

Yes, compartmentalizing is different than processing. Of course, of course. When you compartmentalize, it's there. It's there, but you can still be functional. Correct. It's a super dark topic. Let me make kind of a lighter example. I had a case that I had to travel through Southeast Asia with, and the case, I may have

told you about this before. Did I tell you about the asset that was really into lady boys? No. Have I never told you this story? So I had this target who was really into lady boys. Lady boys are boys. We know what they are. But his specific version of lady boys was partially post-op.

Partially. So they were women from the waist up, and they were full-blown men from the waist down. No testosterone treatment. Okay. Right? So what that meant is they could get full-on, full-sized heart erections. Okay. But they were all lady from the top up, just no hormones involved.

So fake breasts, makeup, maybe face. facial cosmetic surgery, et cetera, et cetera. That was his preferred type. So being there to enable his fantasies, whenever we were together, we found the best lady boy joints that we could find, right? And it was the American taxpayer dollars

who made sure that he got the best dances he could get. Somewhere Mike Mercedes-Benz is going, this! Soft power! Soft power! There it is! There it is! Oh my God. I mean, that's not as...

dark though. No, that's, I'm trying to say it's not dark. But that's the kind of, so what lady boys do with each other to arouse their, to arouse their Johns is like, I'm visually sensitive, dude. I don't want to fucking be kept up at night watching 69s between lady boys. That's not what I want to be doing, especially not when it's happening three feet in front of me and there's people walking around me and like people bump, people squeezing past you in a small space and their fucking erections are hitting your elbow and you're like,

get the. But if my tax dollar. if my tax dollars are paying you, Andy Boost-Monte, you're going to get in there with those fucking little boys. You're going to get that mushroom stamp. That's what you're going to do. Doesn't not haunt you at night, right? But you can compartmentalize that, right?

You can be like, I'm here to do a thing. There's the intel I need. There's the statement I need. There's the network connection I need. There's his phone left by itself. Now I can scan it. There's all this shit that you can focus on while dicks are swinging around your face, right?

Objectively. But then when you go back, at the end of the day, you still got to be like, what, like, I still saw the thing that I saw. I can't just hold it in this compartment forever. I got to get rid of it. Yeah. Right. There's this phenomenal deep cover knock that I worked with.

And he had operations all through some of the hardest places in the Middle East. And unlike me, he was deep cover. Like I was, I was. You know, we just had a knock in here, right? Oh, did you? I didn't know that. Well, I want you to make this point. So he operated in very, very deep cover.

his life, his whole life was just a series of traumatic incidents, right? Who he had to work with, how he had to collect against it, how he had to lie to the people closest to him, right? Separating from his wife to have essentially a cover wife somewhere else, just to make sure that his cover held so that nobody ever assumed he could be the same guy that's married and has a couple of kids back in the United States. All this shit, he had to go through a process of decompressing where he would come back and then eight, agency would put him into a cabin in the woods by himself away from everything, where he had to go through his own internal process being visited by a psychiatrist to work through, to get back to

his American life so that he could then go back home to his wife and kids and actually be able to be a functioning husband, right? So it's really easy to get spun up into your cover identity. It's way harder to spin down after and off. Oh, yeah. And then go back into your normal routine life. Yeah. We had this guy Matt Hedger in here, had him in here, had him in here, twice to tell his whole story. And the only reason he can talk is because his cell, I guess you could call it, of Knox was had a leak. And so a foreign intelligence agency leaked their names on the dark web like a year and a half

ago. So the damage was done. So he had to be immediately pulled from the field. But he was in, he got into NSA when he was like 18 or 19. And then they pulled him out of that at 21 or 22 and trained it to be. and knock for nine months. It's like straight out of a movie, like the whole thing. And essentially he infiltrated one of the top four biker gangs for four years as a

money launderer, drug smuggler, like a bunch of different other things. And that led him to, all this character, connect with the cartels, which led him to the next decade or so where he was one of the chief money launderers for the cartels. And, you know, I've been thinking about him a lot while we've been having this part of the conversation with you talking about the things you witness or the things you know happen or whatever but there's you know with him you can tell there's a lot going on there a lot in his head and a lot that he's never going to be able to get rid of because he had to sit in on these situations and act normal but there's one story he told that just sticks with me and pretty much everyone who heard it where

he explains that he was taken to like a warehouse with you know on like business with with the cartel and i don't know how many guys were in there maybe he was like 20 or 30 and in the middle there was a dude who had been beaten up and he was you know tied with his hands behind his back on the ground screaming crying and on the table was his nine or 10 year old son and this guy apparently was accused of having stolen some money and so they went around the room and they took a carrot peeler to the kid's face and he said it was a test for him you know he's a money launderer he wasn't he wasn't like a muscle guy known to them that way and it was like, is he going to react?

You know, how is he going to react? What's he going to do? And he had to stand there, feeling the way he feels in his head, obviously, watching something unspeakable happen. You want to talk about evil. I mean, this is like the apex of it in many ways. But he had to pretend like it was cool. And I don't know, I mean, he could be, I could talk to him 30 years from now from being

out. And I don't think you can ever possibly be normal. just on that one example, let alone all the other things, you know, on micro examples or other examples like that that happen over a 10, 15 year period form. I don't know how you can possibly like forget erase it that hard drive, but even remove that hard drive from playing in your head at all times. There's a reason that when we get together, like when agency folks and FBI and, you know, Delta or seals or whatever, when we all get together, we don't, we don't swap stories. We don't swap stories like these because we all know we have them and we don't really want to relive them.

And we definitely don't want to put that in somebody else's ear. Somebody who maybe has an experience close to it or similar to it that brings it back in like vividness and richness. And we also know that while there are resources that the federal government offers to help us process and cope with the traumas, it's really just to get us operational again. It's not to heal us. It's not to fully process. It's just to get you back on the line again. Yeah.

They're sending you to the cabin like Rocky. Yeah. Get training. You got to go. Yeah. And that's it. And then after you've lived your utility, then you move on. They spit, yeah.

And maybe you get the VA or maybe you don't or maybe you get something else. Or maybe you're such a high risk that they keep you in some basement with a red stapler. at the agency, right, at Langley forever. But it's, it sucks. Do you, like, I, I hear what you're saying about, and it's certainly human to, about the kids and that in particularly getting to. The one thing I keep thinking about, though, is, and I don't know if this was just pure compartmentalization.

I'm not putting you on the spot, but I remember when we were recording the first Fed Fest with you, Jim and Danny in 2022, I think that was Danny Jones number 166. We were getting into a conversation maybe like two hours and 45 minutes in that one, two hours, 50 minutes in that one where we were talking about blackmail in first world versus third world countries. And you and Jim, obviously Jim has his whole background, was seeing a lot of crazy shit around the world too.

We're both talking about like sharing an example of like going to the bathroom and, you know, a southeastern Asian country. And there's a fucking 12 year old girl sitting there that, you know, is some sort of sex slave or something and you just got to act like it's cool. And I remember like the thing that was affected me about the two of you saying that is obviously the two of you thought that was fucking crazy and wrong. But you're like, yeah, that's just how it is. And that's how the world is, right? There's, um, I'm trying to think of there's any place in the United States like this. If there is, I haven't been there yet. There, when you, when you travel the world,

you'll, you see the, this, the subjection of all sorts of different, I mean, my, minorities, for lack of a better word, but it's not ethnic minorities. Kids are forced to beg, and they're forced to beg so they can collect their begging earnings and bring it back to essentially a pimp. If you want a $3,000 a month payday for life, what would you feel free to do? Maybe take a long weekend, every weekend, or try a bunch of new hobbies. Would you feel free to upgrade and listen, ad-free? Don't worry, we get it.

Every $20 ticket could win you $3,000. a month for life and supports life-saving cancer research at the Princess Margaret. Feel free to buy your payday for life ticket today. Raffle number 155-2194. Please play responsibly. Who they didn't pay a portion of their begging earnings too in exchange for that pimp not beating them, not abusing them, not beating their mother who's in the back nursing the next baby beggar that's going to be coming up, right? That's just the way it is.

You can't change that. you can't you can't fix that so why spend any calories worrying about that it's just like the lady boys the lady boys that are sitting around partially post-op they didn't raise their fucking hand to do that they were raised they were found they were trafficked they were abused and that's that's what they do now that's that's not what they chose to do nobody chooses that lifestyle to live in some some terrible cesspool back alley and some terrible cesspool southeast station countries that isn't even what's on what you your nationality is right like you're from you're from indonesia and you're in vietnam that's that's not what they chose right but trafficking human trafficking

around the world is so commonplace that we don't even comprehend it as americans human trafficking inside the fucking united states even here a lot and we don't even crazy we don't even think about it it's it's it's the way it is we we've we've we've I don't laugh. I love and saddened. Every time I go through an airport or I go through a hotel and I visit the restroom and you see the human trafficking posters that are on the door. Yeah. Right.

Are you a victim of human trafficking? Translated usually into at least two, sometimes four different languages. Like, that's how common it is. It's so common that hotels and anywhere from Nashville to Madison, Wisconsin, have these signs up. That's how common it is. And we walk past it every day. We see it around us all the time.

And we just turn a blind eye in the United States, the freest country in the world. Or we just don't notice it. Most people just don't notice it. I'm sure you notice it. Yeah. You pick up on it. That's part of what I call a blind eye, right?

There's willfully blind, and then there's, like, unwittingly blind. Either way, you don't even know it's happening here. Super easy for us to point fingers and be like, oh, that backwards fucking country and XYZ. right they're so why they're so crazy in pakistan they're so crazy in greece they're so crazy in you know because there's not here it's not our backyard we but it is yeah yep but it's yeah yeah it's a wild thing wild thing that we we ignore the egg called around was just talking about

that when he was here it's like are we are we are we are we gonna reckon it and he has all these insane concrete examples of exactly like almost down to the address of the hotels and he's like here's what's going on like you know what i mean like i can get he's like i can complain about in Mexico for sure where he's from like that's a huge problem but like you also have the problem in your own backyard it's crazy man but you don't you know you don't strike me as the kind of guy who i don't want to say this it's not that you don't have empathy you are just someone who has at least trained himself to understand that there's a place where you can actually step in and there's a lot of places where there's nothing you can fucking do.

And does that rectify some of it to yourself? I don't think it doesn't rectify it in the way that it makes me feel better, if that makes a sense. So what I would actually say is I always struggled with empathy. Empathy was not natural for me. And I would argue that for a lot, not all, but for many CIA field operators, empathy is not natural. What's natural to us is kind of a cold.

a cold view of everything. You're recruited for that. But then they teach us empathy. Like they teach us how to understand how to comprehend, how to visualize what somebody else is going through. Because it's useful, right? When you don't carry the feelings that go along with it, but you can recognize that there are feelings that would go along with it, you can control yourself in the situation better. So for the first, you know, half of my life, I didn't have to worry about the impact of empathy. it wasn't until after I learned it that I was like oh I can actually use this and still I don't have to worry about the feelings from it there's no passive or very little passive impact for me that comes from empathy that all helps so that I can do things I have to do witness things I have to witness say things that I have to say to get the outcome that I'm looking for because that outcome is the end goal and you set out on an operation you put lots of time and effort into an operation for the outcome there's a there's this um

fantastic concept that exists in elite schools, where before you put somebody through a challenging situation, you tell them up front what you're about to do is challenging. What you're about to do is hard. You will be uncomfortable. You will be cold. You will not sleep much. You will be hungry. Set expectations. Right? Because exactly, you increase the probability of success for the right people who go into the challenge because they already know what to expect, rather than being like, okay, guys, are you ready for this exercise? And you don't tell them how hard it's going to be. So if you have a group of 10 people and they're all trying to be elite and you tell them how hard this next thing is going to be, maybe two of them drop out before you even start. So now your five

instructors only have to worry about eight students instead of five instructors being spread among 10 students, two of which are going to take way more resources up because they're not meant to graduate in the first place. So now you're not. Now with your eight that go through the hard training, maybe six come out the other side, and you only lose two, but you save resources along the way, and you can pre-qualify the people before they ever go in, right? That's the benefit of telling people before they start a training how hard something's going to be. The same thing applies in operations.

The reason we spend so much time planning an operation is because that whole planning period shows you. It's going to be hard. It's going to be cold. You're going to be hungry. You're going to get sick. So you own your circumstances in pursuit of the outcome before you ever. start. So then the whole time that you're in the mix, all you're focused on is the outcome.

It's less impactful when the surprises pop up, when the tragedies pop up, when the dark things pop up, because you're so intently focused on the outcome.