Nic McKinley

speaker

110 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard Apr 2025

Nic McKinley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Finding Peak with Ryan Hanley · Former CIA Agent Exposes the Truth About Trafficking · 17 Apr 2025 podcast

To build this studio and the office building that I'm sitting in right now. I mean, it was probably years in the making. Yet with some of the skills that I learned at the Central Intelligence Agency and in military special ops, I could level this building in a matter of minutes. And so it's so much easier to destroy. And so to destroy is the lazy man's path, right?

to destroy is the oh, well, this person is executing and building and doing all these things. And so instead of just saying, I don't agree with the way you do, you're doing these things. So I'm going to go build better. Instead, they say, I don't you're you're a terrible human. When you can't attack the argument, you attack the person.

And and I think another part of this is that drive and intellect are not equally distributed. And I have no idea who said it. It definitely wasn't wisdom coming from me. I stole this from somebody at some point. But paraphrasing, somebody famous once said something to the tune of, Stupid people talk about people and intelligent people talk about ideas. Yeah.

And so if you can't attack the idea because you can't intellectually hang, like you intellectually can't attack the idea, then what are you going to do? You're going to attack the person.

Right. They just talk. It's you are never going to get hate. from somebody who's done more than you. It always comes from the people who have done less than you. I mean, I have mentors that I surround myself with who will call balls and strikes and say, Nick, we don't think you should have done that. You really screwed up here. Have you thought about doing this differently? And I listen to them.

And every single one of them is... economies of scale more successful than I am. They've forgotten more about their levels of expertise than I will ever know. For the most part, probably better people than I could ever be. And yet I learn from them and I listen to them. And never do I get hate from those people. It's always from people who've done less.

And I've had people attack me to say, oh, well, Nick was in special ops, but he didn't really do that much. I was like, okay, well, I guess my 14 combat deployments didn't really count. Oh, well, Nick was at the CIA, but it's not like he was really doing operations. Okay, well, I guess my 16 combat deployments there don't really count. Well, Nick may have went to Harvard, but it was extension.

So it doesn't really count. I'm like, oh, really? I had to pass the same test as everybody else to get in, right? I mean, so, well, yeah, Nick was an entrepreneur. And yeah, he's had this nonprofit that's been around for 10 years and one technology company. And now he's got another one and they're venture capital backed. But that's just because, insert excuse on why I can't do the same thing.

What they don't know is that I'm 47 years old. I've never had a vacation in my entire adult life because I have just always been executing on the mission. I have a few hobbies because it's kind of what you need for health. But that's the reason that I do them. That or it's, you know, things that I'm going to do with my kids and my family because that has to be mission number one.

But beyond that, it's like, no, like, what do I want to do? Well, I've got I've got half a day where I've got nothing to do. Awesome. I've got I've got work to do because my goal is so impossibly big that there's no possible way that I will reach it if I don't continually work on it.

Stop being who you are and start being who God designed you to be. We have this, our two selves, right? And these two selves, if anybody is ever honest with themselves, they both exist, right? You have the good side of you and the bad side of you. And which side gets stronger? The side that you feed.

So it's constantly trying to become what Aristotle used the word praus, which basically means that it was used to describe a war horse, this extremely powerful horse that was trained and designed to run into battle and run people over. It was a destruction machine. Yet, that powerful horse was under the control of the writer. And so the question is, what are you under control over of, right?

What has control of you? I have zero social media apps on my phone. Those are on another phone. And the reason why is because I'm not going to sit there and just scroll the, you know, doom scroll X or Instagram or any of these different platforms because I don't want to feed that side of me. And the algorithms are going to like like I know I can't defeat the algorithms.

So the only way I can defeat those algorithms is to put it on something else so that the phone that I have with me all the time doesn't have any of that stuff on it. So, so taking deliberate steps to not be that person anymore, if that makes sense, right?

I mean, with, with the training I have from obviously special ops in the military, you know, a kinetic unit at the CIA, what are the most selective units at the CIA? I know how to destroy some things and I'm pretty good at it, but that was, that was the then me, the now me. is building things, right? I'm building AI platforms. I'm building data sets for industry.

I'm building a nonprofit that is facilitating counter-human trafficking operations for law enforcement at an extreme scale, right? I'm building things. I'm trying to make the world a significantly better place. And what I used to do was primarily destruction related, but it was the end goal was to make the world a safer place. Whether or not we made the world better, history will tell.

But it was definitely to make the world a safer place in the short and medium term, at least.

It's a really interesting question. The special operations community has been spending years. billions of dollars over its lifetime trying to figure out that very question.

How can you have somebody who has an absolutely terrible childhood and somebody who has a normal childhood and somebody who has an extraordinary childhood all end up graduating and yet the same versions of those people also didn't graduate? They've been trying to figure out that for years and nobody nobody really knows.

I know for me, it has, you know, there's the guys like Jocko who like to talk about discipline. And yeah, that's that's a that's a downstream effect of a decision. So when I went into pararescue, I knew that I had a 92 percent chance of not making it right. Eight out of 100 people graduate statistically, at least at the time. I have no idea what it is now.

Showing 21–40 of 110 · page 2 of 6