Former CIA Agent Exposes the Truth About Trafficking

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Not available in all states or situations. What is up? Welcome back to the show.
We have a tremendous conversation for you with Nick McKinley.

Nick is a Harvard graduate, former military special operations, worked for a kinetic team at the CIA, and is now an entrepreneur with a spin. Nick is also the founder of DeliverFund.org, which is a private nonprofit focused on stopping human trafficking, reducing human trafficking in the United States, in the world by 80%.
And this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. I'm a huge believer in the protection of our children and the development of our children and the fact that the United States is the number one market for human and sex trafficking in the world is deplorable in the purest sense of that name.
And specifically, Nick talks about how he was able to achieve the success of graduating from a university like Hartford, special operations, kinetic team at the CIA, and why he is applying all those skills, all that knowledge that he developed to fighting human and sex trafficking. Guys, I'm going to have a link below to deliverfund.org.
If this is something that you believe in, if you believe that it is our responsibility as Americans, as adults to protect our children, then I highly recommend you scroll down, donate to deliverfund.org. You can give, you know, every dollar counts.
You can give 10 bucks. It doesn't really matter.
It takes two minutes to do and we can start to fight to fight back against this absolutely horrific activity that is happening in our country. This is an incredible episode.
Nick is just filled with knowledge and his achievement and the way he describes what we can start doing to manifest the things in our life that we want to happen. This is one of those episodes.
It's like, this is why I do this show. This is why I put the time in.
This is why I create these episodes is for these types of conversations, these types

of missions.

And I hope that you will take just the two minutes to scroll down or just type it in

deliverfund.org.

Donate today.

And let's keep fighting human trafficking in this country.

Guys, I give you Nick McKinley.

In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. All right, man.
Well, dude, Nick, it is awesome to have you on the show, dude. And I will tell you, like, I've had close to 350 guests on this show over the last, you know, whatever, however many years.
And you were one of the toughest to prepare for because of the breadth and depth of shit that you have done in your life.

Now, before we went live, you referred to yourself as a nonlinear thinker, which speaks to my heart because, you know, for the audience, they know I love bringing in all different people. Right.
And you said something. And this is where I want to start.
like your nonlinear thinking style, you know, allows you to examine questions such as how do you go so impossibly big, right, that no one thinks it's possible. So I want to start there.
Like, how do you how do people grab this mindset? Because we know a large percentage of the population of people that are listening to this show right now have incredible talent, all the ability and means to make things happen.

But they're stuck.

And it's often because they're thinking too small. So let's start at the biggest question.
How do we make these incredibly big things happen? Purpose. It's that simple.
When people are thinking too small, it's, I would say it's usually because they're thinking about themselves, right? Their goal is like, Oh, I want to build the mastermind class. That's going to get me the freedom that I want so that I can have the boat that I want so that I can drop ship stuff from Alibaba on a beach somewhere while I drink my time.
Right. It's I, I, I, I, I.
God did not create us to serve ourselves, right? He created us to serve a greater purpose. And so it's, it's what I call the dragon that you are, that you are made to slay.
Like, what is the problem in the world? What is the problem in society? What is, what is the thing that just haunts you and bothers you? And that is your purpose. That's what you were designed to do.
So I do a lot of coaching of entrepreneurs and companies that I'm invested in and work with venture capital firms for the leaders that they're investing in, right? Because one of the best ways for them to protect that investment is to make sure that the leader doesn't collapse under the weight of that investment. And so one of the questions that I like to ask all of these people is, what is the one thing that you would do if you were independently wealthy? And that usually starts an exercise of they go through, well, like, oh, man, I would retire my parents and I would I would do this for this person.
And I would I've always wanted to travel. And OK, so they get they get all the like me stuff out of the way.
Like, great. You 48 months of playing around.
You still have more money than any any number of generations could ever spend. What are you going to do with the rest of your life now? Because you can't just travel.
You can't just sit on the beach your whole life. I mean, I guess some people can, but like, if you're one of those people, you should probably stop listening to this podcast right now.
Also, dude, those are the people who fall apart. Those are the ones that you read the stories about that become alcoholics or get drug addicted or do all this crazy stuff because they're lost and it's like a ship at sea with no direction.
Right. I mean, that's that's what happens if you don't find this purpose.
Right. Right.
They're so internally focused. So so what is the problem? What is what is the dragon that you're going to go slay? So for me, it's commercial sex trafficking that, that of primarily of children.
Like that is, that is what I focused on with my nonprofit companies. It's what I'm focused on, on, on my for-profit company.
Uh, it's a revenue generator there. It's a, uh, an industry, uh, a weapon for industry to actually wield against that dragon like that that's where i'm focused right and and i think that's that's it you've got to find the purpose and and you can't take steps you can't create a framework you can't do all of these things that people talk about that are downstream of purpose, right? Purpose is the glacier that melts into the stream of your life.
So what is that purpose? And that purpose better be bigger than yourself. And I think there are so many good examples of this that people look to.
And I'm not saying that any of these people are obviously perfect and they all have their own problems. But when you look to the Bezos and you look to the Musks and the Steve Jobs and the people who've been hyper successful in business, I would even say Zuckerberg, right, as a great example, and the Google founders, when you look at them, what are they doing today? They're some of the richest people on the planet, wealthiest people on the planet.
They have achieved the level of wealth that no measure of generations could ever spend. And what are they doing? They're getting up every day and they're going to work.
A couple of billionaires I know are some of the hardest people, some of the hardest working people I know. They have all of the wealth that they could possibly ever need.
And yet they're still working 10 plus hours a day. And that's, and when you ask them why it's because they have a goal and a singular purpose that they're focused on solving, right? So a billionaire that I know is investing in cancer treatments because his mother died of cancer and he's like, it shouldn't be that way.
And so he's just all in on biotech. Another one that I know is really doesn't like the way that society is unfolding and in the divisions among, among the people are unfolding and the things that media are doing.
So he just was like, you know what, forget it. I'm worth $200 million.
I'm going to go create a new, a new media company and, And so that really is what it comes down to. It's just you've got to find a dragon to slay and then start taking the steps required to go slay that dragon.
Why do you think societally, at least a loud faction that looks at Bezos, Jobs, Musk, you know, and vilifies them for their continued pursuit at that mission?

Is it is it misunderstanding?

Is it jealousy?

Is it this kind of is it just insecurity?

Is it a lack of education?

Like to me, I look at someone like this is something that has bothered me a lot recently

because I look at Elon Musk and maybe it's because i can detach some of his personality or life things that he that make him who he is from all the good that this human being is creating in terms of you know you don't have to like all his products but the dude is creating things that seemingly are he's executing yeah okay so like i look at that and then you have people over here shouting about how he's a demon and he's hitler and he's but and i i can't and i'm usually pretty good at at getting to the root of the psychology of where something comes from and And I have really struggled with this because I

thought I had it figured out. And then every once in a while I'll get messages from people because, you know, maybe I'll, you know, reshare something that I think he said that was good or whatever.
And, and they'll be like that. And I'm like, I don't understand how you can see it that way.
Like, what is going on with that mentality? Why are we, why do we vilify? Why is there such a vocal portion of

our population that vilifies people who just push hard with purpose? Like, why is that so offensive to some people? Because those people are the straight stick. And what I mean by that is the best way to point out that a stick is crooked is not to tell somebody that the stick is crooked.
it's to lay a straight stick next to it. And oftentimes, those people are the straight stick who those folks then are confronted by the fact that they're not doing very much.
And I get terrible hate mail. And I've, some of the biggest players in the pornography industry spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to go after me personally, which I consider that a badge of honor.
That means that I'm getting the dragon's attention and the dragon doesn't like it. And that means I'm being effective because if you aren't getting attacked, if people aren't saying bad things about you, guess what?

You're probably not really being that effective. And there are so many people in our society who have just gotten so comfortable.
And like that, that is their life's goal, right? They want to pursue their own comfort. And that means that the people who are actively working to better society, now they may not necessarily agree with the way that they're actively working to better society, but all the same, people who are executing on that purpose, they're executing on the plan, they're very clearly putting their money where their mouth is, so to speak.
That makes everybody else essentially look at themselves in the mirror and be confronted with the fact that they're not doing as much or they're not executing on things. And it is so much easier to destroy than it is to build.
You think about how fast, how long it took to build the house that you're sitting in right now or the office that you're sitting in, right? 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. 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,'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.
I think you're right. I think that, you know, when you dig into who puts these messages out about, you know, any of these individuals that are that are creating and building and trying, trying, you know, like you said, you don't have to agree with their how they're going about it, but they are they are purposefully efforting to try to make society better.
When you see the people who are coming at them, none of them produce anything. Right.
They just talk. It's you are never going to get hate from somebody who has done more than you.
Yeah. 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, never do I get do I get hate from those people. It's always from people who've done less.
Uh, 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, right? Well, Nick may have went to Harvard, but it was extension.
So it doesn't really count. I'm like, Oh, really? I had this, I had to pass the same test as everybody else to get in.
Right. I mean, it's 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 their 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. Yeah.
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. Let's say someone is sitting here listening to this and has the self-awareness to say, you know, maybe I have been, I've been a little critical.
I've been a little snipey. I've been a little, you know, insert critical from and coming from a place of, of insecurity or et cetera.
And they want to start, but they would like to change this about themselves. How would you recommend someone who is like, you know, I don't like this about myself.
I hear what Nick's saying. I believe him.
I don't want to be this person. I've kind of found myself in this place.
How would you recommend someone start to work through maybe moving from a destruction mentality to a building mentality? Stop being who you are and start being who God designed you to be. We have this, our two selves.
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, right? This extremely powerful horse that was trained and designed to run into battle

and run people over and, right, it was a destruction machine. Yet that powerful horse

was under the control of the rider. And so the question is, what are you under control over of, right? What has control of you? Um, I have zero social media apps on my phone.
Um, those are on another phone. Uh, 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 platforms uh 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 uh 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 taking deliberate steps to not be that person anymore, if that makes sense, right? With the training I have from, obviously, special ops in the military, a kinetic unit at the CIA, one of the most selective units at the CIA, I know how to destroy some things. 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. Do you think you were a naturally disciplined person which made special ops and CIA work fit for you? Or did those organizations in your time inside of them help mold that discipline? It's a really interesting question.

The special operations community has been spending 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. Uh, I know for me, it, it has, you know, there's the guys like Jocko who like to talk about discipline and yeah, that's a downstream effect of a decision.
So when I went into pararescue, I knew that I had a 92% 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.
But I decided I was going to be one of those eight. It's that simple.
There was no motivation. There was no discipline.
It was no, I just decided I was going to be one of those eight getting into the CIA. I just decided that I was going to go work at the CIA getting into Harvard.
I just decided I was going to get into Harvard. And I think when you make the decision that something is going to happen and you're not, you know, like you're not jumping off a cliff deciding that you can suddenly fly, right? It's when you're, when you're doing things that are logical and make sense, they may not make sense to the entire world, but they make sense to you.
I think this is every entrepreneur's journey. Everybody thinks you're crazy until you're successful and then they don't.
So if you just decide that you're going to go do something, then you will continually move your feet in that direction and you'll stumble and you'll fall and you'll learn from those failures and you'll get up and you'll do it again. I think too many times when people quit, the people who quit in my special ops selection class or the guys who didn't make it in my CIA selection class, they all were people who hadn't really decided what it was that they were going to do.
They didn't decide for sure that they wanted to be in the Air Force special ops community. They hadn't decided for sure that they wanted to be in the in at the Central Intelligence Agency.
They were just kind of kicking the tires. And that, I think, is the primary reason why they failed.
And I think it's the same thing for entrepreneurs. Yeah, I completely agree with this mindset.

Kobe's got a great, he said it a couple of different times, so I'm paraphrasing now, but it's essentially once he had this philosophy of he didn't negotiate with himself, right? So once he made a decision, I'm going to insert whatever his goal was, whatever the things were he needed to do to hit that goal. He just simply didn't go.
He's like, he just turned off in his brain the, well, you know, I worked out yesterday and I went a little hard yesterday. So today I'm going to do, I'm going to, you know, dial it back a little.
It's like, no, I committed to two hours or whatever, you know, whatever it was of this amount of work at this effort level every day or, you know, whatever the cadence was.

He simply didn't negotiate with himself. And I think I think what I love about that is the simplicity of what you're saying in this idea of like, just make a decision and then don't negotiate, because the path to being successful as an entrepreneur is fairly simple.
It's incredibly difficult But what you need to do

Take making the 8 out of the hundred when you're getting into special ops, right? Like I'm assuming the path is simple. Getting there is very difficult, but just in your brain, I need to have this amount of aerobic fitness, this amount of strength.
I need to know these skills. I need to perform these five things, you know, whatever they are, right? Like, it's not like it's a secret what you need to do, but you just need to be able to do these things.
So it's like, instead of constantly negotiating and trying to find a hack and a shortcut and a this, and well, I'm good at this one. I don't necessarily have to be as good at this one.
It's like, no, no. Here's the five things you need to do to hit your goal.
Do them. The pain, the difficulty is not in the things you need to do.
It's consistently showing up to do the things. And that's why there's $10,027,000 courses that exist out there for all these random things is because everyone's searching for this magical how-to when you don't need the how-to.
You're going to figure it out if you just show up every day and do the things that you know you need to do. It's simple, just not easy, I guess.
Does that make sense? My framing that properly? It makes absolutely sense. In fact, I would say it's so simple that people are skeptical of how simple it is.
You know what the number one thing you need to do to make it into a special ops program is? The number one thing that you need to do. No.
Don't quit. What's the number one thing that an entrepreneur needs to do? Don't quit.
You hear these entrepreneur stories and, oh, look at how this, oh, this person was successful overnight. They don't realize what people don't realize is they tried three companies before that, that all failed.
And the fourth was an overnight success that took 11 years. So, so not, none of it, like I've never seen anybody who was an overnight success.
You look at that, the, the work that Kobe put in, you look at the work that Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan, or, uh, you know, any of these people put in, right. That Musk is putting in that Bezos put in that Jobs put in.
I mean, any of these folks,

if you look at the work that they put in, then they just eventually started tripping over success. And, but it's, they didn't quit and they just continually advanced the ball.
And I think part of the problem that we run into in the business and entrepreneurship community is that we get addicted to fighting battles. So I just put out a, a, a sub stack on this very issue.
Um, I put it on LinkedIn as well. It, and I, I know this personally because in my old world as an operator, we were, we, we got kind of addicted to the fight.
We weren't really thinking about the strategic wins and what was going on all we knew was hey go to this country and go save good guys kill bad guys and do that on repeat and and so we it was it was pretty binary because okay well there's a certain set of skills that we need to be able to do that um i do not need to understand computer science and AI to rescue good guys and kill bad guys. Super simple.
But then at the CIA, things kind of changed. It got a lot more strategic because now very, very small teams operating with virtually no supervision.
And we were kind of able to do really whatever we wanted and kind of came up with our own mission. So suddenly the strategic objectives became extremely important because instead of having missions, missions handed down from, from a higher headquarters, we were, we were developing our own missions and, and doing our own work and deciding what it was we were going to do.
And the agency gave us all the rope in the world we wanted. However, they made it very clear that if we hung ourselves, they weren't going to come cut us down.
We had to start thinking more strategically. And while in my old world as an operator, right, the hard skills are a lot of fun, right? The combatives and the CQB and the gun work, right? It's all really fun.
It's fun stuff. But that's not what moves the needle strategically.
It moves the needle tactically, and that's the foundation. But suddenly I started saying, okay, I see where the future is going.
I see where I'm paying attention to the wars that are rolling out around me. When I'm not on deployment, I'm going to sign up for that computer science course.
I'm going to sign up to go learn that new data analysis tool. I'm going to go hang out with the nerds.
I'm going to go check out, you know, 12 years ago, this like really cool technology called AI that they were rolling out. Right.
I'm going to go learn all this stuff. Well, here we are 12 years later after making those kinds of decisions and the decisions that I made 12 years ago are what are informing what I do today.
So people will say, well, oh yeah, Nick's this like, you know, keyboard guy. But then the people who know me from the past are like, oh no, like Nick's a shooter.
But then people who know me from undergrad are like, oh no, Nick was the like super nerd. Well, I'm actually all of those things.
Every each just each one of those groups of people only got a slight window into who I was. And what that turned into was now I can I can build whatever it is that I want to build, because I put in all the work 12 years ago, 22 years ago, maybe even 32 years ago to lead.
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To the point that I'm at today, and I think the big problem that entrepreneurs run into, or that their detractors run into, is they don't want to put in that work. And that's okay.
We don't need everybody in the world to be launching rockets to Mars or trying to solve the commercial sex trafficking issue. We don't need everybody to be doing that.
But don't demonize the people who are just because they're not living like you are. Yeah.
And that's I'll be honest with you. That's why I do this show is is I've always wanted it to be a home for unreasonable people to learn from other unreasonable people, right? Like that's, that's the idea.
And it came from, you know, my own journey as an entrepreneur and growing in my career and the various things that I've done. I've been referred to as unreasonable so many times.
It was actually out of honor, isn't it? it was actually on one of the letters when I was fired from a job was, you know, the, the,

despite your performance,

the unreasonable nature that you take with your team,

you know,

blah,

blah,

blah,

blah,

blah.

And it's like,

you. was fired from a job was um you know the the despite your performance the unreasonable nature that you take with your team you know blah blah blah blah and it's like so so hitting the goals happy team those didn't matter it was that I didn't kowtow to the leadership with an unreasonable now some of that is me learning and being immature right I probably could handle myself better at certain right but the other side it was, I also was keenly aware coming from where I came from, you know, I grew up in a household where I was blessed with two loving parents, but we were, we did not have any.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere in a tiny town of 900 people with, you know, I mean, like we would get one new shirt and one new pair of pants for the whole school year. And you would just wear the shit from the last year with holes in it and

stains and your one new stuff.

Like that was how I grew up.

Right.

So like I learned very early that looking around where every role model was

either an alcoholic or a pothead or worse.

And,

you know,

looking and going the only way out of here is to become a different version

of than all these people is to become this person who does different things, who does seemingly what they would consider unreasonable things like not getting hammered every night and not, you know, being a freaking clown and not becoming a drug dealer. You know what I mean? Like those, it was unreasonable for me to like beyond, you know, being an athlete and focusing on getting good grades and go, you know, those were like unreasonable things at that time, which may sound crazy to some of you, but from where I came from, very, very unreasonable.
And because you were the straight stick to that, to that community. Yes.
You were a reminder of what they could be, but they were choosing not to be. And for that reason, I literally talked to two people from high school for that exact reason.
Right now I'm fine with that. That's not something I even concern myself with, but, but it's, but's but it is an interesting thing and and what I hear you saying is like look like these are all choices that we we get in life to make and I think what I what I would hope people take from this if you aren't willing to put in that extra effort is be okay with where you are and the choices that you make it like you said it's okay to say you know what I want to do at 4 30 every day i want work to be done i don't want to think about it again i'm gonna hang out with my family watch tv netflix with the spouse you know whatever and that's what i want my life to be and it's like there's no there's there's nothing wrong with that like god bless you for that if that's what you want what, what I, what I think where I do judge those people is in then turning around and vilifying those who say,

I'm going to, I'm going to see my kids less in exchange for this thing that I want to get done.

That's the decision. That's the math they made.
You don't have to agree with their math,

but that's the decision they made. And I just, what bothers is that and is this idea that like you get to choose exactly who you want to be, the life you want to live, right? Your priorities.
Exactly. You're creating your building.
That's great. But there's no reason for someone who chooses a different path that didn't tear you down because your path is different.
And I think that's where from a communication standpoint, you know, our political class has completely lost their minds. So we can't even look to them anymore.
You know, it's funny. I was talking to my kids the other day.
I was at my kids play baseball and I was talking to one of the other dads and we were just kind of standing around before practice. And, you know, everyone's just kind of getting their stuff together.
And I don't know how this came up, but I was like, remember when being the president, like that's, that was like goal. Like when I was a kid and everyone's like, what do you want to be when you grow up? Right.
It was like like the really ambitious kids were like, I want to be the president. I was like, oh, that's awesome.
You want to be the president? They don't even think that way today. Like our politicians have so lost that respect and that that political kind of talking head class because of the nature of their communication and the frankly except for a few none of them create or have created anything literally it's just been these narratives like literally the only thing they create is narratives that to try to get elected and it's it's it's sad that we've we've lost that um but i want to i want to i want I want to turn a little bit to your fund and to the work in sex trafficking.
Where did this come from? Why did that become such a huge part of your mission? Like, where did this come from? The short story is, and I've told this, you know, a lot of times on, you know, podcasts like Patrick Bet David and stuff in much longer form, um, is I met the CIA was working, uh, counterterrorism issues with a JSOC counterpart. We came across, uh, what I like to call smoking gun Intel on a child trafficker that was moving children across the Afghanistan Pakistan border, uh, and basically selling them for whatever reason.
And we figured, like, okay, we now know this intel. Trafficking isn't our mission.
It's somebody else's mission. We're going to write this intel up.
It's going to go through the process and end up in the right person's hands. But it turned out there was no right person's hands for the intel to land in.
And that made me really curious. Human trafficking wasn't, at the time, a mandatory presidential reporting requirement.
I don't think it is still to this day. And that got me really curious.
And when you have access to systems at the Central Intelligence Agency, which like when you're at the CIA and you have the highest clearance that you can possibly get in the government, there's nothing that you can't reach down into. Now, if you start reaching down into classified programs that you have no business reaching down into, like some people are going to come knock on your door and ask you some questions.
But beyond that, you can kind of get to anything that you need to get to. So I started hunting for who's got the ball on the human trafficking issue and is running it towards the end zone and figured out that there was really nobody.
And that then led me kind of deeper into learning about human trafficking. And I learned that dollar for dollar, the largest human trafficking market in the world is the United States of America.
And that just blew my mind because I was just still thinking that a human trafficking was an over their issue, not an over here issue. What does that mean? We're the biggest human trafficker because I was at our biggest human trafficking market, as in we have the most customers and we spend as a country the most money on purchasing primarily children and young girls for sex.
That is something that we, the United States of America, are the number one in the world on. Trump mentioned that as one of the reasons why he wanted to shut down the border.
And I had a friend of mine who's a Democrat reach out and say, you know, this is another one of the ways that he deflects from, you know, his Nazi, whatever is kind of crazy, but but completely disregarding this idea of human trafficking. I think for a lot of for a lot of like everyday Americans in particular, we see ourselves as a good guys.
Right. And I had this conversation actually with my sister who is slowly converting from a liberal to more conservative mindset.
It's only taken me 36 years, but I'm getting her there. And I don't mean to be I actually don't necessarily align with the political parties because I mean, she has kids and she pays taxes, meaning we've taxes now.
She has a house and she's paying taxes now. She's still working on a kid.
Funny how that happens. Yeah, but all of a sudden she buys a home and has to pay taxes and is slowly converting.
But I brought this issue up to her because she's a very thoughtful. She's one of those people who moved to the Democrat Party because she's just got this enormous, like she's so caring, right? Animals, children, she helps the disabled.
She's a wonderful human being, like, wonderful. And so, like, she struggles because she's always seen, like, this idea of, and I really don't want to make this political, but, like, the left is being the good guys, right? And, you know, and I come back to her and I'm like, there aren't good guys, like, you're thinking wrong.
Like there's no good guys and bad guys. Like that's not necessarily how the world works.
Like there are bad people who do evil things for sure, but we can't put them in these buckets. But I brought up the human trafficking, the sex trafficking as a as an issue.
And she was like, no, that's not real. That's all misinformation.
Like where where can we're like, obviously, I know you have you have resources at deliver fund but like i how do we make this tangible for people to understand what is actually i mean this is one of the most horrific things that happens in our world right maybe you know it's certainly it's there at the top level of horrific things that can possibly happen being fucking trafficked into this country and having to have sex as a minor or worse.

It's not even just being trafficked into the country.

So when I learned that human trafficking

in the United States, right, dollar for dollar,

largest human trafficking market in the world,

my mind was blown because I'm like, wait a minute.

Here I am in Afghanistan, right?

We can kill people with flying robots from 6,000 miles away, but we can't do anything about this child trafficking issue. And I'm still thinking it's like, oh, it's coming across the border and things like that.
And that does happen, right? I mean, Trump is not wrong. It does happen.
And there are traffickers who come in here and they bring children with them and they recycle children across the border and all that. But according to the DOJ, 86% of the victims in their cases are U.S.

citizens. Over 70% of the human traffickers are U.S.
citizens. So whether it's traffickers coming

across the border or it's traffickers who are already in our country, they're preying upon

our children. And the reason why is because of the internet.
I mean, in my day, you know, the creep, right, pre-internet, the creepy guy on the wrong side of town, everybody knew, keep the kids away from him. And the only kids that he could abuse were really the kids that he could get access to, which were usually lower socioeconomic demographic, undersupervised, mom's working three jobs, no dad, right? I mean, the typical story.
Now, because of the internet and poverty being relative to what you compare it to, the girl with $1,000 shoes in the private school is impoverished compared to the girls with the $2,000 shoes. And so she gets on her phone because her parents are checked out, right? Mom's on Xanax and wine and dad is just working too much to be, you know, to be relative or to be a good influence in her life and understand what's going on.
And so she gets on her phone and she makes a couple of bad decisions trying to get some extra money. And next thing you know, you have a girl who's being trafficked out of an $80,000 private school.
That is a real story that we were involved in. And she was going to school every day and being trafficked in the evening.
And everybody just knew that her grades were suffering and she was getting, you know, her mental health was getting worse, but nobody knew what was going on. So the internet gave all the predators access to every child in the country and really around the world who has a smartphone or a gaming console.
We've got plenty of cases where that happened. And so that was my kind of epiphany as a CIA officer to say, wait a minute.
Again, most powerful military, economic and intelligence might the world has ever seen. And yet our own children are being trafficked.
We got to do something about this. And then that's where I took my skills training and created a fund called Deliver Fund to be able to fund the equipping, training, and advising of law enforcement officers to help them be able to close human trafficking cases and find human traffickers and put them in bars, behind bars, better, faster, and cheaper.
That was the overall goal, which obviously then also I have for-profit companies that build technology and provide that technology to deliver fund for free and then deliver fund as its own engineers, that it's building technology. And so we have this consortium, right, this ecosystem for good that's all centered around this one problem of...
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Grainger, for the ones who get it done. Fighting child sex trafficking in the United States of America, which then translates to other Western countries.
And so that was kind of the origin story. And that, I think, is the thing that people need to understand is trafficking is not predominantly a border issue.
It is connected to the border. I'm not saying it's not.
But predominantly, it's the trafficker from L.A. who's moving through Oklahoma on his way to Chicago, who who has been targeting a couple of 14 year old girls in rural America and grabs them, drugs them, takes them to Chicago and starts selling them.
That's human trafficking in America. I don't think people know that.
I mean, honestly, what you just said, I mean, this is something that I've even looked into. I had no idea that this was predominantly inside the States issue.
Why is this not like why is this not the most unified topic? Like like like when the movie and I cannot believe that I'm forgetting the name of the movie that came out about the guy that went down to Mexico. It's a fiction.
Yeah, it's all come out in the media that that movie was a fiction. But it at least helped to shine a little bit of a spotlight on.
But it wasn't a unifying topic. Even if it's a whole fiction just to bring awareness to the topic, right? Like even, you know, that being true, how that movie got immense hate.
And I'm like, I just can't wrap my head around. I mean, this seems like the most unifying topic that should exist.
We do not want our children to be sex trafficked. Full stop.
Yeah, full stop. Who, like you would think everyone would be kumbaya, arms locked, like let's find these people.
Let's go frigging get them. Like, I can't understand.
Like, what is the counter argument? Why are there not, you know, and maybe I'm sure you have politicians that are behind what you're doing and helping you at some level. But, like, how is our political class not just like this has to end, period, let's go get them.
Like, we can have a war on drugs and marijuana. You know, we can't have a war on kids getting trafficked.
Like, I don't understand the mentality. Like, what is the counter argument to what you're saying? How could anyone push back against this? Well, think about this.
We have a drug enforcement agency, yet 90% of drugs are actually legal. 90% of the drugs that they enforce are actually legal.
And so we have a entire multi-billion dollar agency that's focused around the illicit sale of legal commodities by and large. Fentanyl is legal, right? I've got some kidney disease because of some, you know, stuff that happened to me when I was in the military and the CIA.
And so I have to go in for these like surgeries and stuff. They give me fentanyl, right? It's hyper useful.
When you look at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms are all legal. One of those firearms is actually a constitutionally protected commodity.
Yet we have this entire bureaucracy that spends billions of dollars fighting what is the illicit sale of those legal commodities. 100% of human slavery, which is what we're talking about when we talk about sex trafficking, is we're talking about people who are being enslaved and then forced to do these things.
100% of human slavery is illegal for the 13th Amendment, and yet we don't have a singularly focused agency on human trafficking. And that's not to take away from those agencies.
Department of Homeland Security, the DOJ, the FBI, they are doing the absolute best that they can. But the major majority of the heavy lifting in law enforcement goes to state and local law enforcement officers.
When was the last time you were pulled over by an FBI agent for speeding? And so it's those state and local law enforcement officers that are doing the heavy lifting and they have no resources, no anything. And I think there's a large part of the reason for this is that there's a massive overlap.
And I do mean massive overlap. And a lot of your a lot of your male listeners are about to get real uncomfortable, which means I'm doing my job.
A massive overlap between human trafficking and strip clubs and pornography. So if you have an OnlyFans, if you're one of these guys who participates in like OnlyFans and Pornhub and things like that, there is a, and you do it regularly, there is virtually a, it's not a non-zero chance, but it's a very, very small chance that you have actually fed money into the human trafficking market.
You have these, you know, and so the guy who likes to go to the strip clubs doesn't want to hear that. And so, of course, just puts it out of his mind.
Nevermind the fact that we have data, we have photos, we have indisputable proof that this is happening. There's this incredible book about Pornhub and the absolute evil that happens on that platform called Takedown.
Lila McElwain, absolute hero for the work that she did in helping to take a lot of the child pornography off of Pornhub and a lot of the rape videos and things like that, and a lot of the trafficking videos. When you have these parts of our society that are the over-sexualization of our society, that are treating women and girls as commodities, and then you have predominantly men.
And again, I said we are the largest human trafficking market in the world, which means that statistically, 30% of the men who are listening to this right now are engaged in those activities and they like those activities. And so they don't want somebody coming along and telling the truth about those activities.
That's why we get so much pushback. And as soon as I see, it's really funny when I go to talk to groups of donors or investors or whoever about the human trafficking issue, inevitably I'll have one or two men come up to me and be like, but human trafficking, isn't that like, isn't that the oldest trade in the world? I go, that's interesting.
I was talking about human trafficking and you brought a prostitution. You just told me everything I need to know about you and what you're into and what, and the types of things that you like and why men like me are, are extremely confronting.
And this gets back to the, the slaying the dragons, so to speak, right? It's why I personally absolutely hate the existence of the things that people like Andrew and Tristan Tate say, right? They're like, oh, women are property. I mean, that's undeniable.
They've said that in text messages like we have that in court documents. And yet they like they the way that that they are training other men is absolutely reprehensible.
And what I find is that the men that they're training are living in their mom's basement. They don't have the courage to go volunteer for the military, much less special ops.
They're not gonna go try to get into a good university. They're not gonna try to go to the CIA.
They're not gonna actually try to go slay a dragon. And they're basically perpetual victims.
So I think the men listening have a choice to make. It's like, are you a perpetual victim? And you're like, well, I can't get a girlfriend.
And so I'm gonna go do this porn thing or this strip club thing. Or I'm gonna go visit this woman who's a prostitute, which by the way, about 80% of what you think is prostitution is actually human trafficking by the best data that we can find.
Or are you just going to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and make a decision that you're going to go be a better man? And the reason I really focus on men here is because that human trafficking market, it's supply and demand generated and the demand is generated by men. If men didn't want the product, there would be no market and they would sell, they would try to sell the product someplace else.
I mean, that's, that's, that's how it works. I mean, it is like us don't stand up to the men who are creating the demand.
Then what, what are, I mean, what, what are we really standing for? Dude, this is why I was so excited to have you on the show, because like, these are the kind of things that just drive me absolutely crazy. You know, I'm a firm, I'm a huge fan of Jordan Peterson and his mindset and the way he approaches things.
And he has this mentality, act as if, right? And it started out of his belief in god when he first started i found jordan peterson uh before 12 rules for life which was a book that changed my life but i found him because he did a 17 episode series on genesis right so where he breaks down an hour and a half chunk it dude i'll go check that out yeah we recommend you got to go way back in his archive but you'll find it It's 17 episodes, it's long But he approaches it from a very pragmatic standpoint And what he says is Because at the time He believed in the lessons But hadn't necessarily Hadn't necessarily figured out His true relationship to God So people would ask him all the time at that time, this is like 2015, 2016. He got asked a bunch, you know, do you believe in God? He would get that question constantly.
And he said, what I believe is the Bible is the best set of rules for living a purpose-driven, fulfilled life. That's what I believe it today.
He goes, and my relation and how I approach God is I don't, he goes, I don't know if he exists or not, but I act as if he does. And he says, what that does is it is what I know, what I know that's going to do mentally is push me in the direction to believing.
I will believe at some point as I act through the lessons that Jesus taught us, right? So I think it's a wonderful mindset. So what I try to coach people and I talk about on the show too is like, okay, you're not that thing today.
You're not the guy that can go to a community event and introduce yourself to a girl and have her be interested. You're not that guy today.
Okay. The only option you have is to act as if you were that right.
Just go act as if you were that guy. You don't have to be that guy.
Pretend go pretend to be that guy. And what's going to happen is the more you pretend to be a fit guy, to be a guy that doesn't, you know, waste time on porno or waste time on social media, right? The more you act as the person that you would like yourself to be, surprisingly and shockingly, you eventually become that person.
It means start as an act. And this goes the same for entrepreneurs, right? You might not know what you're doing, but if you act as an entrepreneur act, solving problems, working through things, all of a sudden you wake up one day and you're like, holy, I'm like an entrepreneur that like build stuff and runs companies.
And, you know, all of a sudden you wake up and you're that thing. And.
But sorry for that diatribe, like it's the whole fake it till you make it thing. Like when when I hear people say fake it till you make it, I'm like, no, that that's that's that's completely wrong.
You shouldn't fake it till you make it thing. Like when I hear people say fake it till you make it, I'm like, no, that's completely wrong.
You shouldn't fake it till you make it. What you should do is you should do exactly what it is that you're saying, Ryan, right? You should act as if you are that person, right? And that's what I'm talking about is like, so to decide I am an entrepreneur, right? We go all the way back to the beginning.
We said like, well, what's the secret, right? It's you find purpose and then you decide that you're going to act on that purpose. It's that simple.
And so once you decide, I am an entrepreneur, well, that doesn't make you an entrepreneur, right? But you're going to now, if you start taking the steps to become an entrepreneur, then you will eventually morph into that person. And if you decide I'm going to have a strong marriage, does that mean, and let's just say your marriage is falling apart, right? And everything's going bad.
I decide I'm going to have a strong marriage. Does that mean that you'll be successful? No, it's the same thing as deciding that you're going to be an entrepreneur or deciding that I'm going to reduce commercial sex trafficking by 80%.
When I tell people that they're like, you are grandiose and crazy. And I say, thank you.
Right. Um, in fact, if you go to my website, which is just Nick and I see McKinley.com forward slash 10 points, I actually lay out in explicit detail to include Markov chain models, right? So, so math models on exactly why I believe that, that I can accomplish this, right? And it's not me, right? That, that we collectively can accomplish this.
Um, and I put it out there publicly, which is probably scary. I mean, getting shot at actually isn't all that scary.
Um, when you've done enough times, but, that would probably be really scary. It's putting out something that public is actually scarier because it's like, all right, I am putting out a manifesto that I'm going to stand on.
I'm telling the world what my purpose is and I'm driving towards this purpose. Does it mean I'll reach that goal? No.
But what if I manage to and we managed to collectively reduce commercial sex

trafficking by 80 or by 60 we don't make the 80 that's a huge win let's do that all the way back to the first point if you and there's a there's a book behind me that was written that kind of shares us to 10x is easier than 2x if you shoot for the massive goal the massive ridiculous unbelievable ridiculous, unbelievable, unacceptable, unreasonable goal, and you miss, you still have an enormous win. But if you shoot for what you think is possible and you miss, you're still unsatisfied.
You're still unfulfilled. You feel like a loser.
And the decisions become clearer, right? With that goal that you set, there's like one path to getting that done, right? Like I have to do this and I have to raise this and we need this technology and I need these three groups on board and blah, blah, blah. You're like, there is one path to hit that goal.
And now you know exactly what you need to do versus, you know, the, the people who wake up every day. And, and earlier in my life, I'm just as guilty of this as anybody where you have like seven things and your goals aren't that big.
So you're not really sure what to do every day. So you start spending your time on, you know, tasks that don't add value.
And, dude, I could talk to you all frigging day, Nick. I absolutely love this.
We're going to have links to Deliver Fund. We're going to have links to your website in the description.
Whether you're watching on YouTube or listening, just scroll down. You'll find that stuff.

And my man, I want this show to be a supporter of Deliver Fund. So I'm going to wait for you after we get done offline and figure out ways that we can kind of build helping push people.
Because this is something that's near and dear to my heart. I coach all my kids' sports teams.
I'm heavily involved. that's kind of kids our kids are so incredibly important to the security and sanctity of this country and it's our our our our god-given responsibility to protect them and i think uh the work you're doing is absolutely incredible i couldn't be more honored to be on the show man so uh any other places any other final place that you'd like to send people if they just want to get involved in your world? If you just go to my website and go to the mission tab, you'll see all the different things I'm involved in my data and AI company.
So if you're a for profit company, we can actually help you make sure that human traffickers are not using your platforms because they use all the platforms we use for business. Right.
If you are a you know, If you're in law enforcement or a prosecutor or part of that chain, we are more than happy DeliverFund will provide you, equip, train, and invite you with everything you need to include case data and intelligence. That's all free for you.
If you're a donor and this resonates with you, you can go right to that mission tab and you can find information about deliver fund and you can you can make a donation there we are solely uh funded right now by by the generosity of donors so all of this like doge cutting and stuff like that doesn't affect us one bit we are we are moving forward with a mission as strong ever have. Um, and then if you just want to learn more about me or, or you can find me on

all the social platforms at the Nick McKinley. And again, my website is Nick and I see McKinley.com.
Appreciate you, man. Thank you so much.
Thank you. In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home.

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