Full transcript
From skiing in Montana to Air Force Pararescue
Nic grew up in Billings, Montana - “not a lot of surfing in Montana,” he jokes, correcting the host’s intro. He left the state to join one of the most demanding career fields in U.S. special operations: Air Force Pararescue, the units responsible for going in after downed personnel and bringing them home.
After more than a decade as a Pararescueman, that record is what put him on the CIA’s radar.
Why the CIA recruits from special operations
“The CIA is not a bunch of shooters running around picking locks and climbing up the sides of buildings,” Nic explains. The kinetic side of the agency - the people who take annual shooting and fitness evaluations - “is a very, very small group of people within what is a large government agency.”
But when the agency “found itself at war on multiple continents within dozens of countries, it didn’t have enough people who could operate in those types of environments - so it started poaching from the military special ops community. That’s how I got involved.” Nic was the first person with a Pararescue background to become a staff officer.
The business model of human trafficking
Asked what attracts so many people to trafficking, Nic is blunt: “Profits. This is strictly a money play.”
He pushes back on the popular picture of who runs these networks. “The misconception is that all human traffickers are men, and that is not the case - many human traffickers are women.” Treating trafficking as a profit-seeking market, rather than a moral aberration committed by a single profile of offender, is what makes an intelligence-driven counterattack possible.
Why prevention beats rescue
The strategic core of the interview - and of DeliverFund - is a simple inversion: “The reason that there are human trafficking victims is because there are human traffickers. So we don’t need to spend all of our time focusing on rescuing victims. We need to focus on preventing victims by getting rid of human traffickers.”
It is the same logic Nic used against terror networks: don’t wait downstream for the next casualty - map the network and dismantle the people running it.
The “real Jack Ryan” label
Nic’s story is famously hard to research - by design. When VICE and Amazon went looking for a real-world parallel to Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, the people around him kept pointing to the same person. The comparison stuck.