Phil McKinney

12/12/2025

Hard work is the wrong answer.

A software engineer grabbed a random word from a dictionary — “beehive” — and designed an algorithm that transformed his company. His colleagues were grinding harder. He was thinking differently.

That’s lateral thinking. Not luck. Not genius. A systematic approach to finding solutions hiding in plain sight.

Southwest didn’t create a better airline experience — they reimagined air travel as mass transportation. Tesla didn’t build a superior car — they reconceptualized personal mobility around sustainable energy.

They didn’t optimize. They disrupted the framework entirely.

The question isn’t whether you’re smart enough to solve hard problems. You are. The question is whether you’re willing to disrupt your own thinking patterns to discover what conventional logic misses.

This is a two-minute introduction to the lateral thinking framework. The full episode breaks down four techniques you can apply immediately — plus practice methods that make mastery inevitable.

Full video on YouTube. Link in bio.

08/12/2025

A military doctor accused him of lying to get disability benefits.

He was a decorated Navy SEAL Chief. Nine and a half years in the Teams. Multiple combat deployments.

An RPG exploded a foot from his head in Afghanistan. He was knocked unconscious—his teammates never mentioned it. The blast was never documented.

Six years later, his body was shutting down. He'd wasted to 130 pounds. Bleeding internally. Brain fog that never lifted.

When he asked if it might be connected to that blast, the doctor wrote in his medical record that he suspected the SEAL was faking it.

The VA later confirmed what the military dismissed: significant traumatic brain injury.

But here's what haunts him most—his buddy Ryan was fighting the same invisible war. Same symptoms. Same confusion. The VA gave him standard PTSD meds that can make brain injuries catastrophically worse.

Zach begged the military not to kick Ryan out. They did anyway.
Ryan took his own life in 2017. The autopsy revealed profound brain damage—caused not by enemy fire, but by training with their own weapons.

Now Zach is building what should have protected them both. Blast-reducing armor. AI-driven concealment. Nanotechnology materials. Quick-release systems that actually work when lives depend on them.

His company's mission is four words: Innovation That Saves Lives.

I'm proud to serve on his Advisory Board and contribute what I can to help him achieve his mission—bringing warriors home whole.

✅ This is his story. I hope you'll read it and share it: 👉 https://open.substack.com/pub/theinnovatorsnetwork/p/bringing-them-home-they-said-his?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

A Navy SEAL's fight against the invisible wounds killing America's elite warriors.

07/12/2025

One million seconds is 11 days ago.

One billion seconds ago? Bill Clinton was president. The internet was just getting started. That was 1994.

One trillion seconds ago, humans hadn’t invented farming yet. We were still painting on cave walls.

After 30 years of watching executives make billion-dollar decisions, I’ve learned that the biggest manipulation isn’t about facts—it’s about scale. The people who control the money know something you don’t: your brain literally cannot process the difference between a billion and a trillion.

So they use them interchangeably. And you nod along.
This is what I call “scale blindness”—and it’s weaponized against you every single day. In boardrooms. In budget meetings. In political speeches.

Every time someone casually tosses around numbers with nine or twelve zeros, they’re banking on your brain giving up.

The fix? Convert to time. Seconds don’t lie.

Once you see this pattern, you can’t unsee it. And that’s exactly what the manipulators are afraid of.
What’s a number you’ve heard recently that suddenly looks different with this framework? Drop it in the comments—let’s do the math together. 👇

Full breakdown + more decision frameworks in this week’s Studio Notes. Link in bio.

Also on YouTube: I go deeper into why smart people fall for scale manipulation (and how to stop).

03/12/2025

Quick test:
One million seconds = 11 days.
One billion seconds = 31 years.

Feel that gap? Your brain can't. And that's exactly what they're counting on.

When politicians throw "billion" and "trillion" around in the same sentence like they're comparable? They're banking on your intuition being broken.

That "4 out of 5 dentists recommend" claim you've heard your whole life? Complete manipulation. Once you see HOW they did it, you'll never trust a statistic the same way again.

This week's Thinking 101 shows you how to fight back.

✅🎬 Watch this week's video: https://youtu.be/kN7nPTEwQwk

📩 Read this week's Studio Notes to experience how I learned numerical literacy the hard way. https://philmckinney.substack.com/p/they-accused-me-of-fraud-it-made

♻️ What's the most suspicious statistic you've seen lately? Drop it below.

Quick—which is more dangerous: the thing that kills 50,000 Americans every year, or the thing that kills 50?Your brain says the first one, obviously. The dat...

26/11/2025

Tomorrow, someone at your table will ask what you’re grateful for.

You’ll have about 10 seconds to answer.

Most people reach for the safe list. Health. Family. Career. The comfortable, expected answers that everyone nods along to.
But what if you actually said what you meant?

A few weeks ago, my 12-year-old grandson Liam sat down next to me at Sunday lunch and started asking me questions. Real ones. Not polite ones.

He’d been listening to one of my podcast episodes about innovation. He had an idea—a big one—and started walking me through the engineering challenges like he was presenting to a boardroom.

“It would need way better batteries than we have now, Papa.”

In that moment, something shifted. I realized what I’m actually grateful for this year. And it’s not on the safe list.

Before you sit down at that table tomorrow, watch this. It might change what you say when it’s your turn.

✅🎬 https://youtu.be/neWSDaryhTo

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

The comfortable list we share at Thanksgiving stopped working. Health. Family. Career. The things we say around the table because they sound right.But when y...

24/11/2025

I stepped out of the shower and my chest split open.

Not metaphorically. The surgical incision from my cardiac device procedure simply opened up. Three bath towels to clean it up.

My wife—a nurse, the exact person I needed—was 1,000 miles away dealing with her parents’ estate. Both had died late last year.

That March morning was supposed to be routine recovery. Instead, it became surgery number two.

Then three. Then four. Then five.

Five cardiac surgeries. Six hospitalizations. All in twelve months.

And here we are at Thanksgiving.

I’ve sat around enough Thanksgiving tables to know how the ritual works. You name what you’re grateful for. Health. Family. Career. The comfortable, expected list.

But when you’ve been wheeled into surgery wondering if the anesthesia will wear off properly… when you’ve watched your wife juggle grief and your near-death simultaneously… the performative list doesn’t cut it anymore.

Something happened during Sunday lunch last month that changed everything for me. My 12-year-old grandson sat next to me and started drilling me with questions that stopped me cold.

What he asked—and what I realized in that moment about legacy—is something I need to share. Especially now.

Because at 65, with both parents dying at 68, the math isn’t encouraging. The years in front of me are far fewer than the years behind.

The clock isn’t just ticking. It’s screaming.

I wrote about what I’m actually grateful for this year—the unfiltered version—in this week’s article.

It’s not comfortable reading. But if you’ve ever wondered what matters when the platitudes get stripped away, this is it.

✅👉🏻 https://open.substack.com/pub/philmckinney/p/what-im-actually-thankful-for-after?r=3rtha&utm_medium=ios

♻️ What are YOU actually grateful for—not the performative version, but the truth?



-----

Want me to adjust anything else?

Five cardiac surgeries taught me the difference between Thanksgiving platitudes and what you're grateful for when the clock is screaming.

20/11/2025

Been writing about something for a year: how we’ve all been outsourcing our thinking.

To algorithms. To experts. To “what would successful people do?”

And we don’t even realize it’s happening.

People keep telling me: “Write a book.”

So I might. 100 pages. Practical tools for thinking independently when everything around us is designed to think for us.

But I need honest feedback first.

✅👉 Read the concept and take the quick survey - link in bio.

Would you actually read this? Or am I crazy for thinking this matters?

Let me know. 👇

15/11/2025

I used to feel weird about this.

People reach out wanting to talk through their decisions with me. And I want to help. But I kept thinking - how do I do this without it feeling transactional? Without it feeling like I’m just... selling hours?

Took me a while to figure it out. But here’s where I landed.

If you’re facing one of those decisions where the path isn’t clear - maybe you’re choosing between a pivot or staying the course, or you’ve got conflicting advice from smart people, or you’re just not sure what your next move should be - I do live one-on-one sessions.

We jump on a call, we dig into your specific situation, and we work through it together using the same frameworks I’ve used for 30 years making these kinds of calls.

It’s not coaching where I just ask you questions. It’s me sharing what I’ve learned from thousands of decisions - the ones that worked and the expensive ones that didn’t.

I do these on intro.co. You can book 15 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever makes sense.

And just so you know - 100% of what I make from these sessions goes to Hacking Autism, a cause that’s really important to my family.

So if you want to talk through a decision you’re facing, link is in the bio. Let’s work through it together.

Intro link: https://intro.co/philmckinney

11/11/2025

I hired 56 people per week for six months straight at Teligent.

Eight people per day. Every day. Over 1,000 employees in six months. Just in my department.

Everyone told me this was success. We'd gone public. We were scaling at startup speed. I was the hero who could hire fast enough to keep up with our growth.

I was actually creating a catastrophe I'd spend years trying to fix.

The culture became toxic almost overnight. HR issues I still can't believe happened. Teams working against each other without even realizing it. Dysfunction spreading faster than I could contain it.

But here's where it gets worse.

While I was frantically trying to hold Teligent together, my parents' health was failing. We'd moved them into our log house in the mountains—seemed like the perfect solution.

Until the night six firemen had to carry my father 1.5 miles down a snowy mountain because the ambulance couldn't reach us.

Everything converged at once: Professional disaster. Personal crisis. And a financial situation that made both problems impossible to solve simultaneously.

I was sitting in my car on the last day of our contract contingency for a house we desperately needed but couldn't afford. In four hours, we'd either commit or lose it. My parents' safety was on the line.

That's when my phone rang.

A broker. Asking about shares I didn't know I had.

What happened next taught me more about decision-making than my entire career at HP—and it wasn't what I expected.

The full story involves a favor I'd forgotten, someone who thought three moves ahead when I wasn't thinking past move one, and a phone call that arrived with timing I can only describe as providential.

✅👉 Read what happened: https://philmckinney.substack.com/p/from-teligent-disaster-to-hp-success

♻️ Question: Have you ever had a professional success that was secretly creating a personal disaster?

Kevin Allodi thought three moves ahead when I wasn't thinking past the first. His decision saved my family—and taught me the framework I use for billion-dollar calls.

09/11/2025

I’ve noticed something happening—to me, to people I work with, to almost everyone I talk to. We’ve started outsourcing our thinking.

Our boss asks for a recommendation. We research what competitors do. Six hours later: thorough analysis. Just not ours.

We need to form an opinion. We check what the experts say, what our preferred sources think, what our community believes. We feel informed.

But we never actually evaluated the claims ourselves.

We make a decision. But first: What do successful people do? What does AI recommend? What would our friends choose?

We’re losing the ability to think independently. Not as metaphor—actually losing it.

For a year, I’ve been writing about this. The response has been consistent: “This needs to be a book.”

So I’m exploring it. A 100-page guide called “Thinking Independence.” Practical tools for thinking independently when everything around us is designed to think for us.

But I’m not writing it unless people actually want it.

I’ve created a concept document—what it would be, who it’s for, what we’d learn. I need your feedback to decide if this is worth pursuing.

✅👉 Read more, get the concept PDF, and take the survey: https://open.substack.com/pub/philmckinney/p/im-thinking-about-writing-a-book

If you’ve ever felt like your thinking isn’t quite your own anymore—or you know someone who’s struggling with this—check it out and let me know what you think.

(And if this resonates, tag someone who needs to see it.)

I'm turning two years of essays into a book on thinking independently. Read the concept and tell me what you think.

03/11/2025

The red light kept flashing. Fifteen NSA employees sat frozen at their desks, thick black covers pulled down over their computer screens.

They couldn't work. Not while I was in the room with my red badge—Secret clearance, the lowest level in the building. They were reading newspapers. Magazines. Paperback novels. Killing time while the guy who built the fingerprint algorithm they wanted sat in a conference room in back, making the best technical bet and the worst business bet of his career.

Here's what that mathematician in the wrinkled shirt taught me about probabilistic thinking:

You are always wrong. Not sometimes. Always. The only question is which kind of wrong you choose to be.

Every biometric system ever built faces the same impossible choice. Lower the matching threshold and users are happy, but security suffers. Raise it and security is tight, but users are miserable. You cannot eliminate both errors. It's mathematically impossible.

Type 1 Error—False Rejection: Legitimate user gets blocked. Productivity dies.

Type 2 Error—False Acceptance: Imposter gets through. Security dies.

You pick your poison. You place your bet. You accept the consequences.

I mastered this in my algorithm. BlitzMatch worked perfectly—quantified the uncertainty, let customers choose their threshold, delivered exactly what we promised. Decades later, it's still running in systems I'll never see.

But while I was nailing the technology's error rates, I completely missed the market's error rates.

I saw NSA buying steadily. FBI wanting integration. Clear government pipeline. So I pushed our investors hard: pivot to government contracts, that's where the customers are NOW.

They said no. "That's not our model. We need 3-5x return in five to seven years. Government contracts don't fit that timeline."

I was optimizing for the wrong variables. The technology succeeded. The business failed.

✅ 🔗 Full story (including what NSA threatened to do with our patents): https://open.substack.com/pub/philmckinney/p/i-wore-a-red-badge-inside-the-nsa?r=3rtha&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

♻️ What's the decision where you got the technical part right but the business part wrong? Drop a comment—I read every one.

I mastered probabilistic thinking in my algorithm. Then made every wrong bet with my business.

13/10/2025

Kroger copied our innovation playbook perfectly.

Every process. Every framework. Every decision gate.

It failed anyway.

I walked into their secret lab—hidden behind whited-out windows in a Kentucky strip mall, doors down from a live Korger store, just like where my aunt and uncle worked for 35+ years. The team had everything: resources, management buy-in, a proven methodology, and bulletproof logic.

And I'd already told them it wouldn't work. 🚨

Not because the framework was wrong. Because they made a reasoning error so invisible that smart people make it every single day—and it destroys credibility before you realize what's happening.

Here's what nobody tells you about "best practices": When you see a company succeed, you're not seeing what caused their success.

You're seeing what they did while succeeding. That difference? It's costing you right now.

I've watched it everywhere:

• Startups copying Google's structure without Google's resources
• Leaders implementing Amazon's principles without Amazon's context
• You, adopting that framework that made perfect sense... and wondering why it's not working

You're not making a dumb mistake. You're caught in the same invisible trap that cost Kroger 18 months.

The breakthrough came when Kroger's team finally understood the difference. That's when everything changed—the scanning tunnel that won industry awards, the IoT innovations, the transformation from "that team that isn't working" to industry leaders.

But the lesson isn't about retail innovation. It's about the reasoning pattern you're using right now to make decisions.

Question: What "proven approach" are you implementing that isn't working the way it should?

Drop it in the comments—I'm curious what patterns we'll see. 👇

✅👉 Read the full Kroger story and discover the reasoning error that's probably shaping your next decision: https://philmckinney.substack.com/p/kroger-copied-hps-innovation-playbook

(Warning: Once you see this pattern, you can't unsee it. And you'll spot it in every meeting, every strategy session, every "let's do what they did" conversation.)

The invisible reasoning error that cost 18 months—and why you're probably making it right now