Doug Pires: Hey, hey, and welcome to Stopping By. I'm Doug Pires, Senior Vice President and Financial Advisor with Pinnacle Wealth Partners at UBS Financial.
Jess DeBear: And I'm Jess DeBear, Associate Director and Senior Wealth Strategy Associate. Also with Pinnacle Wealth Partners. We are located in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, and can be reached at pwp.@ubs.com.
Doug Pires: Our team's mission, our just cause is to bring financial literacy and competency to the masses. We've been fortunate to meet interesting people along the way. They have compelling life stories about overcoming adversity and seeking their passions. Hopefully you'll see that our guests are just like you. So, Jess, who's stopping by today?
Jess DeBear: Doug, would you agree we've had some pretty cool guests here on Stopping By?
Doug Pires: I would agree.
Jess DeBear: Okay. We've had cool guests. I would argue that our guest today may be the coolest ever of our guests. Nothing against the other guests, but today we are chatting with David Rutherford, former Navy SEAL and CIA training instructor. He is also the founder of the Froglogic Institute. He is not affiliated with UBS Financial Services Incorporated and his views are his own.
Doug Pires: Finally, a guest that can match my rugged masculinity, Jess.
Jess DeBear: I was just thinking the exact same thing. How did you know? Pulled the words out of my mouth.
Doug Pires: Let's meet who's stopping by.
Jess DeBear: Hi folks, and welcome back to part two of our special two-part episode featuring former Navy SEAL, David Rutherford. When we left off in part one, we were jokingly asking David if he missed blowing up stuff. And now here's the continuation of this episode where we dive even deeper into his incredible journey, including how he founded the Froglogic Institute and his work with the CIA. Enjoy the rest.
Doug Pires: First of all, this is fascinating and I want to throw out all of our questions. We're going to pivot to, I think, your life after service and how you took what you learned here and move it out to the world. But before one last fun one I'm curious about, you did some pretty impressive stuff. Do you miss blowing things up? When was the last time you blew something up, man?
David Rutherford: I used to for a long, long time. There's nothing better than blowing stuff up. When I was an instructor at SEAL Qualification Training and for our final training exercise, when we would be out at our desert training facility out in the deserts in Eastern California, we would have $250,000 to spend on building these demo reactions. So these kids, the training kids would be set up and we'd build these whole compounds and all this stuff. They'd hit the target, pull out the hostage, get the classified, and then on the way out we would detonate this response. And we'd have 10 gasoline cans filled with petroleum, with 10 pounds of C-4 that detonated creating these monster fireballs. We'd have these .50 caliber squibs that you see in movies come at these guys. We'd hang quarter sticks of C-4 in trees to simulate grenades being thrown at them. We had belt fed blank machine guns that would open up on them.
Doug Pires: Being on a movie site.
David Rutherford: So yeah, every now and then I'll fantasize a little bit about it, but most of all, that itch has faded in my old age because tell you what, it is definitely a young man's game.
Doug Pires: To all of our listeners, David still has all of his fingers.
Jess DeBear: Yes.
Doug Pires: That's an important accomplishment.
Jess DeBear: Yes, yes.
Doug Pires: So wait, let's pivot to Froglogic, right? Using all your training and coming into the world. I believe it started with a children's book. Am I right about that?
David Rutherford: Yeah.
Doug Pires: Tell us about Froglogic. What that is, how you got started.
David Rutherford: When I got out of teams, I came back home to Boca. I tried working for a domestic security company out of Michigan. I was selling camera systems to strip malls and that kind of guard work stuff. And a buddy of mine reached out and was like, "Hey, Rutt. Hey buddy, you want to do a maritime interdiction program with me overseas?" And I was like, "Yes, absolutely." He goes, "Don't you want to know where we're going or who's it with?" I go, "I don't care." He's like, "All right. Be up at Blackwater on Tuesday." And I go, "Where are we going?" And he's like, "Azerbaijan." And I was like, "I don't know where that is, but I don't care." Right? So I was up at Blackwater on Tuesday and out the door on Friday and started my career at Blackwater.
Spent about 10 months in and out of Azerbaijan. Then went back to Afghanistan for a second time. Was training Afghan Counter Drug Commandos and running a building project and then mentoring them on ops and stuff. It was in that, we had gone and hit this small little compound in this village and in Afghanistan, I think was probably the bottom of the barrel in terms of third world conditions, in particular for children, no access to schools. It's as tragic as it can get. And so when we hit this compound, you always separate the kids, the women and the men, and you're doing your stuff. And I'm just looking at these kids and I'm going, how the hell are these kids ever going to have hope? And they don't even know what hope looks like. And that really hit me in a really profound way. And I knew at that time I had figured there was no way I was going to really have any significant way to effectuate real change in the world by carrying a gun for living.
I mean, we obviously need it. What I believe warfare does is it interrupts the decline of the malevolent aspects of the human condition. It interrupts it. It gives people breath, and then they can potentially, hopefully rebuild around something that's not as catastrophic as warfare. When I launched Froglogic for kids, because that was the idea, it was like, all right, I want to work with kids. And I thought, what was the thing that could be extrapolated from what I'd gone through in my experience that could be useful to kids? And I wanted to target that 10 to 15 age range. And it was the idea of self-confidence because that's what the teams really enabled me to regain was self-confidence. So that's when I sat down and I wrote this real basic book, The Eight Missions to Forge Your Self-Confidence and started working with kids. And so from the spring of '06, I did my last gig with Blackwater in the spring of '06. After that I launched, over the next two years I spoke to about 7,000 kids in North America.
Jess DeBear: Wow.
David Rutherford: I started with doing some videos online and then anybody that would have me, any school that would have me, I got a corporate sponsor that would pay for me to talk to any school within a five-mile radius of one of their facilities. It just kept going. And then unfortunately, the 2008 economic calamity hit and at that point I was forced to go back to carrying a gun for a living. And I went to work for the CIA at that time.
Doug Pires: All right, I want to talk more about Froglogic, but you just brought up The Agency. I mean, you bring it up like, oh, I had to get a job at a dry cleaner.
Jess DeBear: I had to go to the CIA.
Doug Pires: All right, so what did you do for The Agency? Or can you not tell us?
David Rutherford: My first two years I was an instructor, and so I wrote and trained case officers how to better integrate with the JSOC units they would be working with in the war zones. Because typically case officers are not operational in a war zone. They do have paramilitary case officers, BMCOs, that do operate in war zones much more proficiently. It's part of a particular group in The Agency, but regular case officers, these are collection people. These are the smartest people, the brightest people in the country that go to work for The Agency. They become the world's leading interviewers. There's nobody better on the planet at interviewing people than case officers. And that's their job to meet with an asset, a source, a sub-source, a walk-in, and to be able to extrapolate critical information that can then be vetted and transformed into what's called actionable intelligence, where it's usable, it's been vetted, verified, and they were phenomenal.
And I got this education and then after two years, it had been since the fall of '05 that I had been in a war zone and really felt detached from it. And so had an opportunity to go back and become operational. And so if your audience did see the movie 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, that's what I did. I provided close protection, security and threat assessments and tactical advisement to case officers who were operating in war zones. And so I spent some time in 2010 in Afghanistan and then 2011 in and Pakistan. And after my final deployment over there in the fall of 2011 is when I decided to walk away from it for good.
Doug Pires: You stopped deploying and then is that how you came back and picked up with Frog... You eventually broadened out Froglogic, right? Not just children, made your way into the corporate world?
Jess DeBear: Corporate world.
David Rutherford: Yeah. When I got back was not sure what I was going to do. We had done a lot of work for Froglogic and I'd written an adult book during those deployments on the basic idea of self-confidence.
Doug Pires: With what time did you have?
Jess DeBear: On the airplane?
Doug Pires: You're protecting people. Oh, my.
David Rutherford: Listen, I'm not writing War and Peace, man. I'm on a flight for three hours and you can finish the book, right? It's just self-help.
Doug Pires: All right, all right.
David Rutherford: It's no great work of prose, right? I'm not Hemingway or anything, but I banged that out and that really kind of seeded the idea like, oh, I could morph this for adults. A buddy of mine who was wholesaling mutual funds reached out. He had gone through Merrill's program and then didn't want to do that, and then became a wholesaler and he's like, "Hey man, I'm doing this. It's a great gig." And he's like, "Are you still speaking?"
And I was like, "Yeah, sure." And he goes, "You any good?" And I was like, "I think so. Yeah, I think so." He goes, "Listen, we use speakers all the time in the financial industry. If you're any good, I'll use you, then my buddy will use you." And that launched. I did around 30 events that first year, and then that launched my speaking career. I really leaned into doing a lot of videos online. I built a bunch of whole curriculum, I started building. I came up with the next evolution of the Froglogic content. The next idea was then talking about what I call the Team Life. And then after that I developed one called Embrace Fear, and then finally there was Live With Purpose. But that all began in 2012 and '13, '14 and '15. And that's really where Froglogic started emerging into what it ultimately became.
I'm coming up on my, it'll be four years in August. I've averaged over 100 events a year averaging, last year I think I was in front of 4,200 advisors in 30 different states. The year before that I was almost 4,500 advisors.
Jess DeBear: That's awesome.
David Rutherford: I think now I really, after doing it in this space for as long as I have, I've finally gotten to a place where I think I can bring significant value add to the teams that I work with or the firms that bring me in. And I understand it now enough to where it's a lot different than it was back in 2012. It's really more to fit the specificity of the industry and what the challenges that advisors and their teams are facing nowadays because, and even in that short amount of time, it's changed so dramatically.
Doug Pires: If I understand correctly, you have girls, you have four girls, three girls?
David Rutherford: Four daughters.
Jess DeBear: Four daughters?
Doug Pires: Four daughters. Oh, boy. All right. And what are their age? Give us an idea of their age.
David Rutherford: 17, 14, 13, and 12.
Doug Pires: Okay. All right. All right. We're in the teenage years. Talking about FOMO.
Jess DeBear: You're going to have four teenage daughters in one year. Oh, this is why you went to Seal Training.
Doug Pires: For multiple years.
David Rutherford: I joke all the time. When this comes up, I tell people, "I'll go back to hell week any day of the week."
Doug Pires: Have any of these ladies brought home a potential boyfriend that you had to interrogate?
David Rutherford: All right. Well, I try and not do that because unfortunately, they all go to a school that I've been working with the football team there to help the school out for the last six years. And so-
Jess DeBear: So the boys know you.
David Rutherford: Pretty much, most of them know who I am, but I learned early on when I first started having girls, I was petrified. But this really brilliant guy who ran a bank out in Memphis, Tennessee once told me, he goes, "Listen, you can do the whole, have your guns on the table and intimidate and all that stuff, but I'm telling you it's not going to go well for you." He had five daughters and done it to his two older daughters, and they had picked horrible, horrible young boys to associate and be a date.
And he goes to his pastor, he tells me, and he said, "I went to my pastor and told him what I was doing. He was laughing at me and he's like, 'Why don't you try and pray for those young boys? Why don't you try and mentor those young boys? Why don't you try and instill in those boys the magnitude of the love that you have for your daughter and what makes your daughter so special and who they are? And if you give that to those boys, then they'll be much more conducive to treating your daughters better. And then also for whatever, if you're blessed enough, they will actually seek you out as a voice for guidance in their lives and their growth as young men.'"
So I've been trying to do that. It's not always easy. I think the biggest thing that I can do is teach my daughters to be strong, intelligent, beautiful, empathetic, resilient young women. Teach them those cornerstone virtues and values that makes them understand what they're looking for.
Jess DeBear: Mm-hmm. It doesn't hurt though that you're a real life, meet the parent. I mean, that doesn't hurt.
David Rutherford: I was in The Agency.
Doug Pires: Alluding to some of those Things is fun to do every now and then.
David Rutherford: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jess DeBear: I'm just going to circle it back to my Uncle Bob. And if you had a chance to sit down with a frogman like my uncle who paved the way, let's say for the modern SEAL, what's one question you'd love to ask about his experiences in the mindset of that pioneering generation?
David Rutherford: That is a fantastic question. And I have had opportunities to get with old UDT guys before. There was this one incident, I used to one time ran a program for foster care boys and the first part of the program, I took them up to the UDT-Seal Museum up in Fort Pierce, Florida. And when I was there, what do they call it, the Emeritus, the head of it, but his name was Patches Watson, Chief Watson. And he was a five deployment frogman from Vietnam. He was a point man on every single deployment he ever did. And he's got a beautiful book out there called Point Man.
He's no longer with us, but I'll never forget, I was up there kind of working through the program with him and he's talking to me about Vietnam days and what they used to do and how hard they were. And this old guy walks up and it's like, "Hey Patch, hey Chief." And he snaps too and, "Hey sir, how you doing?" And he's like, "Follow me." And he's like, "I got someone out in the car." And so we walk out to this old beat up Buick and there's this old guy, it must've been in his 80s, 90s in the back seat, and he was one of the original frogmen, like in the NCDUs.
Then the thing that is common across the whole spectrum and span of service within our unit, and I think other units as well too, is it's about the men you worked with. And so I would ask your uncle, I would say, "Can you describe the men that you worked with?" And I think that's the real stuff of legends. I would want to know about the men he served with.
Jess DeBear: Yeah.
Doug Pires: Relationships.
David Rutherford: Yeah, it's the relationship aspect of it. That's the whole thing. The reason why you go to war is for the guys on your right and your left. That's it. That's the main reason.
Doug Pires: All right, well now I got a light fluffy one for you.
David Rutherford: Good.
Doug Pires: It is a signature question, but everybody has sort of an attachment to it. It's a two-parter. I want to know your earliest memory surrounding money and then what money means to you.
David Rutherford: Wow, that's a brilliant question, the two questions. The earliest real memory of money, we were very fortunate. My dad did well, but there was a moment where he merged with another firm and then the merger didn't go well. They merged, but the principal of the other firm kind of turned on my dad and essentially convinced the partners that he had started the firm with in like '73, '74, convinced them that my dad was not good as the managing director or partner and he wanted to kick him out. And then that got heated and he got to a point where my dad was just like, "I can't believe you guys turned on me." And so he walked away from that and started a new firm. And I'll never forget my old man was back to zero and I'll never forget, he had to go ask his dad to borrow money. And my dad was humbled and had to go ask. And he told me this story and he did so, he wasn't weeping, but he was affected emotionally.
Jess DeBear: Yeah.
David Rutherford: And the lesson I learned was that it can all go away in a minute. If you allow a deep connection to money to be representative of your true value or worth, when you lose it all, it can collapse you. But what I saw with my father is he went and got two 27-year-old junior lawyers there, started a new firm, rebuilt that firm. And so for me, I've stopped and started and lost everything many, many times. And so it's nice when you have it. It's definitely more challenging when you don't. I think the lessons my wife and I are trying to teach our daughters are, it means a whole lot more when you work hard for it. And then to also to think about it as not as an extension of who you are but a result of who you are. And if you are a truly genuine, honest, dedicated, hardworking person and you're passionate about something, then the money will eventually come.
Doug Pires: It's an abundancy, not a scarcity.
David Rutherford: That's right.
Doug Pires: It's a big move. That's great.
David Rutherford: That's right.
Jess DeBear: Doug. I could talk to this man for hours and hours and hours. I also have to say, this may have to be our first two-part series because there's so much here. There's no way we can squeeze all of this into 35 minutes. I am so grateful for you and grateful that you have given us your time today. I have learned so much, Doug. I'm just thankful. So thank you so much for joining us today. Doug, do you have any parting words?
Doug Pires: Yeah, I took bunch of notes. I wrote a bunch of notes. By the way, most are-
Jess DeBear: I did too.
Doug Pires: Some of the acronyms that I have to look up and make sure I understand what they mean and here and all that stuff. But these are the things that I wrote down because they kept coming up. Failure. Pivot. How many times did you... I got up going and then COVID happened. I got up and then the '08 crisis and you had to pivot. And service. We talk about our just cause and that's really what this is about, is delivering service not just to our clients, but to anybody out there that wants to listen. And you have that calling too. It's service. It seems like it drives you. And the last but not least, is something that I take home, which is humility. I think those, not to distill you down into four words, but failure, pivot, service, humility. I mean, that's what you taught us here today. So thank you-
Jess DeBear: Absolutely.
Doug Pires: ... David, for being generous with your time. Thank you for stopping by.
Jess DeBear: Thanks for stopping by.
David Rutherford: Thank you so much. I appreciate y'all. God bless you and good luck. I hope this helps at least one person.
Jess DeBear: Very much so. Thank you.
Doug Pires: Thank you, guys. God bless you, guys.
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