First Trust ROI Podcast
On the ROI podcast, we discuss some of the most important questions facing investment professionals today, ranging from macroeconomic views, to perspectives on the equity and fixed income markets, to insights on practice management. We aim to cut through the noise, examine the data, and provide fresh insights to investment professionals as they help their clients find better ways to invest…seeking to generate attractive returns on their investments.
First Trust ROI Podcast
Ep 34 | Dave Rutherford | Lessons in Leadership, Fear, and Success | ROI Podcast
Dave Rutherford has been a Navy SEAL, a contractor for Blackwater and the CIA, and performance coach. In this episode, he shares insights and strategies for pursuing excellence and overcoming fear in high-pressure environments.
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Hi, welcome to this episode of the First Trust ROI podcast. I'm Ryan Isakainen, etf strategist at First Trust. Well, today I'm excited to be joined by Dave Rutherford. Dave is a Navy SEAL. He was a contractor for Blackwater. He was also a CIA contractor and he is a world SEAL. He was a contractor for Blackwater, he was also a CIA contractor and he is a world champion performance coach. That's what he does at First Trust. He works with our practice management team and he helps financial professionals thrive and flourish and reach their potential. He talks about what's holding them back. I'm very much looking forward to this conversation with Dave Rutherford. I hope you enjoy it as well. So thank you for joining us on the podcast.
Dave:Dave Rutherford. Thank you.
Ryan:Ryan for having me Navy SEAL performance coach we have him here at First Trust as well and also podcaster, so I'm going to have to ask you for some advice.
Dave:You were sharing with me before we started 500-some episodes yeah.
Dave:Yeah, I started in 2013 with a show called navy seal radio and originally the idea was it was right. When online broadcasting was getting its start, there was an old platform called blogtalkradiocom and they had all the the the software built in. So I had to do sign up. I did a sat Saturday morning live show. Uh, after and that was 2013, by 2015, I had amassed about 2 million downloads in in the infancy of podcasting.
Dave:And then in 2000,. End of 2015, I was approached by my friend, marcus Luttrell, the lone survivor, and he said hey, ron, you know, I know you've been doing a show for a couple of years. I love it. Do you want to do a show together? And you know, when you get somebody that has that name recognition and is in the, marcus I know is a lot different than the Marcus. You know, people knew from the movie and the book and the speaking, and I knew what kind of guy he was, how much fun he was, and so I jumped at the possibility.
Dave:So we started the Team Never Quit podcast in June of 2016. By the end of 2016, apple rated us as one of the top 30 podcasts of the year. In just six months I left. About three years later we had amassed just over 25 million downloads and that show is still going to this day. I think they're over 100 million downloads total. I was a part of the first 108 episodes and then when I left, that I relaunched. Mine called the frog logic podcast now and I've done uh jeez, I don't even know. I think I'm at a 70 some odd shows and I think all in all round coming up around maybe five million downloads or something like that.
Ryan:Yeah, so I'm gonna ride your coattails I'm all about.
Dave:I love what you're doing, ryan. I think you know podcasts in this space are challenging. I've done since I've been with First Trust I've probably done five or six advisor-based shows. It's a tough, it's a nuanced, deliverable, and I think you know when. But the way you're doing it is so target, rich, that it's going to generate a lot of people's paying attention to us. And for me, the greatest thing coming on board with First Trust especially with the clout that Brian has and the magnitude with which the Monday Morning Outlook is distributed and you know this the framework for framework for our audience is there and it's so awesome to see that you're converting it into this media space which is, you know, the biggest in the world now.
Ryan:I appreciate it. Yeah, I mean, when we started this just over a year ago I figured, you know, some people would watch it. But even if no one did, I got to have interesting conversations.
Dave:And that's the best thing about podcasts, isn't it?
Ryan:yeah, for sure okay, so you mentioned frog logic. Um, I have no idea what that means.
Dave:Tell me uh, in 2005 I was working for blackwater at the time and I was an international curriculum and training specialist, so I would go over to foreign countries and train their commandos how to be better commandos and I was, you know it was a small group that were doing this. I spent a lot of time in Azerbaijan and then, in the fall of 05, I went back to Afghanistan and was working on a counter drug, training the counter drug commandos and then mentoring them on missions. And on the way out the door they're like're like, hey, can you run a building project in afghanistan? I was like sure, why not? I've never done it before. So that was cool. But it was in that space where, um, on a mission up in the north area, we were going to take down a pretty sizable distributor of opium. Um, a pretty sizable distributor of opium, and to give you an idea of the size and scale of what Afghanistan was producing around the world, in 2005, they produced about $200 million worth of raw opium into Europe alone and that came all out of Afghanistan across Uzbekistan, up into the Caucasus and down into Europe, and so that's a monster amount of illicit drugs.
Dave:And I remember we hit this compound. And when you go into an Afghan compound it's really fascinating. There'll be, you know, 10 adult males, there'll be, you know, roughly around 12 to 15 women, and then you know 30 kids. And so, entering into the compound, we'd done our thing, everybody was dialed in, and I look over and I see these children and if you've ever been to a third world country, it's one of the most powerful things, that that jolts you to your core when you see children that are truly impoverished, when they have hunger challenges, they're malnutritious, they're in societies that are rooted in kind of a cultural dynamic of eye for an eye, a cultural dynamic of eye for an eye. And it's, you know, like in Afghanistan, which I consider probably the worst challenge to be a child right is, you've got you know. By the time you're a 13-year-old teenage girl. You're essentially just a receptacle for procreation. Young boys are beaten regularly. They're also used for sexual pleasures as well, too. These tribes war with each other. Girls can't go to school. The towel ban just came out, and that's a whole other thing. We're still paying them $40 million a week to towel ban. My best friend, sean Ryan, who's got one of the biggest podcasts in the world, broke that story this past summer that we're still paying the Taliban. We're actually paying fees to all the guys that were martyred, killing our friends. We're still paying their families and fees because they were martyred. So think about that for a second. Well, anyways, so you know, I see these kids.
Dave:And my first trip to Afghanistan, when I was with SEAL Team One back in 2002, I had cultivated a hate, obviously, for that sensation of 9-11 and wanting revenge. That hate almost destroyed me. So the second trip, I was like man, I really want to understand the culture, I want to understand the people. I want to. So I went on this. You know, I read probably about 10 books about afghanistan, the history of afghanistan, the people, the different tribes. I worked extensively, I was the intel rep for for this group and and and going into this compound seeing those kids with nothing. And it hit me and it was like my God, why, why can't we figure out how to inspire those children with even a sliver of hope that there's a way to evolve out of this draconian culture? And I, I, you know, I was a medic. So I started looking at doctors without borders, I looked at USAID, I looked at a bunch of nonprofits that I could take my security skills, my medical skills and I could get access to warm tour countries and children, and I wanted to figure out how to help them. Unfortunately, it's just nonprofits, overseas and former special operations guys, kind of butt heads on how they run things, uh, and I've actually lost a couple teammates on rescue missions as a result of that type of of security though I don't want to call it lackadaisical, but they put their mission ahead of security a lot of times and it gets them into troubles, and so I didn't work out.
Dave:But when I came home I was like well, you know, I started to notice, if you look at statistically, at some of the behavioral health stuff with kids in America, in particular the last four years, it's we're in a we're in a nightmare scenario with that. But back in 2006, I started to find statistics that were frightening to kids, in particular kids in that 10 to 15 year age, and I said you know what, after a particular article from a couple of psychologists from Harvard who had coined this phrase internet withdrawal syndrome I said which is essentially the de-socialization of our youth, right, because you're hyper-connected, you're integrated in your device constantly, your socialization skills plummet and that's what is causing just a skyrocketing in anxiety, depression and all the other mental health challenges I think our kids are facing. I mean hell. Two years ago, girls' teenage suicide increased by 50%. That's a staggering number that I don't think enough people are wrapping their minds around. So I wanted to go help kids in that transitional process of where identity begins to emerge.
Dave:So I was like, okay, well, what can I utilize from my past as a division one athlete, as a seal, as an instructor, you know, as you know, working for black, what can I extrapolate and teach kids? And so what I came up with, with, this concept called frog logic and frog is me paying tribute to the, the frogmen of the navy. Back in world war ii. That's what they called the underwater demolition teams because essentially they'd go into combat scenarios with you know a dive knife, you know one of those horrible circular masks and some you know two by fours of spins and like 50 pounds of tnt, and they would drop these guys five miles off the atolls. They'd swim in, blow up the reefs. So all those landing crafts, so they called them the frogmen of the navy. And so I wanted to pay tribute to that mindset that, no matter what mission is in front of them, they're going to get it done. And then, obviously, the logic that goes behind that, right, the mindset stuff.
Dave:And so I created my first program within frog logic, which was teaching people how to forge self-confidence, because I believe self-confidence is one of the core root ideas of human performance. Because when you think about it and I think about it in particular, that's what I do when I go out on the road with our wholesalers you know these guys are under this unbelievable pressure to perform. Obviously, you know that's the beauty and the challenge of first trust. There is this immeasurable pressure that's everybody willing, they want it, they're part of it. And it's funny, I was just, you know, down with a bunch of guys on the beach this morning, as I do every you know end of the year event and mid-year event and get a little fellowship going, get a little beat down session in the ocean and on the beach and and, uh, you know, one of the things is is talking about is is managing that pressure through that recognition that your, your self-confidence is malleable.
Dave:Right, if you take enough no's every day, that's going to start to uh flip and that introspection can become jaded with what I call the negative insurgency right, that constant attack pulling down the structure of your ability. And so I developed this, you know, eight missions of really teaching guys, young, kids, how to forge that self-confidence in this growth of identity. And so that began, the Frog Logic concepts. Well, that was a long-winded story for that, sorry, I do have a tendency to rave.
Ryan:No, that was all wonderful. I've got about 700 follow-up questions that go down different rabbit holes there, but you were talking about performance coaching and it made me think like, what is it that I do typically, that when I fall short of the goals that I want to achieve, is there? Is there one or two things that you think most of us maybe fail to do or that we were not thinking about in the right way?
Dave:A hundred percent. A hundred percent and it's you know my performance coaching career really made a shift. So I I you know after, after I started FrogLogic in in in 2006, I've talked to about 7 000 kids in north america from 2006 to 2008. And then, uh, when the economy collapsed, I got recruited to go work for the central intelligence agency and so for two years trained, was an instructor, teaching case officers. Then for two years I deployed if you ever saw the movie 13 Hours the Secret Soldiers of Benghazi that's what I did for two years. And when I left there, I is when I started professionally speaking, and I started in our industry. A friend I'd gone through training was a wholesaler at a competitor not really a competitor, but a different company and he brought me in and I did 30 events and so that launched it.
Dave:But the next year, 2013, because I had a very strong presence on the internet at that time, because I really understood SEO marketing early, I understood YouTube, I understood social media and then, obviously, with the podcast, really helped boost me up a lot, and so I was approached by the Miami Dolphins to come in and work with the rookies and so in 2013, I started working with professional athletes and then started to work with collegiate athletes and then individual from UFC fighters. I worked with the United States Tennis Association for three years. I guess my pinnacle year was 2018. I helped the Oregon State Beavers win a collegiate World Series championship in my second year with them and then in my third year with the Boston Red Sox. We won a World Series championship there. So you know, I never imagined I'd be a performance coach, ever. I just didn't see how I could translate the ideas of being a SEAL instructor, being a Blackwater instructor, being a CIA instructor, into civilians and their, you know, whether it's athletes or business or business owners. I just didn't have that capacity. But then I started to re-evaluate the core concepts within our, I think, within how you learn how to be an operator, and so those four core things, I think translate across any spectrum of performance.
Dave:So, number one you have to be able to embrace fear. Right, there's no such thing as being fearless. It's, it's a complete falsehood. Right, we are, we're wired for fear through our limbic systems. We're taught fear from day one. Um, it's just, it's, it's so integrated. Out of the, out of eight core emotions, it's the most substantial emotion we have to deal with on a day in and day out. It never goes away, right. So, but the thing that people don't do is they don't address their fears, they don't really know what they're afraid of and they, more importantly, they don't know how fear alters perspective. Right, it restructures your perceptions. That's what fear does.
Dave:And and through the lens I I try and simplify it, it's through the lens of pain, right, when we feel a pain impulse, or internally or externally, we immediately begin to shift how we kind of integrate with that pain point. And and that's where fear is just spark. And if you're, if you're, if you're so afraid of something, man, it owns you, it causes paralysis, as causes are an inability to think clearly, and all the way down on a physical level, right, if your heart rates at 185, you can't even think. Right, right, has all these other effects of physiologically. So, learning how to embrace your fear as a tool, and that's one of the, that's the, the first in a very linear approach to this performance, uh, these concepts within the frog logic concept. So, first, embrace your.
Dave:Second, forging self-confidence right, really understanding how your self-confidence takes a hit as you go through those plateaus of pain. Right, because every time you like I'm cooking it, I'm crushing it, I'm doing great, I'm number one on the chart, right, I'm killing it, you know. And then all of a sudden you have a horrible quarter. You've dropped down 12 points. You know, you're getting the calls from your managers, right, like hey, you, all right, what's going on? Your self-confidence is shaky, so you have to be able to recognize that. All right, how do I rehabilitate self-confidence? And that's the second one.
Dave:The third one is know how to be a good team member and know how to be a good teammate. Right, because there's two different things. One you come in you don't know a lot. It's being able to take orders, follow direction, learn on the fly. And then the next is when you're an actual integrated member of that team, like the pods that we use. Each one of those guys has an expertise that they put forth, but they do it where they all integrate those expertise at a high level, and that's called what I call living the team life, and it's a comprehensive recognition that all success is a derivative of teams. Period, end of sentence.
Dave:And I've worked with you know, ufc fighters, former world champion. I've worked with you know, like I said, you know my third year with the Red Sox. I worked with Mookie Betts that year. That was my main focus that year. So you see these people at the highest level of performance, but it's the people around them constantly, right, that are. You're tapping into the, you know, your manager or your economics team, or us and the advisor consulting group.
Dave:Right, it's me in the car with a guy, a wholesaler, that's been struggling for a few months and like, all right, let's break it down. Right, let's look through all these things. What are you afraid of? How's your self-confidence, how's your team look? And then the biggest one, the more higher one, is to be able to live with purpose. Because ultimately, what If you don't have a definitive purpose in your life?
Dave:Life is forcing you in the directions that it wants to take you, and I think a lot of people in particular that live in a perpetual state of fear allow life to mandate where they go.
Dave:But, more, more importantly, it seems to mute potential, right, but if you have a clear purpose, right when I, when I was that you know 23 year old kid, you know who left penn state and joined the navy man, I had finally had a purpose.
Dave:And and when I made it through training, the purpose got more dialed in when I finally got my. The purpose got more dialed in when I finally got my trident, it got more dialed in. And as I've grown and matured, and in particular now with my children I have four daughters, my wife, man I know specifically what my purpose is and how to execute on it. So those are the fundamentals. If you can evaluate yourself across that plane and see where you, what your performance like, you overlay those on the specificity of performance right, and I think that that's been the the thing that makes a lot of sense with the people that I've worked with. As well as it, it enables me to be able to deliver that message to you. You know a giant LPL conference or one-on-one with an advisor that's trying to take it to another level.
Ryan:Yeah, yeah, those four things definitely ring true. It seems to me that they're all interrelated, but is there one in particular that you think people struggle with the most here?
Dave:hands down? Absolutely. It's crazy, right? The number one question I used to get all the time not so much as I've gotten a little older, but was, were you afraid? And to me it seems like wait. Is that a real question? Are you honestly asking me? I'm submerged in 58 degree freezing cold water for you know, for 90 hours straight. And how we went?
Dave:hell yeah I was afraid I was afraid every single second. And and then when I, when I left the agency, it was that that that question were you afraid in combat, were you afraid here? And I used to be almost annoyed at it, and I was annoyed at it because I was afraid to answer it. It's such an intimate question, right. There's no greater intimacy than what you're afraid of, right?
Dave:Think about all the times you've been in your greatest hardship, your greatest challenge, and you're struggling, you're not doing well, and someone comes up hey, ryan, are you all right? Man, what's the first thing? I'm fine, I'm good. Why? Because you don't want to expose that you're not fine, that you're not sure, you don't know if you're going to be successful.
Dave:So I think fear is the key and part of the seminar that I teach on embracing fear. You know, mission number one is to search for the truth of your fear, and then step one in that is to write down all of your fears that you've, all the fears you had as a child, young man, all your fears right now and then all your fears in the future. Have you ever done that before? I don't think I have, and I'll be in front of 500 people. I'll ask that question and I might get one person in the entire audience who said they've done it, and usually those people are in a 12 program. They're doing deep, deep dive psychologically with a psychologist or psychiatrist, or they did it in some, like you know, philosophy class in college, but that's it.
Dave:But the overwhelming majority of people have no idea what they're actually afraid of and then, more importantly, how it impacts performance Interesting and I think you know that emotion of fear definitely plays into the investment industry as a strategist or portfolio manager or financial advisor, it doesn't really matter.
Dave:The number one thing I hear and last year I think I was in front of a little over 4,000 advisors, right, 30 different states. The year before it was 4,000 advisors, right, 30 different states. The year before it's 4,500 advisors. And I'm obviously not talking one-on-one, but I have a lot of one-on-one conversations out there and the thing I hear most is man, I'm doing more coaching, emotional coaching with my clients than I've ever even imagined I would have to do, and they all laugh when I talk. You know how often do you have to talk your clients off the ledge and especially in the volatility that we've seen, covid, through COVID, what we're dealing with around the world, and you know the way the markets are. I mean, if you look at the Magnificent Seven and one day they gain a trillion dollars in market share, the next day they're down $800 billion and it's like how do you keep that client of yours in that safe space of confidence and trust? By mitigating the fear. So it's understanding on a psychological level what drives fear.
Ryan:Yeah, it seems like there's plenty that people could be fearful of as they look around the world.
Dave:Every day, all day.
Ryan:Yeah, there's so much unknown and I think we're at a point in time where there's so much unknown. But we also get little blips and snapshots on Twitter or X and you know. So we know little bits of a story and then we find out other little bits and it's really tough to to manage the narrative, what the narrative actually is right.
Dave:You're attached to that a hundred percent and that's something you know. I think I, I'm, I'm lucky because of the, the work I've done in my past, I I understand how to aggregate content and information and, yeah, and know how to extrapolate the threads that coalesce the grander narrative and then also the threads that deconstruct that grander narrative in a more meaningful way. I will say we're in a cataclysmic shift in terms of content delivery nowadays. Whereas before you had very few outlets that drove the narratives, well, x has literally dropped an atomic bomb in the middle of that narrative.
Dave:And so now, all of a sudden and that's why, when you look at their growth rate over the since elon musk bought it, it's it's the number one news organization in the world, the deliver of news. It's now they're having more. It's the number one app organization in the world, the deliverer of news. Now they're having more. It's the number one growing app on the App Store internationally, around the world. It's the place people are going to post genuine, well-thought-out content. And now, with the advent of independent journalists, if you will, people that don't care about the aggregate in there, but they're out there trying to deliver real information in real time, you're seeing this, for lack of a better term. A lot of people are waking up to maybe some greater truths that they once didn't know, and that generates fear, too.
Ryan:Yeah truths that they once didn't know, and that generates fear too. Yeah, yeah. Before, when you were talking about the path to frog logic, you mentioned some of the anxiety that you know. I don't know if anxiety and fear are the same thing.
Dave:They're in the same realm.
Ryan:But there was a book that I read recently called the Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt.
Dave:I'm listening to it right now, about halfway through it, yeah.
Ryan:I think anyone who's got kids that are teenagers, that are, you know, dealing with their smartphones and their social media and and all of the anxiety that creates um, really need to read that book.
Dave:Well, kids hell, man, I feel it. I mean I get on right. You know I'm, I'm on Sunday. Uh, you know I wake up, I have my cup of coffee, I go through my feed. Now all of a sudden I just see former President Trump gets shot again. Or guys on the golf course who didn't get shot at, they shot at him. I don't want to misquote anything there, but immediately I'm pegged.
Dave:I think any American is like, oh my God, a second potential assassin. Where are we at? What does this mean for the markets? How does it? You know, it's just, it compounds itself and I think, when you look at what the pandemic did, it reset the framework of our society in particular, but I think globally as well. Many countries didn't have the same effect right as others, but certainly it was a global shift in consciousness, in particular through fear, through the lens of oh my God, if I step out my door I'm going to catch something that's going to kill me, my family, my friends, my, you know, and I think you know we're still recovering from that. That shift in consciousness, yeah.
Ryan:It seems like there's also, as a result of that, maybe a lack of trust in some of the institutions that people used to say you know, I 100% trust this government agency, but now I'm not so sure I can trust them, and I think that's probably global as well.
Dave:Oh, there's no doubt it's interesting Once you start to find those journalists that are in everybody's bias just put that out there for sure, are in everybody's bias I just put that out there for sure, and so. But you watch somebody that's very focused on delivering. You know as close to the truth as they can get. You're seeing that there's this worry, this perpetual state of worry. That's out there and it is global for sure. I mean, when you have the nordstrom pipeline getting blown up, you know you can tell europe and its energy market is going to freak out, right, uh, if you look at uh, uh, I mean it's just you can go all across those markets and everywhere and how they reacted and what's taking place. But I think what, what? Going back to that original frog logic and that core understanding of fear, if you understand how fear affects you, you can actually be able to address it in a much more fundamental way than just letting the effects of that compounding fear build on you to where your performance just starts to come off.
Ryan:Okay, we're going to shift gears a little bit. You've been all over the world, right, yeah, but nowhere fun.
Dave:I don't have all these friends and they're like, oh man, we just got back from Europe, or we went to South Africa or in here, and they're like, where's the best place you've been? I'm like, uh, spin bulldog Afghanistan.
Ryan:Where's the best place you've been? I'm like, uh, spin Bulldog Afghanistan Outside the US. What's the international location that you think is unique and you've enjoyed the most?
Dave:I mean, obviously, afghanistan is where I spent most of my time operationally. It is really this unique space in the world. When you understand the history of it, you understand the Silk Route, you understand, you know transcontinental commerce from ancient China into the. You know the step of Iran it wasn't Iran back then, but and you think about the magnitude of that. And then you also think about the fact that Britain, its back was broken in Afghanistan, russia's back was broken. Now ours back was broken in Afghanistan.
Dave:It's just there's some I don't even know what it is. It's almost like that Saudi Lawrence of Arabia feel right. It's that there's this mystique, this mythological aspect of afghanistan. And you know, I remember when I was, when I was doing this building project for blackwater, I would get in, you know, this old, 50 year old russian helicopter that lockheed martin had bought, and we had this one guy, this old tajik pilot, that was flying. This guy had something like almost 30,000 hours on this machine, on this helicopter, which is a staggering amount of flight time, and he would come out and he'd wear his flip-flops and a cigarette, you know, and he'd just sit there and his pants rolled up and I'd get in the back with my kit and it was just me, and we'd get in this helicopter and we'd fly 1,000 feet above the top.
Dave:I'd go from down in Gardez over to Herat, which is on the border of Iran, back up north into Kabul. And here I am sitting. I'll never forget the coolest story ever. You remember Bamanye, the place where they had those ancient Buddhist statues carved into the side of the mountain there and the Taliban blew those up. Well, I remember sitting there's an airstrip right there those ancient buddha statues carved into the side of the of the mountain there and the talban blew those up.
Dave:Well, I remember sitting there's an airstrip right there and it's where you refill, and I'm sitting on the airstrip, I've got a heater in, I've got my you know my, my cheap ak and I'm in my kid and it's just me and this tajik pilot and his you know his flunky buddy that just gets in so he doesn't pass out. I guess I don't know what he does and I'm sitting there and I'm looking around at these statues and I'm thinking to myself wow, my life is pretty fascinating right now and I hope I can take whatever I'm learning right now and apply it in a good way. So, afghanistan, although it is probably one of the most war-torn countries in in all of the world, there's this mythological uh allure for me in that place and it's also an incredibly beautiful country too.
Dave:Yeah, so when you think about home um you're, you live in texas south florida, south yeah south texas man, I want so bad, but my wife, she's from Maine and I can't convince her to go to Texas.
Ryan:So what do you think is different about the US in comparison to the other places? I mean Afghanistan. Obviously there's stark differences, but there's probably some similarities. But what do you think makes the US such a different place in comparison to other parts of the world?
Dave:The ability that we all have a constitutional right, a God-given right, to speak our minds. There's no greater, more important thing on the planet than the ability to have free speech. Nothing, everything, pales in comparison. No matter where I went around the world, there was always a restraint of free and open speech, and that was operationally or or an otherwise too. I mean some countries, obviously, that you can speak your mind. But I mean, look at some of the stuff that's taking place in Europe right now. There are people that are getting two year jail terms because they're speaking out against a particular, uh, something going on within the government, right, and so they're speaking out against a particular something going on within the government, right, and so they're they're speaking out and they're doing jail time, right. Even look at down in brazil and brazil, uh and the, the, the head of the supreme court down there taking x out of the country and then also making starlink out of the country, so, and it was supposedly like 34 million Brazilians were on X.
Dave:Now, when you look at their last election and what took place with Bolsonaro and Lula, I mean that is one of the most significant things that took place in the last four years, five years, geopolitically, to not have a free and open place to speak your mind in Brazil.
Dave:That's a catastrophic potential problem.
Dave:And when you look at the hyper increase of socialism and, in some contexts, actual Marxism and communism sweeping through South America right now, that's a big deal.
Dave:So when you look at America, in effect, although there's a lot of people out there who can argue that potentially those liberties are fading, and there's a vast array of people that are advocating against it, right, and they use terms like hate speech, or they use terms like misinformation, disinformation then my personal favorite is malinformation, which is true information, but it's whatever party doesn't like it, it's bad, it's bad, right, and I think that's what really makes America so exceptional, and it's what makes First Trust so exceptional too, that Jim Bowen is a profound advocate for free speech and speaking his mind and not being afraid to talk about the way he looks at the other most awesome part about America, which is our capitalistic society. I mean, you put those two together and what have you done? You've created the most significant influence of generating wealth that the world has ever known, and so that, for me, is the most beautiful aspect of what our country represents that right to speak your mind.
Ryan:Yeah, it seems like, in particular, political discourse is something that people shy away from. They're afraid because they don't want to have conflict. I don't know if that's related to their, you know, running from the fear of breaking relationships or something like that, but it seems like, you know, the founding fathers all battled it out. They had different ideas and they weren't afraid to, you know, have conflict and work through problems, and it seems like that'd be a good idea. It's the ultimate idea.
Dave:It's the thing that keeps the structure of the Constitution intact, right, and without that it's worthless piece of paper. And when you hear certain periodicals putting out opinion pieces on their opinion page that do we really need the Constitution, is it really that important? You think to your mind and go hey man, do you have any idea what took place in Romania or Czechoslovakia after World War II? Do you have any idea of the carnage that communism did? And your inability to speak your mind, I mean people can't fathom it, because I think obviously we take it for granted to a certain degree.
Ryan:But if you lose the ability to call out that which is evil, if you will, or that which is untruthful, or these narratives, if you don't have that, then you don't have a society that can function properly, because then tyranny emerges and the next thing you know you're staring at whatever particular, you know tyrannical ideology is going to destroy your way of life right and and I think the way to get to truth is actually to have even if it's some wild conspiracy theory, if you don't, if you're not allowed to address that and have two sides actually say no wait, this is actually what's going on, and I think the ability to actually have that discourse is how you get to truth.
Dave:A hundred percent. There was just a gentleman who went on, probably the guy who has the biggest, second biggest. He goes back and forth with another guy out there and this guy's one of the top historians I've ever heard. I mean he's absolutely brilliant, I mean he is, it is. I've never heard a person deliver history better than this guy. So he goes on there and they get into this discussion randomly about world war ii and he makes a comment about, about winston churchill and and potentially that churchill, you know, could have done some things differently that maybe would have avoided 65, 70 million people being annihilated in World War II. That interview blew up and the way that those two people in particular, this poor historian is just a historian. He's not a personality, he's not a pundit, he's not advocating one way or the other and he actually you know he creates the caveat for the statement before he says it. You know he's like this might be hyperbole, but you know he was attacked from around the world and there were calls for him to be arrested in certain areas or and there were death threats. He got death threats from this, and so when we lose the ability to put an idea on the table and have all of us bring forth that God-given right of evaluation and critical thinking and the ability to make a poignant argument one way or the other, from two other directions you can't even think about. That's how creativity emerges, that's how society stay intact, that's how debate flourishes. And you're right, people have been afraid.
Dave:I think you know, I, I I was a direct uh, um, uh what do you call it? Recipient of cancel culture, um, leading into the 2020 elections. I was essentially locked out of Facebook and Instagram. My YouTube channel was throttled. Several other platforms essentially throttled me as well, and I lost access to about 125,000 followers, and that devastated my business. I mean, I absolutely collapsed it.
Dave:And here's the thing I never was political. I never was advocating one side of the other. I'm a motivational guy. I'm like, hey, let's figure out how to work through this. But there was one post on one thing that someone got on. They bombarded Facebook and I immediately locked me out and I sent over 300 requests saying, hey, what did I do wrong?
Dave:Because this was back when the censorship industrial complex was just getting ramped up, and that's a fascinating thing If you really want to understand that. There's some brilliant people out there Michael Schellenberger, brilliant journalist, as well as a guy named Mike Benz, are doing yeoman's work on describing how significant this is and how it interacts with our foreign policy and domestic policy as well. So you know, when you have the potential to lose your business, that generates fear, or you have a potential to lose your status in your community or your society, because you have a potential to lose your status in you and your community or your society because you have a particular belief system, man, that that, what does that do? It makes you afraid. Fear comes, and then it just generates. And now, all of a sudden, you're having to live this disingenuous life to cultivate what you think society wants you to be, and now that causes massive mental health challenges for people. So you know, I'm absolutely. The number one thing that makes America is what it is is our ability to free speech.
Ryan:Yeah. So I am at heart an optimist, maybe sometimes too much of an optimist, yeah. But you know, I think you have to look at things as clearly as possible and maybe allow yourself to not be cynical but to be an optimist. Is there anything in particular that makes you optimistic?
Dave:Yeah, I do Is our resilience as a nation. I mean, when you think about the Revolutionary War, you know, you think about all the different battles and conflicts in between there, think about all the different battles and conflicts in between there. The civil war, I mean the civil war was. I mean most countries do not recover from civil wars, they just don't do it.
Dave:Um, obviously you look at the turn of the century world war one, world war two, I mean world war two was this catastrophic, the most catastrophic event in human history, and we were our ideals, our vision, our morals, the concept of America was able to fight through the treachery of Nazi fascism and then leading into the 80-year, or, what was it, 60-year, cold War with communism, war with communism. I mean this is substantial, substantial challenges that we have had to face over and over and over over, over really long periods of time. But we keep coming back, we keep adapting, we keep evolving and you know, granted, yes, there are some things that we're not necessarily doing at the highest way we would like, and I think that little bit of lack of confidence in certain institutions is shaking people. But again, that's why I love first trust, right. What do we do?
Dave:We bring the data to the plate, right. We bring the data to the discussion, and when you listen to Strider or you listen to any one of our economists you know Andrew or Brian you know they always say, hey, man, look at the data. Yeah, all of this is going on, but we're still doing really well comparative to the rest of the world. So you know, I can be fatalistic in terms of my foreign policy analysis. Don't get me started on Ukraine and Israel and Iran and all that, but. But I think, at the end of the day, america itself is built on this core competency of resilience, and that's something that you have to take heart to. Okay.
Ryan:Yeah, one more question for you, dave. At the end of all of my podcasts, I generally ask people what they're reading. We already talked about the Anxious Generation, but are there any books on the Dave Rutherford book list that you either are going to read or have read recently that you'd recommend?
Dave:Yeah, so I just finished a book called Kudatah so it's it's coup d'etat by edward and lutwick. Um, I'm reading, rereading a space called the rape of the mind by a psychologist named uh yost mirlu. Um, I'm reading a book called the history of religious ideas, volume one, and then the the one that I kind of do for fun is uh, uh, on the psychology of military incompetence.
Dave:Okay, those all sound like fascinating reads yeah, I people ask me do you ever read for just pleasure? And and I did have a friend recently, uh, buddy of mine, graham, wonderful guy guy, he's from Scotland and he introduced me to this wonderful book about what was it? Shackelford and the expedition down to. Antarctica. That's right. So you know, when I can't focus on coup d'etats or, you know, tyrannical regimes, I'll listen to that struggle and it's just, it's pretty inspiring.
Ryan:Yeah, all right. Well, thank you for coming on the podcast. This has been a great conversation and I have, like you know, 30, 40 more questions, but we're running out of time, so I hope I can have you on again.
Dave:I'd love it, ryan, thank you so much for having me on. Can have you on again. I'd love it, ryan, thank you so much for having me on. It's an honor. I've been wanting to come on with you.
Ryan:I just never knew if I was going to cut it, but I'm happy, glad we worked it out. Thanks for joining us and thanks to all of you for joining us on this episode of the First Trust ROI podcast. We'll see you next time, thank you.
