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The Protectors® Podcast
Welcome to The Protectors® Podcast, where the valor meets the storyteller. Hosted by Jason Piccolo, a seasoned veteran and retired special agent, this series is a must-listen for anyone intrigued by the courage and tales of those who pledge to protect us. Beyond the front-line stories of bravery and dedication, this podcast goes a step further, weaving in the perspectives of those who bolster and narrate the protector's journey—featuring a remarkable lineup including New York Times Best Sellers and acclaimed Hollywood actors.
The Protectors® Podcast offers a diverse array of voices, from those who wear the uniform to the authors and entertainers who amplify their stories. It's a unique blend that highlights not only the raw realities faced by our protectors but also how their sacrifices inspire the narratives we cherish in literature and film. Each episode is a testament to the interconnected worlds of service and support, bringing listeners an unmatched depth of insight.
Dr. Jason Piccolo is a retired federal agent, former U.S. Army Infantry Captain (Iraq 2006), and author.
Past Guests Include:- Sean Patrick Flanery - Andrews & Wilson- Mark Greaney- Stephen Hunter- Remi Adeleke - Florent Groberg - Clint Emerson - Travis Mills
The Protectors® Podcast
529 | David Brown | BOOK DISCUSSION "And Goliath: The Littlest Navy SEAL's Inspirational Story About Living Your Biggest Life"
David Brown, former Navy SEAL and retired federal agent, joined the show to talk about his new book, AND GOLIATH: THE LITTLEST NAVYS SEASL
Make sure to check out Jason on IG @drjasonpiccolo
Hey, welcome to the protectors podcast. We have the real life Leroy Jethro Gibbs on today. Except you know, leroy Jethro Gibbs from NCIS was a sniper. But we have David Brown, former NCIS, former EPA, cid, former DOI, oig and one of the smallest Navy SEALs ever. What's going on, david? How are you doing?
Speaker 2:I'm doing great. Great thanks for having me on, really excited to do the show you know the ncis, listen, we've you.
Speaker 1:You know you were there, but I have a ton of friends that went to ncis and then we have like seven different spinoff shows and like ncis, hawaii, australia and la and kookamonga and s Saskatchewan. I mean it's crazy.
Speaker 2:I don't think people realize the global outreach that NCIS has though. Yeah well, it's vast, it's worldwide, and although the shows are a little bit comparing GI Jane to SEAL Team but it's a little bit of fantasy there and not all NCIS agents or officers are like what they show on TV for sure.
Speaker 1:You know I'm watching the NCIS Origins. I don't know if you saw that one yet, but I think that's the most common-sense type NCIS they have out right now, because that is the origin of the main guy, main guy in ncia. So it's it's. I think it's. It's a decent show, but the other ones are just like all over the place. You know, like when someone hops on a computer and you're like really come on yeah, yeah, we don't.
Speaker 2:There's no such thing as the information you could get in in minutes like they do. Well, they got, they got to run a tv show, so they have to get it in minutes and it's not like with us. You know we're making phone calls, we're on the computer, we're we're doing everything you're. You know you're in the car, you're doing all the things that you need to do, and that takes a lot of time.
Speaker 1:I don't think the producers have the patience for that well, you know investigations, whether it's ncis or other parts of your career. You need endurance and I imagine, like your background, you know you, really you know you're in the seals a bit ago and that stuck with you. I could tell it stuck with you. I mean, as soon as we had the conversation today, I'm like, yep, it's still there, yep, yep.
Speaker 2:It's still there, you mentioned, you know, in endurance. And the funny thing is, you know, I wrote. I wrote this book and, granted, it talks about becoming a Navy SEAL, but I had to start way back and say, okay, where did all this come from? You know, it didn't happen the day I walked in and started going through training, it. All this, all the things that you qualities that you have, or the traits that you have and that I have, they came from somewhere and they have to be expressed and I talk a lot about that, how that really occurs for me in particular, I use my stories to say that. But if I hadn't done certain things and brought out the inherent traits that I had growing up and to be ready to go through buds training and go through seal team and then later on, you know, as you pointed out, being aggressive special agent law enforcement, that endurance, it was a lifelong journey for me.
Speaker 1:It's grit, it's absolute grit, and I don't think you could teach grit. I think you can show people. I think you could put people in certain circumstances where they're going to determine whether or not they have actual grit and whether or not they will do the work. But everything every SEAL I've interviewed, everybody has been through Q courses and this and that, or been through some very incredibly harsh times in their life where they had to have pulled themselves out. It all came down to grit, grit, grit, grit.
Speaker 2:There's a saying, you know persistence and determination equals perseverance, and I truly believe that adversity does not create character, but it reveals it, and so these are things that are deep inside the people and the people you go to. You know something like budget training. You go to training and the guys there are many guys at the beginning you look down the line and you're like, oh, that guy's going to make it, and that guy's going to make it, and I'm sure he's going to make it. And then at the end, it's not the people that you thought, just because they looked a particular way, it's the people that had it inside them from the beginning that are standing at the end at graduation.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of it. I shouldn't say a lot of it. There's a piece of it, this piece of grit. That's the competitive part of us. We need to succeed, we need to win. It doesn't matter what you're going through, what kind of pain you're going through, what kind of mental anguish you're going through, your body is breaking down, but you can't quit, because if you quit you'll never win. And we're not talking. You have to be first. But you see those people leaving and you're, you know what? I got something more than they do. I've got to win, I've got to do this. And that fear of not winning, I think, is what pushes you to the next level.
Speaker 2:I love that you went beyond not quitting and that the succeeding and winning was in what you just said, because I've heard and had many conversations with people that say, well, if you just don't quit, it'll be okay. No, it won't. There are standards, there are timed runs or there are test scores, and there's your life, my life, everyone's life is about being tested all the time. Not quitting doesn't mean you've won. It just means you haven't stopped the activity. It doesn't mean success.
Speaker 1:You got it. And that's the adage of you have to be. You have to get up in the morning and you have to be deliberate. So when you say, hey, you know what? I'm going to be a Navy SEAL. It doesn't matter if you're 17, 18, it doesn't matter if you're 15 or if you're 28, you're 30. If there is a point in your life where you want to get to a point, you need to wake up in the morning and you need to be deliberate, the next, whatever 16, 18 hours, you're up. But that deliberation has to include grit. It has to be able to be like you know what Today sucks, I'm not going to work out. But that grit piece of your mind has to be like nope, I got it. I got to do this.
Speaker 2:That's the hard part. It's not doing it for one day or two days, it's doing it every day and that is it's a lifetime commitment and I think really that it goes to the core of the person. They have it, a lot of people have, I have it. I have something that I write about. It's called pathological persistence and it was a coined term by a psychologist, robert Hill, and he went and studied a gentleman, a guy named Doba. He was a Polish gentleman who was decided he was going to kayak across the Atlantic Ocean, and I don't know if you heard this story, but Dober, by himself, when he's 65 years old, kayaks across the Atlantic. And then after that he kayaked again across the Atlantic and again across the Atlantic, and then he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro where he finally, at the top, had a heart attack and died.
Speaker 2:And what Robert Hill says is, when they let me go back to Doble what they asked, they said why did you do this? He says it was inevitable, it was something that I was destined to do. I had to do it had to do it. And so when he talks about what he's, robert Hill attributed that to a cellular level pathological persistence. And when you talk about grit. I believe that it comes at a cellular level in everyone that has it, and it's not something they can stop, it's not something they can avoid. Even myself, I have to get up and I have to do these things every day and push, push on to, as I call it in my book, the next mission. There's always the next mission. And guess what, when you climb to the top of the mountain, what's there? What's on the other side? Another mountain, right.
Speaker 1:so that is one thing that is is, most people who have that grit will continue that grit. They will have that mission. You need that mission and I think that for mental health-wise you know, especially being in law enforcement or being in a protector community, you need to have a mission. Now you could do your five, six, seven, eight years in the Navy, seals or any military service, but the next thing you do is you have to have a mission, whether, hey, you know what you want to go, get it, be an entrepreneur, you want to be your mission, great. But you have to get on and focus on something that can bring a light to your mind. Now you jumped into law enforcement and NCIS and then, like I said before, epa and then NDOI. It's missions, different missions, and you're like me, I've jumped around different agencies, but there's a, there's a reason for it and you're always. You need to excel Right.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you're familiar with Colonel Grossman's book on combat and the analogy he uses with sheepdogs and how they are the protectors of society. And you mentioned the mission. And I think guys like us, we have that innate ability or trait that we want to go out and we want to protect people, trait that we want to go out and we want to protect people, and so we're. We go into professions like law enforcement, firefighter, military, because these, these are the areas where we're good, that we're good at and we're comfortable at and it it creates a dopamine rush for us, and where we feel good about what we're doing in our job. Right, it's not about. I remember a guy who used to work for me, who was a work for interior. He used to tell me all the time, Dave, so many days I would do this job for nothing. I'm having such a good time and that's the occupation you really want to do most of your life, right.
Speaker 1:I'm glad you brought up dopamine. You know the adrenaline, the dopamine when you are tracking down a case and you have that thread and you just want to keep pulling it. And you want to keep pulling it to see where it goes, especially if it turns into a large scale case. Small scale cases are great and everything and they're cool, but when you start pulling that thread and you start finding other co-conspirators and you're like, huh, where does this go? Where does that go? And these are the types of cases you bring home at night because your mind is always thinking and so you're always getting a little hit off of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no doubt. I mean if, if you're doing the job of a special agent or law enforcement, you're doing detective work and and someone has to force you to go to the next level or go to that to do that interview, maybe you should consider doing something else because I'd love that. For me, the day I got the lead, whatever it was, it was the first 48 hours were the most important. That's why they do TV shows right, like those first hours of an investigation are so important to get to those witnesses, to get that evidence. And for me that was so exciting and I just I went from.
Speaker 2:We would often, when I was with EPA in particular, we would get a lead in and maybe my partner would get in our vehicle and we would just go okay, we'll see you. When we see you, we're going out and we're going to start interviewing people. We would go from town to town, person to person, business to business, stay out until we felt we had enough evidence that we were not going to be impeded by, let's just say, the lawyers coming out there trying to stop our investigation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, epa is lawyers, lawyers, lawyers, always. And you dot your I's and cross your T's with all those investigations Always. And you dot your I's and cross your T's with all those investigations. Now in your book and Goliath, the Littlest Seals impractical story about living your biggest life. I think it's funny because I listened to some of your other podcast interviews and the only thing that pops in my mind is like listen. Whenever I hear about the seals, I think about the boats and buds and all that stuff. And you were five, three and you were". And you were like a buck, something wet. How did you integrate that in with the team? I know we're kind of jumping back to your SEAL thing, but it's just been stuck in my head. So you were on a beach and you got this big-ass boat and you're 5'3".
Speaker 2:If you're talking about specifically with training. Um, yeah, you know, they group you in groups with people that are close to your own size. Okay, five, three and 110 pounds. There weren't many guys my height or size. In fact there was none. I was the shortest guy and these big rubber boats are about 120 pounds. So you got seven guys in there.
Speaker 2:When they first started boat crew. The problem was they are all. The boat was all on the top of their head but it was still off my head. So there's this thing at the back of the boat was a blow up skag which helps you steer the boat. They used to make me run under the skag so my head would at least touch part of the boat. So otherwise I was running constantly with my hands up in the air trying to help other people take the weight off the boat. So that is the physical challenge of but and I paid. I paid the price. I mean instructors would see, brown, your head's not touching the boat. They'd run over and they'd build a little mound under my feet and make me stand on it.
Speaker 1:You know, talk about learning something new about yourself, right, because now you're going to have, because you're your small stature, you're going to have more eyes on you. And then you're going to have these guys who are, you know, the fit guys from the academy who look like they could be like football stars and quarterbacks and all that. And then here you are not ringing the bell, you're just keep going, like we were talking about before you got the grit. So that must've been kind of interesting for you to be coming, you know, out of high school.
Speaker 1:And then you get into this, you know the seals, and all of a sudden you're, you're, you're looking around and back then, listen, the only thing they had going on was, you know, maybe a couple of movies, maybe some books about Vietnam seals, but there wasn't anything really about. There was no YouTube. Back then you really didn't know where you're getting into. But now you're in there and you're looking around and you're like, well, huh, yeah, how am I going to make this? What was that? What was that wave like in your head?
Speaker 2:Well, I joined the Navy when I was 17. So, lucky for me, I didn't know anything about anything. I was, you know, came from a coal mining town in Pennsylvania. I had no experience. I hadn't been out of Pennsylvania ever.
Speaker 2:And then, all of a sudden, I'm thrust into this situation where, since there were no books, as you point out, or movies, or really to talk about what training was, I thought literally I was going out to the Pacific somewhere and be on an island. And you know, we were going to be on a deserted island and we're going to do this training. And so, when I got to Coronado, it was a big relief that it wasn't a desert island somewhere. But that's how naive I was. And so the good part is, I really didn't know enough to quit. I just knew that I wasn't going to and that I was going, as I said.
Speaker 2:As I drove across the bridge to Coronado, I said the only way I'm going to come off this island is if I graduate. Otherwise they're going to have to drag my dead body off, and so that. But that was the mental dedication I had, that nothing was going to stop me from doing whatever was in front of me. And, believe me. There was a lot in front of me that I had no expectation that was ever going to happen. It was way harder and way more torturous than I could ever thought.
Speaker 1:I can only imagine. You know I was stationed in San Diego I shouldn't say station, that was. That was my duty station for the border patrol and for customs slash DHS, but Coronado. I remember driving over there and seeing those guys running on the beach and I was like oh, running in the sand for miles upon miles and trying to keep up must have been a pain in the ass too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, running was my Achilles heel and almost did me in, and it was actually a turning point, not only in Bud's for me, but in my life. I was doing a training run and got to the point where I had fallen behind several other times and I they made me do some really nasty things in order to try to get better. And here I am I'm falling behind again and I thought that was it. My, I wasn't going to make it, I was going to fail. The ambulance behind me was going to pick me up, take me back and that would be the end of my training.
Speaker 2:And I had this epiphany that this was it. I'm either going to run faster and keep up with the rest of the group or I'm going to die right here on this beach book as like an out of body experience where I could was looking down upon myself and all of a sudden I don't even feel myself running anymore. I just sprint, I catch up to everybody and I've never fell behind again. And what did that tell me was it was all in my head. My inability to do something wasn't because I physically couldn't is because I mentally couldn't get over the fact that I thought I couldn't do it, and when I broke that barrier, everything started coming easier.
Speaker 1:You know I can only imagine fast forward seven years and I don't really want to get a lot into your SEAL career because I have a feeling the book is going to have a lot of that and I really want the readers out there and the listeners to pick up the book and Goliath Little SEALs and Pract practical story about living your biggest life which is out now. But I do want to say fast forward seven years and all of a sudden you're at fletzy and that must have been a kate walk, one of the 1811 course. I mean, compared to you know the training and deployments you had before that yeah, uh, have you been to fletcy?
Speaker 2:did you go to fletcy?
Speaker 1:yeah, I think I spent about a year and a half all together with all the different trainings and everything else there remember the big deal.
Speaker 2:Well, at least back in the day I don't know if they still have it was the 500 point pt score scoring perfect on the pt score. There was a wall with at that time when I went through. There's only a wall with like maybe a couple dozen people who ever scored 500. And I walked in there. I looked at that. I'm like oh that's it.
Speaker 1:That's all we got to do.
Speaker 2:You know. So I scored a 500, not once but twice, because I had to go back for EPA training when I was within C. I scored a 500, and then I came back with epa, with seven years later, and scored another 500. So to answer your question, yeah, the pt wasn't all that difficult for me influence.
Speaker 1:No, well, it's good to get your mind going too. You know, compared to like, you know when you come from a, you know a soft community and you're not really. I mean, yeah, you have to use your mind. There's a lot of different technical aspects, especially if you get assigned to like an Intel type slot. But when you get there and you have to learn, okay, well huh, my whole life's been this for this point, and now, all of a sudden, I have to learn how to do investigations. That must've been a really cool, exciting experience for you too, because now you're shifting focus and you're being able to go into using your mind more in your body.
Speaker 2:I love that part. My degree is in criminal justice, so it was really what I was trained to do, in addition to, you know, just being motivated to do it. So I yeah, I was all excited. I couldn't wait to get out and start my first investigations. And then my first duty station was at Marine Corps Base Paris Island, where it all begins for the Marines, and I had a great boss. I had probably one of the best boss anybody could have had. One of his sayings was Dave, there's not enough paper in the world to explain why you did something that was not in the manual, and this had six manuals and we read manuals over and over. He made us be so proficient, not only at being doing investigations, but the way you did them, and because everything you did was was potentially going to be seen in a courtroom.
Speaker 2:And so he drilled that into us. No matter what you do, you may have to testify about it, and so that was the best way to start off as a junior special agent.
Speaker 1:You know, one of the last questions, because the format of the show is a little bit different. Now we do book discussions, which I mentioned before, around 20, 20-some minutes. So I really want people to pick up this book. I'm picking it up myself. I really want people to pick up this book. I'm picking it up myself, I really am. I'm looking forward to it Cause, like you and I do have a lot of similar career field as far as when it comes to post military. So what I would, I would do want to ask you is and I like this question what's your best piece of advice that you've ever received and why and I stole this from another podcast because I was like you know what? I never asked people that. I mean, you have a 30-year career, so I want to know your best piece of advice that you received as a special agent or as anything, your whole career.
Speaker 1:30.
Speaker 2:Um, hmm, hmm, Um I. I think this is the most important thing, um that nobody um. Your integrity is the most important trait you can have for anything you do, and no one can take your integrity from you. You have to give it away. That is the most best advice that I was ever given.
Speaker 1:I love it, and that is if you ever get into law enforcement and in military as well. Integrity is key. If you have no integrity and you lie, god forbid, you lie under oath, you get gigliote. You'll never your your. Your career is done and it's going to. It's going to follow you and it's going to follow you the rest of your career is done and it's going to follow you and it's going to follow you the rest of your career. Now you are really into the training sphere. I like that. Training needs to be relevant, it needs to be engaged, and that's actually my last question for you how do you remain engaged and relevant in the training atmosphere, because people have such short attention spans now.
Speaker 2:Providing training or training myself.
Speaker 1:Providing training.
Speaker 2:That's a challenge. Now you have to know your audience is probably the most important part of providing training that's meaningful, substantial and will remain with people that you're providing the training for. So understanding who you're talking to is the biggest challenge. One of my last jobs was I was the inspector general associate inspector general for communication for an organization, inspector General Associate Inspector General for Communication for an organization, and we provided a lot of training and we provide a lot of information to a very large organization. And for people to absorb that you have to be. There's some elements of providing communication, whether it's training or anything. For people to absorb, it has to be relevant, it has to be given in a way that they will understand and are willing to receive. And then you have to, when you, when you provide the information and training, you have to get feedback from the people you're training so that to understand that, they understand what you're relaying. And then until, unless you can, unless they can, parrot back to you information that you've just provided them, it's right over their head.
Speaker 2:And they're either glazed over from not understanding, not interested, or you didn't present it right. And I've always said if the people I'm training or talking to don't understand what I'm saying, it's not their fault, it's mine, because I didn't present it properly.
Speaker 1:Perfect. Well, david. The book is Anne Goliath. The Little of Seals Impractical Story About Living your Biggest Life. I appreciate you coming on. I'm looking forward to having more conversations after I read the book.
Speaker 2:I'm available. Give me a call, we'll have another chat. Plenty of stories. It was a pleasure to be here, thank you.
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