William Branum

Today on The Jay Allen Show, Jay speaks with William Branum. William is the Founder and CEO of Naked Warrior Recovery, a CBD company focused on the recovery of veterans and first responders. He is a retired Navy SEAL with 26 years of service. Listen to this all important conversation about CBD and the military on The Jay Allen Show.

The transcript is not perfect.

[00:00:02] spk_0: This show is brought to you by safety FM Hello and welcome to another episode of the J allen joe. I hope everything is good and grand inside of your neck of the woods As we take a look back at this year, man, where's the time gone? I can't believe it right now. As I take a look on how close we already are to the month of october I mean we are talking literally a couple of days if you're listening to this in pretty much real time, if not then who knows what time it actually is based on when you're listening to this. But I get it, believe me, I get it. People get busy. So today is an interesting one. I will tell you, I have the great opportunity of speaking with William Branham, Williams, a former U. S. Navy Seal with 26 years of service and founder and Ceo of Naked Warrior Recovery. A CBD company focused on recovery of veterans and first responders. He is a retired Navy Seal with 26 years of service. He has served on both traditional Seal teams, taught as a Seal sniper instructor and served on teams that specialized and undersea operations whose missions must be approved by the President of the United States. After retiring from the military in 2018, he realized that he was suffering from physical and psychological symptoms that negatively impacted his well being and quality of life, migraines, severe anxiety, chronic pains and difficulty focusing difficulty sleeping and falling asleep and depression are some of the symptoms he struggled with on a daily basis. Like so many others, he used alcohol and prescription drugs to mask the symptoms that he had then he discovered CBD and it changed his life. It had such a large impact on his life that he decided to start his own company, Naked Warrior Recovery. So sit back and take a listen to this conversation between William, Branham and myself here on the G allen joe streaming now on safety FM dot life. Well, the best ones are when they tell you that, that you don't know that you're recording and then you just kind of go through the typical conversation that you would go through and then all of a sudden, like, so what are we gonna start? Oh, we already ended. It's over. Yeah, exactly. So I have to tell you, um, I always like to mention how we kind of came about and crossed each other. Um, it's interesting on, you know, the website that we met on, because it's called matchmaker dot FM. And a lot of, you know, when you describe it to people automatically, they think that it's a dating site and I always try to make sure that we're clear that it's like, no, it's not a dating site, it's where we kind of find each other. Uh, so how did this whole thing start for you? Because I want to get to, of course, Naked Warrior, because that's an important part of the conversation military and then you got all the way down this path. How did the military things start for you, How did you decide this was the path that you wanted to go down? Yeah. So we um I grew up in Meridian Mississippi, there's not a lot around there, but my my role models were like chuck Norris. Um you know, he was in the movie uh he was in a lot of movies but he was in the movie called Delta Force where they were shooting rockets off of you know dirt bikes, uh john Rambo, the movie Rambo, there's still, there's still going, he's a beast. Um and uh you know, my dad liked to watch a lot of old movies, I'm much older than I look, but my dad like to watch a bunch of old movies and one of the movies that I remember was john Wayne's Green Berets was a movie. And so those were kind of like three role models that I had. I watched a lot of kung fu theater. I wanted to be a ninja when I grew up and uh but I was heavily involved in the Boy Scouts, we did a lot of like you know, lots of stuff outside camping in the such. I hunted with my grandfather my whole life and so I always knew kind of in the back of my mind, I want to be part of some military special forces something and I don't even know if I knew that vernacular back then or like what an elite force was. I don't think I even had that vocabulary. And uh, and I was at a, at a jamboree, a boy scout jamboree. And I was talking about, you know, wanting to become a, I don't know, maybe an army ranger or a marine scout sniper because that sounded pretty sexy. And then this other kid, he was like, yeah, I'm gonna be a Navy seal and I'm gonna be a uh an F 14 pilot. And I was like, what's the navy seal first of all? And so he kind of explained to me, they're like, you know, high highly trained special forces. Uh, they, they jump out of airplanes, they blow stuff up, they shoot guns, they do, you know all these super secret missions and their very small elite unit and they also are part of the water, they scuba dive and things like that. And I grew up watching National Geographic also. So I was like, I've, I totally want to do that. That's, that's the one I want. And he's like, they are the best. It was like, I want to be part of the best. So uh, you know the summer between my, my 11th and 12th grade of, of high school, the navy recruiter called me and had, he called me six months earlier. I would have a very different answer for him. But I had just had this, you know, met this kid and you know, I was like, that's what I want to do. He was like, hey, have you ever, so the navy recruiter says, hey, have you ever thought about joining the Navy? And I was like, matter of fact, I was just thinking about becoming a Navy Seal and F 14 fighter pilot. And uh he's like, okay, check why don't you come on down here to the, to the recruiting office and let's talk about it. So they showed me a really cheesy um recruiting video and this was many years ago and uh and I was like, yep, that's what I want to do, let's do it, where do I sign? And how do I become a pilot? He was like, hold on one step at a time, let's get you in maybe, and then we'll like, so he, his job was complete and I hadn't even done anything. So he was gonna do, you need to get anything. You did a lot, You did a lot of work. I even got for him. He just like, he made the phone call training here, he took a little bit of action and yeah, exactly, so good. What did you decide that you wanted to become a Navy Seal? Once you got in there, they said kind of like slow down a little bit and then you said, okay, this is what I want to do, that, I want to become a Navy Seal, how long did you have to wait before you could go down that path? So the process, the way the process used to be, it's a little bit different now. But the way the process was is I wanted to join the Navy and and have that to be my, my path. So the navy requires you to have a navy specific job. And that job for me, I chose to be a gunner's mate. And the gunner's mate is not really what you think it is. It's not really working on guns, it's working on uh missile launchers or big gun systems that are on the big, great Navy ships. And so what the school was for becoming a gunner's mate was electronics, hydraulic and pneumatic, which I had zero interest in. But my dad wanted me to learn about electronics because he thought that was the future. And so I I I, you know, kind of was appeasing him, but I still wanted to be a seal. So when I, when I went to boot camp I took the seal screening test, which is what I needed to do. I need to pass that in order to go become a seal. Well, I didn't pass the screening test, I failed to push ups and I don't even, I didn't really fail to push ups. I just quit on the push ups. I was like, I'm kind of tired. I don't think I can crank out 15 more and I probably could have. Um, so that was like my first failure, my first quit on the way to like learning lessons of life. And so I did well enough in this, in this a school gunner's mate school. I thought when, you know, I still needed to take the screening test, but this was up in like north of Chicago in the middle of winter and I was like, I don't I'm not a morning person, I don't want to get up early, I don't want to do this little thing that I need to do, you know, put forth this little bit of effort to go do the thing I want to achieve. And so I was a little bit lazy and I waited and it came, we were close to graduation and I still needed to take the screening test to go to buds. But we were we we had um an opportunity to pick like where you want to go and I decided I want to go to this other school for that was four more months in Virginia beach where it's nice and sunny and warm and I'll go to that school and then I'll take the screening test and then I'll go to buds. It didn't work out quite like that because I didn't really share my, my plan with other people. And it turns out that because I took that that school in Virginia beach for four months. I was obligated to go to a ship for the next 24 months. So I went to, I had to go to Yokosuka Japan For the next 24 months and live on a ship and really it was a terrible experience, but it was great. Last hell of a hell of a trade off for once for 24 months, right? Exactly. And then, um, and then when it came time for me to, you know, call my detailer and say, hey, I want to go to buds, I'm gonna drop a package, my detailer who, the guy who send you around to your next duty station, he's like, that's great, but I'm not gonna let you go become a navy seal because what you're doing right now is more critical than than becoming a navy seal. I was like, what are you kidding me? That that makes zero sense. Um, and so I asked lots of people, I got letters of recommendation and you know, I went to the highest levels I could there in Augusta japan of people to ask if they would recommend me to go to buds and all this other stuff. And everyone said yes and still my detailer said no. And then one day, the Chief of Naval Operations who is the highest ranking person in the navy, like the only people that are senior to him is the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense, he's the top dog in the navy. He comes to my ship, there's eight or 10 ships in Japan and you kuska and he get, he came to my ship, he didn't go to any other ship his whole time there. It came to my ship and, and had CNN's calling. It's like, he doesn't even have any questions. And I was like, yeah, over here I um, I do in the navy to be a seal. I think I deserve a chance to go. But my detailer won't let me go totally threw that guy under the bus and uh, I think I deserve a chance to go and you know what you would, would you mind allowing me to go? And he was like, he turns to my commanding officer who, fortunately I had talked to prior to this uh, hey, is he a good guy? And I was like, he was like, yeah, he was a sailor of the quarter this quarter, which is kind of like employee of the month, employee of the quarter or whatever. And uh, so I did, I did a good job at my job. And so he turns back to me, he's like, check, you'll be in the first class after your Prd, which is planned rotational date and six weeks later I'm off to California. Congratulations, glad that it all worked out. Even though, I mean it took me three years from the day I joined the navy just to get to buds actually a little bit more the to get the opportunity and I can't imagine the level of training that you have to go through to be trained that much before going to. But I was like, how hard can it be? Whoa. There was not the right attitude. So therefore it took me about, it took me about 13 months to complete a six-month block of training because I got injured several times. One of those injuries was definitely not my fault. Someone stepped on me and broke my leg. But happens, what do you want? You have all kinds of interesting stories when it comes to that. So in regards, you went through a lot of leadership stuff. I mean I definitely becoming a seal, You understand leadership, but then you're done with them. Are you still in the Maryland military? Retired in uh july 31st of 2018 meeting in regard to when you decide to go to school, when you decided to go and get the get the organizational leadership in the strategic leadership? I actually agree that. So I did that on my last, you've done some research on me, uh wasn't supposed to be that was that I actually uh the Navy paid for most of that. So I used to my last job in the Navy, I was the Science and Technology Director for Naval Special Warfare Group three. I work directly with the headquarters and what what our job was was to. So we have these operational deficiencies and basically what that is is there's something isn't working at the team that maybe it's a technology, maybe it's operational procedure, maybe it's tactics, techniques and procedures. It's something. And so, you know, this is away from the, from the deck plate level, from the, from the lowest ranking guy, he can submit an operational efficiency report and it will go up the entire chain of command to get visibility and hey, this is something that is keeping us from doing our job or we could do it better if we had this technology or whatever. And so my job was to solve those problems and there's no funding for that. People think that yeah, you know, in the seal teams, you have all this research and development, la la la even guys in the seal teams think that and it's absolutely false. There, we have zero research and development dollars. So my job was to go find solutions, but by the way, you don't have any money to do that. So I were just, we'll, we'll pay for your travel. I'm like, okay. So, um, I was probably on the road 202 150 days a year for my last three years and I went out and found $16 million of other people's money to solve problems that we had in our, in our operational deficiencies. So I created new technologies and all sorts of other stuff while I was doing that. I also got my bachelor's and my masters, I went from a PhD a public high school diploma and that's kind of where I was going with that story is I would be doing the science and technology job, I would sit in the room with like, like scientists, like people with phds and like underwater scientists face scientists, all sorts of people and I'm like yeah, you know, people are introducing themselves and they kind of come around the room and they're like, okay, I'm so and so with this PhD and whatever in that and I do rocket stuff and that comes to me and I'm like, yeah, my name is William Branham, I also have a PhD a public high school diploma, so if I ask some dumb questions, please forgive me, I promise, I'll provide some value. Oh, I love it, I love it. So I went from PhD two masters in three years and uh he was walking on the road, like traveling, doing stuff uh you know, while traveling, getting on, doing all online. So unfortunately the college that I went to, I got to combine a bunch of stuff, you know, they took a bunch of my Navy stuff uh to help with, you know, those elective credits and then I had to do the um the things that they required for the degree and then at the end there are a few classes left over that well they're like, well you could take, you know underwater basket weaving or something or you could take some masters level classes, you know, to count towards your bachelor's and I was like, that makes sense. And then I just didn't stop doing the master's program. I just continued through it. I was like, what am I doing? So I, yeah, I got my, my, my, I went from like my, you know, from nothing to to a masters in three years. So you got rid of your PhD to go from your mouth. I mean technically I still have it. Very good, very good. So at what point during your journey do you say? Okay, I have this great idea, We're naked warrior recovery. I'm sure you're not calling it at the time, but you're saying, hey, I got some ideas of some concepts I want to try out at what point do you decide that this is what you want to go after next? So the first company I started when I, when I retired was and I should have started this a lot earlier but I was afraid of like conflict of interest and some other stuff is I started a consulting company uh, that helped companies to help companies navigate the military acquisition system. So if they had like a technology for the military, I could, you know what, maybe it wasn't ready for prime time. I can help take that technology. And I had just created this giant roller decks of people and money and all this other stuff and I could I can take your technology and I can present it to the military, find a possible end user and then we can find funding to help bring this technology to prime time and then get it part of become a program of record and all this other stuff. And uh what companies really they they didn't really want to go through that process. Number one, they didn't want to hire a consultant because they had been burned by consultants in the past. I learned like, oh that's consultant is a dirty word in industry. So they changed that um the way you're presenting yourself and I burned a lot of bridge just by saying, hey I'm a consultant now and so that's less than number one But number two people wanted me to, if they were like okay consultant, why don't you just go sell my widget that may or may not be ready for prime time? We'll pay you a commission. I'm like I live on a rock in the middle of this, will you pay my travel, will you pay this and that. And so I got some small clients, I got some uh for you know to introduce some, some technology but it was really not a successful business. I didn't think about it, you know well enough, I didn't execute, I certainly didn't execute it well and so I also had a bunch of baggage I got baggage from 26 years of service. I got baggage from bad relationships. I got, I got baggage, I don't call it PTSD, I call it baggage because we all have it, you know, I don't want to put a label on it. I want to just call it. We all, we all carry crap around with us all the time and a lot of times, that's our ego, we don't want to let something go. And I had a lot of it. And what I was doing to turn that noise off in my head is I would drink, you know basically drink myself to sleep at night, just like vodka drink but to drink vodka, drink like 345 glasses. And you know until that noise was turned off or doled out, not really off and I would pretty much pass out and then have to try to function the next day. Not not a great recipe for success. And so I was curious about CBD but I still have my top secret clearance from, from the military. And um and so I was in Virginia dealing with some stuff and I had lunch with a buddy and I was like, hey, I'm gonna see if I can go find some CBD because it's a brand, I mean it is a brand new market even though there's CBD shops everywhere everywhere. Um I was like, hey hey Ray, I'm gonna go see if I can find some CBD because maybe what you have here in Virginia is better than what we have in Hawaii. I have no idea. I was like, you want CBD, I've got some at home. And so we went back to his house, he gave me a bottle of CBD. He's kind of an instagram influencer and the company sent him a bunch of stuff and so now he's an instagram influencer for me. But that's how that worked out. But uh, so I took CBD um, I don't know if I noticed anything right away. Maybe I slept a little better that night. Maybe I was a little less pissed off in the next morning. And what I like to say is water boils at 212° and I was probably living at 210°. I had like, you know from like success to failure. I got baggage. I got Ego, I got all this other stuff. But what I noticed over the 30 days or so of taking that CBD is that I went from like 210 degrees to 205 to 200 to 1 95 to maybe like 1 85. And I noticed that pains in my body Are you know 26 years of service. I'm kind of beat up. Like they were just less bad. They weren't stabbing me as much anymore. They're a little more dull. Still paying, still issues whatever but then I you know and I ran out and I started, you know, I started moving closer to that to that, That, that 212°. And so I took another brand of CBD and I had similar results and then I went to a business conference, I met someone in the industry and like maybe there's something to the CBD thing and I met someone that was in the industry and she was like, you want to do A to B, B to B, B to C. I'm like, I want to do C. B. D and I want to work for you. She's like, you don't want to work for me, I can't hire you right now. Why don't you just start your own CBD company? I was like, I don't know how to do that. She was like, you're, you're, you're a navy seal. Why don't you go figure it out? I was like, okay. So I went and figured it out. And so part of, you know, starting a company is having a purpose, what's the purpose of the company? It's to make money is to help other people. But you know what is the purpose and you know, my journey of like figuring out what was wrong with me and how to heal myself as I realized that I had all this ego and other people with bigger egos are putting their crap on me and I'm carrying it around and I'm like, well if I just take it off and set it in the corner like I am free, I can jump higher, I can move faster, you know, in combat. We we put our armor on and we, we go into harm's way and sometimes it saves our lives and that's awesome. And sometimes we didn't even need it, we come back, we take it off and you know what I found is you know that that ego, that armor that we carry around most of the time, we never ever take it off and we never find that rest and recovery. And so I realized like, well the the predecessor of today's Navy seal was called the Naked Warrior. They were you know, before the, before the assault on Normandy um that you see in saving Private Ryan, you had these volunteers who are really good in the from the Navy who are really good with demolitions and they swam into the beach. They conducted reconnaissance on the beach where the fighting positions were, they figured out lanes of assault. They saw all the demolitions are obstacles on the beach that they needed to blow up. Prior to the assault. They got back in the water. They did hydrographic reconnaissance in the water. They created a chart, they went back and hours before the assault on Normandy. They came in, you know under fire from the beach every single time, you know, and they put demo charges on all the stuff. They cleared lanes of assault. They got back in the water, they put demo charges on everything in the water And this was before the assault even started. And then as the assault started, they pulled back and they blew all the obstacles to clear the way. And so that was the predecessor of today's Navy seal. Um, so that was that Naked warrior kind of, that taken off get Naked, kind of, uh, kind of stuck with me and, and you know, being the naked warrior, you know, as my lineage as a seal, um, that just seemed to fit the, the name of the company, you know, take your ego off, Get naked and naked also has a whole another acronym that I've kind of created for mindset and things like that, because CBD was only a, it was a modality. I had to get my mind right in order to move forward and start being successful again. Well, I mean it's a very interesting on how you came up with the concept because because I love it, I love the whole ideology behind it, about, you know, taking off your ego and really kind of laying it down and being the person that you want to be. So as you're doing all of this stuff and you're doing the studying in the research and getting everything ready. What misconceptions did you find immediately when it came to CBD because there's still a lot of them out there that people still think one thing or another when it comes to CBD. So what did you find in your research that you were doing? So that the industry is incredibly dirty. It's very corrupt. So CBD wasn't legal until December 20 of 2018 when they passed the farm bill. And so when that happened, like everyone and their brother just like took a they're like, oh here's an opportunity. And CBD was kind of like a fringe kind of black market industry off to the side. And so what people did is they were like, oh let's just like flood the market with whatever we can. And so the FDA went out and did a bunch of of research. They did a bunch of spot checks on companies and they found that most companies Uh either don't have CBD in them, they don't have the level of CBD, they say they have in them, they have high levels outside the legal limit of .3% THC um you know, to make it illegal products. So that means it came from clearly came from marijuana. Um They have high levels of heavy metals, mercury toxins, arsenic, things like that. I also found that found out that that CBD is a bio accumulator, which means it pulls all the good stuff out of the soil, but all the bad stuff out of the soil. So you have to have like good quality dirt, you know, it's such a powerful bio accumulator that they're using CBD at Chernobyl to clean the radiation out of the soil so that they can maybe go back and re populate that area one day. So it's like you need to have a good dirt, you need to have good quality. And so I went out and I found, and I found a bunch of people were selling CBD bunch of suppliers and most of them were, you know, I started asking basic questions and then I started asking a lot more complicated questions and when they couldn't answer the complicated questions, I knew that they were probably not on the up and up. And so what I did is I found suppliers that I believe we have the highest quality CBD on the market and I'm not saying that other companies don't have quality CBD, what I'm saying is we go through efforts that even the biggest names in CBD do not go through and you know, for a third party everything that we, everything that we do, we have a a QR code on on all of our products to so that you can go in and you can see lab testing. So a lot of companies will do lab testing, like they'll extract the oil, they'll test the soil test the oil and a third party lab and then they'll just go through the whole manufacturing process and never tested again. We test the oil when it's extracted, we put it through the manufacturing process and then we uh test the final product and that's the that's the QR code, that's the lab results that you get on the backside. Other companies don't do that because there could be some contamination uh, somewhere in the manufacturing process, something that happened. So, um, so yeah, if you're if if people are listening to this and there are interested in CBD, I would say make sure that on the website you have current lab results for every lot. A lot, A lot of companies even put like a lab results on their website and it was like five years ago. It's like, well, we don't want them going to any other website, we want them to go to your website, you want them to come to my website. But people are, people are weird about, you know, they're loyal to like different brands and I and I totally appreciate that. Um my website for my CBD is N. W. Dash recovery dot com or Naked warrior recovery dot com. Just because I didn't, I made naked Word recovery all one word, my my website and then I was like, maybe people don't want to write naked in their search engine. I don't know, I'm not judging. Um So let's just make it, let's make it a little easier for N. W. Dash recovery dot com. So you did reference something there when you were going through everything that yours is th th c free. Can you explain that a little bit more to people? Because of course there's always the misconception that if you talk about CBD automatically it has to have th e. Inside of it because it's an activator it's an activator has to activate somehow. So can you explain that a little bit? So people, so there's three, I'm gonna say there's three main categories of CBD. There's a broad spectrum which is you know it's extracted from the oil are from the plants and it still has some trace amounts of THC so the hemp plant to be considered hemp legally hemp it has to have 0.3% or less THC in the driveway of the plant. There's ways to test that. Um So that is extracted and so a full spectrum means it's got everything in it. It's got all the minor cannabinoids and all the Turpin's which are essential oils. Uh That kind of work synergistically with the body. It still it still has trace amounts of THC up 2.3% in the in the oil. The other spectrum of that as a CBD isolate where they just extract the molecule CBD and get rid of all the other minor cannabinoids and Turpin's and they put that in a in an olive oil or an M. C. T. Oil or maybe even a hemp oil. And it's in my opinion it's the lowest quality and they're not just my opinion. Other people lowest quality because you're missing out on all the other benefits from the from the other minor cannabinoids and Turpin's and there's lots of research happening now on other minor cannabinoids being better for different things. And then where I am, it's kind of in the middle which is the most expensive way to do it is we have primarily we carry a broad spectrum almost, we're 98% broad spectrum have one full spectrum product just because people ask for it. But basically we maintain most of the minor cannabinoids and Turpin's, but we extract the THC from the oil. Like, you know, on the other side of the isolate, they were extracting the CBD only. We're extracting the THC only so that we still maintain the minor cannabinoids and Turpin's so that you kind of get that synergistic effect with the body and kind of in to put that into perspective and get a little neuroscience here. The reason that CBD works for so many people, I mean it doesn't necessarily work or not work for other people, but why people who are getting like great benefits out of CBD, why they think it's like this panacea that cures everything, It doesn't actually cure anything CBD is like uh it's like a multivitamin, super multivitamin for your endocannabinoid system and your endocannabinoid system was. Its new science is was discovered in the 1960s. But then Uh medical marijuana became illegal again, or marijuana, whatever. War on drugs, just say no. And then in the 1990s when medical marijuana became legal scientists they took a radioactive isotope and put it on A. T. C. Molecule and put it inside the human body to see what's going on. And that's how they found this giant neuro receptor that's connected to every other system in your body. And they named it the endocannabinoid system because it's you know it works off of cannabinoids and our bodies create endogenous lee to minor cannabinoids. One is called anandamide which is the bliss molecule to feel good. The runner's high. That's it's very closely associated with THC to feel good. And then the other one is AnAnd is uh to A. G. And it's a big long word and I don't remember what it does but those those two molecules their their their cannabinoids just like you get from the cannabis plant and they feed your endocannabinoid system. And sometimes we don't make enough, sometimes we have chronic illness and that you know the that pulls everything else kind of out of out of balance out of whack. And so what CBD does is it's kind of a it's shaped like a key like those other minor cannabinoids and like an an a minor to E. G. And it comes in and it feels those locks those holes for the endocannabinoid system and it brings it back into homeostasis. And once that's back into homeostasis the body starts working more correctly and it will start healing itself. And that's why people are like, oh it cured my cancer cured by what it did. It did not cure anything. There's not medical advice. What it did is it supported their endocannabinoid system which is connected to your your respiratory system, your endocrine system is connected to your digestive system, your immune system, your central nervous system, it's connected every system in your body. And so when that thing comes back into homeostasis, everything is working properly. And that's why CBD seems to be like, it cures everything. So is this why you correct inflammation and things like that? So is this this is why you stayed on your website in particular, that is supporti