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Aug. 22, 2022

From Seal To Civilian with William Branum

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.
He has served on both traditional SEAL Teams, taught as a
SEAL Sniper Instructor and served on Teams that specialized in
undersea operations, who’s missions must be approved by the
President of the United States. He led major combat operations
ranging from protecting the interim Iraqi elected officials to Direct
Action missions in Baghdad and across Ambar province.
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, difficulty focusing, difficulty
sleeping/falling asleep, and depression are some of the
symptoms I struggled with on a daily basis.
Like so many others, he used alcohol & prescription drugs
to mask the symptoms he had. Then he discovered CBD and it
changed his life. It had such an impact on him he started Naked
Warrior Recovery to bring the highest quality products to the
market and to teach the GET NAKED! Mindset.

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Transcript

Josh Wilson
 Good day, fellows. 


 William Branum
 Welcome. 


 Josh Wilson
 Uncensored advice for men. Men. Hey. I love you guys. Let me just say that right off the bat. This shows for you. This is our impact show. We've interviewed pastors, p*** stars, everything in between. Some of my favorite conversations, minus maybe the p*** stars that was fun. When I bring on some people who either in the military, police, fire because they've seen a part of the world or a part of humanity that maybe the general population has not seen. With that, I wanted to have a conversation with maybe Seal and ask him some questions. We've interviewed a few, so let's have a chat with Mr. William. William, welcome to the show. 


 William Branum
 Thanks for having me here to be here. 


 Josh Wilson
 Absolutely. All right. So you got a phenomenal beard, right? 


 William Branum
 I just trimmed it up. It was way better. 


 Josh Wilson
 Really cool. You also have a shirt that says get naked. Here's a guy with a great beard but a shirt that says get naked. William, tell ups who you are and why are you trying to get me naked? 


 William Branum
 All right. Yeah. Awesome. It's a great question. So my name again. William Brandon. I grew up in a little town outside of Mary, Mississippi. Not a lot going on there. As a kid, I always knew I wanted to be part of something bigger than myself. I was kind of a mediocre kid at best. Very poor mediocre mindset. Someone told me about the Seal teams, and I thought, well, that's where I want to be. I want to be surrounded by excellence. I want to be surrounded by people who are better than me, that I will always rise to the occasion. I knew that as a kid. I will always rise to the occasion, try and surround myself by people who are better than me, smarter than me, faster than me, stronger than me. So I joined the Navy. I took the Seal screening test. I failed it the first time I went to my Navy school. 


 William Branum
 I went to another Navy school, which put me on a ship in the Yakusa, Japan. Not Seal training yet in Yakusa, Japan, for two years. After I did my time in Purgatory on the ship. I was ready to go to the Seal teams or go to Seal training and try and get to the Seal teams and when I called the guy that's in charge of telling you what to do and where to go. He said. Sorry. Bro. You're not going to become a Navy Seal because that school that you went to. That second school. That made you too critical to the Navy. You're more critical to me as this guy working on missile launchers for Tomahawk missiles than you are as a Navy Seal over here. I didn't take no for answer, and I kept pushing, and I got letters of recommendation, and I eventually, finally passed the audio screening test. 


 William Branum
 I failed it twice, actually. I just kept going and kept asking, and I continued to get the know from the guy that made the final decision. One day, the Chief of Naval Operations came to my ship in Yakuska, Japan. To put it into perspective, who the Chief of Naval Operations is? He's the most senior guy in the Navy. The only person in the military that's more senior to him is the Secretary of Defense and the President of the United States. So he's the most senior guy. He came to my little ship in Yukuca, Japan. There's 815 ships in Japan. He only came to ours. He didn't go to any other ship. He had CNOs call. He's like, this is my vision of the baby. Does anyone have any questions? Yeah, I raised my hand. It's me over here, this guy. I said, yeah, I joined the Navy to become a Navy Seal. 


 William Branum
 I think I deserve a chance to go, but my detailer won't let me go. Maybe I'd make it, maybe I don't, but I think I deserve at least a chance to go. He turns to my commanding officer and he says, Is he a good guy? And he was like, yeah. He was a sailor of the quarter, this quarter, which is like Employee of the month, because I did a good job sweeping or mopping the floors or something like that. He turns back to me as I check, you'll be in the first class after your PRD, which is planned rotational date. Six weeks later, I'm off to California to seal training. Nice. So I went through Seal training. It took me 13 months to finish that six month block of training. Got injured a bunch of times. There's some stories in there. Got to the Seal teams, I had of a mindset shift. 


 William Branum
 Most people only look at the first mountain that's in front of them. For me, it was like getting to the Seal training. It took me from the time I joined the Navy, which was really the summer before my 12th grade of high school. Went off the boot camp. It was almost four years before I actually got to Seal training. It took me 13 months to get through Seal training, and I thought the journey was over. That journey was just beginning, and so I had to change my mindset. I learned very quickly once I got to the Seal teams, you're nothing now. You have to actually earn your right to be here, because Seal training is just a selection process. I earned my right to be in the Seal teams. I taught sniper school. 911 happened. We deployed to combat. I retired. I use air quotes here. 


 William Branum
 Retired after 26 years of service. I had no clue who I was or what I was going to do in the military. In my entire adult life, I've been a part of the military. In the Seal teams, I had a purpose, I had a mission, and I had a team, and I had a bad a** purpose and a bad a** mission and a badass team. And then overnight, it was all gone. Team Chat happened. It was like if you've ever seen the movie The Avengers, where Thanos snaps his fingers and half the world's population goes away, it was that for me. It took me a long time to figure out my new mission, my new purpose, and to do what I call now building my new Seal team. Now, like I said before, I try and surround myself with high performers, people who perform better than me. 


 William Branum
 They're faster than me, they're better than me, they're stronger than me, they're smarter than me. I try and surround myself by those people because I will naturally rise to that tide. So that's what I'm doing now. Getting naked is really about taking that ego that I had, about like, I don't need anyone's help. I actually need a lot of people's help. Taking that ego off and exposing myself, becoming vulnerable and being brave enough to ask for help, ask for people to help me get where I need to be. I also make it as also an acronym, and it stands for the Inner for Never Quit, the Accept Failure, the KSK, Mediocrity, the E is Exposure, Fears, and the DS do work. 


 Josh Wilson
 I like that, man. 


 William Branum
 I want you to do that every single day. That's why I want to get you naked. 


 Josh Wilson
 Maybe not with you, but I'll get naked. All right, so let's chat about this before we go of the mountain from Seal to civilian. There's a mountain there, too, right? There's a bunch of mountains that you had to climb. I like the way you said, this is like, I climbed the biggest mountain in my mind, which was becoming a Seal. I made it. And you're like, no, that's s***. That's baby step number one, really? Right, right. Selection process. What was the next while Team Chat was the next hurdle that you had to see or mountain that you had to do a mindset shift and learn? 


 William Branum
 I think when I started being put into leadership solutions, like true leadership positions, that I probably wasn't ready for I know I wasn't ready for mentally my performance based on my performance. The military puts you into different leadership positions. Like, oh, you did a good job here. We think you'll do a good job here, and so they advance you based on your potential capability. You've shown the capability here. We think you have the potential to do this leadership role here. I went into these leadership roles not really having a clue on what to do, not really wanting to be a leader, like, terrified, like, oh, so much more responsibility. There's this fear of failure, but there's also a fear of success. I kind of had that, had a lot of that. No one talks about that a lot. They're like, what do you mean fear of success? 


 William Branum
 You get more money, you get more praise, you get more whatever. You get less praise. Maybe you get more money, maybe you don't, but you get a lot more responsibility. The payment for that responsibility is more work, but it's also more gratitude at the end of the day, when you have been able to create an incredible team around you, when you're the person that's really influencing and driving the culture of that organization, that's really the value there. 


 Josh Wilson
 Super cool. Let's pause there for a second because it's super important for us to unpack because I was working with a coach, and he was just like he's like, Tell me about your story. I was like, I was a firefighter medic, and I built a fitness technology company. I was super heavy in speculation, in real estate, in venture capital and private whatever. Fear of failure doesn't really resonate with my brain. Like today, there was a car stuck on a railroad track, and I ran towards it to try to help them get it off right. There's something wrong in my brain to run towards that kind of stuff, but my coach pointed out that I had a fear of failure because what happens if you do get in the spotlight? What happens if you do win? People are going to be looking at you, and then you have responsibility. 


 Josh Wilson
 You have to step up to the occasion. People's lives will be dependent on you, people's livelihood. How in the world did you or have you overcome that or work through that? 


 William Branum
 How do I go overcome my fear of success? Yeah, I think first you have to accept the fact that you're in charge and you are absolutely capable. Like I said earlier, I came from a little town in Mississippi, and I was a mediocre kid with a mediocre mindset. Yeah, I had to change my own mindset. I had to have more positive self talk. I had to stop feeling sorry for myself. Yeah, it's work. Work is a good thing. The pain is a good thing. The struggle that you're going to go through is a good thing. When you can change your mindset and think about those struggles as a good thing, the things that make you better, it's like working out. You don't go to the gym and you just get on the StairMaster and walk on the treadmill. When you're trying to get bigger and stronger, you lift heavy weights and you go to failure. 


 William Branum
 Through those failures, your muscles, they go to hypertrophy and they're like, oh, my God, I can't get the thing off or my legs, I can barely walk today. That failure is the thing that's going to make you stronger tomorrow. It's the short pain that you go through that gets you stronger and better and smarter and more capable tomorrow. You have to be willing to accept those failures. 


 Josh Wilson
 Yeah. I think that this is something that I think men and I'm guilty of this one. I think we lose that hunt, we lose the drive, we lose the warrior, we lose the masculinity, the force towards uncomfortableness. Right. Are you meeting that in today's world because you were an elite soldier, top 1% in the world, soldier wise? Right. Are you meeting that in today's, especially from steel to civilian? Right. Are you seeing that in today's men culture? 


 William Branum
 When I left the steel of teams, I say that's the hardest military mission I've ever been on, and I'm still on that mission, but as I'm moving forward, I'm finding more clarity, more purpose and more vision there. But yeah, 100%. I saw it while I was still in the Seal teams, and I was like, dude, I cannot function in civilian like, in a civilian company. Incorporate. Like watching the whining, watching the woe is me. Watching the it's not my fault, brother. It is your fault. Do something about it. 


 Josh Wilson
 Team Chat was your nickname. What did the guys call you? 


 William Branum
 I didn't have much of a nickname. They called me Will or Senior Chief for the most part. I spent half my career as a senior chief. 


 Josh Wilson
 Okay. 


 William Branum
 Snacks came up every now and then because maybe I was always eating, but yeah, there weren't any that really stuck hard. 


 Josh Wilson
 Mine was cookies in the fire department because people would bring cookies by the thing and I would eat them all. We'd get a structure fire and I'd puke them all up. So they called me cookies. 


 William Branum
 Anyways. 


 Josh Wilson
 All right, so snacks. I like that. As you were going through this thing the day before you retire, air quotes retire, what was scarier? That or gunfight? 


 William Branum
 Oh, retiring. Not having a mission or purpose or anything. Yeah. I get on stage now and I speak, and then I talk about the get naked mindset or I talk about something leadership or something like that. I'm very nervous and I stutter when I get started because I have to get warmed up and I'll stop and I'll say something like, if you guys hear me, like stutter or I forget what I'm going to say. It's because I'm nervous. Because I'm more nervous. This is scarier than being in a gunfight. No one ever taught me how to speak on stage in front of a bunch of people, but they didn't teach me how to fight getting a gun fight. Right now, I'm just kind of going through like I'm in gunfight mode and we're trying to get through this. 


 Josh Wilson
 Public speaking is scarier than getting shot at. 


 William Branum
 Yeah. 


 Josh Wilson
 That's so crazy, right? 


 William Branum
 Well, I can caveat that with when I was 15, I was shot. I think my odds of getting shot again are way less than your odds of getting shot. 


 Josh Wilson
 Hey, I sit in an office all day, my odds are getting shot unless I shoot myself accidentally. Like I miss fires on there. I don't know. All right, so you got shot at 15. What the h*** are you doing to get shot at 15? 


 William Branum
 Hunting with my great uncle. 


 Josh Wilson
 D*** Cheney. 


 William Branum
 Yeah, it's very similar. Very similar. Funny. I was watching him last night. It was my great uncle. I'll try to make a long story short, my grandfather picked me up from the bus stop, 15 years old. He's like, all right, you and Uncle Grover and his son Albert, who has kids my age, you're going to go hunting. The weekend before I left, my turkey call down this, like, one little logging road. I'm like, I'm going to go find my thing, and then I'm going to go find another place to sit and call some turkeys and see if we get something. So I go find my turkey call. I go down the other way where Albert and Uncle Grover went, and I find a place where I think maybe the turkeys will come in as a clearing. Here is a thing over there, a field over there. 


 William Branum
 I sit down by a big pine tree and I do my call, and I'm pretty good at it. I see Uncle Grover walk up, and he's, like, wearing all camouflage with a face net. I'm wearing, like, a camouflage jacket and jeans with, like, a little net across my legs and a camouflage hat. I do my call, and he looks up and he looked right at me, and I'm like, oh, he sees me. We're good. He goes over and he sits down. Now, when my grandfather was taking me to drop me off with Uncle Grover, he was like, well, maybe you got you and Uncle Grover sit together, one of your calls, the other like, shoots and blah, something like that. That is actually kind of what happened, only not in the way that it was intended. I'd sit there and I'm trying to be a really good hunter. 


 William Branum
 I want to impress Uncle Grover. I'm being very still, and I do my call, and I set it down, but there's these mosquitoes that are kind of flying around, and I kind of try to swap them very slowly out of my face. He sees this movement, and I happen to be looking this way, and then I hear boom. And I felt kind of the blast. I was like, I'm really mad right now because I'm doing the calling. A turkey showed ups, and he shot it, and I didn't even see it. I looked to my left, and I'm thinking, there's a turkey going to be flopping around over there, and there's no turkey. It's just, like, super thicket. You can only see, like, 2ft into the woods. I start getting really hot, and my face starts I get this metallic taste in my mouth, and my face starts swelling up. 


 William Branum
 And I'm like, what's going on? I felt like the blast. It was I'm getting hit with a baseball or something, and I'm, like, metallic taste in my mouth. Maybe I bit my lip. Well, I don't know. I'm still looking for the turkey. Maybe he shot me. And you accidentally yeah. I say, if I spit blood, he shot me, and I'm going to shoot him back. So I spit it's nothing but blood. And I'm like, you shot me. No, wait a minute. He looked right at me, talking to myself out of, like, being shot. I go through some more self assessment, like, more pain, more things are happening with my body. And I'm like, wait a minute. If I spit blood again, he shot me, and I'm going to shoot him back. And so I spit nothing but blood. Now I'm just p***** off, and I'm like, you shot me, you mother. 


 William Branum
 I tried to pick my gun up to shoot him back, but because he hit me, like, in the arm and in the face, and my arm didn't work, and I'm trying, and I'm, like, really angry right now. He's like, what happened? What are you doing here? And he ran over. He did the smartest thing possible. He took the gun away from me, and I'm still yelling and cussing at him. He's done that, and eventually right, and then I calm down, and then I walk out of the woods, and he goes to bat down and finds albert, his son. And then we go to the hospital. Anyway, that's my quick story of being shot. 


 Josh Wilson
 How many pegs did they get out of you? 


 William Branum
 Like, two. They only took 2 hours. There's like, a whole 30 something in my body. Anytime you do a head chest xray, they're like, have you been shot before? Yeah, we're good. I'm in the account over there, but two of them went into my colon, like, through my ribcage, into my colon, and caused some internal bleeding. I'm, like, laying there in the hospital, like, in the er. They're like, I'm like, My stomach hurts. Can you give me something for pain? And they're like, no, you're good. You're just in shock. I'm like, I'm not in shock. I'm fine. I walked out of the woods. I know what's going on. I'm 15, talking smack, and I'm very like, I don't talk smack, and at least not at that age. Nowadays, I might but they're like, you're fine. Finally, they brought me in for a cat skin, and they're like, oh, we need to go do surgery because you have some major internal bleeding, and we don't know what that's from. 


 William Branum
 I'm like, I got shot, dude. I woke up with, like, a giant zipper down my belly where they had to pull all my guts out, find where I was bleeding from, fix that, and then shove everything back in there. 


 Josh Wilson
 Well, at least it looks a six pack now, right? So if you have the zip code. 


 William Branum
 Right out the defining line right down. 


 Josh Wilson
 The front bad a**, right? Super cool. 


 William Branum
 Yeah. 


 Josh Wilson
 Hey, where'd you get that from? Uncle Grover. 


 William Branum
 Uncle Grover shot me. No big deal. 


 Josh Wilson
 Super cool. Hey, thanks for sharing that, man. That's funny. Not funny that you got shot, but funny that Uncle Grover shot you. Dang it. Uncle Grover. As you're going through this process, you go into the Seals, and thank you for your service, by the way. 


 William Branum
 Thank you. Yeah, for sure. Thank you. Thank you for your service. I think what you did was braver and more notable than what I did. 


 Josh Wilson
 I agree. All right, so I think the hardest thing ever has been being a dad or a husband or trying to lead other men. I think, for me, the hardest journey, and I've done some cool stuff, but I've also failed a lot. For me, the hardest thing was overcoming my ego was getting naked, like you say, was be willing to come up on a stage and go, listen, I've been bankrupt. I've been on food stamp. I failed like this, or I failed this. And now what about you, man? Because you're Seal, dude, you're supposed to be badass with no emotions, no feelings, but with a super strong chin and then just run through s***. Right? Like, that's what a Seal is supposed to be. When did you realize that's maybe not the best way to live long term? 


 William Branum
 I would go back and do it all over again if I could. The Navy actually said, you got to go because your time is up. I didn't want to go. 


 Josh Wilson
 That guy. 


 William Branum
 Right. 


 Josh Wilson
 Let me post the question differently. You went from badass leader of Seals right to now talking about getting naked, being transparent, being vulnerable. That's a whole different thing. That you probably didn't have those kind of conversations as a Seal. Am I right or am I wrong? I've never been to Seal. 


 William Branum
 Yeah, no, 100% right. In the Seal team, I for sure I did my best to never show any kind of weakness. Everything is really a competition between platoons, between old guys and new guys and whatever. I'm an old guy in charge of all these new guys studs and I'm trying to beat them every single time we work out. Not always successful, but god help you if the old guy beats you. You will not hear the end of it. When I got out, I struggled a lot of, I call it baggage, kind of talked about that earlier that I was just carrying around. Some of it was from occupational hazard, some of it was from not so awesome relationships and ex wife that I still go to court with twelve years later, still battling and some other stuff. I'm thinking like, whatever, I'm a Navy Seal, I can't show weakness. 


 William Branum
 My job as a man is to take care of the family, take care of the kids. Quite honestly, she would use that against me. She would use that as like, why don't you want to take care of the why are you not ever the kids? I don't generally talk about this openly or this direct, but that was breaking me down more than anything. It wasn't until I had to make a conscious decision to not see my kids anymore, until they were ready to see me because they were being weaponized against me. I would pick them up, we would have a great time. I'd drop them back off across the country and across an ocean because I live in Hawaii and they live in Virginia and I would get to see them and I would break down those barriers that were being built while they were not with me. 


 William Branum
 And then they were super happy. They were stoked to be around me and with me and love me and then go back to their home. The walls would go up higher and thicker. Every time I got to see them, it would be like breaking this even a bigger challenge. I saw the damage that was being caused by the going back and forth. At some point I had to be brave enough to say, I will just wait until they're ready for me. Yeah, they're not quite ready. One day they will be. It was heart wrenching and it was really difficult as an understatement for me to mentally go through that process. I'm watching them suffer and just be manipulated from one side. Let me just step back and stop participating in the damage of the children. That was really one of the hardest things that I had to do. 


 William Branum
 It's weird because I'm a man and my job is to provide. On the other side it's just a lot of take. Take? You didn't do this, you need owe this. What are you talking. About the perspective is completely different. It was like, I learned this word, narcissism, that I didn't know before. I was like, what rational person even talks like this? Or this like this? I don't understand because I think I'm normal, I'm a rational person. It was this other person that was really like, saying just out of these world things that make zero sense to anyone. I was deeply affected by that, and I didn't like it at all. 


 Josh Wilson
 Yeah, so I'm proud of you, bro. Love you, man. I think that you're doing a lot of hard work on yourself, and that's tough. That to me, overcoming self is the hardest thing I am going through 100% right as you're going through this, at what point where you're like, what? I'm going to help other dudes go through this journey of self discovery, of getting naked, of regaining masculinity and becoming men again. When did that start clicking? 


 William Branum
 The first thing that happened was part of my journey was I got out. Even before I got out, I knew I had all this baggage, but I didn't know how to manage it or deal with it. I certainly wasn't going to ask for help. I didn't want to show weakness. I would just pretty much drink myself to sleep at night. If you frame it differently, maybe I drank until I passed out at night, not really sure. Getting up the next day is not awesome. It's not awesome. And it was a vicious cycle. When I got out, it was even worse because I lost my purpose, I lost my mission, I lost my team. CBD was a modality that I used to drink less, to sleep better, to turn down the volume of this noise in my head that I was really not able to control. 


 William Branum
 I started a CBD company called Naked Warrior Recovery. Our vision originally was supporting veterans and first responders. Now our mission, it's still supporting veterans and first responders and anyone else. Really our true why we're here is the 22 to 00:22 veterans take their lives every single day. We've lost more veterans to suicide than we have in 20 years of sustained combat. Once I saw those statistics, I was like, holy s***. Oh, by the way, my dad is one of those 22. My dad was a veteran. My dad took his own life. He took his life about three months after I graduated steel training. Four months, I think. That became a very personal message for me. As I'm going down that road, like I said, I'm building my new Seal team. I came in, connect with more people. I was in the military. I was in the Seal of Teams, a pretty elite organization. 


 William Branum
 And so everyone is somewhat alpha. We're all vying for like, that top position, even if you're a senior leader, you got to watch out because their dudes, like, chomping at your heels. But that's a good thing. They will hold you accountable. It's awesome. When I got out and I started looking around, and I'm like, where are my people? Where are all the alpha males? And alpha is not bad. Alpha does not equal a******. Alpha equals get s*** done. Alpha equals taking ownership of what you're doing and what your responsibilities are. That's what alpha is all about. And so, like, where are these men? I see this, like, toxic alpha, whatever. Toxic masculinity. I'm like, what the h*** is that? What does that even mean? That means nothing. That's some made up f****** word over here with some of my own coaches. I was listening to a podcast, and I heard of a guy who used to be a professional baseball player. 


 William Branum
 When he left the baseball, he went through the same struggles that I went through. I was like, I want to meet this guy. I want to connect with this guy. Well, it turns out he was already buying some of my CBD products. He had one of my T shirts on. We happened to be on the same zoom call one day, and the coach was talking about my company and my T shirt or whatever. Josh jumped in the chat, and he was like, hey, I love my Naked Warrior T shirt. I was like, you have my shirt. Hold on. I pulled up the backside of my Ecommerce store, and I was like, oh, holy crap. He's been buying my energy drink and shirt and all sorts of stuff. And so we connected outside of that. And now he started it. I'm coming in to kind of really help blow the thing up if I can. 


 William Branum
 This organization called man made. Really the purpose of this is to help men become men again. 


 Josh Wilson
 Cool. 


 William Branum
 Help men understand that masculinity is not toxic masculinity is a good thing. How many women want a non masculine man? If you want to have a badass woman, I like alpha women in my life. I like women who know what the f*** they want and know how to do it. They don't need me, but they want me. They want me in their life because I bring something more alpha to the table. An alpha woman wants someone who can take over because she's so tired of leading all the time. She's like, okay, you got it. Go do the dishes and take out the trash. 


 Josh Wilson
 Yes. 


 William Branum
 So I don't have to do it. Be the man, for crying out loud. 


 Josh Wilson
 Yeah. We're going to get into Manmade in a second, but I got a guy that we interviewed, Tom Satterley, Delta Force guy, and he said if you don't know him already, he runs All Secure Foundation, helping Special Force vets and badass dudes and ladies recover some stuff. I'll do an introduction for you later, also for our guests. That's also a really cool program that they got. I love the fact that this is you came from this world. You saw the struggles you even experienced. It close to home in terms of, like, loss. Because when you see s*** or have to be involved in stuff that most humanity will never see, it could f*** you up. It can really do stuff for the guys out there. I know that there's a few soldiers out there listening in, maybe some of our buddies or whatever, and maybe they're struggling with this idea of, am I going to be number 22 today? 


 Josh Wilson
 Or something like that. What advice, what hope, what love can you share with these guys? Because I think that this is a timely message. 


 William Branum
 Asking for help. If you want to be brave enough to ask for help. Like, the courage that it takes to ask for help, I think, is so much more than the courage to take your own life. Be brave enough to ask for help. I just lost a buddy of mine recently this past weekend who was a huge advocate for suicide prevention and veterans and first responders because his brother was a Marine, and he came back from Afghanistan after a couple of deployments and took his own life. And he was bigger than I'm. Like, Andy, I bet you struggle with stuff. He's like, bro, you know I do. Andy died, like, in a weird, like, dove into a shallow pool and broke his neck and loss of life, the tragic loss. He was an advocate, and I had some pretty heart to heart conversations with Andy about suicide and bravery, and he's like, yeah, man. 


 William Branum
 My brother wasn't brave enough to ask for help. He just like, I felt sorry for himself. He didn't understand the consequences of the loss. That's the thing if you're thinking about it, think more, because a lot of guys that do it, they think that if I do this, then all the problems that I am experiencing and other people that are experiencing because of me are going to end. It actually just magnifies the losses. It magnifies the things that are happening. But there's certainly help out there. There's different organizations that can help. There's different kind of medications, psychedelics, whatever, natural stuff, not pharmaceutical stuff that can help you do some of that internal thinking, but all you have to do is ask. 


 Josh Wilson
 Yeah, dude, super awesome. I'm sorry for your loss, man. It's brutal with what you shared. That was the only thing that kept me from jumping off a bridge. I was standing on the edge of a bridge thinking of doing a swan dive off, and I thought about the likelihood my wife either was pregnant or we had a baby already. I don't remember. I know that if I killed myself, the likelihood of my kid suffering mental illness or struggles would increase dramatically. So I held on for that. So let me do this. If there's a dude in the audience and you're thinking that, man, please reach uncensored advice for men. Men.com. Reach out to our guests. Reach out to anybody and just go, hey, I need help. I'm thinking of doing something that's going to be permanent. Don't do that. Reach out to us. My cell phone 352-274-4500. 


 Josh Wilson
 Text me. I love you guys. All right, so back to you, dude. Sorry, man. It's important to me. The Man Made. This guy kept on buying all your s***, and he's like, hey, man, you're awesome. And blah, blah. You're like, no, you're awesome. You're buying all my stuff. Let's do this together. What is Man Made? 


 William Branum
 So man made is an organization. It's for men to help men become men again. We do that through some doing hard things. It gives men a safe place to talk about themselves, talk about this struggles. Yeah, you don't go there for free, but it's a place for you to we kind of help break you down. You do really hard things physically, physical things affect your mental and your emotional capacity. We talk about it. Why was that hard? How did that impact you? We come back to the other and we do more hard things, and then we talk about it some more. And then we go celebrate being men. We do manly stuff. We just finished a hike last I think it was last week. I was on the road for two weeks, like, straight speaking, visiting my grandmother, hiking Grand Titan, going to a coaching event in Texas. 


 William Branum
 It was like a two week deal around the country. We climbed Grand Titan and it was interesting. It's such a cool group of men. We came back, it was an 18 hours round trip to the peak and back down and came back for dinner. Josh's dad was like, okay, tell me a lesson learned, like a lesson that you got from this hike immediately. Not decompression time. We just crushed our soul. Me coming from sea level, I suffered more than anyone else, and I'm pretty in pretty good shape with that. Lack of oxygen at altitude severely affected me. We got back, and I'm barely, like, hanging on. I had 1 hour of sleep the night before, and all of us were exactly the same except for the guy that guided us. He looked like he just rolled out of bed. What were the lessons that you learned? 


 William Branum
 I was like, oh, we're going right into the debrief, which was awesome. I have a notebook full of debrief points that we all just sit around and talk about. How do you apply that to your life? How do you apply, like, whatever, hire a guide. And not everyone is a guide. Hire the right person, the right coach, the right expert. Hire the expert for what you're doing and what you want to do. Like, the guy that we had, he climbed that mountain for the first time solo when he was 19 years old or 18 years old. It took us 18 hours to do it. He said he's done it in just over 5 hours. 5 hours, eight minutes and 22 seconds is what he said. I'm like, that's not even humanly possible. Find the right expert, the path that you think is correct is probably not the right path. 


 William Branum
 We were going up a waterfall, and I was like, this cannot be right. And there was another team behind us. They were going a whole different way. He's like, that's not the right way. That way, he's going to get you in trouble. He's been on that mountain 150 times. He knows every route, every rock, every place. He knows the right way. He knows the wrong way. There were so many lessons that we got out of doing that hard thing that we just shared for the next two days, and we just kept going back and pouring into one another. I'll tell you what, my cup is full. It's overflowing from that event. I went to a whole other event overflowing. So I'm like, let's go. I'm ready to roll. But that's what we're doing with men. 


 Josh Wilson
 You're glowing, buddy. You look beautiful. That's awesome. See, that is something that you get in the military or in the fire service or in a team sport. You get this camaraderie. We start having families and kids, and we show up to the office and we pull these levers and we do this s*** all day long. We miss out on the camaraderie, the challenge, the physical challenge, the competition, and then they're sitting by the fire talking, right? Yeah, we're missing that as men. And I love what you're doing. Where could we go to learn more about what you're working on and connect with you and buy some of your stuff? 


 William Branum
 So for Naked Warrior Recovery. CBD Company NW recoverycom? If you want to learn more about the Get Naked Mindset, go to five. The number five sealssecrets.com. Put your name and email in there. I send you this PDF? It's like seven or eight pages with some cool pictures that a buddy of mine took about Seal training and how these lessons apply to your life and make it again. There's never quit except for your acildcrate, exposure, fears, and do the work. It's also the keynote that I give, and then Man Made is manmade.org. Or you can just go follow me on Instagram at William R. Random and ask me about Man Made and I'll send you the information that you need. 


 Josh Wilson
 Super cool. If I grabbed your phone and let's just say it's a phone that you've had for 20 years and I played the number one song that you've played over the past 20 years. What's your number one go to song? 


 William Branum
 It's probably either something Eminem $0.50 or Gangster Paradise, something along those lines. 


 Josh Wilson
 Oh cool. J M and M or $050 super cool. I wouldn't have expected that from the but I'm glad I heard that. What's a question that I probably should have asked you that I screwed up and did not ask. 


 William Branum
 I'm not sure because I've done a lot of these. I've probably done 350 of these in the last 18 months. I'm pretty good at getting the message out cool. That I want to share but I'm trying to this I don't know, I've got lots of stuff that I can still say. I can still drive. 


 Josh Wilson
 Let me just ask one more question. Right. You found and this will give I know we've got a few minutes and then you got to go onto your next show but you've found that drinking yourself to sleep or maybe just to the pass out point. The volume of things going on in your head and just the general stuff that you struggled with you found that a tool and that's when some self discovery. Some self work coaching and such but also a physical tool. Some natural tools from Earth. CBD and you found that's been helpful. Give some type of testimony there or maybe a recommendation for some of the dudes listening and maybe they should choose this versus sure. 


 William Branum
 My journey with CBD is I heard about it on a podcast while I was still on active duty. It comes from the cannabis plant and I equated cannabis with marijuana and a drug test. That's not going to work for me. Still being active duty with a top secret clearance, that's a great way to do early retirement papers and not get retirement out of it. So I'd heard about it. It was still not federally legal. I didn't really know that at the time. I'd heard a lot of mention about it where it has helped with chronic inflammation. It helps people get better sleep. It helps with certain kinds of epilepsy. The way that I had heard about it is a guy was talking on a podcast, he was like, everyone knows about THC and medical marijuana and things like that. There's this other whole other molecule called CBD that I think is going to be the next big thing because it does all of these things with inflammation and pain and sleep and stress and anxiety and I'm in denial about my stress and anxiety. 


 William Branum
 I know my habits of drinking myself to sleep at night and then getting up and trying to function the next day in a high capacity. It's not easy. And I'm like, maybe I need that. Maybe when I get out and I got out and I still didn't try it and then I was having lunch with a buddy of mine, and he was like, oh, if you want CBD, I've got some at home. Some company gave him a bunch of bottles. He gave me a bottle, and, when I took it, I didn't really notice anything. Maybe I slept a little better. Maybe I was a little less p***** off. I don't really know. What I noticed is, over the time, that like, 30 days or so, because it's 30 servings, I say water boiled at 212 degrees. I was probably living my life at 210 degrees. 


 William Branum
 It didn't take much for me to hit that boiling point. What I noticed when I kind of did a little introspective review of, like, did CBD really do anything for me? I noticed that I went from 210 to 205 to 200 to 195 to 190 to 185. I got out of that red zone, like, ready to hit that boiling point. My fuse just got longer. It was these things that would fire me up. It took a lot longer and a lot more of them to make me hit that boiling point. So I stopped taking I ran out. I stopped taking it, and I started getting closer to that boiling point again. Also, the pains in my body from 26 years of service started to come back kind of with a vengeance. It's one of those things where you don't notice it. You take it, you don't notice anything. 


 William Branum
 What you notice is the things that aren't there anymore less stress, less pain, less anxiety, less drinking. And then I tried a different brand. I had similar results of getting away from that boiling point. I was like, I want to be a part of this industry somehow. I met a girl at a business summit that a buddy of mine was speaking at. I got to be, like, his VIP guest. I was like, hey, you're the CBD girl, right? And she was like, yeah. I said, I want to do CBD. She's like, do you want to do A to B or B to C? I was like, I don't know what that means. I want to do CBD. She was like, okay, why don't you start your own CBD company? I said, I don't know how to do that. She said, you are a navy seal. 


 William Branum
 You can figure it out. I asked her for my man card back. She kindly gave it back to me to never give up again. That's how I started CBD naked word recovery was based on my own shortfalls, my own desires to get better. It had such a positive impact on my life that I'm like, hopefully, if it helped me, it can help other people. That's my personal testimony of CBD. 


 Josh Wilson
 Super cool, man. Love you, bro. I appreciate you coming on the show and sharing your journey, guys, as always, reach out to our guests and find out what they're doing. Find out a way to connect with them. If you need help, especially ask for help. Be bold enough to ask for help. If you've got some advice to share on this show, head. 


 William Branum
 Shaahin. Shaahin. 


 Josh Wilson
 Shaahin. Shaahin. Shaahin. Shaahin. Shaahin. Shaahin. Cheyene uncensored advice for men form. Maybe get you on the show next. Love you guys. Talk to you all in the next episode. Peace.

William BranumProfile Photo

William Branum

CEO

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.
He has served on both traditional SEAL Teams, taught as a
SEAL Sniper Instructor and served on Teams that specialized in
undersea operations, who’s missions must be approved by the
President of the United States. He led major combat operations
ranging from protecting the interim Iraqi elected officials to Direct
Action missions in Baghdad and across Ambar province.
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, difficulty focusing, difficulty
sleeping/falling asleep, and depression are some of the
symptoms I struggled with on a daily basis.
Like so many others, he used alcohol & prescription drugs
to mask the symptoms he had. Then he discovered CBD and it
changed his life. It had such an impact on him he started Naked
Warrior Recovery to bring the highest quality products to the
market and to teach the GET NAKED! Mindset.