On Duty CBD: An Interview with Gregory Keeley

Good morning my name is Rob Pincus. I am the Executive Director of Personal Reforms Network and I'm really excited about this conversation. This is something that I don't get to do very often through PDN, usually I'm talking about product and it's something I'm relatively familiar with. It's a gun or it's a bullet or it's a suppressor and sure I read the specs and I talk to the developers but today I'm gonna be talking with Greg Keeley. And this is a product that I really don't know much about. Maybe you know a lot about it. Maybe you've read some of the headlines some of the story It's actually a product related to a whole body of conversation in the United States and it's CBD and I'm gonna get right to you, Greg. Greg thanks for being here today to talk to us about on duty, specifically your product and sort of, there's a great backstory I know of how you end up being involved in CBD and ended up being here with us at Personal Defense Network but also just the product in general helping the PDN audience understand it a little bit more. So thank you for being here today. Oh Rob, great to be here. I'm excited to spread the word and it's funny. It's talk about you understand guns and bullets and that's me too, right? So on this on the PDN and read all the magazines and do all that sort of thing. And all of a sudden here I am doing hemp and doing CBD products you know it's kind of crazy. I would've thought I would've been on the show to talk about tactics or about interrogation techniques or whatever but no. So It is you know the and I'm I would probably love to have those conversations as well. Sometimes I know you have a vast amount of knowledge there that we're all gonna learn a little bit more about sort of how you come by that knowledge as well today. But the interesting thing here is about 10 years ago I had an injury a pretty pretty devastating injury and it was really you know it's like anything else you know we get old and we live active lives and some of it related to military law enforcement service or security service and some of it's just related to being adventurous guys. Right and that builds up. And then you go on one last adventure maybe and that last adventure required. Yeah and so that's all I was looking in surgery and it was not a pretty scenario and was back injury related and I've never known anybody to say, yeah back surgery was great I'm really glad I did it. So I went with the epidural steroid injections had a few months before the scheduled surgery and just rehabbed and I got with Jeff Martone with the tactical athlete program and Kettlebells back in the CrossFit. And what ended up happening was I got so passionate about it that I started sharing fitness information and especially sort of job related fitness information with my students with the guys I was teaching defensive shooting with the guys I was working with the military tactics stuff and through PDN. So we actually have a lot of fitness and health information here through personal events network. And it all grew out of my injury and having to take it a little bit seriously not just being like young and tough enough to deal with it but actually doing real work. Yeah that runs out after a while. Doing real work so and I think there's some overlap here. So maybe with that as the background because the PDN audience really they do know that they've seen it and it's like why is there a fitness information on the gun website? We need it. Why are we now bringing them CBD information? How do you end up here in this conversation? Yeah that's a you know the $10 question you know I did tours in Afghanistan, Iraq and blah, blah, blah. Like many of us have it was only my last tour which was back in 2012. You know I was I guess 42 or something 43 when I went away. So that's old for doing what we were doing. And I came back banged up you know I had a couple of concussions, I had you know a number of closer calls and mum would've liked, I pulled my back out and I can talk about that rotator cuff issue at length. At some point when I was on, you know I went to the VI you know I only recently in the last month or so was released from off the TDRL process. So because I was on the temporary disability list and that only resolved itself literally a week or so ago. So I was on terminal leave for a long time. I was on a seven different drugs from Trazadone, Centraline you name it for anxiety for sleeplessness to PTSD for my shoulder pain et cetera et cetera. And my wife who's a nurse an RN one day said, you know after six or seven years of taking that many opioids every single day was like you've got to stop doing this because it's going to kill you. And I become so used to it as part of my regimen every day if I didn't take it like the Trazodone I just couldn't sleep. If I didn't take the Centraline I was anxious and jittery and like all day. So you know what to do the VI and I love the VI. They've been great to me but they no help in like my situation you know they're not built to deal with a little issue Right. So I started looking at options and CBD was recommended to me at one of the PTSD sort of clinics that the VI runs separately to the VI. And I was like okay well I'll give it a try. I got nothing to lose I didn't know what it was. I've never smoked a joint, never taken anything right? Ever anything, the only thing I'll take is an aspirin kind of deal and all these opioids. So I met a guy through a friend of a friend and this is probably two and a half years ago. We met in the parking lot for the Piggly Wiggly in downtown Birmingham ,it was like we're doing a drug deal. I'm not kidding you Now for the median members that aren't part of the audience Piggly wiggly is like an acme is a grocery store. Yeah it's a grocery store in Alabama. It's just got a great name. I just love saying it Piggly wiggly. So we met in a parking lot in his car and it was like, I'd never met the guy before And he had like long hair and it looked a bit sketchy on like, Oh my God. So he gets his drop by and he says, look hold this under your tongue and see what it does and okay obviously it didn't do anything. He gave me the bottle, what was left of it and he said, take this for a couple of days and I was like, okay. So I did and whilst it didn't hit me immediately I noticed a better sense of calmness, less anxiety and I was sleeping right. Just from taking this stuff, anyhow so I looked into it, turned out what he gave me was dog CBD which is basically the same thing. Just not as strong, but this was made in China. Right and I'm like ah, I'm not doing it. Like am not putting anything in my body that's made in China So after a lot more research I worked out I couldn't find anything that my wife would give the thumbs up to. So I thought well we'll just make our own. And a good friend of mine Dr.Taylor Bright here at the university of Kentucky was already doing heap processing for the school and other people and I just reached out to him and said hey man can you just make me some of this stuff? He was like yeah sure so we just made me stuff just put it in a regular old bottle with a dropper and we got let me tell you Let me just jump in there for a sec cause this is I think this backstory is like really important, right? How do we get here? Because this isn't just another gun that fits my hand better or whatever this is a radical departure and as you said and I'm sitting here in Colorado right now at my Western headquarters and when I first moved out here to run the Bala training center in 2002 or three, I was you know I'd come at two years before that I was a full-time cop back in the East coast. I was an undercover narcotics detective in the late seventies, eighties I'm as anti-drug like I just, I'm running around living in Telluride, Colorado where it's the fact that we've been legal for like 40 years in a culture shock. So let's jump to that moment, right? Because I know that's a question people have and this was and it's not improper world in survival world. And even like personal meaning world, it's regular we talk about the idea that the vets can get you stuff that will work on humans. So that idea that it's a dog pharmaceutical we'll write in third world countries we know sometimes that's where you were going to find this stuff. But in the U. S for a guy who's lived a clean life straight-laced life privately. Someone obviously military service background a great service to earth really and our country, you end up in a parking lot taking a drug out of a dropper from a guy, right. And then maybe this isn't the route. And you end up now at the university of Kentucky with a guy just as calmly and casually apparently saying oh yeah I can make that. So let's get this part of the conversation out of the way this isn't THC, this isn't marijuana this isn't a controlled substance as a drug. It's not an archive it's not a narcotic. It's not anything is going to interfere with your right to keep and bear arms on your work as a police officer or military right? And that's a really good question. I appreciate you asking that because one of the things when we started this company you know I took the the drops Taylor made, Dr.Bright made for me to a few friends I said hey this has just worked for me try it you know I wasn't selling it to them I was giving them to try it right. Anyhow without question they came back and said, this is amazing I'm sleeping. I don't feel anxious I can go to the supermarket because some of them were pretty bad you now previously primarily on TBH and all of a sudden wow it's helping people and it's not expensive. It's over the counter It's entirely legal like everything. I mean if we move this back to step back two years there was a lot more gray area and all that sort of thing but CBD now is so mainstream, you buy it at Walgreens you buy it at CVS you buy Piggly wiggly you buy it at target. You can get it everywhere problem is that stuff, not all but some of that is you don't know where it comes from, Is it imported? What's it made with, is it maybe chemicals blah, blah blah. So I just thought we'll make our own but I wanted to make it simply to provide veterans and first responders that have suffered through, things that no one else ever sees and seeing things and doing things that people will never see or can't even begin to appreciate an alternative to taking an Ambien or something like that, Right. One of the key parts for me was making sure we had a product that first responders could take, Military could take that had no THC in it. So you've got two types of CBD. One has THC one has zero THC. Well we do always and our zero THC literally has zero THC So it has the same effects and everything like that but it's clear it's tasteless and it's impossible for there's just no THC. So it's impossible for any THC to be in your system and we will very carefully Is that removed from the plant substance. Okay so it's him that could be used to do something else. Could it be that you're actually chemically? so now talk to me a little about the doctor. So the doc you said is a friend of yours from before this project at university of Kentucky he's doing research or something with hemp anyway and he says yeah we can make this happen. Right so Dr. Taylor Bright his name is in UK He's like yeah will I can make you some sort of thing. I was like okay great so he makes me some it all works. And then we were like all my friends liked it other vets liked it And I'm like you know this could be a opportunity here to you know build something employ some veterans and all that sort of thing. So what we did then was scaled up the operation at our labs are all at the university of Kentucky. So we sort of scaled up with new equipment and that sort of thing. And we got some we've got a chemist on board we've got you know lab directors, PHDs all sorts of stuff that will work with us on the production. So we scaled that up and we just started making the stuff. And you know it was pretty rudimentary at the start. The product has been the same for two years but the packaging and everything was pretty much a bottle and we'd stick a live water by hand and the demand for it has just been extraordinary. And I'm not at all making this up. We get testimonies almost daily from people or caregivers to you know disabled bead or whatever that are like, this has changed my husband my son, my brothers, like life. And we get those almost every day. And to me that's what I set the company up for. You know we're not gonna make a million dollars doing this but it's my way of I can't be in service anymore. So this is what we're doing. And the people that grow our hemp here in Kentucky they're all within 20 miles of downtown Lexington a veterans so we have a farm manager that goes around and helps the vet. So a lot of these guys had tobacco farms and they weren't selling tobacco anymore. So we have a guy Carry that goes around our farm manager and he will help them plant and manage and harvest the hemp, which we then use so Is that so it's like a small business from them or are you leasing them? Yeah no so they have their own farms. That's great. We just and they're all veterans every single one of them, some of them are only three acres being right. And we just go out we help them, we give them advice on what plants to put in the ground. So they all say constant with what we're doing. We help them with the farming process during the year. And then we obviously helped them with the harvest. And we might payings that we pay the farmers immediately they deliver their product. And that's been a big problem in the industry because there's so many Cowboys just doing it bad in the industry, we had farmers that weren't getting paid for years at all and that wasn't how we wanted to operate. And so we had a couple of farmers ,Pat who also worked at UK has a PhD and he was our first grow, he's an army veteran and then word of mouth got around that we'd go and help we introduce everything and pay them. And then all of a sudden we had all the events just coming to us and saying, "hey, can we help?" "Can we be involved?" and it's been great it's been really good. I love that small business aspect as well so it's a real quick another little aside that I want to get back to some of the details for the product but so UK university of Kentucky, I'm hearing an accent so when you say okay, I want to clear that up. How do you end up as a veteran of the service in America with that cool accent and yet now, so the UK and the UK but where how do you get here? Give us some biography Okay all right. So I'm Australian born and raised in Australia. on the military side I served with the Australian Navy as an officer for 10 years I did a couple of years as a loner to the Australian federal police international deployment group. So we were deployed to Papua New Guinea, East Timor places like that where we couldn't send the military things like this Australia is like the policemen of the Pacific around the camp like Papua New Guinea pullout team and all those little countries around there just like the US is globally Australia does that sort of deputy chair role in that region? and you know there's some countries you can't send the military to they don't want a bunch of clearance divers going into downtown port Moresby but they'll put us in a police uniform and send us to downtown port Moresby and I'd find and it was great because I got a badge and you know sidearm and little uniform was awesome. So I got to play cop for a couple of years which was kind of fun. And you know so I did 10 years mine was the intelligence officer. We with a focus on the special forces, Navy special forces community, which is very small in Australia but it's a very well trained, entirely capable unit. You know you never hear about them. The clearance dog teams never hear about them but they are awesome. So they're like a small version of the special air service which is a you know a much more well-known unit in Australia and that's where we grew up right, Literally right down the road from the specialist service base in Perth. And my father going way back was an army officer. And so you know after high school and everything he just assumed I would go to Duntroon, which is Australia's West point. And anyhow, I came back and said ah you know, he's like all excited and you sort of almost do a rush kind of deal you know, which academy you're going to go to because it's much smaller. And anyhow, so I come back from that that's like a guy. So you got in and you're signed up said yeah, I'm going to Creswell, which is the Naval Academy. It's like Annapolis. And he literally looked at me. I'm really not making this up. He said, what am I going to tell my friends Reasonable question. Right. And so, you know that's how that all happened. So 10 years down there and you know we had deployments all over the place, as I say mainly the Pacific you know of Papua New Guinea team or we had a little shooting war with the Indonesians in Timor when I first joined and then obviously I did a tour in Iraq with the Australian military in 2003 and then did a tour with the US Marines you are not a full like embed. If you like with the Marines in Iraq into 2003, 2004 I guess, still Australia what they call a third country deployment. So it's still Australian under Australian rules of engagement and in unit strong uniform and everything but I was under U S military command. So, and that's sort of how this all happened. And then as a result of that I got recruited into the U S Navy. It's a long story, but And then you did, then you served in the US Navy for a period of time. And now you end up under the VA. And as you said a lot of great things have happened under the VA And a lot of frustration happens under the VA as well. And as you said, your personal experience that was pretty good but at some point it's check the box. Here's the standard protocol, it's not customized. And as we know, and it's not nearly as bad anymore from my understanding you know people on the inside and watching it from the outside but the opiate problem was a problem for a good solid 10-20 years. That was sort of like your, take this take more of this and take this more often and it gets you out and you suffered through that and then found this as the alternative Right, I mean Rob case in point if you make an appointment to go and see your mental health guy for PTSD, right? The mental health doctor, you go in there you know they've got 15 appointments in the day every 20 minutes or whatever it is, right. 30 minutes with a 10 minute break, right. You go in and you see other gods seen it. And I just sit at their laptop saying how much of this you're taking? How much of that are you taking? Talk, talk, talk, okay, thanks. Take that to the front desk. And I don't blind them because they just crushed. But that's what the care is, you know? So this was the whole reason we set up on duty was to try and help. Even if it alleviates two of the six drugs, you take it you know that's what we're striving for. And the two things I think that it hits folks most noticeably is the sleep at night. You know if you wake up with night terrors or just you know, nightmares cause I didn't sleep through the night for nearly 10 years. And the other thing is anxiety. So you know this is perfect for PDN guys. So you know I'd go to the range. I've never been a very good hand gun shot, anyhow like pretty crappy actually. But even when I was 20 I don't know why. I just never been very good at it anyhow but after I came back and I was jittery, you know just not good with it. Anyhow, this was the first time I really noticed it was on takes the on-duty CBD as it was by then and I was calmer, I was more focused on you know, on target. And I honest to God I probably shot 25 to 30% better but that's coming from a low bar. You know, it was a pretty bad I'm sure there's some self-deprecation there but but you noticed a confidence and I think that's Immediately. So, let's talk about that. What are the effects because I think there's you obviously, you had some physical issues you also had the stress, the anxiety issues. It does this affect both sides of the thing or is it just Yeah So tell me a little about the physical effects Right okay. So physical effects, so CBD, a lot of where a lot of it germinated was it is very effective against inflammation. And that's why if you've got a hangover or you know you've got arthritis or whatever, you take the CBD oil and it really does help with inflammation but then we have other products which are topicals Like we have a sports product which is like a mental, like cold roller. We all, I see hot kind of deal. We have a low hand lotion. We have a bomb which might have beeswax, which you can put on your shoulder, or you put on your hands case in point there's a guy Paul Glasgow that has a show on Fox in in Louisiana, like a local TV show down there. And he's like back guns and shooting. Anyhow, he cooked for his show. He said, he's just shooting 1000s of rounds a week. And he was getting old problems with his trigger finger. With his loading hand he started using the on-duty topicals just directly on his hand. He's on our website talking about the difference it makes to him being able to shoot and shoot all day. Just the stuff works and I don't know the science it works and it's natural and it's legal and it's amazing. And I'm not just saying they're trying to sell the stuff which I am, but it does work, its extra ordinary. And people, you know if you don't know this, you Google just inflammation. you could read the internet, you know for years just inflammation in general whether it's injury based, whether it's you know maybe not all induced but the diets, right. Even the food that we eat there's so much information out there from nutritionists as well as from sports docs, from rehab, from physical therapy side just inflammation, inflammation, and pleasure. I mean, this is the reason people in the military is like, you know that that 800 milligrams of ibuprofen is a community, right. That's knocking down the that's and then, you know So this is science there, whether you and I, you know, maybe we'll get the doc on some time to draw something on a whiteboard. I'd be happy to. But yeah, but I mean, that's really the key here is it it is a non, you can't say it's not a chemical but it's a natural anti-inflammatory it just works. And this is the only interaction I've had with CBD was as a topical as a bomb. And I know it worked but you know, kind of didn't I was using it to specifically address a certain injury and it wasn't something I stuck with now. I'm really excited to try the product, obviously but I wanted to talk to you first. I wanted to sort of let the PDN audience, you know share some of this journey with me. I take melatonin and obviously I think anybody who's followed PDN for the last 15 years know that knows that I've been diagnosed with ADHD and I'm pretty hyper guy and you know, anxiety that kind of I gotta do 20 things in a day is common day for me right, as opposed to super booklets. Right, So I'm excited about that that aspect of it as well. I'm probably maybe more than anything else you know like let me leave the melatonin now and see what this does. And then also see if it helps with the focus and things like that. And without any of those negative sort of chemical effects that we all know from whether it's Adderall or anything else. So I'm personally trying this out. What else does the PDN audience need to know about you know, the options what's available again if you got to go over the line and talk to us a little bit about price, because I think that's something that people would probably already know what is, what what is a vial and how long is a vial last? Absolutely yeah, Very happy. So option wise is there's basically two streams is the what we call the topicals, which you'll put on your shoulder or your hands or whatever. And that's like that guy which I just, funnily enough, I'm sitting here. That's like a mental, just a roll of it. You'd just rub it on like this sits on my desk. Like I use this all day and it it's amazing. This is the only thing we have that has like an active ingredient in it. It's got mental it, everything else. There's no chemicals in anything else. So no manmade chemicals in anything else. So we had that, then you have a lotion which is like a traditional hand lotion. It's sort of green in color. One thing we don't do is remove everything from it so you get a lot of benefit from all the turpines that are in CBD to plant in the hemp plant. And so you'll see without products, particularly our lotion it has a little green tinge to it. It's because we don't take anything out of it. We don't add smell, we don't add anything. We just process it, stick it in a bubble. And that's why, you know, people will go, Oh this one's like a lot darker than the last one I had last month. And you're like, yeah, it comes from different batch in the different plants. And you know, but it's all about the same level of CBD in it and the same efficacy. So we have those topicals, we have a bomb which is made out of beeswax, which is great. I think that's the best bang for our bang for the buck we have on the topical front. I think that comes in somewhere around $22 or something, 20 bucks. They were about the lotion and the cold Rola sort of around the $40 range. I think 40 of the lotion might be a little bit more than that but you know they work you know, CBD is expensive stuff. There's a lot of very expensive CBD out there. And we don't want to do that because that's not who we're trying to sell. Yeah like I said, it's all over the place out here in Colorado. And even at like a high-end store. I see the little canisters of the bombs were 80, 90, a 100 dollars. We don't do that. Yeah. We don't do that. So we're in, I think 800. So this is the other part of this I think which the PDN guys like our product we don't sell in beauty parlors or head shops or any of that sort of nonsense. It's just not what we want to do our product. I think we're nearly a 1000 stores now around the country. They're all gun shops, uniform shops pulling shops that sell guns, an outdoor you know where you go to buy hunting supplies and you know it goes cross country skiing and all that sort of thing. We're in a few golf clubs even around the country but that's who we do this for. And that's why we're not interested to sell it at Mike or at the local you know grocery store. We're only in gun stores and outdoor stores. And we do that because they're smaller. We can educate the people in the store very easily because the general only four or five people we can give them the product. They can try it themselves and if they're trying it themselves and using it it's just a no brainer for us right. So we get the word out that way, people and also get it on our website, but the gun stores. And if you know, any of your PDN guys have, you know have a gun store or we're in a few ranges actually we're in a lot of shooting ranges, have a rind or gun store or whatever we'd love to hear from you because the more we can get that message out the better. And we will also, once COVID sort of all stopped we're very happy to travel to places and do in store you know talks or training or go to their, you know they have a little show or something like that because we need to connect with folks like people that are on the PDN network that have never really heard about it or thought about it, or it's something entirely different. And I don't know what the benefits are. And they've seen on the internet that someone got busted you know for marijuana. and then they claim Oh well I was only taking CBD. No you popped on a drug test because you were smoking pot and then you blame the CBD. Yeah. It is amazing what we, what we see out there. And that's really one of the things I wanted to make sure. And that's why I touched on it pretty early. I'm glad you circled back to it. You know what I mean? Even the name on-duty right. And the fact that it's in the gunshot there is zero issue here with that that conflation a lot of people, right. Side you know it's like, choose your freedom. You give you're in a state where recreational marijuana is legal. You can use it, you know or you can carry a gun, but you can't do both and this is not that this stays away from that and has nothing to do with that and your shipping. And then obviously people can go to the website and get it directly to them anyway Right. Yeah and on the website, we have a we use the ID me platform. So military first responders, nurses, they're on depending on what month it is 10 or 20% discount off the top of everything. First responders, everyone using ID may get free shipping and if they're not on ID me and they don't want to go through the hassle, you can just email us and we'll, we'll sort of discount out. We've got a really good team most of them have served overseas or our families, all veterans or first responders, cops, nurses, firemen, paramedics. So everyone in this organization knows what it's like to serve. And they want to you know give back like you know my wife's an RN, a nurse she wouldn't let me so anything that she went you know give the thumbs up to you know and I was good. We were going to put something in the market once I would it was, but she's like "aha," and she just black Boulder, and I'm like "ah, all right gotcha" That's she has veto power. I mean she's got the training and and you know, she tells me what to do so that's fine. We know that work. Not really know. I'm not really the boss of the company at all. Right, Well listen, I really appreciate you spending time with us and the personal who network is going to be able to more about this. I'm going to have this stuff it's just for everybody. I know this is going to live forever but right now this is February, 2021. And I'm going to start is an adamant and I'm going to kind of cold Turkey off the melatonin and immediately start trying to use some of this stuff. And hopefully I don't get injured but you know at my age there's going to be something we'll try that too. But I'm going to take this around as I go around the country too and be able to talk to people about it. So I want my own personal experiences with it. I'm going to make sure everybody sees the website and sees that quite a bit because if nothing else I know that it's helping other people. That's how we ended up talking together is just the fact that it's helped you, but it's helping other people. And the small business aspect the veteran community is sort of the services that you're providing now after again serving earth and serving our country. You know, thank you very much, Greg. Thank you for bringing this in a responsible way to people that need it. Thanks, Rob. I really appreciate it. and I'm honest to goodness, you know people on Instagram or Twitter I'm just Greg on duty on everything. Like can reach out to me there. I'm very happy to answer their questions or you know go to the website, shoot me an email. I will answer the questions if I can't answer it, I'll get Dr. Bright to answer them. You know, they can also go on there and see all that testing where the stuff is growing. Everything we're very transparent. You're going to mostly be websites. There's no pictures of any actual people because they're just buying it from a bulk thing right? We have pictures of everybody that works with us. That's on the website. I actually was looking this morning. I was going through on the mobile. I had looked at the website on the laptop but I hadn't looked at it on the mobile. And that there's a great video that comes up with the farmers sort of doing the work that just roll. So it's so check that out. The website again is ondutyusa.com. Onduty usa.com. Thank you very much, Greg. You and I I'm sure we're going to talk more because I'm gonna want to tell you about my experiences with this. And I don't feel like it will get you in front of the PDN audience again as well. So thank you anytime. Thanks Rob Appreciate it.