Invest With Courage | Max Kulyk | Growing Money with Sean Trace

In this episode of Growing Money with Sean Trace, I sit down with Max Kulyk, founder and CEO of Chicory Wealth, to talk about money in a way that goes far beyond budgets, portfolios, and retirement accounts. Max shares how his own complicated relationship with money led him into financial planning, and how he now helps people think about wealth through the lens of identity, safety, freedom, and values.

We talk about the financial challenges many LGBTQ individuals and families still face, including estate planning, healthcare decisions, legal protections, marriage, emergency reserves, and the need for real financial security in uncertain times. Max also shares a powerful perspective on socially responsible investing, why your money should reflect what you believe in, and how asking “who benefits?” can change the way we look at financial decisions.

This conversation is about more than investing. It is about freedom, courage, resilience, and using money as a tool to protect the people and communities we care about.

What does financial freedom mean to you beyond just having more money?

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Now, Sean, I don't know about you, but twenty-five years ago or fifteen years ago, I wasn't ever thinking that I was gonna be helping my clients think about an escape route from this country because they were that nervous, that worried about what might happen to them. Okay. Right. So your Vietnamese wife, I'm gonna assume, is a U.S. citizen. Okay, dude. So I'm just saying, welcome, welcome in, right? And this is, you're right, you're exactly right. The tentacles of this, they, you know, a uh when this kind of thing turns in history, they always pick off, they start by picking off the groups that are easiest to pick off. And right now, the absolute, you know, the thing that they made great hay with is transness, because transness is some weird exotic thing that they can, you know, forgetting that if people really think for a moment, they're going to know people who are actually trans. But they always start with the most vulnerable and then they go to the next, and then they go to the next, and then they go to the next. And so you are correct. And it has implications, has implications for all of us, our fundamental freedoms, but also, you know, our what that looks like in terms of our life, what it looks like in terms of our financial life. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:33

Welcome everybody back to the Growing Money with Sean Trace Podcast. I have an awesome guest with me today. Would you like to introduce uh yourself and tell people about everything that is you?

SPEAKER_02 1:44

That's a big question, Sean. Right? Uh let's see. Well, my name is Max Kulik. Uh I'm the CEO and founder of Chicory Wealth, uh, which is a registered investment advisory firm um begun in Decatur, Georgia. Now we're um national in the sense that I've got team members in 12 states and clients in 26 or 27 states. Um we are, as of Monday, 25 um members of the firm. Uh I am more than happy to tell you my long history. Would you like me to begin with at my birth, Sean? Or where do you want me to go with that?

SPEAKER_01 2:28

Well, that's the hard part, right? Uh it is always I just wanted to know how how how did you get into financial services? How did you get into helping people with money?

SPEAKER_02 2:36

Yeah, that's a great question. So um through a very weird backdoor, actually. I um when I came out of college, I had a political science degree and didn't know what I was gonna do with it. Wound up going back to work for my family business, which still exists. It's 126 years old, I think, this summer. Uh 121 years old this summer. Uh as a manufacturing firm up in northwestern Pennsylvania. I did not think I would go back to work for them. Um a week before my college graduation, my hometown was struck by a tornado uh on May 31st, actually, 1985. They killed, I don't know, 12 or 15 people in just in the town I was in, and it just devastated the town. And it motivated me to want to go back and um do what I could um in the town and kind of go back to family for a while. And I wound up working there for about six years. I knew it really wasn't my permanent path. I uh through uh a set of odd circumstances, I wound up going back to graduate school down here in Atlanta at Emory University and um uh felt to study religion. Specifically, I was I have a master's in divinity and an ABD and a PhD in early Christianity. Um uh but as an out, you know, queer person from the time I was probably 14, there was no obvious path in the early 90s for someone to be ordained. I thought I would be a professor of religion. Uh again, uh life events conspired to turn me in a slightly different direction, mostly for reasons related to my personal life at the time. I was when I was about to finish my PhD, didn't have an obvious path to a job, couldn't leave Atlanta, and um was really very stuck and didn't know what I would do next. And by this time, I'm nearing 40. Okay. So yeah. Um, and I sat down one day and was um meditating over what I should be doing. And uh this voice in my head said, get up and deal with your money. And I said, I didn't think you did money. And I uh did begin to examine my relationship with money and found it to be extremely dysfunctional. I was one of those people, this is like the early 2000s, you know, um, who never wanted to open a bank statement, never certainly never wanted to open a brokerage account statement, was very avoidant about anything related to money. And um it dawned on me that perhaps I was not uh the only person on the planet who felt this way. And so I had this um kind of inkling that I might be able to do pastoral care with money. And so I didn't know how I would do that. Um, but I took my Vita, I made it a resume, I sent it into cyberspace, and in uh about February of 2001, I got a call from a guy in Alfredo, Georgia, who was recruiting for what was then American Express Financial Advisors. And I wound up going to work with for them on a client ready in Aug on August 21st, uh 2002. And um, and that was the beginning of this journey of mine, which has been very weird and you know, like if you told me you know, it wasn't it wasn't like I, you know, I now meet people who go to college to be CFPs or knew they wanted to be in financial planning when they were in college or even teenagers, and I'm just like, really? Like I that was not that was not my path at all. But it's been a great um, it's been a great uh it's been a great career, and it's been great to be able to um create the firm we've created that's focused on socially responsible investing and comprehensive financial planning and really now increasingly what I would call financial activism. And so it's uh it's treated me well as a career path.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

There's so many cool things and interesting things to unpack there. Um, but one of the things that you said that just struck me, and it was because I have a similar uh background, uh, I thought you didn't do money. That was like right. Um, I grew up with, I love my family, love my father, love my background, but grew up with some people that were really conservative and were really like money is root of all evil type. And I was just sitting there going, hmm. And so I had to, I had to find my own relationship with money. And it was something that after graduate school, I was sitting there going, What am I doing now? And it was something that was learned, and you know, I also had that inspiration to sit there. Mine all came on a lot because I have a 10-year-old daughter now, and she was like, Dad, tell me about money. And I was like, Oh, I can tell you about a lot of things. That's a hard one to tell you about, you know, yeah, and it it was like this uh no pun intended, but coming to God moment about figuring out what money is all about, and yeah, it was powerful though, because there was this I realize there's a power in helping people explore and own that part of their life. And and also you talked about your identity, you know, including being LGBTQ. How does that shape the experience, the way you or other LGBTQ experience money and financial security? Is that uh something that changes that?

SPEAKER_02 8:37

Well, that's a really good question. I mean, I think for me, uh for just I'll I'll I'll talk about myself and then I'll talk about working with folks who are in the community, right? So in my own life, um, you know, I was born female, knew at an early age. I was not traditionally female to say the least, and now I actually am in transition. I'm in a, I'm I'm actively transitioning from from uh female to male. And but I'm 64 years old. Okay. So it wasn't like I did that, you know, when I was born in 1962, and even in the early years of my life, um, transness per se was not um, you know, it wasn't in the zeitgeist in a sense. Like it wasn't really a category that I could grasp, even though I knew from a very early age that I really identified more as a boy than a girl. That was that was very much my experience. I think because of that, speaking again, just for me personally, um, I knew early on that I was with never, you know, married to, I didn't have any of this sort of typical, what one might call stereotypical understandings of um, you know, uh a woman's relationship with money through a man. I always knew I was gonna have a career. I always knew I was gonna need to make money. I all, you know, that was my experience. That had more to do with gender than it did with sexuality. That was my sort of gender orientation. Um and I do think that, though, for many people, um, particularly lesbians, because female and also queer, I think that there's, you know, has been historically a lot of risk associated with being out, um, a lot of risk for financial stability, um, certainly risk in terms of legal issues. It got to be significantly less post um, you know, our ability to marry, etc. But um, you know, we're living in a moment where all of those things are now up for grabs again in a way some of us thought it wouldn't be ever, right? That these things had been, that these were that these were uh uh controversies that had been settled, and we now realize in the moment we're in, these are not controversies that have been settled. So um, yeah, I mean, I think identities and your access to um um security, financial security, safety, money, et cetera. Yeah, I think those things all play out. I think um my experience of working in the more traditional like lesbian and gay community is that um very frequently uh I would say, you know, gay men probably have a little bit more um financial security. Um there are men in a culture that still prizes maleness and still pays maleness better, um, where lesbians maybe a little bit less so because they're female, et cetera. So it's like first it's gender and then it's sexuality. And from a planning perspective, of course, all these things are um a little bit trickier. They used to be, like in the early part of my career, we would do lots and lots of planning to have to mimic the security that you would get from being able to legally marry, right? Now people can legally marry. Um, some people choose to, some people choose not to. Um, and those create their own, and then you've got, you know, family situations, adoptions, you know, uh birth children, insemination, you know, there's all sorts of interesting planning things that arise. And and at the moment, the marriage question is relatively stable. Um, but like for a trans person, um, things are not stable at all, potentially, I would say, particularly if you are transitioning from male to female. I think it's even more, we're in an even more dangerous moment, and things can get a lot more difficult on the front of jobs and security and where there's legal protections and where there aren't any legal protections. So it's pretty thorny. And again, you know, like if you'd asked me 10 years ago, I would say, well, we're on a trend line where things are getting more stable. I no longer think that uh in fact, I know that to not be the case. And it's um so yeah, these have lots of implications for financial security. The legal structure has a lot of implications and the protections or lack thereof.

SPEAKER_01 13:16

One of the things that I think about is that I'm so happy to talk to you and to hear your story because I think that it's easy for people to think about, well, that's someone else's problem. That's someone else's problem. They hear it, you know. And like I have a, you know, I have a uh a Vietnamese wife, and you think back a certain period of time, like ago, it was illegal to have interracial marriage. And people go, Oh, well, that, you know, that couldn't happen. You know, uh, well, this, you know, it was interesting. We did some um some genealogy of my family recently, and we always had this story of like in our family that we were part Native American, part Native American, part Native American. And we went and um, I think it's my uncles did their their DNA testing. What they found is that our family was part African American. And then when we started really, well, why was it said this way? It was because the racial restrictions were so extreme that people would say that we're part Native American, that's why our skin is slightly darker.

SPEAKER_02 14:32

And more green that's the African American connection, yeah, yeah, of course.

SPEAKER_01 14:36

Yeah. Right. And so, and like, and because it was literally illegal to have interracial marriage in places, and like and people go, oh, well, these issues with the LGBT community, uh, LGBTQ community don't apply to me. Yeah, yeah, they they do, because we're all dealing with, you know, fundamental rights. And like to think about that, you know, if you have a person and like, and I what I want to go back to in what you talked about is that things that we assumed were settled, rights that we assumed were settled are being revisited. And like, like, and I know this is a financial planning podcast, but people gotta understand that this is a very big part of people's estate planning, a very big part of people's life planning. And, you know, it is very much a financial issue. And I wanted I wanted to ask you this because what are some of the financial challenges that LGBTQ individuals or families still face that many people may not realize?

SPEAKER_02 15:46

Yeah, oh absolutely well, for something really um basic in a way is um uh should I plan, should I be planning to leave this country because I have a trans child, for example, or because I am a transsexual myself, is it still safe for me to live in this country should I have a plan B? I have helped two families just in my firm uh uh leave the country, or in one case, leave the country, physically leave the country, in another, um apply for and receive a golden visa uh in order to have a plan B. Should they have to leave the country quickly, a place to go? Now, Sean, I don't know about you, but 25 years ago, or 15 years ago, I wasn't ever thinking that I was gonna be helping my clients think about an escape route from this country because they were that nervous, that worried about what might happen to them. Okay. Right. So your Vietnamese wife, I'm gonna assume, is a U.S. citizen.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

No, she's a green card holder, which is where Okay, dude.

SPEAKER_02 17:10

So I'm just saying welcome, welcome in, right? And this is, you're right, you're exactly right. The tentacles of this, they, you know, uh uh when this kind of thing turns in history, they always pick off, they start by picking off the groups that are easiest to pick off. Yeah. And right now, the absolute, you know, the thing that they made great hay with is transness, because transness is some weird exotic thing that they can, you know, forgetting that if people really think for a moment, they're going to know people who are actually trans. But they always start with the most vulnerable and then they go to the next, and then they go to the next, and then they go to the next. And so you are correct. And it has implications, has implications for all of us, our fundamental freedoms, but also, you know, our what that looks like in terms of our life, what it looks like in terms of our financial life.

SPEAKER_01 18:03

Yeah. And this is something that I want people to think about. I don't have the answers to everything in society. I do not. None of us probably have the book of answers for everything. And if you have it, it might make life really boring. But what I do know is that anybody who is on any side of the political spectrum, if you don't think that other people around you should have the same financial rights that you have, to have the same safety rights that you have, think about what happens to them and flip it back on yourself. Would you like to see someone not allow your spouse to inherit things? Would you like to see someone challenge your child in a way to have the financial things they need? Like, from a financial perspective, like you have to ask those questions because um we had this thing where our daughter, and this is just a wild little example, when you are in different countries, they have different names, order. So, like, uh, my name is Sean Eric Trace. But well, in Asia, they invert my name, right? Well, my passport still is easy enough to read. My daughter's name in Vietnam, they flipped her name and the passport on the birth certificate as well. So now when we travel, she has to travel on to this location on one passport to this location on another passport because she has to return to Vietnam, which means that we have to buy different tickets, which is a financial challenge. And that's just a little thing with a name. Like there are other things, like people don't realize how much of a headache it can get if you don't have that clarity and that protection. And to me, like I love what you're saying because right now, above and beyond anything, like I am an ally, but I I don't know much about everything. And I just want to have a place that I can listen and that other people can listen. And if you have an opinion, shut the hell up and listen, because listening is so damn important. Because I promise you that you don't understand everything about another person's perspective. And yeah, we need to create dialogue again. But I want to ask you this because um what advice would you give to people in the LGBTQ community about like getting ahead financially? And then for people that are listening to this that might not be LGBTQ, um how can they better listen to what uh the community is dealing with with their finances and such?

SPEAKER_02 20:52

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, one thing is um um, you know, in an i in an ideal world, you're working in a, you know, uh a profession that, you know, pays you a living wage and you are relatively safe in four. I mean, no one wants to live, no one wants to work in a situation where they have to hide who they are. Plenty of people still work in situations where they have to hide who they are. So in an ideal world, you're working where you don't have to do that. And I would just say that, you know, I'm I mean, I'm sitting here in the state of Georgia, right? I vote in the state of Georgia. Um, Georgia is not California, it's not Washington, right? It's not um, and I live in a sort of bubble in Atlanta. I live in some zip codes that feel very, very safe. Um, I run my own business, so I have a lot of autonomy. Um, but um, you know, many people they don't, they're they're working in jobs where they're feeling like they have to hide, and that is a terrible thing. And I would just say if there's any way you can. Find a find a place, find a state where you feel where there are real protections and where you can work safely without worrying about losing that job or having something come back on you because you are out and you're able to claim your own identity. That's a mental health thing as well as a financial health thing. If you're if you're constantly living in the shadows, what in whatever way you're living, that is no way to live. So, I mean, that's very fundamental, but I would just say that that's, you know, basic. Um if you are partnered and you are not legally married and you are otherwise committed to that person. Um, you know, when when when legal marriage came through for gay and lesbian folks, I had clients who I've known for years who had never been able to legally marry and they weren't sure they wanted to legally marry. They were like, you know, marriage seems like pretty like a heterosexual thing. Like it's not, we're not sure it's for us, even though we're very committed. And I would just say, you know, um, you if you want, if you want certain legal protections, um, you should marry. If you intend to divorce, by all means don't, because it's a real hassle. You want to lose money, get divorced. That's a great way to lose money, right? I mean, divorce is very expensive, it's very difficult. But if you are committed, um uh marriage protections are very, very strong. They're very strong in healthcare, they're very strong in inheritances, they're very strong from a tax perspective. Um it is just, you know, there's a lot of advantages to being married if you're otherwise committed. And in many cases, I remember one case in particular where my clients were, one of them was getting, for both of them, they were getting health care through uh uh institution, Emory University in this case. And um, they weren't sure they wanted to marry. And Emory Emory University said, look, we're gonna continue to provide healthcare now, but only for married couples, not for domestic partners, because you can marry. So because you now can marry, if you want this healthcare coverage, you gotta get married. And they were like, okay. I mean, that was an example of like healthcare marrying this couple, right? Um, I joked with my own partner when we got married. Finally, after many years, we couldn't legally marry. We did legally marry in the state of Washington. This is back in 2012. Washington said, you can legally marry. Then they said, oh, wait, it's going to a referendum. Well, we got married in 2012 and it wasn't valid. So then we had to get married again in 2013 in the state of Washington. And it was, I think, 20, I should go back and check, but I think it was 2014 or 15 before the IRS said, if you're legally married in a state, we're going to recognize you as married filing jointly. I remember I called on my partner, I said, congratulations, honey. We're actually now really married because the IRS says so, right? This is the way, you know, finances interact with your personal life, whether you want them to or not. Governmental situations interact with your personal life. If they were to invalidate gay marriage, and I don't know that they will, but if they were, untangling that would just be a nightmare. But if you had asked me again 10 years ago, would I think that would ever happen? I would say no. If you ask me today, I don't know what can happen. I really don't know what can happen. I mean, what are the other things you got to think about? You know, I would just say, you know, papering your relationship, having your estate plan written in such a way that there's no, you know, having your powers of attorney and your healthcare powers of attorney, right? If an emergency happens, you want to make sure the person that you really want making those decisions is making those decisions for you. Um, you know, how you take title of a house, how you take title of a brokerage account or a bank account all has huge implications for uh married and non-married couples, whether you're straight or whether you're gay, all of those things matter a great deal. But if we're talking about, you know, how do we how do we shore up our situation relative to any kind of state intervention? Know the rules and play out by the rules and do everything you can to protect yourself. Uh I'm gonna stop and not say everybody has to have a plan B to get out of the country. I don't, I don't really want to say that. I think that would be a little um I well, I guess maybe I'm self-serving here. I hope uh those of us who feel the need to stay here will stay here and do what we need to do to protect ourselves and everybody else who are being um impacted by this, including green card holders, for example, or people who were here in an undocumented way, but who have been here for 30 plus years holding down jobs and being part of a community and are not, in fact, criminals whose lives are not being disrupted. Um I mean, you know, you you haven't asked me anything about like the markets or all I have lots of thoughts on that, but I'm not sure where you want to go with that. But um making sure that you have lots of liquidity, you know, yeah. You always want optionality. So cash is cash may, you know, is is uh I would say cash is still king in relationship to that, even though you know, have have optionality, have the ability to, you know, see opportunities or protect yourself, have good emergency reserves.

SPEAKER_01 27:39

Um I love that. Well, if you don't mind if I could spin a little bit, because I love I would love to talk more about general money topics as well. Like, and I want to ask you from your perspective, what does wealth actually mean to you? You know, if you were to talk to someone about wealth, what does wealth mean to you?

SPEAKER_02 27:57

Yeah, um uh freedom. I think it's uh that just kind of popped into my head. I mean, at an individual level, it's the ability to have some small semblance of control of your life. Now, there's a lot we don't control. I'm fresh off the death of a family member who was elderly. It was a no, right? It wasn't a tragedy, but it's a reminder of the um the fragility of life there and the reality of how little um at a really deeply fundamental level we control. We don't control, you know. I I used to joke when I would do these seminars on financial planning or creating a plan, I'd say, you know, somebody'd say, well, how do you do how do you do a plan? I said, well, we gather all this information, you know, we'll ask you about everything, you know, your your savings accounts, your checking accounts, your house, your debt structure, your job, your income, your own assets, et cetera. I said, but really the number one thing we gotta know, if you tell us this, we will be able to tell you precisely what to do, even like tomorrow. We gotta know exactly when you're gonna die. So if you give us that piece of information, we've got the perfect plan. In the absence of that, we do the best we can, right? So I say that to say, you know, what is wealth? Well, you know, on this, in this earthly plane, in this moment when you can still breathe and act and do these things, it can mean uh freedom. Um, it can mean um care of the people you love and your communities. Um, it can mean uh the ability to give to others or give to causes that matter to you, um, to live the life you wanted you want to live. But it all is really based on, first and foremost, your ability to um, you know, um physically live in a way that is um vibrant. So there's a I mean, I do think it's not cheesy to say there is a dramatic connection between wealth and health, right? You can have lots and lots of money, but if you've, you know, no kidding, if you have garnered that money in such a way, or if you're just unfortunate enough to have very, very bad health, it just doesn't matter a damn. Right. Yeah. And when you die, you leave all your stuff behind you. It's all gone. But you, if you are the kind of person who was really engaged with other human beings and you were really involved in your community and with your family, and people felt your love, then there is something that that I think does again. I mean, I was literally at a memorial service on Sundays and for with that amazing woman who was so beloved. Um, and to hear people talk about her and how much she influenced their lives, you know, she she didn't have a lot of stuff, she didn't have a lot of money, but she was, you know, if there's a way in which that was a kind of incredible wealth that will outlive her. Yeah. Um, but if we're just talking about this side of uh eternity, optionality gives you some freedom, gives you some choices. And um that to me is very important.

SPEAKER_01 31:22

I love choices. I love optionality, and I love financial freedom, is one of the topics that is most important to me. But I wanted to ask you this too, because I also am interested in investing in companies that are good for the world. And what does it even mean to invest in companies that are good for the world? And can you still make money doing that?

SPEAKER_02 31:45

Yeah, yeah, you can. I mean, we really, I mean, um, I will I'll say a few, I'll give you a few caveats to that. Um you can the first thing you can do by choosing your portfolio carefully, and you can't do it, by the way, with mutual funds or exchange traded funds.

unknown 32:06

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 32:07

And I'm very flat-footed about that. You cannot do what you want to do if you're trying to do better in the world by just buying an exchange traded fund that says sustainable on it, or a mutual fund that says socially responsible. I guarantee you, you cannot get, if you really are interested in doing the job right, you can't get it done with a product. Um you actually have to get it done at the individual stock. It's an individual company level. And I do believe you can invest first and foremost, minimally, you can do significantly less harm by investing properly in the public markets and still make money. So can you be perfect? You probably can't be perfect, but you can be significantly better. And I really am one of those people who believes that um uh perfection can be the enemy of the good. So I think it matters to do less bad. Um, and I don't, I won't, that's a position I hold very passionately. And then in addition to that, I think you can invest in companies that are um providing goods and services to that the world needs, um, that are doing it in such a way that they are a force for better. Um and I'm thinking about, you know, not just the sort of obvious things like a solar energy company or something, you know, which is also good. I'm thinking about um, you know, companies that are uh trying to serve the needs of one of the, for example, sustainable development goals. So really benefiting women, really supporting education, really doing, you know, clean water types of things, really doing infrastructure stuff that's gonna make a difference longer term in terms of decarbonization. And all of those things are possible. Um, and and they make money, you know, over time they make money. Yeah. When oil gets going, can you trail? Like when you shut down the Strait of Hormuz, for example, and obviously nobody saw that coming, I guess. Right. We'll bracket that, right? It's just crazy. But let's just do oil companies, you know, eventually start making money for a while, hand over fist until they destroy, until we get demand destruction. Yes, they do. Uh, but one of the one of the moments we're in, even with that happening, is we now have a heightened awareness yet again of the value of non-carbon-based energy and the importance of it, and alternative energies and the importance of it. You know, you can't um uh you can't jawbone your way back to we're all just gonna be dependent on fossil fuels. It's just not gonna work. No matter what you think about climate change, it's not gonna work. So, you know, there's there's a turning back to those sorts of things. And um, yeah, I mean, we build our what we do is we we have a proprietary portfolio we use, and um we screen out a bunch of stuff, we add in a bunch of stuff, we look at the fundamentals, and we wind up with about 50 to 60 companies that we feel uh like we can stomach putting our clients' money into. And it does well. You make money.

SPEAKER_01 35:37

I think there's one of the things too is that um couple things that we poked at there, but like I think people sit there and uh I think people at times question, can you make a difference? And what I would like to tell people is, yeah, you can. There are people and organizations that you probably if you might probably not might probably don't align with the values that you have. And like it's okay to sit there and ask, like, is this the right thing for me to put put my money into? And I think that that's like wherever you're at. Like to be active about that. And I'm talking about if someone is there, was a company a couple years ago that I remember. Um, it was from outside Vietnam, and it was a chemical company from I don't know what country it was, but they came to Vietnam, bought up a bunch of land on the ocean, and then they dumped massive amounts of chemicals into the ocean, killing off about 150 kilometers, uh like a hundred miles of fish. Massive death along the like think about the level of pollution to kill 100 kilometers of fish, like just washing up on the shore. That is an organization, a company that I would never want my money to contribute to. I don't care how much money I was making. That is not an organization that I want to have anywhere near what I'm investing in. And I think that that's the type of thing that people, you know, you do have I you do have the ability to filter where you're putting your money, you know? And I think that that's powerful that you're you're doing that because, you know, it's like put your money, put your money, or was that that's that's saying put your money where your mouth is? Like, I mean, you're you're actually doing it. You're stepping up. I don't even know how that idiom works.

SPEAKER_02 37:36

Yeah, something like that. Yeah, I mean, um, yeah, uh it's not that let's see, um, it isn't rocket science. Now, I mean, yes. What I what I mean by that is um uh it's easy to it's it's it's just very easy to go, uh well, there's just nothing I can do. And uh and I think that, or what can one person do? Well, yeah, who here amongst you and I would disagree that we've seen a few few individuals cause enormous amounts of damage. Yeah. Individuals can cause an enormous amount of damage, can't they? If an individuals can cause damage, can't individuals be forces for good? Yes. Right? I mean, so like don't this whole like, well, you know, I I I hear that some, I mean, there I was certainly the people who work with us are very passionate people. They're very um, they they are very mindful of what they are profiting from. They want to be very careful about what they're profiting from, and they also want to be uh to the best that they can on the side of investing in companies or putting their money in things that are doing significantly less harm and in many cases significant good. They want that. It's possible to do that. Not everybody has that passion. Some people have lost, I mean, they've really given into a kind of cynicism. It doesn't matter. Um, you know, it's it's really just about me and how to make money. Anybody who's doing this doesn't really care about it. It's actually just posturing or whatever. To which I would say um you lack courage because it takes courage to not lose honor. Hope is not a feeling, it's a verb. Right. So you can feel that way, but you're gonna have to own your own cynicism. You're gonna have to, it's not gonna be like you're not gonna do not project that onto others. That is you. That's you doing that, and you can make a choice to do something else, and it's possible to do something else. And um, particularly for those people, I mean, are there plenty of people in the world, and certainly in this country, who don't have any kind of invested assets. Yeah. Um and, you know, to whom there that's, you know, we're not talking to those folks. Those folks are just trying to get by. I get it. They're just trying to get by. That's a different, but to people who do have, and if you got a 401k or a 403B, boy, you better be watching out because there's some really interesting stuff going on in terms of how those some of the investments inside of those things are going to be uh exposed to certain, for example, alternative investments, right? You may have read about this, Sean, where there's like there's a big push to, I love this, democratize um alternative investments, non-publically traded stuff, and put that stuff in 401ks or 403Bs. Here's my I hope your audience takes this away. Anytime Wall Street talks about democratization, do you know what that means? No. That means they've run out of people to sell shit to. And they need to pass it on to retail investors in the form of exchange trader funds or mutual funds that are going to own that stuff because all of the juice has been squeezed from that orange. That's what democratization means. So beware.

SPEAKER_00 41:21

A couple things.

SPEAKER_01 41:23

One, and I think it's a core part of this whole episode. Um, it is important and good to ask questions. Yes, it is important and good to ask why something is happening and and look at that.

SPEAKER_02 41:41

And who benefits? Who we bought who benefits?

SPEAKER_01 41:44

And who benefits that right? And also, are we protecting everyone that needs to be protected right now? Because right now, I think that there are I I love that you bring up cynicism because I think that when people look at it, that what was that poem? There was this poem about I I saw them taking the people down the street, but it wasn't me. It wasn't me and I didn't mean I didn't do anything. I saw this happening over there and I didn't do anything, and it wasn't until it's right here in front of me.

SPEAKER_02 42:25

Then it came for me.

SPEAKER_01 42:27

Then it came for me.

SPEAKER_00 42:28

Then it came for me. Right.

SPEAKER_01 42:31

I think one of the things that if you want to create change, these people that are in power doing these things that I think are beyond they're beyond okay, horribly not okay. Right. Um, don't respond to a lot of things. But one thing they do respond to is money. And we're having a money conversation right now.

SPEAKER_02 43:00

That's right. And that's exactly right.

SPEAKER_01 43:02

I I guarantee you that if Wall Street suddenly said, Hey, people in power, you should really tone it back. Like this isn't going along with our constituents. You know what happened to public policy? It would change, it would change real fast. It would change real fast.

SPEAKER_02 43:21

I've been really, yeah, yeah, I agree. I I've been shocked at uh I've been surprised at the level of pushback has been as little as it's been, there's been a little capitulation on Wall Street in a way that I've been surprised at. We didn't get that same capitulation in the first administration. We're getting more of it now, and it's it's making me wonder like, I I mean, we could this could be just a political podcast, Sean, because I got a lot of opinions. But I do, I mean, but just when you look at um, it brings the question of if the market, uh uh the market and what is the market now and how concentrated the market Market is in a particular trade, a particular set of companies, and what all that means, how much money is being made in that and the and the collusion that is allowing it to be made. I think there's it it there's a lot of tentacles there. And it's not like it's it's what is it, seven or eight companies, not out of you know, five hundred. You know, the others say 470, 480 companies. What let's talk about what they're doing, you know, how how well they're doing or not doing, versus this very I mean the index, the SP index, as you know, no doubt, is as concentrated in terms of how much it's being its its valuation is being driven by seven companies or something as it's ever been in the history of the SP. Which means it's an incredibly fragile market right now. Right. Incredibly fragile market. Right. So at some point the chickens come home to roost, and then we'll see what all happens. But meanwhile, a tremendous amount of money is being made. Um I mean, I was having a conversation with my daughter, like 36-year-old daughter, before I got on this call. And she was talking about the connection between capitalism and fascism. And I said, yes, but are we even in capitalism anymore? Have we entered a different phase? Is this what we're really even talking about? Have we not entered something that looks a little bit more like kleptocracy or something? Is it really what's driving so much of this? Is it really you know, capitalism has its problems, but you know, um I do think we're seeing something that's of a slightly different order of magnitude that is not uh that is likely not sustainable. But between now and then, a a fairly very a very narrow bandwidth of people, a very, very small percentage of people are making an enormous amount of money on the backs of all the rest of us. And I'm not just talking about the rest of us, like, oh, you poor working or underclass people. I'm talking about those of us who used to think we were fine. Yeah, it's like we used to think we had a seat at the table. We need to understand we're on the menu now.

SPEAKER_01 46:30

I think one of the things that I um when I look at all of this, when I try to think about this, because everything I'm framing in terms of my daughter, you know, and first of all, even all of that, I still have to try to tell her and teach her how to try to build these basic protections in place, you know, set aside money, create an emergency fund, and all those things. But it's like I also want to say to people, and my daughter is one, um, ask questions, figure out is the system working, and keep the hope that together we can speak up and make a change. I remember a couple years ago when the uh it was wild that we had all of this division happen after something that was so beautiful. The 99% movement, I saw everyone coming out, standing together, asking for change, speaking for change. I saw all these different races, all of these different uh genders, I saw all of these different people there together. And then all the division started after that. And I have to think that there's probably more of that was forced than than anything else. But one of the things that I would say is that people inherently, most people want the same thing. We want freedom, we want love, and we want stability. And I think that we have to do what we can, but we also have to look around us and ask that question are my brothers and my sisters and my family and my friends and my whoever having a seat at the table to? Because if it if not everyone's having a seat, we have to try to strive to make sure that they do. And I think that, you know, it is my mission to try to like help people see that. Like, yeah, I don't I don't have the answers, but I do know that we shouldn't be shutting people out.

SPEAKER_02 48:27

That is well, and I think that that you know, it sort of it makes me want to say, you know, when we're talking about like personal finance, what's the number one thing you can do for your own personal finances? Educate yourself on public policy and vote because this this idea that our politics is not directly impeding of our finances. I mean, I think that people who were upset about inflation, you know, two years ago, who are now increasingly upset about I mean, people do vote their pocketbooks, right? But sometimes they don't ask the right questions about the in there and they're easily bamboozled, I think, about how how that's actually going to impact them. And um it's it's you know, our politics now, and some of the, I mean, we've had so many dramatic shifts um in the political environment, they're having a direct impact on our financial situation. And will have a much longer-term impact because the damage that has been done is going to have a much longer and more negative impact. And it will not be easy to fix all of the damage that has been done from a macroeconomic perspective, you know. Yeah. I mean, I could we could talk for, you know, like for we could talk for hours, Sean.

SPEAKER_01 49:57

We could talk for hours. Yeah, but I would say we need to do this again sometime, but for for now, where should people go to find out more about you and what you do?

SPEAKER_02 50:08

Well, thank you for that opportunity. Um, so you can look us up at chicorywealth.com. That's chicory like the plant, C-H-I-C-O-R-Y. If you're wondering why, chicory, because you might be. Um, it's a if you if you know it, it's a weed, grows by the side of the road. It can grow through asphalt, it can grow through concrete, uh, it can grow in diesel fumes, it can grow. It's a very resilient medicinal plant, and it has a beautiful blue flower. And that's how we came. We wanted, we wanted something that symbolized endurance and uh resilience. And so we're chicorywealth.com. And you can uh Google us and you will learn tons about us on our website, and you can uh email me directly at max at chicorywealth.com if you have questions. If you have a different political view, God bless you. Please don't email me. But I I wish you well. I do. I just I don't want to get into a debate with folks, but you can feel free to get me there. Um and I appreciate the opportunity just to, I mean, it was a pretty wide ranging chat, I know, Sean, but I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you about these things. Um, we're just in a very, very intense moment, I think, in our country's history. And it has uh lots of impact on us financially and will have yet more. So