Heroes in Business - Carter Wilcoxson, Brian Adams, CEO, Founder Excelsior Capital

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

Brian C. Adams is the President and founder of @excelsior_gp, where he spearheads the firm's investor relations and capital markets arm. On this episode of the Health and Wealth Podcast Show.

Welcome to the Health and Wealth Podcast with your hosts, Tim and Carter. What's trending, enrichers? Carter Wilcox, founder of CSI Financial Group here with my co-host and former wealth advisor, Tim James, founder of? Tim James, founder of ChemicalFreeBody.com and your new health advisor. This is the show where we reveal the connection between physical and financial abundance. Hey, welcome back, enrichers. Carter Wilcoxon coming to you from perfect weather, Phoenix, Arizona. It is our official season out here in Phoenix, Arizona, the time when the snowbirds show up and the average temperature is 72 degrees. So if you have never visited Phoenix, Arizona, because of you're so afraid of the heat, this is the next six months. This is whenever you want to come out here. So

as is normal, I am joined by my Mr. Chemical Free Body himself, Tim James. Tim, I know that you are not necessarily the same temperature as I am right now. How are Body himself, Tim James. Tim, I know that you are not necessarily the same temperature as I am right now. How are you doing, bud? Well, last week it was 74 degrees. Today, it's snowing. So that tells you anything. And we've been getting a lot of rain. So definitely not the best thing when you're doing construction on the property because it's turned into a mud pit. But you just got to get out there and get stuff done so after this podcast i'll be out there in my muck boots moving some dirt and getting some rocking so these guys aren't in mud but um yeah things are good man i was actually i was actually talking to one of my uh private coaching clients today and uh he's in he's in scottsdale um actually

his visit is visiting his sister who lives in tempe when I talked to him, but he'll be there for a while. And then he's got spring training coming up because you guys have, I mean, that's where it's at. I actually got to play when I was playing baseball, we would plan these men's teams and we got to play on the spring training fields. And we would do that in like may. And it was like 80 degrees in Arizona and fricking awesome.

So I'm, I'm a little jealous. I might have to come see you now, Carter. Well, it would be about time. It's funny because, and I'm going to, I'm getting ready to introduce our, our guests today, but I was speaking with him pre-show about how, uh, you know, the two of us, we've got almost 75 episodes that have launched and we've never met one another physically. That's because we're too damn busy. Exactly. So without further ado, though, let me go ahead and bring in our guest today, Brian Adams, founder and president of Excelsior Capital. We are very pleased to have him in from, I believe, Nashville, Tennessee.

Is that right, Brian? Yes, sir. Music City. That's right. Music City. Well, we are very excited to have you on the Health and Wealth Podcast show. And Richers, thank you again for joining us for another episode of the Health and Wealth Podcast. Let's go ahead and jump right on

into it, Brian, if you don't mind, because I know you've got a fairly extensive background. You've had a lot of experience doing some podcasts yourself. We'll talk a little bit about that maybe in the second segment. But our enrichers like to know your backstory. They like to hear how is it that you got into the financial... Originally, very kind of small town. I went to a college in Connecticut. And that's where I met my wife. So my wife is from Nashville. Originally, we met in school, started dating, we did the Northeast thing, we both went to graduate school up in Boston. That's where I went to law school. And like every Nashville native,

she wanted to move back home. And so 15 years ago, we moved back to Nashville or her family is all still here. And I practiced law for a couple of years, but, um, my wife's family has a family office. And so when I joined, when I married, when I got married, I joined the board as an ex officio member. So I'm a non-lineal. So it means I don't have any voting interests or direct benefits, but I can attend meetings. And I didn't even know what the hell the family office was, to be honest with you, until we did the prenup conversation. And because of that ability to connect with our CIO and my father-in-law and learn about private equity and alternatives and commercial real estate, because the family had invested in those things over the

last 20, 30 years, it just opened up this whole world to me. And so I started learning about what that looked like really from the investor LP side. And then I had the opportunity to attend an abridged version of a course offered at Owen, which is the business school at Vanderbilt. And it was called Launching the Venture. And it was taught by a guy named Michael Burcham, who has had multiple exits in the healthcare space, unbelievable person, great guy. And the first day that we were all in this class, and it was 25 kind of young lions all trying to take over the world he said you know before we get into the subject matter like who's here to make money and become wealthy everyone raised their hand he said okay when you look at the forbes 400 and you take away inherited money station over time, that, that vesting

schedule. And then ultimately upon exit, you realize all of the equity that you've gained in the, in that stock. And then the other one was real assets. So it could be real estate, commodities, energy, oil, and gas, timber, et cetera. And that's pretty much it. So which journey are you going to go on? And I just thought, man, that's like the smartest thing I've ever heard in my life. It's so simple and true. And I started doing coffee meetings with people in town. I was very fortunate because my wife's family had the opportunity to meet anybody pretty much that I wanted to. And I realized very quickly that I did not have a great idea. And that being entrepreneurs, very challenging in venture capital, tech, et cetera. And I didn't

really want to grind it out at a corporate gig for a very long time. And I started having coffee with real estate people. They seemed like they did well. They were fun. They had a good time. Low barrier to entry business, kind of the wild West. But if you just were a little bit smarter than the average bear, you could build a real business for yourself. And so that's how I got into the real estate business. Wow. So now originally from upstate New York, you said, and then you said you went to a small school in Connecticut. I mentioned earlier that, you know, my marketing guru, his name is Miles Beth. He actually lives in Connecticut. That's where he's at and everything.

So where did you end up going to school in Connecticut? Yeah, I went to a small liberal arts college called Wesleyan University. Our claim to fame is that Bill Belichick went there and Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote Hamilton, are kind of our two highlight alums, but it's a small little school, quirky place. Well, I'm 99% sure that that's actually where Miles went to school. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. It's a small place. My brother went there there i was a legacy uh it's not for everybody but it was a lot of fun i really enjoyed it so so um so share with the enrichers a little bit about what it was like you know growing up you know with your parents were they influential at all in the direction that you headed uh whether

that be you know um wesleyan or whether that be, you know, ultimately to follow your passion and what was, you know, growing up, what was that like for you? Yeah. So my dad fashioned himself kind of a gentleman farmer. So we lived out in the country. We had 50 acres. My mom's mom's child psychologist which is a whole different can of worms probably for a different podcast to talk about being that being your mom um and then i had a younger brother who's about five years younger than me and you know we didn't really talk about money we didn't talk about finance we didn't really talk about business per se. It just was not something within our family culture that we discussed. And looking back on it, I wish we

had had that, honestly, because I don't think I had any appreciation for what different jobs or industries look like from a compensation perspective or from a work-life balance perspective. I went to a very nice all boys military school. It was a private school where a lot of affluent families had their children. So I had exposure to some, like, you understand whose parents do what, et cetera. But I don't think I had a real appreciation for it. And the goal was always go to the best college that you can get into and we'll, we'll pay, right. You won't have to worry about that and then work really hard. And then you'll just figure it out. So there was no real plan to be honest.

I just went to a liberal arts school and was just on this journey. I was actually about to go to do a teach English in Japan program that I've gotten accepted to when I started dating my wife. And then I pulled the plug and came up with a different plan in like two weeks. This is very much serendipitous meeting her and then understanding this whole different world and what that looked like. So you met her, said at wesleyan is that right yeah that's right gotcha so um so you you look like a fairly young guy i'm guessing uh late 20s mid 30s maybe right now yeah i'm 40 years old wow dude you look great for 40 years old i don't know i don't know what the secret is it's not clean living i can promise you that uh but i appreciate that oh that's awesome so um he's got a really good lens is that what it is yeah i've got all

the i've got all the videos go through phases where i'm very focused on and then phases where i'm not but turning 40 was definitely a uh kind of wake-up call but i read something in new york times that said that the average 40 year old man in america loses a pound of muscle and gains a pound of fat every year from 40 on and i just decided like i was not going to be in that camp so yeah that's good that's a good decision to make yeah that's awesome we'll get deeper in that one into the third episode. So I'm just curious about I noticed that Tim always loves that somehow I bring golf into the into the podcast. But I noticed you got a Travis Matthew shirt on. Did you play any sports growing up? And then and then I know a little bit about your Vanderbilt connection. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah, so I did. I went to the high school I went to was, was very sports oriented.

Um, so I played hockey and lacrosse and we, we had very competitive teams in both those sports. I was not a great hockey player, but, uh, I love, I'm a huge fan. Um, I actually want to come down and see the coyotes play in the ASU rink that they're playing in this year. I think it's going to be pretty wild. Nice. And then I played lacrosse in college. So I did, I did play collegiately again. I was not anything to write home about it, but I loved playing.

I love the atmosphere, the culture, the guys, the friendship, the physicality. So, yeah, I did.

I did do that. I'm not a golfer, so I'm a member of a club that has a golf course. I own golf clubs, but ever since my second kid was born and the business, I just haven't really picked up the sticks. So, well, that's a, that's a great segue because the next question I was going to ask you is you and your wife have been together, obviously for a while. And it sounds like you got two kids. Talk a little bit about them. Yeah. We've been married 14 years. A lot of work life balance stuff that you're trying to deal with it is what it sounds like, which is pretty typical, right? Whenever you're, you know, entrepreneur, right? You're the CEO, principal, founder, you know, of Excelsior Capital. You know, you're doing all that, you know, daily grind stuff.

How has it been with having a, you know, your your foxhole made there with your wife? What type of support and how critically important has that been for you for your journey? Yeah, it's been huge. right? I think her father, so my father-in-law, um, uh, his day job was as a trauma surgeon at Vanderbilt. So he started the trauma department. We have a lifelike program that he started and Vanderbilt's a level one trauma center. So they see, you know, the, the, um, some of the gnarliest stuff and we cover a huge geographic area because of where we are. So everything from Southern Kentucky, Northern Alabama, Tennessee river, East Tennessee. And so they have a lot of volume

as you could imagine. So when she was growing up, he worked constantly, right? He was, he was doing night shifts. Uh, He was always at the medical center, getting called in a lot, obviously, when there was a wreck or somebody had been shot. So he's got that. And then he ended up inheriting money from his father. And he took a company public in the 90s down here, which is the catalyst that formed the family office. And so I think for her growing up and her mom is the deputy general counsel at the medical center at Vanderbilt. So two parents that both were just working a lot, really hard, but very passionate about their jobs. She was very comfortable with

the journey that I was going to go on. And we're very fortunate to have a cushion and have the support system of the first set of a school in Nashville. And she runs our family foundation. So for the last 10 years, she's really been the service component of it. And I've been the entrepreneur. It might not always be the case. It may do a role reversal at some point. But, yeah, she's been killer.

And early in the business, I was probably doing 100, 150 flights a year. And so I was traveling a ton it's obviously hard with a young family but she's she's been a trooper thankfully I don't travel as much anymore so that's pretty awesome Brian I was uh I was checking out your website and it said uh founded in 2010 15 current investments I'm like oh is, that's exciting to me because normally no advisor is telling you how many investments that they're sharing. So I like that because what I've seen is like, when I was an advisor, I would tell people, I'm like, look, you can go do this yourself. The only deal is, is we do it all day long. But, um, you know, if you are going to

do it yourself, cause you'd run into some of those people. I'm just like, look, um, you know, if you are going to do it yourself, cause you'd run into some of those people. I'm just like, look, you, you could feel it, you know, that you could just go do it yourself. Cause sometimes if they're not buying into your approach, it's like, you just go do it yourself. And, um, as I would just tell them, you know, basic things, but, um, real estate was always in the picture because in all of our portfolios, the more real estate we added, the better returns people had. Right. So I said, the best thing for you to do, if you don't trust people, then the best thing you can do is trust yourself, invest in companies that you're actually using their products. You really like them, you know, do your own research on their board and all that stuff.

But I said, that's what I would do. I would invest in things that you actually use in your own personal life that you actually believe in. And, and you've just had, that's where you have the real experience. Cause I have been a customer of this company for 15 years. Like that's probably a good place to invest. So anyway, we're going to take a quick break and we get back. We'll get into maybe some of those 15 investments and what Brian's doing to help people manage their money and grow it. We'll be right back. Estate planning. What does that even mean? When the inevitable happens for everyone on this planet, your estate plan kicks into action. But first, let's start with what an estate is.

An estate is simply everything you own. Now, here's the issue and what needs to be understood when this event occurs. You only have two choices on this plan. Number one, either you plan how your estate gets handed out and distributed to those you leave behind. Or number two, your state decides who gets everything you own. For the first time ever, you can now take complete and total control of this plan that you've been deprived of for most of your life and generations before you. You can get personalized assistance along the way with a team of specialists whose job it is to make sure you have true peace of mind.

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in the house, we've got Brian Adams from Excelsior Capital, and they're out of Nashville, Tennessee. Adams from Excelsior Capital. And they're out of Nashville, Tennessee. Hopefully, Brian, when I, you know, plink my guitar a little bit more, maybe in about four or five years, I'll come hang out with you and stay at your house while I'm following my dream. I'll just come as a broke musician

and I won't tell anybody. I hopefully have some money at that time. It's Nashville is like LA. Whenever you, you know, go out to a bar or restaurant people are always this is what i do now but i'm actually a songwriter or i'm actually this guitarist and it's a fun place to live honestly because the music it does give it a vibe and energy that's really cool my My kids go to school with some musicians' children. In Nashville, the culture is we don't bother them. You're the only company I've ever seen that says,

we have 15 current investments that we're doing. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, sure. I started the company initially to source opportunities for the family. The family wanted to do direct real estate investing, didn't want to go through a fund. They didn't want to have to pay a high minimum. And they wanted to work with somebody that they knew. So I actually started the original iteration of the firm 10 years ago. We ended up making a whole bunch of mistakes and we can talk about that if you guys want, but we grew really quickly. And it was kind of a hybrid. It was a mixed match between a fund and then direct deal by deal syndication. And we eventually recapitalized it with a private equity group.

And four years ago, I decided, okay, version 2.0 of this, I'm not going to make the same mistakes I made the first time. And I'm going to be very intentional about how I'm going to set this thing up and who I'm going to work with. So at Excelsior, we are a fundless sponsor. So we're just syndicating deal by deal. We only work with individuals and families. So only private taxable investors, no institutional equity, no private equity, no allocator funds. I don't want anything to do with that. And really the problem, as you all know, talking to clients, even though it seems like everybody out there is doing real estate, access is a big challenge for affluent folks at lower minimums. And so I created a platform where they could get exposure

to real estate, get all the tax benefits, do something other than multifamily, because a lot of them already had apartment options that they were in their portfolio, and be very, very focused on what the investor experience and the investor journey is from everything from when you first enter into the website, all the way through when you become an investor. We mapped it all out, did the road map and it's worked really well. We've made 20 acquisitions in the last two years and grown our investor base pretty dramatically. And it's been a lot of fun. It's kind of slowed down a little bit here with everything going on with the Fed, but it was a wild ride for about two, two and a half years.

So are these all real estate investment trusts, aka REITs, or what's going on? No, so they're not REITs. A REIT would be a publicly traded stock that gives you exposure to real assets, right? And oftentimes our investors already have a REIT position or they have a fairly good REIT portfolio and they want actual direct real estate investment, like as if they own the building themselves without having to go source the deal, without having to find the debt and handle all of the brain damage that goes into managing these assets, which is actually quite a bit. And so we are structured as an LLC. So within that LLC, it'll be a specialty

purpose vehicle entity. And the only thing in that LLC will be this one particular building in Dallas. And you'll say, okay, I'm going to do $50,000 in this one opportunity in Dallas. And there's no cross-collateralization or exposure to other opportunities. So you're just rifle shotting it into one specific investment when the timing is right for you, when the return profile is right for you, and when you have the liquidity and everything else that you want to participate. Interesting. So it's just specific properties then. It's money and other people's money together, and then they go knock it out. Right. So we obviously participate in all the investments ourselves.

Our firm does. And then we have a pretty, at this point, a pretty broad network of investors that we've built over the last 10 years that we send them to. And we can get into that too. But yeah, that's a similar setup. Yeah. Cool. Well, I'm curious, then the you mentioned affluent clients and low barrier to entry or low minimums or something like that. Is that right? So give me give me an idea of the type of clientele you are would be your ideal clientele. Yeah. So the minimum is $50,000 and we only work with accredited investors, which is a defined term within the SEC IRS regulations. Basically says that you've made $200,000 or more for the last two years, or you have a million dollars or more of net worth absent your primary residence. And there's more qualifications, but generally speaking, that's it, right? So the idea is if you are affluent to that extent, then you have the ability to take risk

and you can do these private placement investments that we offer people. In terms of the LP profile or the limited partner profile, sorry, the investor profile, it's barbelled. I'd say that 80% of our total dollar value in terms of investors comes from 20% of our overall investor community. And so probably 20% of our equity and capital stack, probably 80% of our actual overall

investor community, if that makes sense. Yeah, no, it makes all the sense in the world. Now you're in Nashville over the last two and a half years, a lot of people became very comfortable doing, you know, business virtually or online or whatever like that. What type of an effect, positive or negatively, has that been for your, for Excelsior? Yeah. So interestingly before COVID, for Excelsior? Yeah. So interestingly, before COVID, we revamped all of our marketing. So the way that we launched opportunities, the way that we put deal packages together, the way that we thought about investor relations, reporting, communication, we took it all down to the studs and rebuilt it. And that COVID, first year of COVID, we had a lot of time on our hands. And so we got really deep on the marketing side and how we put together these investment offerings and from the empathetic perspective of the investor.

And so we did all this work. And then in 2021, we kind of flipped the switch and we said, okay, like, let's see if the machine works. And we did in January and we did nine acquisitions that year, which was 3x what we had ever done before. So just incredible amount of volume for our firm. So net positive obviously yeah totally net positive i will say that um i am back on the road now and i think big these are i think we got lucky because those were legacy relationships that we had but people felt obviously more comfortable pulling the trigger on stuff over over that well you know um Tim's been doing this podcast with me for quite some time and he's heard me say maybe ad nauseum that the advisors that we talk with on

a regular basis, we are in the relationship business, right? And it's super competitive out there, right? So you've got to find some differentiation. There's no doubt about it. And I mean, you know, we we span, you know, from mass affluent to ultra high net worth. Right. And everything in between our advisors work with them. But predominantly, we've been working in more of the mass affluent demographic, you know, providing services that typically would only be accessible to ultra high net worth in our on our platform. only be accessible to ultra high net worth in our, on our platform. But again, whether you're looking to work with ultra high net worth accredited investors or, you know, the mass affluence, everybody, when it comes to advisors, you're all like working in that same, you know, blue ocean or red ocean rather, trying to find the blue ocean for yourself, right? Find that niche or find that uniqueness about your own offering. But it all comes down to when it's all said and done, you are in the relationship business.

And in order to monetize those relationships, people, and this will never change as far as I'm concerned, right? They do business with those that they know they like and they trust. And it doesn't matter how well off you are or, you know, to the, you know, if you, if you have $500,000 to your name or a hundred thousand dollars for your name, if you're going to potentially do business with someone that's going to change your livelihood, you know, in whatever manner that might be, you want to know and like, and trust the person that's going to help you with that. Yeah, a hundred percent. And the exciting thing about our business and where I think the future is numbers move around a little

bit, obviously, but call it 13 million accredited investors in America today that meet the requirements. Less than 3% have exposure to private equity or real assets directly. So there's a lot of opportunity there. That's a pretty good TAM. It's more like the crowdfunding thing, right? Where you're bringing those types of investments to someone who's not necessarily accredited, but they're like, hey, I mean, I've got $1,500 that I would like to get into something that I ordinarily wouldn't be able to. And that crowdfunding that, you know, that, um, reg CF stuff is, is becoming very prominent right now. Are you, are you saying

anything on, on your side of that? Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think anybody participating in private investments in whatever form or fashion is good for our industry. It just gets people comfortable with it. They get to learn. They can educate themselves. And yeah, I mean, some of the numbers I've got friends who are at CrowdStreet and Real Crowd and Jamestown. And I mean, they're putting out real numbers. I mean, I think CrowdStreet did over a billion dollars of acquisitions last year.

Yeah, they don't mess around. And so it's very powerful. I think you're seeing this play out with the wire houses and the big Wall Street firms trying to move, quote unquote, down market and service these folks because they see it as the future. And frankly, this moat that Wall Street had created around themselves to only have their fiefdom be the way that people can access private equity and real estate and venture, et cetera, it's good that that's being disremediated. The more participants, better pricing power for the consumer, it'll be better for the client. So competition is good. Yeah. Well, I've always been a huge fan of, of competition. Obviously, you know, Tim James,

my co-host here, chemical, Mr. Chemical Free Body himself, is, you know, he played baseball as growing up. I played baseball growing up. Right. And, and that competition that was sort of bred in, you, you played hockey, right? I mean, competition is good because it, you know, iron. Very useful. I love hiring people that played college athletics, especially if it wasn't like a big D1 program, because it just shows you that they're passionate about getting better, being part of a team, how they view success is different. I've just had a lot of success with that. So. Yeah, I think having like an open, I know,

I know having an open and free marketplace is the way to go, but we have to be careful because as these entities just start getting bigger and bigger and they swallow stuff up, I'll give you guys an example. You see it in the grocery industry. Okay. Whole foods, as an example, you see it in the grocery industry. Okay. Whole Foods, little MonPas deal. It grows, it gets big, it gets bought by Amazon. And what's happening is, is that we are getting crappy products. That's what's happening. The bigger these companies get, the crappier products. So if you go to Whole Foods, you'll see organic 365 brand and more and more and more of it. It's crowding out all this stuff because they have all the metrics they're tracking everything to the penny like oh that product sells so either buy

that product and keep it going and then they change the ingredients on it typically slowly over time because it's more profitable or they'll just phase them out and they'll replace it with their brand as an example and then you're just you go in to buy and you're like i need some hummus and it's like what happened to the mary's hummus the sprouted hummus like well they got organic 365 i gotta go i got a party to get to i'll get a couple of those and i'm out of here you just got a crappier product that's what it is so it's really important like i like what i like what brian's doing is he's like like min mini wall street direct to consumer cutting out middleman all the red tape and all the bullshit that people have to go through. And it's like average investors, especially that, you know, they don't have a whole lot of money.

They don't want to go down because otherwise these these big, huge companies, it's a mess. You know, the market falls. Everybody's falls everybody's like oh my god my financial advisor is the worst and they leave edward jones and they go over to merrill lynch and they shuffle the deck and they give them a different deck of stocks bonds and mutual funds it's the same shit and then like oh the market went up my merrill lynch guy's great and then it tanks and they're like merrill lynch sucks and then like they interview a bunch of people i'm going to ameritrade and then they reshuffle the deck and it's the same shit, just a different, you know, hand. And it's like, no, it's the market going up and down. And you, you were just,

they're all firms to me are the same. It's all the same stuff. They're just big, huge behemoths doing the same thing. So I really appreciate your approach, Brian. Yeah. And that's, and that's what I love actually about the family office office model. Right. And yours in particular, right. I mean, we work a lot through the family office because of our estate and legacy planning solution that we provide. But I love, you know, you've said a few things, right? You've got the family office and you mentioned earlier,

I didn't know what a family office was, right? And actually, maybe this is a good segue. Why don't you talk a little bit more specifically about the family office makeup and why that is beneficial to the types of people that you're looking to work with? Sure. So I guess we could get definitional for people that aren't familiar with the term. But in my mind, a family office is a corpus of assets that are meant to maintain a quality of life over a multiple generational time horizon and avoid paying taxes. So but they can all come investment periods. You know, families don't have that at all. Right. And now they're competing directly with private equity and venture capital and tech for deals and for talent. And so they're incredibly powerful and they are at this point,

really their own asset class and its own industry onto itself. And I think a lot of it came from the fact that the other options in the marketplace were underwhelming. I mean, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, UBS, all the big shops. To your point earlier, it was the same 60-40 bullshit. And maybe you got exposure to some IPOs. Maybe you got access to some funds that otherwise you wouldn't. But now with the internet and technology and things like iCapital and other platforms, there's no secret deals anymore. You can go participate in something if you want to. Yeah, without paying fees.

Right, without the friction costs. Actually, that was the one thing I told people a lot was like, you can just go get into a naked mutual fund and ride the roller coaster yourself and you don't need to pay anybody to do it. And for less than a point, why would you pay them, you know, three to five points? It just doesn't make sense. And that's where the family can be super powerful because if you have enough money to screw up your grandkids, it's usually not going to be the investment side that messes things up. It's going to be the relationship dynamic. It's really interesting that you got brought into it from your wife. And didn't you tell me that your brother-in-law played quarterback at Vanderbilt too? Yes, sir. So I'm like the schmuck out of the three

brothers-in-law because I played division three sports. My one brother-in-law played golf at Navy. He was a really good golfer at Annapolis. My younger brother-in-law was the quarterback at Vanderbilt when James Franklin was the coach before he went to Penn State. They actually had a lot of success. I think they went to three bowl games when he was there. He was a stud, like a big recruit out of high school and, um, he beat UT in Knoxville for the first time in 30 or 40 years, I think. Wow. Wow. That's awesome. He's a good guy.

Well, cool stuff guys. I think it's time for another break. So when we get back, we'll, we'll flip the script on Brian and he can start chatting about health, asking questions. We'll be right back. You want the absolute best for yourself and you want it to be easy. That's why we created Green 85. It helps with detoxifying the body gently. We're proud it's chemical free, unlike almost all other supplements you'll find. Bottom line, Green 85 will get you healthier. We look forward to hearing what Green 85 did for you. To get this product and our other amazing products, go to ChemicalFreeBody.com.

That's ChemicalFreeBody.com. What's up, enrichers? Tim James here. I am back with my co-host, Carter Wilcoxon. Again, today in the house, we've got Brian Adams from Excelsior Capital. And Brian, this is the segment where we do the health segment, you know, because without health, it doesn't matter how much money you have. Ain't much you can do with it if you're dead or if you're not feeling good. Right. You want to have a good quality of life. That's what we're all about.

So we want to have wealth. Probably five years ago for a whole host of reasons. They've been great. And one of the things they did as they onboarded me as a client was they did an audit of all of my stuff. So we did a trust and estate audit, upgraded the wills, blah, blah, blah. And then they did my life insurance. And I was like, what are you going to review my life insurance? You can actually go back to the market and recast it and reprice it. So they brought in a third- party consultant who told

me that I was like way undercover and I could pay less premium. And the insurance companies pay the difference. It's just benefit for me. It was great. So they had to come and do the blood work and all that kind of stuff. And I'm 40, reasonably healthy, never had any issues before knock on wood. And I screened for high cholesterol and I, and it's not a problem now, but you know, I do not want to have to go on some type of medication if I can really, if I can help it. I don't want to start that like merry-go-round. if I can really, if I can help it, I don't want to start that like merry-go-round. So are there, are there some things like diet wise or activity wise that I could do to target and lower that cholesterol over time? Sure. Well, I guess the first, the first thing I would say about the whole cholesterol deal is like, everybody's different. Okay. Everybody's different. I've actually seen cases of people that had 400, 500 cholesterol, 800, 1200. I mean, like off the charts type stuff, but it's okay for them. That's just their whole family there because there's some people out there that are made three, 400. You just might have some hereditary thing. It just, it still works for you. Okay. We're different.

You just might have some hereditary thing. It just, it still works for you. Okay. We're different. But for most of us, again, you know, wanting to keep that under 150. So if you're in that camp right now and your cholesterol is high, one thing that I learned is that like these statin drugs, as an example, is what you're going to get put on. Yeah. All, almost all of these drugs, they find them in nature and then they synthesize them.

They'll take one isolated component of something in nature and synthes they synthesize them they'll take one isolated component of something in nature and synthesize it and patent it and sell it and you know it's that's how they make their money whereas for me i like to just get the full spectrum from nature so i'll give an example if you've ever taken an aspirin yeah you know where that comes from no white willow bark so why wouldn't we No. White willow bark. So why wouldn't we just take white willow bark? That's my question. Like, why wouldn't we do that?

And it's available in most of the health food stores. You can just get it very easily over the counter. Why wouldn't you do that? Because, like, sometimes they'll prescribe aspirin to thin people's blood. And there's side effects to it i mean i actually just saw a commercial on tv where they were like try this drug it's not as basically as bad for you as aspirin it's like so the drug companies are selling it aspirin yet now there's another one saying okay i've got a better drug so now they're appealing to people taking aspirin it's not working for them yeah they're kind of admitting to it in the commercial that's bad for you and this is a better option for

you it's a it's basically a coated aspirin so it's not destroying your gut and your your bowels as it goes down through you just but it's still a different form of aspirin so with that said um these statin drugs they're made they originally come from red yeast rice. So one thing that I learned, again, I'm not going to help mitigate the situation. And if that didn't work, then I could always go on to a drug. But then we still need, whether you go drug route or you go red yeast rice, you still have a fundamental foundational problem to address. Why is it high?

It's typically your inputs your body's a system so if that's the case what are you you know what do you put in your mouth what are you drinking what are your stress levels and it always boils back to that and how much pollution do you have in your body which everybody's polluted and as brought up a million times just search three words umbilical cord chemical in your browser umbilical cord chemical and you'll see that every single child being born today has 180 cancer-causing chemicals in it in the womb before it even comes out so i already know that every child being born today and that's why we're seeing kids that are born with cancer nowadays

which is insane right it's because we're polluted. Mommy and daddy gets polluted and generation now two, three generations down the road of pollution and D D evolution. Now kids are being popped out with cancer. It's fricking ridiculous. It's stupid adults need, we need to wake up and take, take charge of what these inputs are. So with that said, what are some things that are going to help with cholesterol? Well, if you look at and you watch that, there's a there's a documentary called Forks Over Knives. And it's it's it's out there. It's all over the place. Forks Over Knives, one of the top cardiac surgeons in the planet, Dr. Esselstyn. He he was the guy that, you know, if you were a king, you're he's doing your heart.

He's doing the bypass surgery for you. He's the top, top, top of the top heart surgeon and big waiting list for this dude. And he every year is like just every day is taking taking people's disease arteries in their heart. He's cutting the artery out of the leg and stitching it on and bypassing that bad area. And inside of it's this plaque. And finally, he studied the plaque and he found out it was it was animal was animal fat, basically. So he thought, hmm, remember, this is a farmer. He's also a farmer, dairy farmer that grew up raising cows and eating cows and drinking the milk. And that's how there's a lot of emotional stuff there, too, because it's a family business. And he's like, I wonder if I test this stuff. What is it? And he's like, oh, it's it's animal. I wonder if I stop eating animals that that would help clear

up my cholesterol. And that's what he found out. And that's that whole movie was based on a lot of that. And he actually had another doctor who was a surgeon in his office at the Cleveland Clinic have a heart attack while he's at work. and they took a picture of his diseased artery and he went to a plant-based diet and two years later the artery had completely healed itself five to ten percent of their food is fresh it's it's a lot of it's cooked you know i mean it's it's not fresh it's packaged it's processed maybe 20, 30 percent is vegetables, plants. Right. It's very low. Or if it is, it's like really bad crap. Like it's you know, it's like pasta made of wheat that's grown over here and it's genetically modified that will definitely screw you up. And if you don't believe me, listen to my other podcast, Episode 134.

Right. Health show. It's if you if you listen to that episode and you continue to eat wheat grown in America or that's been genetically modified, you're basically suicidal. I mean, it is so bad on the gut. So what I recommend is like people just start eating fresh, clean food, not sprayed, chemical free. And they just start adding that in their diet and they start bumping up the percentage of fresh plants and go up the ladder all the way up to 100% and then come back down. And over time, six months, a year, two years, take some time, go up the ladder and find your set point, find what works out for you. And then boom, because that's actually what my path was. I went completely raw food, living food, vegan. I mean, 90 plus percent of my food by weight was living food, sprouts, sprouted nuts, sprouted

seeds, sprouted grains, sprouted beans, sprouted juices. I mean, I went full tilt because my buddy healed himself of cancer right in front of my face doing this stuff. So I was like, what's possible for me? And I became fanatical about it and actually drove a lot of friends away too, because I became so fanatical, but I had to finally, I came out of the cloud and I'm like, well, you know, even though we eat mostly plants and it worked for me, you you know people would have a little bit of meat from time to time so I went back and added a little bit of meat a little bit more a little bit more and I didn't feel as good and I went less less less and now what I found is what I do is if I pick chanterelle mushrooms in the in the fall and I want to have a chanterelle mushroom omelet I'm going to do it and I don't

stress out about it because the rest of my lifestyle is I'm daily detoxing and cleaning i'm fresh food i'm doing i'm actually doing a liver flush right now as we're speaking like as soon as i get done with this i'm gonna go do an enema and and and and i just i did a castor oil pack and um and i drank a bunch of uh oil and some you know freaking like what's his name uh gabriel cousins do like 30 pull-ups when he's in his late 70s he did like two 300 push-ups there's guys that are 114 years and women too that are 100 100 years old they're running marathons you know teaching yoga yoga instructors that die at 104 and they taught they taught the day they died and they're in great shape actually i do you guys know this i there was a yoga instructor over in india i just read the story about him about six months ago and blew my mind.

I just read it again. He was like 84 years old. He was a yoga instructor. And one day a week, he would go into town. He would take a train into town, and he'd have this place. And like 200, 300 people would see him, and he would heal them. He's also a healer. He was like an Ayurvedic traditional healer, medicine doctor.

The train was shut down it couldn't go he had two handlers with him and he's like okay and he just hops on the train tracks and runs 44 miles in the middle of the night and he shows up at 4 a.m in the morning and he heals helps and he sees all of his two three hundred patients and it wasn't until later that afternoon that his handler showed up and then people the word started buzzing around it's like hey he didn't take the train in he ran 44 miles is like some dude in his early 80s and it was like no big deal for him because he had kept his body in shape such good shape he'd been working on it for his whole life right so he made that a practice just like brian you're working really hard on excelsior

and the version you know 2.0 is going to be better and modify modify it's the same thing with our life, right? So he made that a practice. Just like Brian, you're working really hard on Excelsior and the version, you know, 2.0 is going to be better and modify, modify. It's the same thing with our body. And as we age, things are going to change. So that percentage of plants and animals might vary too, as you change and you might need different nutrients as things change. And as you change as your age, something else about cholesterol, that's very important is to not overlook at all is there's certain bacterium in the human gastrointestinal tract that have been there for for forever and uh there was a guy named uh he's a microbiologist from germany named uh reuter

and this guy had been studying the gut bacterium from the 1940s 50s and 60s and what he noticed in the 1960s is some of them started disappearing there's no longer there and what happened at that time well after world war ii the chemical companies had to stay in business so pesticides fungicides herbicides larvicides right on the food people right on the food and then the drug companies and you start taking antibiotics that goes in and kills the bad bacteria, but it also kills the good. Some of these good bacteria couldn't take the hit like L. reuteri that they named after this microbiologist Reuter. And what ends up happening is, is now they're calling these

things missing microbes. And when you reintroduce them to your body, they do amazing things. So it's almost like imagine being born without a foot. And for 40 years, you got along and people like, wow, Brian, you did things you can do with no foot. Amazing. And all of a sudden, you yogurt that I'm taking that I'm making, it actually increases oxytocin tremendously. So it's great for calmness and stuff like that. But there's also kefirs and cultured yogurts that can reintroduce these things. There's some of these bacteria, Brian, that are so important. And some of them eat cholesterol. That's my point. There's bacterium that you can get in yogurts and cultured foods and kefirs that can help you can reintroduce to your gastrointestinal tract. They'll just go in

there and they'll eat the cholesterol in your veins. Those eat them up because it's a food for them. So that's another way to mitigate it when you're looking at, you know, keeping your cholesterol down. All right. I got my homework assignments. I appreciate that. You've got some work to do. It's good, though. It's nice that there's options out there. Oh, there's a lot to do. There's a lot of things you can do. And you might have to stack two or three or four of them to get what you need or maybe just one of them. You know, maybe just one of them will work for you.

But great question. And we really, really appreciate you coming on the show today. Yeah. Thank you guys so much for having me. Appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. Hey, enrichers, thank you so much for joining us for another episode of the Health and Wealth Podcast. And to be able to see all of our other wonderful guests like Brian Adams from Excelsior Capital, you can go to our website at www.thehealthandwealthpodcastshow.com.

And make sure to like, share, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, Apple, Spotify, or Google. So for my fantastic co-host, Mr. Tim James, Mr. Chemical Free Body himself, all decked out in his health hero. I got it all. Guard today. Yep. Hat, sweatshirt, and poster behind me.

I can't believe it all matches. Yeah, perfect. I'm Carter Wilcox and poster behind me. I can't believe it all matches. Yeah, perfect. I'm Carter Wilcoxon, CEO and founder of CSI Financial Group, an epic services company. Wishing you all a very wonderful day. And Brian, seriously, my man, thank you so much for coming on the show today. You were a phenomenal guest.

Thank you for all your insight and sharing all your backstory and where you're taking your own business to the next level. Yes, sir. Thank you so much your insight and sharing all your backstory and where you're taking, you know, your own business to the next level. Yes, sir. Thank you so much for having me. Hey, enrichers. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Health and Wealth Podcast.

I'm your host, Carter Wilcoxon. And I'm your host, Tim James. And by God, we are committed to helping you guys have fat wallets, flat bellies. So tune in again for another episode and make sure to like, share, and drink a lot of water. Or beer. You have just listened to the Health and Wealth Podcast with Carter and Tim.