Inspiring Conversations with Zachery Talley of the1863

Today we’d like to introduce you to Zachery Talley.

Hi Zachery, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’m a big believer that God has a way of using your biggest hurt to mold you into that issue’s biggest weapon. I’m really just a man from Augusta, GA by way of upstate Carolina- on a journey,

I learned at eleven years old that in America, poverty isn’t about money—it’s about knowledge withheld.

My father died in the snow outside his family’s home, the day after Christmas. No life insurance. No succession plan. No financial literacy was passed down. Just a Black man’s body covered in white snow—the perfect metaphor for how this system buries us.

His employer’s small insurance policy was supposed to secure my future. Instead, a “trusted” financial advisor—recommended by our church—bled it dry.

At fifteen, I interrogated that man until he basically confessed: the only money he’d made was his commission. We’d lost almost everything.

Compiled betrayal rewired my DNA, or at least my neuropathways. I became obsessed with understanding not just money, but the ecosystems and psychology of money.

Why and how did my brilliant mother—a college-educated nurse who taught me multiplication in first grade—trust blindly? Why do intelligent people make devastating financial decisions? Why do our communities stay trapped in cycles designed centuries ago?

Life went sideways before it went up. Got into trouble. Made mistakes. But I understood early that time is the ultimate currency. You can spend it, invest it, or let it go to waste. I chose to invest.

University of Miami. Cooley Law. Morehouse Medicine. Banking, Investment Firms. Tax law. Real estate. I was collecting weapons for a war I didn’t even understand I was fighting.

By 2014, I’d built a “successful” finance firm. Awards. Money. The American Dream. But success became my prison. I had the house, cars, suits, PTSD, anxiety, and divorce. I was dead inside, winning a game that was killing me.

In 2020, I met my wife, who was the first person strong enough to hold up a mirror I’d been avoiding. She made me care about life differently. She introduced me to self-care.

2022: We fled to the Caribbean for healing. Within a month, doctors found brain damage from chronic stress. By 2023, stress-induced strokes. The day of my diagnosis, I learned the eighth brother within a certain degree of proximity to me had committed suicide that year.

That’s when God spoke clearly: “This entire time you thought I was punishing you. I was preparing you. Use your voice”.

I didn’t have a clue what that meant or what I was doing, but I created “Dear Trauma”—a podcast where we stop hiding our wounds and start weaponizing them.

Those conversations opened doors to stages, boardrooms, and eventually led to me acquiring the accounting firm that tried to acquire mine. I became a partner in a family office and saw clearly: The same tools hoarding wealth for the 1% could liberate the 99%.

That revelation gave birth to The 1863 Collective—a revolutionary reimagining of the family office model. We take strategies reserved for the ultra-wealthy and deliver them to FQHCs, churches, community organizations, and the broader community. It’s education, resources, support, and the finance team that you need to create and sustain wealth. We are democratizing access. But this isn’t charity. This is warfare. We are teaching people not to need us, either by not being our best clients or by being our best clients. Either way, the client wins!

For years, I’ve argued and advocated: “We can’t keep letting the one thing we all need—financial understanding—remain taboo.” Not understanding an issue allows it more power and leverage to distract you from achieving greatness. Financial illiteracy is the number one public health issue in the world, yet we avoid it.

So I decided to be the change. At The 1863, we address everything from your relationship with money to the tools and resources for immediate wealth transfer, holding you accountable to your goals. But it doesn’t start with a budget—it begins with understanding.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Not at all—life is daily spiritual warfare. When the enemy can’t have your spirit, he goes after your mind.
I’ve battled mental, social, neurological, developmental, and spiritual issues since childhood. But here’s what I’ve learned: the road has been exactly how it was intended to be.

We each carry a unique design, which creates a unique journey, which builds unique perspectives. If we believe we’re created in the image of the ultimate Creator, then that journey—with all its warfare—is forging our ultimate unique creation.

Let me be clear about something: Being humble and practicing humility are not the same. Humble is who you are; humility is what you do. Too many of us chase “easy” like we’re chasing a carrot on a stick. But easy doesn’t exist—that’s the lie that keeps us slaves.

You have both convenient and inconvenient options. And here’s the revolutionary truth: You cannot grow in convenience.
My struggles—the PTSD, the brain damage, the stress-induced strokes, watching eight brothers commit suicide in one year—these weren’t detours. They were the curriculum. Each battle taught me that our communities don’t need another financial advisor. We need liberation architects who understand that freedom is just a right, but liberation? Liberation is a daily choice.

The smooth road would have made me soft. The warfare made me a weapon.

Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about the1863?
The 1863 Collective isn’t a business—it’s an economic liberation ministry. In 1863. On January 1st, the Emancipation Proclamation freed our bodies. Just 54 days later, on February 25th, the National Banking Act locked us out of the banks. That wasn’t coincidence—it was calculation.

We named ourselves The 1863 Collective because we’re creating liberation in the areas that will allow growth through action, dedication, and accountability. Most of us are handed responsibility with no support and accountability.

Before Tulsa, and Black Wall Street, Tunis Campbell took freedpeople to Georgia’s Sea Islands and built self-sustaining communities—governments, schools, economic systems. We had everything except access to the banking system, which was designed to exclude us.
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The Freedmen’s Bank—our one shot—collapsed in 1874, stealing $3 million from 61,000 depositors.
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That $3 million? Worth $76.7 billion today. Each depositor lost what would be $1.26 million—more than most Americans will see in a lifetime.

This is the calculation we’re reversing.

What We Actually Do:

We take Wall Street’s wealth-preservation tools and deliver them through:
Your the1863 Financial Liberation Command Center—combining Fortune 500 technology with community trust. We provide:
• Your 24/7 the1863 app Freedom Coach —financial guidance in your pocket, built for our community’s unique psychology
• Your the1863 Wealth Council—the same strategic teams billionaires use, now protecting YOUR legacy
• Your Liberation squad—certified wealth managers and finance professionals assisting with strategies to keep what’s yours
• Your Money Mission Control—institutional-level planning tools, democratized for every church, FQHC, and family
This isn’t charity. It’s reparative warfare.

What Sets Us Apart:
Traditional firms play checkers with your money. We play chess with your liberation.

We’re the only firm combining:
Cognitive Economics—how 161 years of trauma affects money decisions
Liberation Theology—money as a spiritual tool, not an idol
Historical Authority—we ARE this story
Revolutionary Mathematics—tracking the $36.3 billion extracted DAILY from our communities
Our Focus: Family, Faith, Finance, and Freedom
For FQHCs: Transform healthcare trust into the wealth-building infrastructure Reconstruction promised
For Churches: Convert tithes into what the Freedmen’s Bank should have been
For Families: Build the generational wealth 1863 stole

What I’m Most Proud Of:
Teaching people to either not need us or become our best clients. Either way, they win. That’s revolutionary—creating the self-sufficiency denied for 161 years.
Our Cadre model means we’re not employees—we’re co-liberators, sharing profits based on impact. When our communities win, we all win. That’s not business—that’s biblical.

The Opportunity Before Us:
A $34.3 billion gap exists in the community financial services sector. Collectively, Black and Hispanic/ Latina Communities have over $4 trillion in spending power. Traditional firms can’t crack have figured it out, if you keep people in a loop of ignorance, and keep them emotional, they kill themselves to spend their way to a quicker death. Colonization has a way of making a threat out of what it cannot defeat. Every day we wait, our communities lose another $36.3 billion. That’s not a statistic—it’s an emergency.

We’re not building another firm. We’re completing Emancipation’s second phase:
The first freed our bodies.
This one frees our minds and wealth.

We’re not asking permission—we’re taking position. Because freedom was just paperwork. Liberation is daily work.

What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
The most brutal truth I’ve learned is that oppression isn’t just external—sometimes we become accomplices to our own bondage.
Everyone doesn’t want change. Some people are more loyal to dysfunction than liberation. That loyalty is literally killing us.
The data proves what my heart knows: We’re dying 4.7 years sooner than our White counterparts
. Not from bullets—from boardrooms. Not from violence—from grind culture. The average Black household loses $1,574 to cultural resistance alone—choosing tradition over transformation. Multiply that by 35 million households, and we’re bleeding $55 billion from self-inflicted wounds.

Here’s what grind culture really costs:
Burnout rates: Black professionals experience 1.5x higher burnout
Mental health: We’re 20% more likely to experience severe psychological distress
Physical toll: Chronic stress increases our cardiovascular disease risk by 40%
But the deepest wound? We’ve internalized the very systems designed to destroy us.
The 1863 betrayal—freedom without financial access—created trauma we still carry. Now we resist the very education that could liberate us. Only 28% of Black adults participate in financial education versus 45% of Whites. That 17% gap? It’s not just access—60% is cultural resistance.
The revolutionary lesson: Liberation requires us to confront not just external oppression but internal collaboration with it. We have to stop being loyal to:
Grind culture that sacrifices life for money, we don’t keep
Competition that divides communities meant to rise together
Convenience that keeps us comfortable in bondage
A tradition that honors suffering over healing
I learned this in the Caribbean, staring at brain scans showing what “success” had done to me. Chronic stress had literally damaged my brain. I was dying for a system that was designed to kill me.
That’s when God revealed the deeper truth: We weren’t placed here to merely exist. We were created to LIVE—abundantly, collectively, purposefully.
The 1863 Collective exists because I learned that financial liberation without mental and spiritual healing is just decorated bondage. That’s why we combine:
Financial strategy with trauma therapy
Wealth building with wellness practices
Economic education with spiritual liberation
The Preston Model proves that communities that collaborate build 3x more wealth than those that compete
Worker cooperatives show 85% higher survival rates than traditional businesses
Community land trusts prevent 95% of displacement.

Collaboration isn’t weakness—it’s revolutionary mathematics.
However, here’s the hardest pill to swallow: some people will choose familiar chains over unfamiliar freedom. They’ll defend the very systems destroying them. They’ll attack you for trying to liberate them.
I learned to stop trying to save everyone and start empowering those ready to save themselves. That’s why The 1863 Collective teaches people to either not need us or become our best clients. Either way, they win.
The lesson that changed everything: Stop dying while building their wealth. Start living while building our liberation.
Because every day we stay loyal to cultures of death, we lose:
$36.3 billion in community wealth
129 Black lives lost to preventable stress-related deaths
Countless souls to the lie that suffering equals strength
We have to lean into discomfort and grow. Not grind—GROW. Not compete—COLLABORATE. Not exist—LIVE.
Liberation isn’t comfortable. But bondage shouldn’t be either.
This lesson birthed The 1863 Collective. Because I finally understood: The greatest act of resistance isn’t fighting the system—it’s refusing to internalize it.
And that refusal? That’s where liberation begins.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/Taxmantalley
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CincoTalley
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zac-taxman-talley