Codie Sanchez says you can ignore those get-rich-quick schemes

The American economy is booming, but for many, especially younger Americans, achieving financial security feels like an out-of-reach fantasy. However, Codie Sanchez, social media superstar, investor, and founder of Contrarian Thinking, offers a solution for building wealth. She outlines a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” for young people, and asks everyone to ignore the get-rich-quick schemes because, as Codie explains, wealth is often earned slowly. Sanchez’s advice mixes fun with hard truths in a quest to expand financial freedom to more people.

This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by a former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.

So the stock market has been soaring, trillion-dollar valuations for tech companies, AI firms like Nvidia are off the charts; it’s been a time of incredible wealth-building. And at the same time, a lot of people feel left behind. You’re talking to people about this all the time. What are you hearing and feeling at this moment?

When I talk to young people on social media, I’m finding that a lot of them don’t really buy into the systems that you and I probably did. I went to Georgetown. That was a nice school; that was really important. I worked at some big financial institutions; that was really important to credential yourself and move up the corporate chain. If you did that, you were supposed to be okay. And I think what we found is that increasingly, for the first time ever, we’re having the youth, so let’s call them younger millennials to Gen Z, making less than their parents did on an inflation-adjusted basis. 

For the first time, really, since probably the internet revolution, in a really tough affordability of housing crisis, with home prices at all-time high levels, people just feel like things are out of reach, and like the thing that they were told to do isn’t working.

In many ways, we’re richer than we’ve ever been. We’re living longer than we’ve ever been, except for a few areas. And so, I feel it in the blue-collar area in particular, where people feel like they’re not part of this growth trajectory that those of us who are maybe in the top, whatever, 10 percent, have seen as a huge boom of abundance.

When you talk to young people, to Gen Z and younger millennials, about personal finance in particular, do they approach that differently than other generations? Are their motivations and fears the same? Are there activities and responses just different?

What’s interesting about my generation was it was nearly the first one where we almost grew up with an iPhone nonstop, but I just missed it. And this generation is fully there. So the cell phone has become a part of you as a human.

I remember back in the day, I had a chance to invest in Robinhood and I passed, which was dumb. My thought was, why would you want to gamify the stock market? That was such a bizarre thought to me.

I never thought that young people would want to engage like that. And yet, they are. I think young people today have been programmed in a weird way. They’ve been programmed for immediate, adrenal response. I feel that too.

It’s always alongside me. I could easily buy and sell a stock as opposed to going to a bank. I could easily invest in “real estate.” So it’s this instant gratification. And I think for young people today, it’s a pushback. 

I’m not actually happier, even though I have more knowledge than I’ve ever had. So what am I doing wrong? Because I’m not happier, I’m not richer, I’m maybe having less sex, I’m not getting married early, I don’t have a stable job. So what do I do? And how do I get the thing I saw my parents have?

I mean, I feel like so many people want to get rich quick. And listen, it’s always been that way. Right? But that’s rarely the way that wealth-building really works. What do you think people misunderstand most about that?

Yeah, I loved Warren Buffett’s quote, which is, I think it was Bezos [who] interviewed him and was like, “Hey, if this strategy works so well that you’re doing over at Berkshire Hathaway, why doesn’t everybody copy you?” Warren’s famous response is, “Because nobody wants to get rich slowly.” And I thought that was so perfect and so true.

We all want to get rich quickly, of course. But I think the unrealistic expectations of the youth are that it’s going to be easier because they see 20-year-olds everywhere flexing. And they don’t realize that what we’ve actually just done, instead of making more people rich younger, we’ve made it easier to appear rich.

Yeah, it’s that illusion, right?

Yeah. For the first time ever, we have an ability to rent a private plane. That is a material jump from having to buy one.

And you can do the same thing with purses now—you can rent them. And so I think these status symbols are confusing because you look at them and you think, well, they must be really, really wealthy. And then you see their bank account and you’re like, no, they’re not.

And I think for young people today, you just gotta realize that; don’t show me what you’re capable of. Why don’t you actually do the work, and can I see you do it live, as opposed to transferring trust from logos?

You’ve said and written about in your book about this big opportunity—this wave of baby boomers who are retiring and baby-boomer small-business owners, right? And if I understand this right, that individuals can sort of apply the principles of private equity and buy these often “unsexy” businesses. This is the rapid response opportunity that you see out there right now.

Every so often, you have a generational wealth-creation event, and if it fits your skill set and your interests, you can draft off it. We’ve seen that with the internet, we’ve seen that with AI. We’ve seen that if Cerberus out of New York, if you knew how to turn around companies, if you knew how to buy distressed companies and debt in 2009, 10, 11, and you took action, you made incredible amounts of wealth because you were riding a tide.

I don’t like to market time, but I do like to look at supply-and-demand 101. If there’s a massive amount of supply, like tons of small businesses for sale right now, and the demand to buy them is quite low because not very many people know how to do it, then that’s an opportunity you could capitalize on.

If I don’t have enough money to make myself wealthy in the stock market, how do I have enough money to be able to buy even an unsexy small business?

I call it the three legs of the tripod. So, like in chapter three, we talk about three ways to get equity in a business without your own capital. The first way is sweat equity, right? So can you go in and help an owner? And if you do so, you can get a percentage of equity in the company. So no cash needed theoretically, or you earn into cash over time. You earn into the business over time. 

The second way is experience. If I own a local media company and I want to get out of my local media company and I live in the same town as Bob, the media company is profitable. 

I bet Bob could help me grow my local media company and he could bring it from pamphlets to online because he’s done that before and knows a thing or two about online subscriptions. So I might give Bob part of my company or even my whole company at some point if I could just ride a little of Bob’s upside, or he pays me some degree from the company.

And then the third way that you can do it, increasingly, I’ve found is there is so much money on the sidelines. Even with everything awful happening in the world today, we’re at record levels of cash held by investors. That money is sitting there, and they’re looking for ways to invest it and diversify. So if I’m young and hungry, I can do a search fund. I can get capital to back me to buy these businesses.

So, what do you feel is at stake right now for your listeners, your viewers? Do they need to be wealthy? Is the idea of wealth something that can drive you to just a better life? How do you look at this moment and what you’re trying to do now?

I think today, more than ever, we have an ability to equal the playing field on money. It’s never been easier to start a business; the amount of small businesses created since 2020 has been astronomical. And so, today I think it’s your moral prerogative, if you want to be free, to go and get more money and then assert your will in the world.

And you’re much more powerful when you have a check behind you.

I really want us to own our country as individuals, not as big huge corporations, and I think we actually have a real shot to do it. It’s not like “buy local,” that doesn’t work. Nobody buys local—we buy from Amazon. But you know what does work? If you have a nice coffee shop down the street from a Starbucks, you’re gonna use it. So I suppose I’m pushing this on so many people because I think it can actually work, and we’re sort of proving it does right now.

Well, and it sounds like this transition from baby boomers to younger generations: It’s good for the baby boomers because they’re getting some assets, some resources for their hard work, and it’s good for the younger generations because they have a foundation to build from.

You’re exactly right. And right now, what is the narrative between boomers and young people? It’s like, “Okay, boomer” from the young people, and it’s, “Shut up, you’re quiet quitting,” to the young people. 

And so there’s this generational tension. Young people say, “Boomers, you screwed stuff up.” Boomers say, “You guys don’t work hard.” But what if you guys are actually the solution to each other’s problems? What if that boomer that you think doesn’t get it could actually be the answer to the fact your wages have stagnated over the last three years? 

And to the young person, what if you could actually come in and be part of the solution to the fact that probably our social security system doesn’t actually work? So instead we could help them exit their business with some real cash. I don’t want to be Pollyanna and say we can solve everything with this, but I do think there is an opportunity for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of humans across this country to do so—to get some skin in the game.

You don’t burn down the building that you own. You build it. You fix it up. You make it nicer. And so maybe our country would be a little bit less of a tragedy of the commons if we all owned a little piece of it. We would care more about making it better.

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