How to build wealth in 2024

CODIE SANCHEZ: 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? And 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?

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 a tragedy of the commons if we all owned a little piece of it. We would care more about making it better.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Codie Sanchez, investor and founder of the finance and media company Contrarian Thinking. With millions of followers across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, Codie has made a name for herself sharing advice on how to accumulate wealth. Young people in particular have been drawn to her message about looking at entrepreneurship in a new way.

Codie gives us an early look at lessons from her upcoming book, “Main Street Millionaire,” including the opportunity to apply private-equity-like tactics to what she calls ‘unsexy’ businesses. Codie and I also explore how Gen Z approaches personal finance differently, what people most misunderstand about investing, Get Rich Quick schemes versus Get Rich Slow schemes, what she likes and doesn’t like about billionaires, and more. So let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

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SAFIAN: I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Codie Sanchez, investor and founder of finance and media company Contrarian Thinking. Codie, thanks for joining us.

SANCHEZ: I’m thrilled to be here, Bob. Thanks for having me.

Copy LinkHow young people feel about the economy today

SAFIAN: So the stock market has been soaring, trillion-dollar valuations for tech companies, AI firms like NVIDIA 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 in this moment?

SANCHEZ: When I talk to, predominantly, let’s say, 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.

SAFIAN: 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?

SANCHEZ: Well, I think what’s interesting is my generation was 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, right?

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 on. 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?

Copy LinkWhat people misunderstand about building wealth

SAFIAN: 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?

SANCHEZ: Yeah, I loved Warren Buffett’s quote, which is, I think it was Bezos 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.

And so, I think 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.

SAFIAN: Yeah, it’s that illusion, right?

SANCHEZ: Yeah. So, I mean, 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 transfer trust from logos?

Copy LinkThe unlikeliness of beating the market

SAFIAN: You mentioned Warren Buffett. You don’t particularly stress stock market investing as the road to wealth. Why not? Is that part of what you mean by contrarian thinking?

SANCHEZ: Well, in order to get wealthy, you typically have to have money that way, right? There’s not really a way to safely leverage other people’s capital in order to invest it in the stock market and have that grow. So if we already know that a lot of people today don’t have enough money to cover basic goods, how are they going to be able to materially invest in the stock market and not actually have to pull it out at the worst points when they accidentally get fired from a job and they have to cut back their savings?

I love stock market investing because I’ve done it in the background since I started in finance in 2008, and I think it’s an important portion of every person’s career — diversification. Rich people hold stocks, for sure.

However, it’s really hard to get wealthy if you don’t have money by investing. So where I push back is like, there’s all these people out there that say, “Hey, let me teach you how to day trade.” Data shows, terrible idea. There’s a lot of people that tell you, “Hey, I like this stock pick, and so you should plow a bunch of money in there for this.” We saw it with GameStop or even crypto. And, I just think that since I was on Wall Street watching people invest, these people are brilliant. The best Wall Street hedge funds, the best private equity companies, the best mutual fund companies, would eat my lunch and everybody’s lunch that’s tracking this.

And so, I think we have to be careful thinking we could beat the market. I think it’s really hard.

And it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest and learn, and you can play with it, but let’s be honest about your likelihood. You know, the house always wins, and so in my opinion, it’s a more interesting idea for you to consider how can you learn to earn more, and then once you earn more, definitely invest. But first, let’s obsess on increasing your earnings.

Copy LinkToday’s generational wealth-building event

SAFIAN: So one big opportunity right now, you’ve said you have the book out, is 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.

SANCHEZ: Yeah, I mean, I think every so often you have a generational wealth creation event, and if it fits your skill set and your interests, you can draft off of it. We’ve seen that with the internet, we’ve seen that with AI. I think 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.

SAFIAN: 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?

SANCHEZ: I call it the three legs of the tripod. So, like in chapter three, we talk about there’s 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.

Copy LinkThe philosophical freedom that comes with wealth

SAFIAN: Your mission at Contrarian Thinking is to help a million people become financially and philosophically free. Now I get the financially, but what do you mean by philosophically free?

SANCHEZ: Most financial freedom starts with, “I can pay for my rent, I can pay for my mortgage, I can have a little bit of savings. I got this.” Then the next level of financial freedom is physical freedom. So, “Hey, I can work on what I want, when I want, where I want.” And then the final level of freedom to me is philosophical freedom. I have so much financial freedom and security, which means that I can say what I actually think, and I can do it without fear of reprisal, and I can stand my ground a little bit more. And I suppose I saw, with how crazy the world’s getting, that we seem to have less tolerance for diverse views, for things we don’t agree with. And so we go with the herd.

And I think the world would be a lot better if more of us were more financially free and could say, “I don’t agree with that,” and, “No, you can’t tell me what to do on that.” And because of that, I’m going to put my money behind this initiative. So that’s my idea of philosophical freedom. I think it is the highest level of freedom.

Copy LinkMaking profitable businesses that help people

SAFIAN: As an investor and owner of multiple businesses, why do you do the media part of it? Does it help your deal flow? Why not just buy the businesses yourself that you’re out talking to other people to buy?

SANCHEZ: I mean, we own 26 businesses now in Main Street Holding Company. We own a small part of 30 in the Venture Fund. We own three in the media company side. So we got our hands full. But the part that stuck with me actually happened at Starbucks, and I don’t know if you’ve been in one of those lately. But it was gnarly. I mean, the place was gross. They kind of like yelled at me; you know, there was nowhere to sit. And I remember thinking, God, you know, the CEO of this company has never been to this Starbucks for sure. And I remember being annoyed at that, and so I said, we’re never going to Starbucks again, like categorically, like I’m out, not doing it. And then across our company, we, I said, “Actually, we’re not going to buy at these big corporations. Anything that is owned by private equity, I actually don’t want to fund.”

So if you want to go to a local coffee shop, awesome, I’ll buy your coffee. If you go to Starbucks, you buy your coffee. And they’ve caught me a few times, like I almost got a Chipotle, and they were like, “Not on our dime, you’re not.” I was like, okay, fine. And so, it started out just from me feeling this way, and that we were losing touch with our communities. If you walk down Main Street of Coronado, which is in California, it’s the way I thought Main Street was supposed to look. It’s like the flower boxes and the American flag, and it’s clean, and it’s beautiful.

Then you go to most Main Streets. Austin, Texas Main Street is a nightmare. It is so dirty. Half the businesses are shuttered, and the rest that aren’t shuttered are largely conglomerates. I remember thinking, if we don’t do something about this, then we’re going to live in a nation of neon signs and dirty streets. And so I was like, well, I don’t want to be part of the problem.

And I want to, now that I’ve made enough money to feel comfortable with it, I just wanna own the businesses in my local community in Austin and do what, like, the Bass family did in Fort Worth, which is buy up a bunch of the local businesses in Fort Worth and make Fort Worth beautiful.

And so that was my idea. It’s like, I don’t really know much about charity. I wouldn’t know how to allocate that properly, but I think I know how to run businesses, and maybe we could make profitable businesses help people, too.

SAFIAN: After the break, Codie and I explore why people find personal finance so daunting, and why boomers and young people should set aside their differences to help each other achieve a brighter financial future. So stay with us.

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SAFIAN: Before the break, investor and founder of Contrarian Thinking, Codie Sanchez, shared why she’s encouraging her viewers to ignore the pitfalls of viral investment pastimes like day trading, and instead invest in some of the ‘unsexy’ businesses that exist in every town across the country. Now, Codie reveals why she’s okay with being labeled socially ‘elitist,’ and reveals whether she feels a burden of responsibility if her viewers follow some of her boldest advice. Let’s dive back in.

Copy LinkStanding out in a competitive media space

I’ve really been taken with how you engage your audience with your content. Your headlines are provocative. I was looking at one today, “Seven businesses that almost never fail.” Do you worry at all about overpromising in some of this? One of your recent posts is like, “Get insanely wealthy in 12 months,” which isn’t really practical, right?

SANCHEZ: Yeah, it’s a great question. How do you manage the clickbait to get attention with the delivery of actual end product? And we’re working on it every single day. I think the one thing that we hold really true to is, do we believe that if a person watches a video and actually takes the actions in the video, they would be able to deliver the results? And the problem is typically not the information. The problem is, we humans are flawed. We don’t actually do the things we need typically to get the things we want out of life. So I very much worry about us ever promising that you individually could do something. The one key guarantee in life is that if you don’t take action yourself, you’ll achieve nothing. And so a lot of our stuff is a little hard, and the team makes fun of me sometimes about it because I’m like, this will not work if you don’t work longer than you want, harder than you think is reasonable, increase your skill stack continuously, develop a network and deliver a product that is above and beyond anything else in the space. So at the end of the day, all the advice we give you still relies on you.

But yeah, I mean, titles and subject lines — I think I have a moral obligation to get eyeballs on the things that can help people, and we’re up against the Kardashians, we’re up against the presidential election, we are up against Mr. Beast, and I refuse to believe that you can’t be entertained and also educated, and that those of us who are here to teach people something, I think we’ve got to be a little better.

Copy LinkDemocratizing financial advice

SAFIAN: How much responsibility do you feel about the advice you give your viewers and readers? Are there situations where you’ve been blamed when somebody tried something and it didn’t go the way they hoped?

SANCHEZ: I don’t think that’s happened yet. Anybody listening to people online, you have to know rule number one at Contrarian Thinking:

Those who say it’s impossible should get out of the way of those of us doing it. And the second one is question everything, including and maybe sometimes especially me. I’m not saying I don’t get hate on the internet, by the way. I get lots of hate on the internet. It’s all over the place. Look at any YouTube video — I’m sure there’s a few — and then on Twitter is always a real blast. So I get tons of hate, and I think that’s just part of the game. I think you just have to assume that some people are miserable and they’re going to do it. And maybe sometimes they’re right. I don’t know.

SAFIAN: On the flip side, you must get stories of appreciation when things do go right, right? I mean, that must be part of the fuel that keeps you going.

SANCHEZ: It does feel incredible when people tell you that they’ve made changes, but I kind of try to say the same thing to them. I think I would say, if they said, “This is your fault that something’s messed up,” I would say, “I did nothing.” Really, nothing that we come up with is totally unique and novel. I have taken everything I learned in finance and private equity, most of the playbooks from large billionaires, from big holding companies, from private equity, and I have applied them in a more democratic, easy-to-understand way to the rest of us. And so, at the end of the day, I didn’t do anything for these people. They did. And that, I think, is so much more freeing. It’s like, I’m not smarter than you are. The only person that can change your life is you.

And I just wish when I was younger, more people had talked about this stuff more freely. Like, I didn’t, I thought a mutual fund was mutual fun—like we all had a good time when we’re all together. So, these days when people tell me, “I did this and it’s because of you,” I’m like, “No, man, this is you. You just, you didn’t have the programming before, and now we have better access to programming.”

SAFIAN: Well, there’s so little in our system that prepares people for a lot of things financially. It really is a shame that we’re not taught certain things, you know?

SANCHEZ: Why do you think that is?

SAFIAN: I think there’s still stigma of people not wanting to talk about money, like there’s something bad about it. And I think also people are intimidated by the idea of math. And they think it’s all like math, right? You know, it’s not really that complicated to understand how a credit card works, right? Or what compounding is, but that’s not a priority of things that are taught in schools the same way as certain other kinds of skills are.

SANCHEZ: I think you nailed it. It’s one, it’s just not taught, and I’m still unclear as to why. Every time you go on the internet and you share things about money or finances, you immediately trigger a mirror reflex in somebody who doesn’t have what you have. And so that can be really hard for people to hear, I think. So if you’re like, “Hey, it’s actually not that hard to make money, look how I did it,” somebody who’s having a hard time making money goes, “It is hard, you don’t know my life, you’re privileged.” So, one, I think as somebody who talks about money, you’re like, “Ooh, do I want to do that again? Cause that didn’t feel great.” And then two, it can also be seen as pretty lowbrow and unsophisticated. So I think once you achieve financial freedom, you kind of don’t talk about it anymore. And you find this with a lot of really wealthy people and maybe celebrities too. They don’t want to talk about their deals.

They don’t want to talk about how much money they made because it’s less interesting. Now they’re like, no, I want to save the world. I want to understand why I’m here. I’m onto these bigger questions.

SAFIAN: I don’t know whether it’s, it’s less interesting. It’s just the way they want to define themselves. Very few successful celebrities are not also very savvy business people, but what they want to talk about is their art.

SANCHEZ: I always kind of giggle too about the people that are like, it’s like, “How did you build this huge social media presence?” And they’re like, “I just, like, I was authentic. And I went out there and I just, I just was me.” And you’re like, come on, you hired a team of people, you split test, you went after it, you put together. This isn’t by accident. You don’t make money by accident. You don’t get fame by accident. It is controlled and manipulated. And that’s okay to say, but it doesn’t seem cool to say. It’s much cooler to be like, “Well, I woke up one day and all the internet was following me.” You’re like, nah, okay, I don’t think so.

Copy LinkHow Codie Sanchez feels about billionaires

SAFIAN: I’m curious, you talk about billionaires, you’ll name-drop them sometimes. But at the same time, you say, you don’t want to be one. You want to broaden the access for more folks to have skin in the game. It’s almost like you’re dismissive of billionaires sometimes. And at the same time, you talk to them. Can you explain what’s going on there?

SANCHEZ: Well, I do want to play the billionaire game, to be clear. I absolutely want to build enough value to drive a billion-dollar valuation, if not even billion dollars in annual revenue to my companies. I think that’d be a really fun game to play. My point, I suppose, is twofold.

One, I don’t think they’re happier than us. So I don’t think it’s a goal that we should all strive towards. If you are uniquely driven where that game of business is one you’re obsessed with, awesome!

Go build a billion-dollar company. We need people like you in the world, because you employ hundreds or thousands of people and drive massive amounts of value. Love that. Simultaneously, I like to steal other people’s homework. So every time I can steal somebody else’s 10,000 hours, I’m into it—like, legally steal. But if I hang out with a billionaire, I’m gonna ask all the inappropriate questions like a 12-year-old at the dinner table. Like I can’t help it, and I think there’s very few people that have seen that level of wealth. And what I’ve found with them, not always, but they do have a few different screws loose than we do. They think slightly different, slightly bigger, slightly weirder. And I like to try to take those ideas and talk about them and write about them, because that’s how I learn.

The impact of exposure to wealth and opportunity

SAFIAN: So you’ve also said that the people you’re close to are critical to you leveling up. And that can seem almost like elitist. Like you have to be in the elite group to get into the elite group.

SANCHEZ: Yep.

SAFIAN: Who is more important than what you know.

SANCHEZ: One of the studies that I liked was the one on social and economic interconnectedness, right? So this idea of if you and I grow up at the same exact level, right? Our parents both make the same amount of money, they have the same types of jobs, our family income is the same, the neighborhood type is kind of the same. But one neighborhood has slightly more interconnectedness with rich people—like they have some rich people in the neighborhood—and one neighborhood doesn’t. It’s largely the same homogenous group. The people who just have interactions with more wealthy people earn more over time. This is over a 30-year study. And I thought that was fascinating, and it’s probably true.

SAFIAN: Because you aspire in a different way, or you’re privy to opportunity in a different way.

SANCHEZ: My belief here is that it’s probably a mixture of both. One, just if you’re around rich people more, you have more opportunity because maybe they hire you. Maybe they write a letter for you to get into college where your parents wouldn’t even know about a letter. Maybe you watch the way they engage and negotiate things with other people. So maybe there are just some network effects that rub off. There’s some knowledge effects that rub off, and there’s probably some aspirational effects that rub off.

I do think there seems to be a reality of it’s hard to be something that you’ve never seen. And so, when I see some of my friends who I know are human, are just as flawed and screwed up as I am, and they achieve something big, I go, “Huh! That means I could totally do that too.”

And so, I wish we could have more people think that way. But I can pretty much guarantee you one thing, which is you’re never going to be really, really rich if you hate money, if you think people who have money are bad, and if you think that it’s not possible for you to get money. I’ve never met anybody who thinks those things and is really, really wealthy.

Copy LinkWhat’s at stake for the future of the economy?

SAFIAN: 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 wealthy 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?

SANCHEZ: 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.

SAFIAN: 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.

SANCHEZ: 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 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.

And maybe the last thing I’ll say is, 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.

SAFIAN: This has been great. Thanks so much for spending the time with us.

SANCHEZ: Thank you for having me. It was a blast.

SAFIAN: Codie makes finance fun, and I applaud that. I totally agree that proficiency about money should be a basic skill taught to everyone. I also applaud how she equates finance with freedom. There’s no question that moving beyond just making ends meet gives us security, confidence, and choices. I’m not sure being “wealthy” is necessarily the ultimate goal, but to be fair, I’m not sure it is for Codie either. High aspirations is one of many tools she’s deploying to cajole, shock, and engage people into taking charge of their financial situation. While the tactics she cites may not be for everyone—buying businesses, emulating billionaires—the underlying messages about being what she calls “hard-o” and taking ownership over our decisions are good reminders for all of us. I’m Bob Safian, thanks for listening.