BigDeal - #81 Dear Gen Z:

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

On this solo episode of BigDeal, host Codie Sanchez shares her advice for Gen Z'ers hoping to build a life of meaning and means. She shares her winding personal journey to entrepreneurship, and the role that adventure and chance played in shaping it. From reporting on human trafficking in Mexico to building a billion-dollar business, she talks about the risks she took, the mistakes she made, and the lessons that shaped her path. Want help scaling your business to $1M in monthly revenue? ⁠Click here⁠ to connect with my consulting team. CHAPTERS 00:00 Intro 00:39 Move Fast, But Take More Detours 07:20 Is This All That Life Is? 9:08 Sam The Bananaman 10:12 Misfits Market 13:27 Ignore The Haters 17:29 Closing Thoughts MORE FROM BIGDEAL: 🎥 ⁠YouTube⁠ 📸 ⁠Instagram⁠ 📽️ ⁠TikTok⁠ MORE FROM CODIE SANCHEZ: 🎥 ⁠YouTube⁠ 📸 ⁠Instagram⁠ 📽️ ⁠TikTok⁠ OTHER THINGS WE DO: ⁠Our community⁠ ⁠Free newsletter⁠ ⁠Biz buying course⁠ ⁠Resibrands⁠ ⁠CT Capital⁠ ⁠Main St Hold Co⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Don't miss the Devil Wears Prada 2 in theaters. Merrill Street, Ann Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci are back. In light of the recent scandal, I'm here to restore your credibility. I did not hire you, and all I need to do is find my time until you fail. On May 1st, I'm going to make something of this job. Rain. Be the bridges I burn. Night my way.

Forever. I just love my job. Get tickets now. The Devil Wears Prada 2 in theaters May 1st, directed by David Frankel. Hi, I'm Cody Sanchez. Welcome back to the Big Deal podcast. When I first started out in finance, I was like maybe a lot of you guys. I was working on stop. I kind of made some pretty good money, but I was spending too much of it. It's really expensive just to live once you get out of college. You're like, wait a second. I'm making all this money, but then I've got rent, that I've got a car, that I've got to eat. What I realized is that most people make really big mistakes early on in their career. And I did that too. So I thought I'd tell you what they were and how I would change them now. If I was going to make myself rich, have a ton of fun, and make myself really set up for my 30s. My first rule would be,

move fast, but take more detours. So my senior year of college, I took the second half of the year, and I spent most of it down in Mexico. I was a human trafficking journalist along the U.S.-Mexico border, and I would cover something called Las Disapparciedas,

the disappeared women in Juarez, which is right across the border from El Paso. And I saw things that I'll never be able to unsee. I saw bodies swinging from overpasses, because at that time it was the Sinaloan and the Sonoran cartel and they were going at each other. One of the biggest prison breaks that ever happened in northern Mexico was there when I was there.

I would go to the morgue to check how many people were women. It was mostly women who were murdered, and I would try to figure out who they were and write stories about them. Maybe the part that I've never told is like, I had adventures. You know, I remember we were covering one of the cartels and we went to this club in Juarez,

which was kind of dangerous, which is like half the fun of being, young is doing stupid young, dangerous things. And I remember being in the club and you knew which cartels were in there by some of the things that they wore, the colors that they wore, and the outfits. But I remember, like, having a little love story with a guy who was trying to get out of a cartel while he was there and, like, dancing to this music, it's called Banda. And having this, you know, this moment where I, like, find out that one of the cartels is going to have, like, a big violent event. And so we were a journalist. So we went and covered it. Why do you want this? Because

I eventually got into finance, and I became obsessed with one guy whose name was Jim Rogers. He was the former partner to George Soros. I know not everybody loves him, but he was super, super rich. And at the time that he was with George, they had the top performing hedge fund of all time. But I remember when I was going on, my adventures, I read about his. And what was fascinating is one of the reasons that he's as big as he is today and as successful is he stopped working with George Soros. He gave it all up, and he moved to travel around the world.

But I remember reading his stories, and he was saying, I didn't have to be that much smarter than anybody else. I didn't have to work that much harder than anybody else because I was doing things that nobody else could think of that led to money. His adventures are actually one of the main reasons why he became so successful. He learned how to see opportunity in emerging markets and think, like, oh, if I invest, if I bring U.S. dollars to this location, my dollar goes two to three X farther. And so if I buy a house or I buy properties or I buy investments, I'm immediately in. the money on them, basically. And so he would do this all over the world. And I think today, like, half the problem with being young is we have these soulless, terrible jobs where we don't do anything interesting. And then people say it'll be fine. You'll eventually be able to afford a house and have a

life you want, and it'll be okay. But we sit on TikTok and Instagram all day because it's so much better than the life that we live, because we no longer do adventures. We just sit in a fucking corporate cubicle all day under fluorescent lights. And I don't think you need to do that. My first job after being a journalist and covering those war atrocities and waras, after that, I went to a company to work in investments. And I kind of hated it. I made a ton of money. So, you know, first multiple six figures, then I made, you know, seven figures. And I was like pretty miserable still, which sounds like a world-class problem, like first-class problem, but that was the truth. And then I realized that I wanted to go back to adventuring. And so I decided that I wanted to build

up a business in Latin America. And so I kind of spoke okay Spanish. I got with this company called First Trust, and they didn't have a Latin American business division. And I was like, listen, I do finance stuff in the U.S. You don't have anybody doing finance stuff in Latin America? What if we pair the two? Let me go and build this business for you. Like, pay me the same amount that you're paying me to do America things, and I'll go do Latin America things. And I built a business that was a billion dollars in assets under management.

There was this one moment where I sat in the office in Santiago, Chile. It was one of my biggest investors there. My Spanish again, okay, not great, but we bonded because guess what was behind him? He also had a copy of Jim's book. That was George Soros's partner. His name is Jim Rogers. The reason that this guy ended up giving me my first tens of millions of dollars in investment was because he had been inspired by the same book.

And this one man led to a meeting where just about everybody I needed to know in Santiago, Chile, and build my almost billion dollars in asset center management business, I was connected to through him. Santiago Chile is actually like all the wealth is super concentrated. So one man, a mutual love of adventure, something a little interesting, led to a giant business. Those people today who tell you that you can't have fun and you can't adventure while you're working are totally fucking full of it. You know, I hiked the mountains of Padionia by myself, one called Torres del Pinae. It's beautiful. And I remember at that time, I was like kind of going through heartbreak.

I don't know if that ever has happened to you guys, but, you know, my heart was broken. I was having a really hard time. So I went on a solo trip down to the edge of the world. And I'm by myself. It's one of the last days of the season before it gets really, really cold there. And I'm in this converted hotel that looks like an apocalyptic bunker. It was so cool. There happened to be flamingos, which is amazing in Patagonia.

They have these flamingos that fly over these like glacial lakes. It's almost eerie. It feels like another world. And so I go on this hike by myself. Everybody else's couples. And I'm like sitting by myself in the evening. we're getting ready to go hike the main mountain, Tori de Paine. And we're hiking and I'm, you know, thinking about things.

And I have this moment where I'm really in my head and I think everything is about me. And as we're crossing a bridge, I put my hand on one side of the bridge and the bridge and the bridge breaks. This is a true story. And I'm carrying a backpack because we're hiking and I got a bunch of shit in it and food and water and whatever. And I've got my hiking poles. And I fall off of the side of the bridge. And the bridge has like, you know how bridges have like the pole that holds the hand,

Well, thankfully, that pole hadn't broken, just the handle had. So I wrap my leg, my knee basically catches on the side of the pole, and I'm hanging off the side of the bridge that's like shaking. And, you know, and I remember thinking in that very moment, like, what if this was the end? Like, what if everything ended at that moment? And in that moment, I had the weirdest thought, which is I've lived a pretty fucking cool life. So even if I fall off into this glacial lake all the way down there and I crash on those rocks

and it's a total disaster, that's pretty cool. I built a billion dollar business in Latin America. You know, I'd loved somebody, I'd lost somebody, I'd had adventures around the world, like, cool. I don't want to die, that sounds awful. But if I have to, cool. And so I wish somebody else would have told me when I was younger, it is okay to go do wild and crazy fucking things. And you do not have to spend your entire life working. In fact, you can intertwine the two.

The second lesson I have is I do not want you to stop and ask yourself, is this all that life is? And I'm rather obsessed with this other guy. Let's talk groceries, specifically your groceries. With Instacart, you want your groceries just the way you like them, right? Well, the Instacart app lets you do just that. They have a new preference picker that lets you pick how ripe or unripe you want your bananas. Shoppers can see your preferences up front, helping guide their choices. Instacart, get groceries just how you like.

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Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. I buy the name of Jim Simons. Apparently I got a thing for Jim's. So Jim is the founder of Renaissance Technologies, like arguably one of the best investors in the world. His flagship fund, it's called Medallion, they basically built these algorithms that made 66% average annual returns every single year, making it like one of the world's most profitable funds ever. What's fascinating about him, though, is before he became a multi-multi-billionaire,

he took many detours beforehand. And he talks about how he survived a mudslide going through Latin America, how at one point he was surrounded by a group of teenagers and an angry mob that wanted to kill them. I think the thing that people don't tell you today is, I wonder how many builders are adrenaline junkie seeking adventurers. I don't think you want your life to be planned out and easy. You want excitement and surprise and problems big enough to be worthy of conquering them. And Jim Simon keeps asking himself this question all the time, which is, is this it? Is this how the rest of my life will be? And he had it all. Like when he decided that he was going to go create his own business. He had, he was at MIT, the university. He had tenure, so super hard to fire, make a lot of

money, really hard to get. He had a Harvard University degree. He had mathematical, academic respect, but his life seemed to be too much planned. And so he went on a new adventure. And, you know, I basically made millions off of the fact that I wanted to do adventure and business. So that's what you maybe could consider doing, too. The third lesson is called Find the Unripe Bananas. I'll tell you a couple different stories, but the main idea is this. Where is their money hidden in plain sight? So there was a business owner who created a banana empire by buying overly ripe bananas they were all going to throw out. His name was Sam Zemarie, famously known as Sam the Banana Man. Sam basically noticed that big fruit companies were discarding ripe bananas. There were too

mature to ship across long distances before spoiling. They would just throw them away. So he bought these ripe bananas at a discount, and then he said, what if we were just faster? Like, how could we get them as fast as possible to only the closest cities, like New Orleans, for instance? And then he sold them right before they spoiled for way less and turning a solid profit. So by the time he was 21, he had made over $100,000, which is worth like today, that would be millions and millions of dollars, and founded his own company, basically. And he later took over United Fruit Company, which was one of the most powerful corporations of its time. So he started with a few ripe bananas, then he built his own company, then he built his own company, then he later. he takes over one of the biggest companies in the space. And then he buys more of the other companies

in his space. He was big on mergers and acquisitions. And I like this finding the ripe, the unripe bananas idea, because it's the same with another company called Misfit Foods, where the founder basically went to an apple orchard, saw them like having bruised apples or apples that fell on the ground that still looked totally fine and said, like, why are you throwing those away? What if instead I bought all of the beaten up, like, weird-looking fruit that was still good, and I sold it at a discount in, like, surprise boxes. And he turned that into a business well worth over nine figures.

I think this idea of adventure leads to opportunity is the underlying of all of this, which you have found the apples, the bananas, you know, the opportunity. If you were behind a seat, no. And so my last lesson for you is like, do not ever let anyone tell you what you're capable of or that you have to do it their path.

Choose your own. You know, when I left Goldman Sachs, my own family said replacing Goldman Sachs, so GS with CS, Cody Sanchez, was a huge mistake. When I started to division Latin America, a colleague said, you must be a secretary. You're too young to head the region. Another one asked me, who I had sex with in order to get the job that I had at that time. And the answer was none of those motherfuckers, that's for sure. Anyway, you know, when I got on social media, one of my partners said, literally I saved this text. Do you guys? I can prove it to you. You're dumbing down the firm. I hope you got more likes today. Jokes on you, Dan, because now my, it's bigger than yours, no, just kidding, but my bank account is bigger than his. And then when I left to start my own media

company, a colleague at the company at that time, said, well, don't lose my number for when that cute little blog fails, you know, and like, I think it kind of meant well, but I was, I, I, I, torched that number immediately just on principal alone. You know, when I started a venture capital fund, they said, you're not in Silicon Valley, that'll never work. They said, Austin, Texas, That's not where the deals are. And now we have one of the top performing venture capital funds in all of the 2022 vintage, which means for that year. It's called Contrary Thinking Capital, if you guys want to see it.

And then when I started buying businesses, the internet trolls said, they're going to make no money. You probably don't even own them. I bet you've never even been in a laundromat. Like, you can't win with these people. When I started our academy to teach people how to sell, buy, and grow businesses, a bunch of ex-Wallstraders that I used to work with said, this will never work. Normal people can't buy businesses. When I launched my book, if you guys have seen Main Street Millionaire,

they said, just another internet guru, I bet it sucks, and it won't sell any copies, and then it became a New York Times bestseller. When I launched Bizckel, which is our business and buying and selling marketplace, they said, it's just a knockoff of some of the others. It'll never get big. So the moral of the story is not that I've done all of these cool things, it's that every single thing I've ever done, and every single thing you ever do,

people will tell you why you can't do it. And why will they do that? Because, like, if you achieve that, then what's their excuse? Because if you do a big thing, then how come they failed? Because you become a mirror to a person they don't really like, which is themselves. You know, I've never had somebody who was doing more than me, who is more successful than I am, shit on me on the internet, ever. And you won't either.

So ignore the haters, because the truth is, you have to trust you, not any other who. Okay. When I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids, and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime.

I wonder if my head of office has a forever setting. An IG Private Wealth advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IG, When a country's productivity cycle is broken, people feel it in their paychecks, their communities, their futures.

What does this mean for individuals, communities, and businesses across the country? Join business leaders, policymakers, and influencers for CG's national series on the Canadian Standard of Living, productivity and innovation. Learn what's driving Canada's productivity decline and discover actionable solutions to reverse it. You know, your biggest mistakes will not be a how or a what, but a who. If I could go back and do anything differently, it would be, one, I got married too young and with reservations. I wouldn't do that again. And two, I felt like that was the path I had to follow because everybody else did.

And so more than anything else, I think what you should probably try to go do is get into some more fucking trouble. You know, the other day somebody asked me what they should do to create content like I do and how to go viral on the internet. And I, like, thought about it for a second. And I was like, my first viral piece of content, you guys, was about a laundromat I bought that was kind of like a piece of shit, but how I made money on it anyways.

And the reason that that went viral is, like, I was doing it. I wasn't like, let me sit and think about 10 things young people should do today in order to become successful, as said by me, not a successful person. It wasn't any of that. It was literally, I'm doing this thing. I don't know. I think it's cool. It's hard to hide obsession.

And so my response to this person was, if you want to be cool, you got to do cool shit. So like, when you go do cool shit, your life is the content. You don't have to come up with ideas. You live it every single day. So, like, do you really need to go watch another get ready with me video from somebody? Do we really need to talk to somebody else on the internet who hasn't done a thing that they said they're going to do, you know, they said they did? Go get some experience.

Get some scars and scabs. Bring back some stories. And then the content writes itself, you know, You can talk about war because I was in a cartel war as a journalist. You can talk about going to Mexico and building a business there. And I remember walking in the presidential palace and trying to figure out how to sell them investments. Fun side story there that was hysterical. At the time, I was like down a walkway.

This is in Mexico City. And if you've ever been to the presidential palace there, it's just stunning. It's in the middle of, it's called the Zocolo. And I'm walking down the thing. I think I'm going to meet with one of the heads of the Treasury Department there. and trying to get them to let us invest some of their money. And I'm bringing one of my super, super Midwestern principles of the company. So he's the one that invests the money.

I was the one building out the business and selling the investments. And if you look on the wall, as we're walking past, there's all these photos of former Mexican presidents. And this poor guy when I was like, oh my gosh, he's like, man, they don't really look like Mexicans, do they? And I was like, Jesus, because they're very Spanish-looking, as opposed to. Indichanao, which is another way to say, like, more indigenous looking. And I remember in that moment thinking, this guy who was like, I don't know, he must have

been 65 years old, he has traveled so lightly upon the world. He has not had adventures. He doesn't know what it's like really on the ground in someplace like Mexico. And so he makes a silly comment because he had never really seen. Even though he had all the money in the world, he had probably locked himself up in fancy resorts in Cabo and all-inclusives and never really seen anything. You know, and those little stories, like the time that I almost got kicked out of the Mexican Stock Exchange, and I had an entire business there that was reliant on me being able to have my investments on the Mexican Stock Exchange, if they would have kicked us out, I would have been out of a job and out of money. And so I remember it happened because Black Rock, they bought my biggest client, one of the affortees. Those are one of the pensions down there. And so BlackRock bought my biggest client, who was called Bonamec. I have this amazing friend of mine, Rodriguez, down there.

We did a bunch of business together, and I lost a hundred million dollar client because they literally bought that entire business and then replaced my first trust investments with their I shares BlackRock investments and got rid of my entire business overnight. And so these adventures led to a place where today, when something goes wrong in business, when something doesn't work out, when we've got a new opportunity, I can go, that's cool. Because you know what the thing is about problems? When you find problems, that's where all the profit is.

And so young people today, if you're listening, and if young Cody was listening, I would say, go on adventure some more, make some big huge mistakes. Trust you instead of another who never settle for a life where you get to say, is this hit? And don't believe that you have to do some traditional career path in order to make a ton of money. If I'm nothing else, I could be an example for you of why that is not necessary. All right, guys, if you liked this episode, let me know. It's kind of just me talking to you more from the heart. Like, I wish somebody had talked to me when I was young and trying to figure things out. Or me even if I was older and before I figured it out.

If you liked this episode, you might want to go back to another one I did called Why Top 1% of Earners Don't Stay in Their Hometowns. And the reason why is because it might push you to go shake up life a little bit and then you can grab it. If you weren't subscribed right now, what are we doing? I thought we were buddies. Hit that subscribe button. I want to see you next week. Every single time you subscribe, it means we get to get better guests for you. It means we get to talk about the subjects that you care about. Put down in the comments what you want me to cover next. I read every single one of them because this is the big deal podcast and you are a big deal to me.

Hey guys, if you've ever thought about buying a business, we've built what I think is the best acquisitions in business buying community and education curriculum in the world. If you've ever thought about wanting to buy or own a business or if you want to add more businesses to the mix, it's called the contrarian community. And what this is is the goal is we give you the three things that the best business buyers use, your own advisory team, your own investment committee, and a deal team. We get together each week to review deals live and beat up all the deals that you're currently looking at while you simultaneously learn the best way possible, which is called modeling by seeing other people put together deals. This is how private equity buys businesses.

This is how investment teams work. And we're stealing the methods from Wall Street and giving them to you. If this is interesting to you, go to click the link and you can actually talk to my team direct about if this is a fit or not. We can help guide you. The link is in the show description. By the way, if you're building a business right now and you're stuck or you want to break out to the next level, maybe you're not where you want to be today.

Believe me, I've been there many, many times. I want you to know, I got you. We helped thousands of business owners a year figure out how to scale to the next level. One of my favorite mentor said, every level you have, there's just a higher level and a higher devil. And so if you've been in business for a while and you're doing six, seven or eight figures, there's probably one thing standing in the way of your next level. That's why we host growth and scale workshops four times a year throughout the year in Austin, in Miami, in San Diego, and you may be a fit to come to one of them. If it sounds interesting to you to get help on how to

scale your business to the next level, you can reach out to my team at the link in the show notes. We believe in you builders, but we also believe that it's a lonely road and you can't do it by yourself.