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, 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 Disapparacidas, 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 Bandha. And having

this, you know, this moment where I, like, find out that one of the cartels is going to have,

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