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- [00:01]
Podcast Sponsor/Announcer
This episode is brought to you by indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate. C. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs have four times more applicants than non sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply. K Pop Demon Hunters, Saja Boy's Breakfast Meal and Hunt Tricks Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.
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Mike Lazaro
It is an honor to share.
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Podcast Sponsor/Announcer
No, it's our honor.
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Mike Lazaro
It is our larger honor. No, really, stop.
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Podcast Sponsor/Announcer
You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side.
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Mike Lazaro
Participating McDonald's while supplies last.
- [00:58]
Paul Morris
Welcome to the Paul Morris Podcast. We have Mike Lazaro from the famous Mike and Cass entrepreneurial duo, and among many accomplishments, really started off in the Internet boom with golf.com had a. Had a rocky but then good exit, I think. And then. And then. Then off to huge, huge things with Boom. Buddy Media. Right, with Buddy Media. And then an exit to the behemoth Salesforce. So without. Without further ado, Paul Mark Morris as your host and formerly radical wealth plan, we've got the Paul Morris Podcast rocking today with Mike.
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Mike Lazaro
Thank you for having me. A dream comes true. That's the.
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Paul Morris
That's the. That's the New York sarcasm already. I like it.
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Mike Lazaro
Not at all. No, there's. There's a lot of podcasts, not a lot of real people running them. And so it's an honor to be here.
- [02:06]
Paul Morris
Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. So, among other things, you know, you. You. You're a husband and wife team. And. And you know how over the course of a long period of time. When did you start your journey? How long have you been married?
- [02:25]
Mike Lazaro
Yeah, I've been married 26 years. Been together for 30. We've built eight businesses, three kids, too many dogs to even name, and we lived to tell the story. We wrote a book, Shoveling a Love Story, which was a New York Times bestseller last year. And this is great because we do pretty much everything together. And I can't tell you how great it is to just be on a podcast by myself. And so now that she's out here, maybe we can have a little, like, a real session let's get real about this whole thing.
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Paul Morris
I love it. And just the, you know, the. Wrote a love story called shoveling shit. Just that alone, that gives you a pretty strong dichotomy.
- [03:13]
Mike Lazaro
Yeah. I mean, any entrepreneur out there knows that they should show up to work and what do they do? They just shovel shit. They don't know what's gonna, you know, be thrown at them. And you just keep shoveling. And that's where you find your purpose. And it's very hard work. It's miserable. We like to suffer as entrepreneurs. And when any entrepreneur is asked, would you rather have a job or would you rather do something else? They say no. And so it's this idea that it's both miserable and awesome at the same time. It's both shoveling shit and a love story. It happens to be our love story because business was our love language. We built businesses as we built our family. And the book isn't just kind of a how to on business, which in many ways it is. It's the 50 cheat codes we wish we knew when we started out. But it's also how to live a life worth living, which we're still trying to figure out. But at least we've shared the mistakes we've made along the way.
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Paul Morris
How old are your kids?
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Mike Lazaro
They're very old. They're 24, 21, and 18. We are empty nesting. Wow. Which we love. The point of parenting is to create independent human beings and get them out of the house. And we have one well on his way off the payroll, has his own AI company. One graduating from Emory University this May, and one starting out pre med at Northwestern University. Wow.
- [04:42]
Paul Morris
Amazing. And my daughter is. Is 22, a senior in your neck of the woods, Upper west side.
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Mike Lazaro
Yeah. Love it.
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Paul Morris
So talk to me about the first. You know, did you. Okay, so did you have. Did you have a paying job?
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Mike Lazaro
Paying job?
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Paul Morris
Never.
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Mike Lazaro
I've never had a ping. I've never had a. A job that I'd have to create a resume for. Let's just say I've never had a resume. But I had jobs. You know, I shoveled snow growing up. Golf caddy. I always liked having some money in my pocket. My dad actually went bankrupt when I was 13 years old. He was an entrepreneur. Is an entrepreneur. And I solved kind of the disastrous effects of, you know, kind of not having money. He fell in some hard times, had some mental health issues. And so I got into this entrepreneurship not to create like a billion dollar business like we did at Buddy Media. Got into it just to have like freedom and ability to kind of control my destiny. You wouldn't have started an Internet business in 1994 if you really liked money. The only people who started Internet businesses when I did back in the early 90s, really hated money or didn't like money because There were only 13 million people on the Internet. There was no commercial Internet. Netscape had barely launched. There was really no commercial browser. Yahoo was organizing the web with people. And at the same time, as a journalism major, I just, it felt like it was going to be big. So I was early, not too early, but I was young. I was 19 when I started my first Internet company at Northwestern, where I went. And then once I started, I just never stopped. We ended up taking that company public through a merger with a company called Student Advantage. Went on to golf.com and you just keep going. I mean, entrepreneurs, the idea of retiring scares us. It's our identity, it's our life, it's our purpose, it's our passion. So we just keep going.
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Paul Morris
Even just because as a side thing, I've bought a bunch of domain names along the way. And even just golf.com I know for sure is a seven figure name right now.
- [07:07]
Mike Lazaro
Yeah, we bought it in 2000 and we bought it as part of the bankruptcy of a company called Quokka Sports. And we were prepared to pay a million dollars actually for it. And we got it for 289,000 in a auction where you have to dial in through a regular phone and you basically would confidentially give your bid and whoever was the highest bidder. And so we got it for 289,000. And that was right after we had sold the company and bought it back. It's a very different world now. You know, at the time people would type in domains. Right. And you're a real estate guy, you love real estate. I love real estate. And this was real estate. This was Fifth Avenue Real Estate or Augusta National Real Estate. Golf.com, four letters, rich people. And so we thought we had made it. What transpired would really why it became a decent exit. We sold it for $25 million, which at the time were like, that's just a boatload of cash. I can't believe that we ever created a company that ended like that. And we basically took. If we hadn't sold at that time, I think it would have been an issue. And the idea of real estate online has really been changed by mobile social AI. People aren't going through the front door anymore.
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Paul Morris
Yeah, that's. And yet you still I still see. I still see domain names selling for a boatload of money when it's. When it's a easy recognizable name. But yeah, for sure, the way that. The way that search has, has changed, you know, and we'll. For sure we'll get into that a little bit. But tell me about the. Tell me about the. The Golf.com journey and. Because I know you sold it once and then reacquired.
- [09:09]
Mike Lazaro
Yeah. So we launched Golf.com when we were dating. Actually, we had not even gotten engaged. I was still working at U Wire and Student Advantage. Cass was in Chicago working for the global digital agency of Leo Burnett. It was called Giant Step. And Cass is very competitive. She likes competing. She's a great athlete. Let's just say I'm not what they call an athlete. Even though I like to have fun with sports. I don't really compete in sports. I compete in business. I'm not competitive. But Cass has to win. And she started tracking her golf game on a spreadsheet. And when the Internet, with her brother, with her dad, and when the Internet came around, she said, why don't we do this online? It was supposed to be a recreational golf site and we basically built it. And there was a company called chipshot.com which was making knockoff golf clubs in Silicon Valley. Raise a lot of money. Sequoia Capital. They backed like companies you probably have heard of, Google and Yahoo and Apple and all these like. I mean, it's the storied firm. And they wanted to own kind of golf clubs, content, commerce. What better way than, you know, golf.com and what we were doing. And so we merged with them, got all stock. We thought we were very rich until the really beginning of 2000, where the market started teetering. They couldn't raise their next round. They went bankrupt. We bought the company back. And that was really the beginning of the growth. It was also a key lesson, which is you gotta work hard, you gotta shovel. But luck plays such a huge part in most big businesses. I'm not talking about just like, you know, a laundromat or something that, like, we love small businesses. But to get to a, you know, a multimillion dollar exit, we got really lucky. And we got lucky cause there's this kid named Tiger woods who took the world by storm. People don't realize that at the time, Tiger woods was like AI and Taylor Swift all in one. Like, there was this huge frenzy about this kid Tiger, who did not look like the other golfers, walked into the Masters, won it by 12 strokes in his first year. And we rode Tiger woods to the exit to, you know, we sold it to Ty Warner, based in New York City, which is why I'm in New York City right now. It got us to New York City. They wanted me. They didn't really need an operator. I'm more of the salesperson, visionary, product person. Cast does all the operations. So she does like 98% of the stuff. And then I do a few things. As she would say, I kind of stand in the corner and turn in circles. I don't really know where I am half the time, but I can sell shit, right? And it got us in New York and the rest was history. Hanging out with a lot of people who are early Internet. And when Facebook opened up its platform and social media started, we really dove into that market, which is probably what we're best known for. Buddy Media, which sold for close to a billion dollars to Salesforce on the back of the social media revolution.
- [12:32]
Paul Morris
And I remember interviewing, it was a
- [12:37]
Mike Lazaro
while back,
- [12:40]
Paul Morris
a guy who. And it wasn't on the podcast. So we were interviewing a
- [12:48]
Mike Lazaro
group of
- [12:48]
Paul Morris
people, were interviewing a startup incubator, the head of the startup incubator, and he listed the sort of five or six things that people commonly attribute success to and one's quality of the idea, of course, what's the problem you're solving? And know the how. How solid is the team would be another one. Another one would be, you know, what investment banks. Are you backed by Sequoia, Are you backed by, you know, Goldman? Or you're backed by a nobody? Or, you know, what's the. What's the capital structure? And, and, and these other things, and, and, and timing was one of them. And none of us put timing as number one. And when he. And he did this whole regression analysis with different. With different. With all these different factors and all these other things are very important. And timing turned out to be the most important. And he had examples, you know, where he had. He had invested obviously in lots of companies, many of them not winners, a few of them huge winners. And he's like, oh, yeah, we had Airbnb before Airbnb and it was called whatever. And you know, we had all the things right. But, you know, people were like, who's going to want somebody sleeping on their couch? You know, this is a terrible idea. And then, you know, then with the timing, you know, Airbnb crushed it.
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Mike Lazaro
So definitely timing is number like in venture, it's the only thing that's correlated to success. And there's been A bunch of studies about this and these ideas that have been around forever. It takes the right combination to propel them. Even AI right now. I've been doing AI stuff for 20 years. It was called machine learning. It was called. You would basically using cameras to recognize objects. AI was not what we think about today because we didn't have the compute power, we didn't have the neural networks that we have today. And so all this stuff builds on each other, and sometimes you need a few building blocks that wasn't there. And I think there's a whole bunch of companies which, thankfully, it's how we made most of our money that built on the top of first the Internet, then mobile. Right, because, like, without mobile, it's really hard to be a Facebook or an Airbnb or one of these companies. And then, you know, obviously now AI and there's stuff going on there. And so timing. Timing's everything in venture. And at the same time, venture is changing as well. And so a lot of the stuff that we're focused on is actually hard assets and other stuff that are just real businesses.
- [15:37]
Paul Morris
Well, it's interesting too, and I definitely want to go through more of the journey, but very interesting now in terms of the hard assets and. And, you know, back to. Back to real estate, One of the things that I, that I look at is what are the. What are the things that, you know, are likely to survive, you know, great, great technological change. So, you know, the. The one of the most obvious disrupted industries for me was the travel agent. You know, because, you know, I hate to admit for, you know, I'll buy on one site versus another if I can get this, you know, seat 6A from LAX to LaGuardia, you know, it's seat 6A whether you buy it on which. Which of the 10 sites you buy it on. So for $3 less, you'll switch. And. And real estate is one of those things that, unless you're really dealing in a community where there. And there are some, of course, these developments where there's, you know, thousands of boxes that are the same.
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Mike Lazaro
It's.
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Paul Morris
There's a lot of nuance to it. It tends to be, you know, the most expensive asset that a family owns for many, many, many for. For households that have wealth, you know, 70% of them, you know, the largest asset is there is. Is. Is their home or real estate. So it's.
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Mike Lazaro
It.
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Paul Morris
It does feel like I'm always trying to figure out. And then obviously, that's the investment side of it. And I run a big brokerage and I'm always trying to figure out, well, you know, where's the, where's the life cycle of the Realtor and is it going to be the tech enabled Realtor or is it going to be the realtor enabled tech? And I still think it's going to be tech enabled realtor, but I might have a bias on that.
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Mike Lazaro
No, I agree with you 100. I mean we, you know, it's and it's not or so it's people and tech for the most part. Now there's some industries which will be just automated, but those are industries that primarily are automated already overseas, right? So if you're sending work overseas, which you're not doing in real estate, chances are that AI is going to eliminate that. The relationship, the trusted relationship between a broker and a buyer and it's very emotional and seller, very emotional transaction I don't think is ever going away. It may change. But it's the firms that get to the future faster that are using AI to find clients to market their properties, to create content and get it out to the world to let people know like you do, right? Like you save it. You own this. I would say your content provider happens to monetize it through real estate, right? Like I assume you like your time. You're doing this not just because you hate your time and you want to waste time you're doing because it makes sense for your life. That may scratch an itch, but also the business. It's how I know about you, right? Like you are known. You have attention, gravity, you are out there, people find out about you without you doing anything. And I think that we spent a lot of time as investors in the future and entrepreneurs thinking about it and we've just come to the conclusion that tech is no longer a competitive advantage, it is an enabler of other advantages. To me, the biggest, what it's all about is demand generation. The next generation of great companies will be those who turn attention into demand at scale. And that's the only thing that matters. When a 13 year old can rebuild your software in 13 minutes, you know anyone can. And so that's basically table stakes. And so we're focused on a bunch of industries that we love and the industries that we're really focused on, just where we are, which I don't, I think are only going to be helped, are wellness and longevity. So businesses serving customers who want to feel better, live longer. There may be an AI component, but you're not just going to go to an AI clinic for that. Travel Sports and entertainment. These are emotional connections, fandom, live experiences. And then the last one is, unless we're all going to be walking around naked. Fashion, beauty, and cpg. That's why I love Liquid Death. People are like, you're a tech investor. Why are you one of the largest shareholders of Liquid Death, the canned water company? Well, we just believe that it's all about demand. And they were able to capture attention unlike any other beverage company in the history of the world. It's only been, what, five, six years and $1.4 billion valuation, selling hundreds of millions of cans, all because of demand. Real estate's a little different. Like, if you have Fifth Avenue real estate, there's just some value there. People have to live somewhere. It's not an option. Right. But we love businesses. I was talking to Cass about, like, you know, a lot of the stuff we're doing, and it's all. We didn't know we were doing this. It comes down to businesses that provide products and services that people want or need. Very different than the beginning of our careers. Let's reinvent the world. Let's do stuff that no one ever has done and probably doesn't want. Now. It's like when I said hard assets. It's like, stuff that really people need. Real estate, probably. If you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, real estate's kind of a big part of that and big revenue stream. But there's other things. Luckily, you don't just sit in your house naked kind of bored.
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Paul Morris
You said fashion, beauty, and then you threw an acronym. Which?
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Mike Lazaro
Consumer Packaged Goods.
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Paul Morris
Yeah, which. Which. Which. I knew for sure. I was supposed to know what it was, but then I'm like, so if I don't know it, maybe. Maybe one or two of my listeners don't. Was it.
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Mike Lazaro
Yeah, it's basically anything that. It's like anything that you eat. Yeah. Drink. And that whole world is crazy. Like, kids aren't drinking alcohol. Like, there are all these alcohol and stimulant alternatives. Like, you know, the world has just changed. Like, we used to drink beer. My kids are, like, going to the gym.
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Paul Morris
And I think, you know, Huberman told us not to. Not to drink alcohol. So none of us are drinking alcohol.
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Mike Lazaro
I don't know. I don't know if I put it on him, but I think it reflects kind of people. Just information flows freely. And, you know, I used to drink a lot. I just feel better when I don't drink. Yeah, it's not like a. It's not an. Like, it's not an ethical thing. I do plenty of other stuff that wouldn't be kind of welcomed in church or temple, but for me, alcohol just doesn't do it for me. And a lot of other people have made that decision.
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Paul Morris
Yeah. And I do think the wellness. The wellness podcasters are bringing a lot of that to the. To the forefront. And the. The liquid death, you know, is something that if someone came to me and said, let's invest in another. Another drink, another. Let's put water in a can, you know, call it something cool, I would have passed on that investment. There's a lot of great stuff that I can honest, even in hindsight, can say, well, yeah, I would have said no to that one, because it's really, you know, I would say it's really a marketing. It's got to be a marketing play. I mean, look how Giant Red Bull is.
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Mike Lazaro
And it's all marketing.
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Paul Morris
Yeah.
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Mike Lazaro
I mean, the product's great. Right? This is replacement. This is a root beer wrath. I'm a big root beer fan. I used to drink maybe a soft drink a week. Now I drink three of these are 10 calories. Nothing bad. It tastes like root beer. Right. But it was, you know, liquid death from the beginning, had a bunch of qualities that we look for. One is like, we knew the founder, and so he'd worked for our very good friend gary Vaynerchuk at VaynerMedia.
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Paul Morris
Right.
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Mike Lazaro
He was a creative director there. You know, Gary started his whole kind of empire out of our conference room at Buddy Media. He didn't have any money when he left his dad, and so we were very close. And there was this, like, kid who was just an awesome marketer. And then he partnered with our friends at the Science Incubator out in Santa Monica who had just done a company called Dollar Shave Club.
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Paul Morris
Right.
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Mike Lazaro
And so I was like, okay.
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Paul Morris
I met one of the founders at, you know, it's like at a. At a sandwich shop in Beverly Hills. The older, older guy and a younger guy. And I met the older guy.
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Mike Lazaro
Yeah. So there's Michael Dubin and then the little older guy. And, you know, so it's kind of a playbook all about demand. Can you make something that's basically a wellness product? Water building block of life. It's like, everyone needs it. Can you. Not that you need it in a can branded as death water, which launched during the pandemic. That's a whole nother story. But the idea was that can you make this product that's inherently good for you cool and, you know, it Started in the heavy metal world where a lot of people, these heavy metal fans and artists used to drink and do drugs. Now they do yoga and they're totally sober and. And they tapped into that and then it kind of grew from there. And you had kind of operators at Science with great creative director who knew that he didn't know operations, had never done anything in terms of manufacturing. Right. It wasn't easy. Like, people ask why we've raised like 100 million-plus. It's like, you know, we made a lot of mistakes. You gotta can the water somewhere, you gotta ship it, you gotta get it into store, you gotta do in store marketing. It's like, I probably wouldn't. If I knew about the water business, like at the time that I know now, I probably would have been like, you, Paul, like, no, thanks. But, you know, I was naive. But we had reasons for doing it. You know, I took it to Cass and I thought she was gonna veto it. I take a lot of things to Cass. She's not a pessimist. She's just a radical realist. She's, you know, I say, why? It's gonna be great. She says, what are the things we got to think about? And she loved it. And I give her credit because at the time, over half the customers right now are women. You know, it's a grocery store product that, you know, 12, you know, the 16, the 12 ounce cans. But at the time, most women hated it. They thought it was this bro product. But Cass liked it. She liked the marketing. She thought it was going to get attention. They were already early on, people. We invested before it launched, but very quickly people started getting tattoos of the brand. Yeah, crazy. I would invest in like brands that people will get tattoos versus, like just consume it.
- [27:16]
Paul Morris
There's a real estate team that used to work at my firm. We remain very close. And he had such believers. He had people tattoo the real estate to the name of the team.
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Mike Lazaro
I was like, wow, that's a business. That's a brand. Like I. And it's not easy. People are like, oh, I'm just going to market like liquid death and I'm going to shock people. There is a brand foundation that for them is built on wellness and getting plastic out of the ocean. So there's no plastic in liquid death. It's all aluminum cans, which are infinitely recyclable. And the marketing they do, even though it's like super stupid. Right? Like, my favorite was there was a comment on Facebook, I'd rather drink back sweat than this. And so Mike Went out and hired a comedian called Fat Zach. That's his name. I'm not body shaming him. And put him in a sauna and basically said, okay, first lick his back and then try Liquid death. Turns out 10 out of 10 people like liquid Death better than the back sweat. So that's like awesome content, right? And that's what he does. He does, you know, $10,000 videos that get billions of impressions because the idea is funny. Like you can't recreate that. It's not easy.
- [28:44]
Paul Morris
I have a friend and a guy that, I admire his work quite a bit and he made several of those $10,000 videos for Liquid Death. It was one of the things, some of the content that he was creating
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Mike Lazaro
and you know, it's not easy. Like that's like, just say I'm going to market. Like that is for me. It's like, say I'm just going to like go to the moon. Yeah, like, it's very hard for most businesses even comprehend what it takes to do that.
- [29:18]
Paul Morris
So when you look at discernment and choosing between one idea and another, I mean, if there's one thing, Obviously if you could say no to a hundred ideas, even good ones, as long as you're the false positive versus the false negative, saying no. Saying no to a good idea is a bummer. Saying yes to a bad idea is a, is a problem. You know, so.
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Mike Lazaro
So all of the above many times, which unfortunately we've have a lot of scars.
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Paul Morris
And so how do you. Interesting, interesting. I'll pitch just the idea of real estate is that in 30 years of investing, I have not lost money on a single deal in real estate investing. Now I have lost money on
- [30:23]
Mike Lazaro
not
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Paul Morris
lots of other things, but other things. I haven't invested in many other things. I've said no to ideas that were great, which is a bummer I've said yes to. What I will do is I'll invest only in something that is very adjacent to my business so that I'm. So that I can add value, therefore get a discount. Also. I'll get a discount. I'll add value. You know, you know, we'll let you in at this. You know, this earlier round was a deal that I made. Plus, we'll give you a seat of the board of advisors. You know, you can still pick wrong, but, but at least I know the industry. I can have some impact. But you know, I've said, I've said no to, I've said no to a, you know, a couple of big winners. I've Said yes to a couple of losers, you know, and said yes to something that worked out, but. But discernment. So, you know, you. When you see something, you know, it sounds great. And my problem is if you're talking to a great founder, it's going to sound great. So I just say no, you know, unless it has to do with real estate where I really know something about it.
- [31:34]
Mike Lazaro
Yeah. So we made most of our money as entrepreneurs. We lost some of that cutting our teeth as investors and really didn't get our, you know, feet as investors until we started doing it professionally. And the reason, like, we have a hundred of, like, tech deals ourselves and, you know, we're often called like, drunk babies and all, you know, like, you don't do that many deals if you're really deep diving into all of them, right? And so we got really much better when we launched a venture firm and we had to figure out, how do we make decisions? Because investing is just a decision game and most investors suck. Most investors just follow the lead. Oh, AI is hotter. And. And so I think we prided ourselves on doing stuff that is a little different. And for us, we actually defined it. And it comes down to six things, which in the book talks about. We call it the go gauge, but it's about how to greenlight an idea if you're an entrepreneur. But it's the same lens we use as investors. And it's like, it's actually pretty simple. It's like, what are you selling? Like, if a. If a CEO can't say that in like one second, like, literally less than five seconds, I'm out. Like, if it's like, oh, we do this, this and this, and then we use that to do this, it's like, okay, that's like, I call it a hop, skip and a jump business versus like, oh, we make an iPhone here, buy the shit, right? Like, that's a business. Like Ace of Spades Champagne. Like Jay Z Champagne. When we were doing Buddy Media and we went and met with them, pitched them, he said, I don't understand your business or his business. I don't understand your business. This is a business. $800 I sell this for. Cost me 13. Like, so, like, what's your product? Right? Why is it better than existing options? Number two, that differentiation three, where we go the deepest in is customer. People call it market size, right? You see the tam, which is like, you know, target market, right? Like the total addressable market. We think that's bullshit, right? The golf industry is 80 billion. But if you don't own a golf course, it's 20 billion. If you don't own a golf ball company, it's 15 billion. If you don't own clubs, it's down to 10. By the time you get to media, it's like 100 million. Right. So it's like we look at who will buy it and how many potential customers exist. So who will buy it and how many of them are there. Multiply it by the price, which you shouldn't have to really spend too much time on, and you get kind of like, can it be a big business? You look at liquid death. Okay, who could buy it? Well, just in the US, 300 million people. And you get to a point where you're like, oh, that's a big market. It's the largest beverage, non alcoholic beverage market. Right. Water. Then 4 is sales and marketing, which most people don't think about. You have to in real estate, which is why I love real estate. If you don't know how you're going to sell it, like, and have a sales plan. So how will customers find out about your product? We added this next one, number five, delivery. Because of liquid death, people don't realize they were canning it in Austria, putting it on a bus to get to a train, to get to another bus to get to a boat to then reverse that in the US and it almost killed the company. And so we get like, if it's complicated, we'll typically stay away. And then the six, because I'm a journalism major, is just financial model. Does like, the financial model passed the smell test. And we're very unit economics driven, literally. What are you selling it for? What does it cost to make it? What's left over? Can you support the organization? Like, it's not business school stuff. And where companies have got, where investors have gotten a lot of issues is like, oh, we'll never make money. Like, this is like upside down now. So those are the six things what we have. Also, as a venture investor, we ask a question which is not why it won't work. Because every business, Airbnb, Uber, talk about, like our company, Etched, which is a semiconductor chip company. There's a thousand reasons it's not going to work. You could sit in a room and any smart person's like, hey, it's not going to work because of this. What we ask is, what happens if it does work? How big is big? And then it becomes a probability game. Yeah, like, we invested in a company called Etch, which was like three Harvard dropouts who basically had lunch with them. And they said, we want to beat Nvidia. Literally. They were 12 years old, maybe 20, 21. I was like, okay, that's cute. You're Gonna beat Nvidia. 4 trillion dollar company. No, here's how we're gonna do it. And then it became apparent that, wow, probably low probability, but, I don't know, 10% probability that these guys can, like, create something that goes far. And they just announced, you know, they raised 500 million at a $5 billion valuation. Significant orders because their stuff is 10 times faster than Nvidia's fastest, fastest chip. Half the cost, half the energy. In a world where we need more and more compute now, it only does one thing. It only powers GPTs. So it's the inference language models. That's kind of a pretty big thing, right? How many of your audience have used it 10 times today? ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. We've gotten to the point where we're not doing a lot of illiquid private deals because interest rates are high, the value of money is high. We have over two dozen real estate deals. We love real estate. Most of our life has been on the innovation side. Find good managers who know what they're doing, whether they're developers or. Yeah, we've done everything from malls, multifamily housing, college housing. We just love button seats, companies. And there's nothing better than real estate for that. And I'm not talking about, like, prop tech. I'm talking about, like, apartment building in Arlington, Virginia. Like, that's how generations made wealth, and we love that.
- [38:26]
Paul Morris
And, you know, I definitely want to. Definitely want to dig into that. One of the things, One. One of the things. Things I didn't hear in year six, maybe I just missed it. Maybe it was the differentiation part. But one of the things I want to know is what's the moat around the business? So what is the. You create this thing if you have all the other things, but now you've created this great product and there's not. There's not much of a moat around. I mean, there's not really a moat around liquid death. Right? So, like, I'll. I'll. I'll put water in a can and compete with you. That's probably a terrible idea, but I don't see the most.
- [39:04]
Mike Lazaro
I mean, so we put this together really, for entrepreneurs to like. So many entrepreneurs waste so much time doing businesses that make no sense. And that's. We're in the business of saying no. We see, like, we say no 3,000 times a year, and so you know, when I look at moats, the fact of the matter is if you only invest in businesses that have huge moats, you're not going to make any investments. Like, very few companies truly have moats. And that's okay, right? Facebook didn't have a moat when it launched. Its moat became the virtual representation of real life relationships. It's called the social graph that developed over time. But it wasn't like a thesis of Peter Thiel do this because we're Gonna like have 3 billion humans on our platform. You know, he talks about folks starting with like really small markets and, you know, dominating them. And so our biggest wins, which have been game companies like Scopely, which sold for 5 billion, and Buddy Media, which we started, sold for close to a billion. And you know, Liquid Death, which is still going. And you know, Etoro, which is a public company, like there are 100 competitors. It just shows it's a big market. Like most companies, if they get 10% of a big market, they're massive.
- [40:35]
Paul Morris
Okay, so interesting. And then, and then the other thing too is just to, to sort of iterate off of your idea of, you know, you can always find a thousand reasons why something wouldn't, wouldn't go right. One of the ways that I evaluate an opportunity is I take best case scenario, which is like a lightning strike, and I take worst case scenario totally off the table. And I go a little further and say, what is the, what's the best likely scenario? And you know, like, we really, you know, it would be like a, you know, lightning strike might be 1% on either end of the curve. You know, really like a solid likely. You know, we're best likely could be 25% chance. And then what's the worst likely? Was sort of in the same 25% chance range. And if I could survive the worst likely, then, you know, maybe if there's enough upside in the, in the, in the best likely, that's the way I use my brain to try and discern those opportunities.
- [41:45]
Mike Lazaro
Yeah, I mean, we, you know, the worst case scenario is like they run out of money, right? Which we've had plenty of companies when you do 100 deals, run out of money. And I actually like when companies run out of money. You know, a lot of founders are so convincing, they keep raising money and convincing people to invest more. And then like five years later it goes out of business. Like, dude, you should just put it out of business rather than wasting your time and their money. And so it's just a nature of investing. You know, you can't do one deal. Like you're not going to buy one stock in the stock market. Don't just do one illiquid private deal. And at the end of the day, the reason why we've gotten so bullish on this idea that nothing matters but demand gen, it's the ultimate defense mechanism against going out of business. And if you look at kind of attention driving revenue, attention is the most valuable asset in business today. And if people know about, you know about your products, you can listen to them and create products that will create a business. It may not be a billion dollar venture exit, but all of a sudden you've mitigated the downside risk, which is really what you're talking about. And so very few times even in our venture world have we has it been a zero. Like we have two companies right now that have tried their best and they realize that they don't see a path and they're returning capital. One's returning 50%, one's returning 70%. Okay? That's a stock that goes down in a bad market. And both of them had customers, both of them were capital efficient. They just don't see a path to really getting profitable and doing what. And so I think if you're investing, like, just look at where the attention is coming from, where's the demand coming from? And if that's kind and if you don't know and if it's like, well, I don't really know how people are going to find out about this. Like, run like, it's why we've done so much with Gary over the years. Like, he launched Empathy Wines. Okay. He knows the wine business. He grew up 20 years in his dad's wine store. Immediately 50 million people will know about the wine. He's not taking grow risk. He's just buying grapes and then mixing them himself. Okay, and was it a surprise that two years in he sold it to Constellation Brands? No, because he had like demand, he had customers. And for him, what demand also does lets you control your channels. So for even today, liquid death, a big part of the business is Amazon. It's not people going into a store and just seeing it in this long line of waters. It's searching for it and buying it because they don't need to be told to buy it. It's unaided brand awareness. And so with this world of AI and everyone's an entrepreneur and there's more businesses like premium on storytelling and marketing, which is what I love because I'm not a technologist, I'm A journalist and marketer. I think your listeners are closer to me than people like Zuck, who are naturally gifted at engineering.
- [45:17]
Paul Morris
And, and that, that. That's what I. We talked a little bit before we came on the podcast. That's what I found so interesting about this particular. This particular political consultant who has been a very, very successful Hollywood screenwriter. And, and he. It was all about storytelling. And so what story are you telling? What, you know, what, what. What is the message? Who's. How are they hearing it? You know, And. And I found that to be very interesting.
- [45:56]
Mike Lazaro
That is politics, right? Like, it's not who's most qualified, it's who is known. Absolutely. It's water, it's entertainment, it's fashion. Like, pick the industry. Why is Ryan Serhant so big of a business here in New York? I had dinner with him, actually, at Gary's apartment. I hadn't really known him. I don't watch, like, reality tv. I haven't bought an apartment in a while. And after the dinner, I started looking him up. I'm like, holy shit. Fuck this guy. Like, he's built a real business because he was like an actor and he's like, really entertaining. So if you're an accountant and you're selling your. I mean, AI may be after you, but. But if you're like just a small business, how do you tell your story? How do you get out there?
- [46:49]
Paul Morris
And I love it when. I love it when I have guests because I. That I really, I want to learn from. So I'm going to ask your advice on a couple of things. But one of the things, you know, we. We have a mutual friend, Nicole Lapin. That's how we got connected, who has a tremendous show, money, rehab, and, and she. I didn't realize until I went on her show that she can be. She can be tough. You know, I forgot that I didn't. I didn't realize that of her, you know, six bestsellers, you know, three of them had the word bitch in the title.
- [47:29]
Mike Lazaro
She.
- [47:30]
Paul Morris
She's super nice. We know that, but she's not going to throw softballs the whole time. So what she came at me with was real estate during this period of time. And she's got the stats. I don't have the stats. Real estate during this period of time, long period of time, decade, 15 years, whatever it was, has appreciated on average, 4% per year. And, you know, S P 500, you know, is 11 and a half percent during that same period of time. So why in the world would I invest in real Estate. And, you know, why would I even own a home that's rent and you know, put that money into, into the stock market? And the, the answer that I have for that is that. So first of all, in that 4%, there's people that are losing money, that people lose money in real estate all the time. My firm does 5,000 deals a year. We see, we see people that lose money in real estate. And yet I haven't in 30 years on, on my real estate team. So I've been in the brokerage business for 25 years, but, you know, finally, you know, put together my own, my own team. And we have, we have, we have some guys on our team that, that service only primarily they service investor clients, developer clients. And if they take a deal, the reason why they're so successful is they underwrite the deal first and they don't waste the guy's time. So they underwrite the deal and they go, here's the deal. You're going to love it, and here's why. And you know, half the time they say yes, and if they say no, then they go on to their next investor. So they're selling a lot of real estate, but they, they have to do all of the work to uncover, identify, whatever. And, and when I came back from Nicole's podcast, I ran to this guy, you know, I was like, all right, so, you know, and, and what he said to me was his investors will turn down a deal unless it is a 50% return in one year. So if it's under 50, they won't even look at it. So, so now part of, part of what? Part of, you know, so we should drop everything we're doing and just run to these guys that are on my team and buy real estate. But part of, part of the other, the flip side of that coin is they're, they're selling to somebody that is really great at execution. So if I went to, and I, and I do this, I go to the same guys, I go, hey, you know, when you see the 60% deal return that you're going to give to this guy, give it to me. Instead, they give it to me. It's not a 60% return, it's a 40% return, which is still great because I don't execute like these guys. So there's a whole, there, there's something else to it. But you know, you really, unlike a stock and you're in the venture world, you're really looking very deeply into, into companies before they go public, you know, but you can find out more about a house in a neighborhood or an apartment in a neighborhood and, and know the trajectory of the neighborhood. Let me put it this way. One of the things that I like to say it put it sums it up is in real estate, insider trading is legal. Insider trading meaning not doing anything to break a fiduciary duty. But insider trading meaning I can learn more about the property than the market knows about the property. So therefore I have unfair information. And, and that is something that you know, obviously you can't do in a stock market.
- [51:22]
Mike Lazaro
So private markets work. I mean it's not just real estate, right? Like oh for sure. I mean in private markets, like I was an executive, like I was chief strategy officer at Salesforce. Like I built a software company, I've built, you know, media company. And so like I, I just know a lot about the operations of these businesses. And so when you invest, an entrepreneur is going full open kimono in a way that you don't get in the public markets. There's no CEO who's like opening up everything to you. Like we do very significant due diligence. And so real estate, it's basically everyone I know who looks like a hustler has created asymmetric information advantages they find and the information could be got the deal early, found out that something was about to go up for sale and you know, front ran the market. They have the most recent data on a certain block. They know that there's a Simon Malls coming at some point. Like there's always like a story like every real estate deal has like a story of like you know, they're gonna put in a subway stop here and this rest in Virginia apartment building is going to be perfectly positioned. Right. It's why I don't do real estate directly. All of our real estate is through like managers and you know, developers we trust. I also come from a real estate family. My grandfather built low income housing his whole life and you know, 70 years bought, built 12,000 apartments, right. Never seemed to have a lot of money. When he died he had like a legacy of like all these apartment buildings in Baltimore, Maryland and some in Florida. My dad, you know, before he got in trouble was building single family homes around Maryland. And so the key to being a good investor is just knowing what you don't know. And to me, I know very little about real estate other than like I could see track records like oh, this person's like, I don't, I mean listen, I Wish I did 50% like deals. Like I'm talking, these are deals like 8 to 12% if I'm lucky right here. Yeah. There's nothing I'm doing that's in the level that you're talking about.
- [53:47]
Paul Morris
Yeah. And like I said. Yeah. The flip side of that is that those, those investors are putting the, you know, they're doing the construction, they're doing lots of things.
- [54:00]
Mike Lazaro
Take the risk capital.
- [54:01]
Paul Morris
Yeah. And then, and then generally, you know, generally the deals, the deals that I do, which are table stakes for me, you know, we, we give our, we give our investors, you know, an 8% preferred return. But, but, you know, the upsides, it's, it's always sort of we land in 15 to 20 annual because we're, we're buying value add. And like you say, the asymmetric information. I, I believe that you can get that asymmetric information in real estate a lot easier. It's more, it's more readily available to, to, to people than, than it is in, in, certainly in the stock market. I mean, I, I looked again, you know, when Nicole asked me that question, I didn't have it. I didn't have it right in front of me. But, you know, professional money managers beat the s and P500 what percentage of the time. And my guess would be like 50, at least 50% because you could throw a dart. Right. And the, and the real answer is quite a bit less than that because by the time you tack their fees on, so they're throwing a dart and then charging the fees, and it ends up being, you know, 30 or 40% of the time they beat the S&P 500. Okay, so here's the, here's the advice. I want some advice from you because you're talking about demand marketing. I recently, Gary, Gary Vee recently spoke
- [55:27]
Mike Lazaro
at
- [55:30]
Paul Morris
company convention for real estate, and he told the Realtor audience that they should be spending 51% of their time creating content. And. I'll lay my cards on the table in advance and say that I think that's the worst advice you could give this room full of Realtors, and, and I'll tell you why that is. But one of the things that you were saying to me, you said early in the podcast is that, you know, that, that I forget how you said it very eloquently, but you know that there's. That I'm driving this information, but, you know, or attention, but real estate's the vehicle.
- [56:18]
Mike Lazaro
Yep.
- [56:20]
Paul Morris
And I know if I'm coming to, if I'm, if I'm coming to see, you know, and I'm going to sell your House. I know from the interview where I'm going to have to lean in in terms of getting you to sign my listing agreement. But what I will say is that the what's for sale right now, which would be you as a seller, so you're going to come on the market. The what's for sale right now is available, widely available to the public. So I could really do a social media blast. I could do all these things and these things generally are to help the seller choose me more than to sell the house. So what's going to drive the sale? And that's not exactly true, but I'm making this argument to see where you think marketing would, would play a role for the sale of a home.
- [57:23]
Mike Lazaro
Yeah, so my, listen, I'm not an expert in real estate, but my belief is that in terms of the actual product on market, it's a pretty efficient market, right? Like I need a four bedroom house. That does it. I say, okay, here are the 12 houses in like Bethesda, Maryland that I, that you should look at and someone like takes you around. And very rarely have I found, I bought a lot of houses, sold a lot of houses, apartments. Very rarely have I found a deal. There's always a reason that it's like price low or that like it's. If you think that every time like, oh, I got a deal, it's like, oh no, I'm just a schmuck, right? And to me, I don't think you create content to sell houses because it's like a, you know, selling the house is basically a transaction, you know, oriented exercise. It's a lower funnel activity. It's, you are, there's only a select number of people in the market, you know, at any given time, globally, nationally, in your state, city, zip, right? And very few people shop. Like, I'm shopping in New York, I'm probably not shopping in la, right. And if I am, there's probably someone doing it for me because I'm so fucking rich that someone's just like putting together a portfolio. And so I think where content comes in, what Gary was saying, which I'm not going to say whether 51% seems high to me, I think what he's saying is everything you do, you should at least capture. And as you're going about your day, if you're making $500,000 as a good realtor, right, does it make sense to have a content team that you're spending 50 grand a year on and you're bringing, you know, a small camera everywhere and sometimes Your junior person is filming you. You're walking into houses. And so you do it not to sell that house. You do it because you want to share your expertise, your personality, you want to connect with people, you want to stay. A lot of it is you do it for your current customers, right? Like people who already like you stay top of mind. And then when a friend asks you, like, hey, like, you, I'm thinking about selling my house in the Hamptons. I don't have a house in the Hamptons, by the way. We don't go there. But I'm thinking about selling my house wherever, if we had one. Oh, talk to my friend Paul. He's great. Here he is on Instagram, right? And LinkedIn. I just had dinner with Gary and the question was if you could keep one of your social media accounts. Which one? He said LinkedIn. And I think for Realtors, that's a real thing. You know, your identity is your identity. People are there in a professional setting. You also can share information in a way that is interesting. On deals, on markets. And so listen, like, I know what goes into being a realtor. It's like hard, right? It's marketing, it's building awareness. It's kind of, you know, you're going to events, like, you gotta show up. These people wanna see houses. It's like wasting a day. It's like. But if you think as a media company, like, content first, like, oh, you know, we have a member of our community. We become close with Crystal in Minnesota, who has the biggest listing in all of Minnesota. It's a $90 million house. It's for sale for 55 million on Lake Minnetonka. And she's done just a masterful job, like using it to sell herself. Like, here we are going to the most expensive house and like, look at this wine room. Look at this baby Jesus. Like. And she's not someone who you would say, like, is a Gary Vee. She's very like family person, goes to church, owns pizzerias, which is cool. But I could tell you we would not have been a New York Times best selling author if we hadn't gotten out there. It was very cringey for us, even though we were in social media. And a lot of our stuff is relationship stuff because it's like, helped people get to know us. Just our normal banter. We're not acting. It's just like, people seem to, like when Cass is like yelling at me or doing stuff. That's funny, right? And I just think you for so long in Life, you had to have two personalities. You had your work personality and you had your like real personality. Right. Like you are an accountant, but you're going to like dungeons and like all this like crazy stuff. It's just who you are, right? Be one person, be who you are. No one cares anymore. Like everyone has interests. I'm a huge music fan. I share that stuff. Not everyone likes music, but whatever. And so I think realtors got into the business because they like making money. They like people, they're entrepreneurs. Right. They're not tied to a desk like share that now. 51. I think Gary's a little crazy, but whatever.
- [62:38]
Paul Morris
But yeah, there's it's a Gary thing to say, right. You say 51 and they do, you know, 15. It's a win. One of the things that I think social and by the way, I, you know, obviously, right. I have, I spent a lot of time, I have two podcasts, I coach live twice a week. I record it. I recently became involved in and invested in a, in a, in a startup that claim your name is what it's called, but it's a startup that, that is, that's helping people build their identity online. So what that you know for sure what happens is when you say, oh, you know, you should talk to my friend Paul in Los Angeles, you know, about real estate, the first thing they will do is. Is Google you.
- [63:40]
Mike Lazaro
Yeah.
- [63:40]
Paul Morris
You know, and then, and then you know, helping people. For example, you know, Google business profile is such low hanging fruit. I think that you can spend a much smaller amount of time putting, creating social proof where, where, where people don't do that. It's not as content intensive
- [64:04]
Mike Lazaro
and it's also not. People have to realize, and this took me a little while to realize it's no longer about followers. So don't worry that you don't have followers because all of the content, thanks to TikTok and like its influence on Instagram and Snapchat, all of the content gets shown to 200 people. They then use that to figure out whether it's of interest to different psychographics. And if we have dinner with Gary, the three of us, I would kind of bet that one of like our pieces of content may outperform his just because his follower count doesn't really matter and in some cases hurts if what he's talking about doesn't match why they showed up. And so you know, we've had like, you know, Cass and Mike brand, which is our brand online at Instagram. We've had you know, several videos that have gotten millions of views and it's just because they're good and it's not hate. Like we don't do any hate. So it's not like we're trolling anyone or. But it's just people share them. A lot of times it's relationships, it's not really business but you know, be yourself.
- [65:19]
Paul Morris
Yeah, no, I totally, I totally, I totally agree with that and get that I have, I have maybe one. I appreciate your time so much and I'm learning as I learning as I'm going and I want to ask your opinion because something again, I think something again has changed. Oh. So first of all I'll say that, that you know, you, you said earlier in the podcast like oh, a 13 year old's going to create, you know, we'll, we'll create the code for the product. So you know the, that that's, that that's almost the product. The tech product is, is table stakes. I totally agree. You can see such crazy examples just like you know, open AI took so many years and billions of dollars to create this and then deep seek, you know, oh, we see how you did it and you know, $26 million, six months later you've got something not as good but you know, and so on and so on. And I think that something else has happened recently and that is the, the agentic AI which was really was not invented two weeks ago. Okay. People were do have been doing this for a year or more and yet you know, I ordered Mac Mini. I had to order it because there are none, none can be purchased. There's a run on them and, and the idea that the latest models seem to have gotten easy enough for me. I haven't done it yet because I'm picking my Mac Mini up today. But it's now gotten so easy that even I could create these agents that are out doing all these tasks all day long. For me this seems like a next level revolution.
- [67:28]
Mike Lazaro
So this is a, what you said has blown my mind and I'm knee deep in it because my oldest son decided as a psych major, decided to get into AI and he's basically built like a McKinsey for small business. And he came to me with this idea of like Mac Mini like a few months ago to run like he's a two person company but he has 10 agentic co founders. So AI co founders that do real work, proposal writing and product work and each one has a different thing, right? A follow up bot. He even has one to keep his mental health in Check like if he works too hard and doesn't stand up, it's basically shuts everything off and says, miles, go play pickleball. Right. And I'm like, listen, the world is cloud. Like this is crazy going on Prem. And he was right. And the reason is, you know, we don't want our data out there. We can run it locally and give it access to everything in our stack without like all of our texts and like emails getting into like the public sphere. And a lot of them, most of them are open source with tons of YouTube videos. And I will admit I haven't done that myself, but that's what Miles is doing for small businesses and for people who need help.
- [69:01]
Paul Morris
Yeah.
- [69:01]
Mike Lazaro
So now, so like Miles is now building that for too many clients. He doesn't even, not even bringing on new clients because it's like unlimited business. And eventually it's just going to be. And he knows this. You just, you know, out of the box, it's just going to happen. You hook up all your stuff and it just happens. He's building some of that also. But that's a world that's hard for us to get our head, head around because we're not of that generation. Like, social came easier for us because we kind of grew up with mobile. Like, not grew up, we're both old, but kind of like mobile. When the iPhone came out in 2007, we probably both adopted it. Right. And we grew up professionally over the last 20 years with it. The younger generation is going to build up with all of that, plus AI, which is 10,000 times more powerful. And so I would encourage everyone to learn and then find someone like Miles to be your rabbi, to be your Sherpa.
- [70:03]
Paul Morris
Oh, yeah, yeah, that's, that's. And I, I do have, I do have a Sherpa, you know, and yeah, other than have him create it for me, I'm gonna do it alongside him because I, I really, you know, I want to learn, I want to learn that, that process as I go. But it, it has now, it has changed from very recently to something that I think, you know, a lot of people can do, not everybody, but, you know, it's, it's now within, within grasp. Just like coding, you know, I created
- [70:39]
Mike Lazaro
this is so much more powerful because it's giving you the ability to scale what we are losing, which is our brain and our mental firepower. I'm losing it. Like the older I get, it's harder to like, remember everything. Oh, I got to follow up with Paul. Like our lives get complicated What Miles and what you're doing to make it very simple for people. It's called setting up vector databases, but it's vectorizing your data to create a brain. And a brain is this all knowing piece of software that knows everything and then once it's set up, you can talk to it. Hey, what are my to do's today? You know who in my network, you know, live in la because I'm about to go to la, you know, send out a fundraising email to the donors of Cycle for Survival last year and use the template and just make sure I approve it before it goes out. You know, all of a sudden you're talking to people who would have been junior employees to me, but now they can do all of these things and it's just incredible. Like the world we live in is crazy.
- [71:53]
Paul Morris
It is, yeah. And the speed at which it's changing is the thing that's, you know, I guess I won't go more into it. I could talk to you about it forever. So you're coming to la?
- [72:10]
Mike Lazaro
I love la. Liquid Death's there. Scopely. Was there a lot of friends? We love la.
- [72:16]
Paul Morris
I'll have to grab you for coffee sometime when you're in la. And yeah. So really, I mean thank you so much for spending this time with me and oh, maybe I'll get, you know, I'll have to get product advice from you on this startup. I have to run it by you.
- [72:40]
Mike Lazaro
Yeah, let me know. I'm addicted to startups as you. Yeah.
- [72:43]
Paul Morris
And, and one of the things, one of the things that I do at the end, at the end of the podcast is ask fire round questions. Must admit I don't have them in front of me so I'll, I'll, I'll. But I've asked them so many times.
- [72:59]
Mike Lazaro
I was gonna say like I've heard them.
- [73:02]
Paul Morris
Yeah, right. So you know, just top of mind, what's your idea of perfect happiness?
- [73:14]
Mike Lazaro
Perfect happiness to me is being at a fish show. It's the only time I could turn off fish ph. I'm a huge fish fan, 200 plus shows. It's the only time I could turn off my brain and be like really present, no drugs included. Just like love the music and have for 30 years.
- [73:37]
Paul Morris
What's your greatest fear?
- [73:39]
Mike Lazaro
Sharks by far.
- [73:46]
Paul Morris
What is a talent you'd like to have?
- [73:49]
Mike Lazaro
I mean the biggest talent that I want to have is keeping my brain young. Like I'm thinking a lot about this that like I'm in pretty good shape. I have an artificial heart valve which Seems to be working, but we still haven't figured out the brain. And so if I could just, like, keep my brain. Figure out a way to keep my brain healthy forever. I'm fine living in a vat and talking through a computer. It's just, you know, we're still too many people are dying of Alzheimer's and dementia, and it's just that behind sharks that scares me, so. So that would be the skill I would love to have. Just brain health forever.
- [74:27]
Paul Morris
What's an insult that you've gotten that you're most proud of?
- [74:32]
Mike Lazaro
An insult? Well, the biggest one is I'm not going to name the name. But the competition never kills the companies. It's usually something internal. I just had lunch with one of our competitors at Buddy Media, and he's someone who. And he basically said, I've hated you for so long, you kicked my ass. You know, I thought you were an asshole. But he's like, you're just better. Like, you're more strategic, you raised more money. And so it's basically someone who called me an asshole, but then, like, apologized for it. That's when it comes top of mind.
- [75:13]
Paul Morris
What's a trait that you look for in friends?
- [75:20]
Mike Lazaro
Just do what you say you're gonna do. Like, that's it. Like, say you're gonna show up. Show up. I think, you know, people just did what they say they're gonna do. Life, like, don't. You don't have to go overboard. Just, like. And I think our biggest disappointments are that, like, people who just don't, for whatever reason, do what they say they're going to do. Love it.
- [75:50]
Paul Morris
So LA has a lot of great, great hikes. There's one right, right outside my door. You go straight up the hill and you get up to this, the top of this, top of this crest, and you look down and you see. You see Cass and your three kids and your close friends, colleagues, and your whole community, and you shout one thing. What do you shout?
- [76:16]
Mike Lazaro
I'm alive. Which I shouldn't have been. Almost died twice. And so I love life and I love that I'm alive.
- [76:27]
Paul Morris
I love that you're alive, too.
- [76:28]
Mike Lazaro
Oh, thank you. Appreciate it.
- [76:31]
Paul Morris
Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure. And I feel like I've gotten to know, you know, a kindred spirit. A lot, a lot of fun and, and also amazing, amazing information and, and, and so tell me your. We. We'll put it all in the show notes, but, you know, where can people find you on Instagram? Obviously, what's your, what's your Instagram?
- [76:57]
Mike Lazaro
So it's Cass and Mike K A S S and A N D M I K E really everywhere. Instagram is the where we're most active and our website, www.cassandmike.com doing some live events coming up which will be fun. Yeah. So connect with us. Have a newsletter. It goes out to about 12,000 people. It's all about entrepreneurship and just stuff that we like.
- [77:29]
Paul Morris
How do I'm going to subscribe? How do I subscribe?
- [77:32]
Mike Lazaro
Just cassandmike.com everything is there. Or you could go to LinkedIn and you could find it at search for Michael Lazaro or Cass Lazaro there. We think LinkedIn should be more about you as a person than the business. But the other platforms are Cass and Mike.
- [77:50]
Paul Morris
So again, thank you for taking the time to visit with me on the Paul Morris podcast. Really appreciate it and looking forward to following up.
- [78:03]
Mike Lazaro
Let's go. Congrats on the success.