A Goldman M&A Banker Helped Bring the Olympics to Los Angeles

We're in an era of megadeals, with Goldman Sachs reporting a record year for big deal volumes as companies scramble to compete with AI. Gene Sykes has seen multiple deal cycles come and go over his multi-decade career. The co-chair of global mergers and acquisitions has worked on famous transactions like Comcast's purchase of Universal and Disney's buyout of Pixar. In addition to being "the most-influential M&A banker you've never heard of," as New York magazine has put it, he has also spearheaded Los Angeles's successful bid to bring the Olympic Games to the city in 2028. In this conversation, recorded live at the Future Proof Festival in Huntington Beach, California, we discuss how a city pays for a big event like the Olympics, and parallels between the early 2000s TMT environment and now. Read more: Port of LA Foiled Around 120 Million Cyberattacks Last Month https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-17/port-of-la-foiled-around-120-million-cyberattacks-last-month?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=odd_lots&utm_content=article Goldman’s Snider Says Fears of US Earnings Bubble Are Misplaced https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-18/goldman-s-snider-says-fears-of-us-earnings-bubble-are-misplaced?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=odd_lots&utm_content=article Only http://Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots https://www.bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots?in_source=oddlotspodcast Subscribe to the Odd Lots Newsletter http://bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Join the conversation: discord.gg/oddlots https://discord.gg/oddlots See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Tracy Alloway?

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• 1:07Speaker 02

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• 1:51Tracy Alloway?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 2:06Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

• 2:07Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, we are here in lovely Huntington Beach at the Future Proof Conference.

• 2:11Joe Weisenthal?

  I love coming to this conference so much.

• 2:14Tracy Alloway?

  You can't complain. The beach is right there.

• 2:15Joe Weisenthal?

  They do such a good job. Every time I'm here, the only thought I have is they have brought heaven on earth. And the only mystery I have is why there are people, you know, you think about like the great migration west. It's like, imagine stopping in Nebraska. You could have gone a little bit further and you could have been in California. And it's like, it was right there. And the question I have is why doesn't everyone live here?

• 2:40Tracy Alloway?

  Okay, well, we made it to California. It's our fourth year at this particular event. And we do, in fact, have the perfect guest. We recorded an episode live onstage with Gene Sykes. He is the co-head of Global M&A at Goldman Sachs, a longtime partner, and also the president of the U.S. Olympic Committee. So take a listen.

• 2:59Joe Weisenthal?

  Gene, thank you so much for joining us.

• 3:02Speaker 05

  Happy to be here.

• 3:03Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's start really simple. We can like save the tough questions for the end, but let's start really simple. Like, you wear many hats, Goldman, the Olympics. What are you up to now? Tell us, tell us who you are, maybe.

• 3:15Speaker 05

  Okay, I'm still a Goldman Sachs partner after many, many years. I think I've been a partner at Goldman Sachs for half my life. And I work on technology and media, healthcare and other things. And because I've been around for a long time, I get to do more or less what I want, which is to give people advice who need advice and value it, and work with all of our teams and spend a lot of time mentoring people. So that's the Goldman part of my time.

• 3:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 3:43Speaker 05

  The other half of my time, or more, is spending time in everything related to the Olympic and Paralympic ecosystem. So I was the head of the bid when we bid for the Games for Los Angeles, originally for 2024. We were awarded the 2028 Games, you know, less than two years. We'll have the Olympic and Paralympic Games right here in Southern California. But then, four years ago, I became the Chair of the Board of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. So I spend a lot more time now thinking about, how do we create Team USA? So that our athletes are always the highest performing athletes in any of these Olympic or Paralympic events. And then about two and a half years ago,

• 4:25Speaker 05

  I became a member of the International Olympic Committee. So I sort of see the entire Olympic, Paralympic landscape.

• 4:31Tracy Alloway?

  When I think about the Olympics, I'm not big into sports, okay? Like, I'm not, not Sydney Sweeney, like, sports, sports, sports, sports, right? I just see the Olympics, they're kind of interesting. What counts to you as a successful Olympic Games? Is it keeping the cost down as much as possible? The vibes? What does it actually look like?

• 4:51Speaker 05

  Successful Olympic Games has to be a games that everyone says, I'll never forget this. This is an incredible experience, and I only saw it here. This is the only way I can see all of these incredible athletes in these kinds of competitions and see them in one place at the same time. And when you say you're not a sports fan, how many people are Alyssa Lou fans with figure skating who wouldn't call themselves sports fans? The other thing about the Olympics most people don't realize is, the Olympics are the one sports experience that's skewed toward women more than toward men.

• 5:25Joe Weisenthal?

  Really? I would not have guessed that at all. You know, we obviously just hit the World Cup in the U.S., but that's like, one sport. There are probably 12 stadiums or something like that. There's one governing body. Can you give us a feel for essentially, like, the sprawl of the organization? And how many different, maybe we call them stakeholders, have to be brought in to make an Olympics go well?

• 5:53Speaker 05

  Sure. So in contrast to the World Cup, we had 104 matches during the World Cup between Mexico, the U.S., and Canada. 16 different stadiums were hosts for the events.

• 6:05Joe Weisenthal?

  That's enough.

• 6:06Speaker 05

  Not that much. 600 athletes, let's say. I mean, not that, not that many athletes. By comparison, in the Olympic and Paralympic Games, when you put the two together, we'll have 17,000 athletes, we'll have something like 900 separate events, medal events. It's enormous. We'll sell 15 million tickets between the Olympic and the Paralympic Games in Los Angeles. The World Cup sold 6.5 million tickets. So it's a significantly bigger and more complicated experience than, than the World Cup. You know, it's not everything, but it's maybe 90% of everything you can imagine in the world of sports.

• 6:43Tracy Alloway?

  So if there is one thing I know about the Olympics, it's that people like to complain about the cost, right? And empty stadiums and finding uses for all this infrastructure that was built afterwards. What's the funding mix actually supposed to be for the 2028 L.A. Games? Because I keep reading headlines saying, the first privately funded games. I'm not sure that's true.

• 7:03Speaker 05

  Well, it's essentially privately funded in that there's no government support to put the games on, with the exception of the federal government playing a role in security and security-related logistics, things of that sort. You can't do that without the federal government with everybody in the world being here. There are 206 countries that will send teams to the Olympic Games. So it's, you know, it's quite a security event for sure. The idea of the privately funded Games in, in Southern California, we have the best sports infrastructure here of any city in the world. We have more stadia and arenas and world-class places where sports already takes place. So we don't have to build anything. We're not building a village for the athletes, you know, which is what

• 7:45Speaker 05

  Paris had to do, because we've got such great residences at UCLA. We're going to keep all the athletes at UCLA. And UCLA houses many more students in a regular year than we'll need to house athletes during the Games. So this is the ideal setting to have a Games like this, and that makes it a lot easier to plan and to execute.

• 8:05Joe Weisenthal?

  I have some friends in L.A. and they have a house here. And they're like, by the way, we're thinking of renting out the house to people coming. But if you wanted to come, we would let you stay in the house.

• 8:15Tracy Alloway?

  They would give up the money for you, Joe.

• 8:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. But to my mind, I know, it's a good deal. But the flip side is like, oh my God, the traffic and the standing in lines. These are some of my least favorite things to do in the world. Make the argument to me that if I come down to L.A. for the Olympics, I will actually find it a smooth experience, rather than an experience where I'm spending half the day in lines, and then in the week up to it, logging into eight different sites just to be able to like, buy a ticket.

• 8:49Tracy Alloway?

  I mean, L.A. traffic is bad at the best of times, right?

• 8:53Speaker 05

  Well, I don't know. The best of times, it's not bad.

• 8:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, four in the morning, the best of times is not bad, but.

• 8:58Speaker 05

  To be, to, to give you some comfort, people said the same thing about the eighty-four games.

• 9:04Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 9:04Speaker 05

  We hosted the games in nineteen eighty-four. A lot of people said, I'm, I'm gonna leave because the traffic's gonna be so bad. And the, the traffic was totally manageable. The thing about LA and traffic is if you tell people in advance, something is happening, stay off the roads, and they all know about it. They know where it's going to be and they know when it's gonna happen. They do. People behave based on what they know and what they're expecting to happen. Now, that plus the fact that you're gonna have a lot of very, uh, elaborate planning for how you get traffic moving around through what, what will be called Olympic lanes. Today, they're high occupancy vehicle lanes, HOV lanes.

• 9:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah. Am I gonna have to download three apps to like buy a ticket or whatever?

• 9:47Speaker 05

  One app, you're either gonna buy your tickets in advance. Literally, half the tickets have already been sold. So you wanna, you wanna register for the tickets. The next time the tickets are available is next year.

• 9:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 9:57Speaker 05

  So I, I think tickets you'll get in, in advance. You don't have to go to a bunch of different apps. You'll have one app which will tell you what's happening, where to go. It'll be easy for you to see it. And I don't think you'll have many lines. I think the venues actually will be really great. Remember, all these venues already do sports.

• 10:13Joe Weisenthal?

  You're selling me.

• 10:14Speaker 05

  Well, think about it. All of these venues have enormous events all the time that people who operate them know exactly what to do.

• 10:22Tracy Alloway?

  You already have accommodation, Joe. You should just do it.

• 10:24Joe Weisenthal?

  Should just do it.

• 10:25Tracy Alloway?

  So I know it's not a perfect apples for apples comparison, but you know, the World Cup was this sprawling, complicated sports event. When you look back at the summer, is there anything with your Olympics board membership hat on that you would have done differently when it comes to the World Cup?

• 10:43Speaker 05

  Certainly, I would have been careful about calling the president for a red card violation. That probably wasn't the best thing for the World Cup's image. Having said that, the experience for Americans was awesome. I mean, the fact that people in the United States could see soccer, which everybody else calls football, it's not really our sport, but they could feel like they were part of it with the very, very best athletes in the world. I think it actually really transformed Americans' view of that sport. And they'll appreciate that sport differently than they ever have before. Plus, the people who came and they were cheering for their teams, they found America to be incredibly welcoming.

• 11:23Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 11:24Speaker 05

  And Americans to be exciting and interesting. And the image that, that we Americans made of ourselves to the rest of the world was incredibly positive and constructive, even when, you know, the, the public image of American politicians may be very mixed.

• 11:39Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 11:39Speaker 05

  So I, I think it was a huge positive.

• 11:56Joe Weisenthal?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Tracy and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis, but sometimes you've only got ten minutes and need to know what's moving markets and why. That's the Barclays Brief Podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and Research get you up to speed on what matters and what to watch next. About the time it takes to grab a coffee. So search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Some people treat ChatGPT like some kind of smart search engine, and some use it to get work done. ChatGPT Work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting work mode. Available on Plus and Pro Plans.

• 13:03Speaker 06

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• 13:30Speaker 06

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• 13:33Joe Weisenthal?

  I don't think I've, in my lifetime, there has been a single sporting event that the week before, you see all these headlines, the stadiums aren't ready, the grass isn't growing, the seats are still being sold, and then it all works out fine. And then in more recent sporting events, you're like, well, the international tourists aren't coming. They don't like the vibes in the United States, et cetera. Based on what you've seen so far, and you mentioned the first batch of ticket sales, do you have any reason to think that the environment in the US, which we could talk about in a million different ways, is going to affect attendance in one way or another?

• 14:12Speaker 05

  No. The, the ticket sales, first of all, have been incredibly positive. As soon as they were offered, everything was sold. And you said they're high priced. They are high priced, but they are, they are priced at the market. And it's gonna take a lot of ticket sales to actually pay for these games. So I don't really apologize for the fact that they're high priced, except to say, if you wanna see the very, very best in sports, in any sport, at one place, all at a very compressed period of time, it's, it's a premium priced experience.

• 14:45Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, I didn't say they're high priced. I have no concept of what a fair value is for a sports ticket. But, okay, let me try to segue between the Olympics and the media landscape. But you have to raise money for this, right? Through media sponsorships and air rights and things like that. What's the demand like that you're seeing so far?

• 15:05Speaker 05

  Uh, well, the demand's great. So some of this is done, it's pre-baked. The International Olympic Committee sells media rights for all the games. They do it years in advance. NBC is the media rights holder for the United States. They've got a deal that now goes through twenty thirty-six. We don't even know where the games are gonna be in twenty thirty-six. And they're committed to be the media partner in the United States for those games. That's, that's a significant amount of money. It's, you know, a billion and a half dollars or more per games to have the rights in the United States.

• 15:36Joe Weisenthal?

  Wow.

• 15:36Speaker 05

  Then the IOC also sells a bunch of sponsorships to people like Coca-Cola and Visa and Samsung. You've seen the names of these companies around every one of the Olympic Games. But then the domestic organizers get the opportunity to sell more rights. And so they've sold rights to Starbucks and Uber and Google. And so you get the idea. There is huge corporate interest in sponsoring these games. They wanna be part of it because they know this is gonna be the biggest event in the history of the world. And I, I, I mean, that sounds crazy, but I think it will be that. And if you're here for it, you're gonna say, I, I have just been part of something which is gonna be remembered forever.

• 16:16Tracy Alloway?

  So I lied before when I said I don't like sports. I do like football slash soccer. But one of the criticisms of FIFA was rampant commercialization in the games, right? So, you know, fifteen minute water breaks so that there are more ad sales and stuff like that. Are you thinking of additional ad or sponsorship opportunities for the Olympics?

• 16:37Speaker 05

  Well, definitely not like that. So the Olympics are famous for having clean venues. If you've been in Olympic Games and you see the field of play, you'll notice there's no corporate advertising anywhere in the field of play. Anywhere you see the athletes competing,

• 16:52Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right.

• 16:52Speaker 05

  there's no corporate advertising at all. And that's kind of an Olympic rule, and everyone abides by the rule. And if there's gonna be any sort of advertising, it's the brand, and the brand is offstage. Maybe where the athletes are, you know, putting a helmet on or something.

• 17:06Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 17:06Speaker 05

  But it's very, very distinctive in that it's totally clean. And you feel like, wow, this is all about the sports and all about the athletes.

• 17:14Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's talk about the media landscape because you've been a deal maker in that space for a long time. And I got, first got my interest in markets during the dot com bubble. And the weird thing now, and we were talking about this a little bit backstage, is this dynamic where the public companies don't feel like the incumbents in some way. And the incumbents, and I'm talking about AI specifically, feel like the private companies. And I'm curious how much that changes the business of deal making. This very strange condition where it's not going to be the public companies like making the big acquisitions, et cetera. It's like something is completely flipped.

• 17:58Speaker 05

  Well, on the one hand, this is the biggest M and A year in the history of the world.

• 18:04Joe Weisenthal?

  Really?

• 18:05Speaker 05

  Biggest year by far. We expect the M and A market to be much bigger than it was at the peak. The last peak was twenty twenty-one, inflated by COVID.

• 18:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Sure.

• 18:15Speaker 05

  So just keep that in mind. And it's deep. And, you know, for the past several years, forty percent of the M and A market has been selling companies that were owned by private equity sponsors.

• 18:27Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 18:27Speaker 05

  Forty percent. This year, that's thirty percent. And the reason is there's so much more substantive demand with things that are happening around the technology impact of the economy in every possible way. And you think about it, every industry, natural resources or power generation.

• 18:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 18:45Speaker 05

  They're, they're experiencing the same thing, again, because they're building the infrastructure for AI. We've seen an enormous boom in semiconductor technology, semiconductor equities and semiconductor M and A, when everybody wants to have proprietary semiconductor technology. So what's, what's driving the M and A market is the same phenomenon that we see driving interest in almost everything. And it's actually incredibly strong.

• 19:11Tracy Alloway?

  Can companies buy their way into, I guess, like AI fluency or nativity? Because you see, I was reading the Goldman Sachs M and A outlook on the beach, which is the best place to read it. And you were talking about DNA deals and this idea.

• 19:25Speaker 05

  Don't, don't get sand on our, our stuff.

• 19:27Tracy Alloway?

  Sorry. And you were talking about this idea that like a lot of the M and A activity is being driven by companies that want more of a foothold in AI. But then when I look at larger companies, it really does feel like it's a challenge for big incumbent companies to integrate AI into their existing organization. And sometimes it feels a lot easier for the startups to just start from scratch and say, we're an AI company. We're building this from the ground up.

• 19:53Speaker 05

  Well, every startup, even in AI, has to think to themselves, what's the endgame? And for 80% of the startups, the endgame is selling themselves to somebody else. So if you think that's in the mind of the entrepreneur who's the founder and the venture capitalists who are financing the entrepreneur, that's sort of the economic payoff of actually building something innovative. You have to think, how does what I'm building help somebody else who has some other part of the puzzle? And so I think that's actually present in every kind of entrepreneurial investment, every entrepreneurial venture. The 20% that actually become sustained companies, they have something totally differentiated, or frankly, they would never be able to find somebody who could buy them.

• 20:38Speaker 05

  And you think about SpaceX. SpaceX did something different, and they did something different in a market where there were lots of incumbents, but the incumbents played in a regulatory environment that SpaceX decided to defy. And it's that kind of differentiation that leads to a company that becomes an independent company. I think we'll see, obviously, Anthropic and OpenAI be independent companies. They're almost too big for anybody to buy. And so that's the other part of this. If the companies do become too big, they've succeeded very, very well, but you just have to have a lot of confidence that they're going to have a durable platform.

• 21:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Am I going to read an S1 one day? And when you list through the risk factors, that one of the risks is, we believe there is a non-trivial chance that our technology wipes out the entirety of humanity? Is that the type of thing the lawyers are going to make them put in?

• 21:33Speaker 05

  I think the lawyers will probably say, you better protect yourself and make sure that the disclosure is complete. So imagine, big, crazy, scary things like that will be present in S1 language, for sure.

• 21:46Joe Weisenthal?

  I've always thought if people only read the S1s, they would never invest in another company because they're always so frightened.

• 21:51Speaker 05

  Maybe that's a sad comment about what people read.

• 21:53Joe Weisenthal?

  That's probably the case.

• 21:55Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, when I read an S1, I always flip straight to the risk factors. Is that bad?

• 21:59Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, we always do that. That's what we always do. We always want to see that. It's our, it's our natural draw. It's a risk, a doom.

• 22:05Speaker 05

  No, no, that's the journalist prerogative.

• 22:06Joe Weisenthal?

  That's the journalist prerogative. Fair enough.

• 22:09Tracy Alloway?

  Very true. Given your TMT experience, you know, a lot of people have been drawing parallels between what's going on in AI right now with the TMT buildout, and everyone was excited about the web, and so we laid loads and loads of cable. And directionally, we were kind of right. The internet did, in fact, become a thing.

• 22:25Joe Weisenthal?

  It all got used eventually.

• 22:27Tracy Alloway?

  It all got used eventually, but in the meantime, there was a big bubble. Do you see parallels between what's happening now?

• 22:32Speaker 05

  Well, certainly, there's no way to know for sure. How, how big is this market going to be? And are we committing to build too much infrastructure relative to the real demand that we're going to see five or six years from now? I think the answer is, we just don't know. I will say, the people financing the investments are not just venture capitalists, who are the principal investors in the first buildout of the TMT internet phase in sort of 2000, 2001. Now, the, the investors in this buildout are the most successful big technology platforms anywhere in the world, who had hundreds of billions of dollars of free cash flow until this year. So it's a, it's an incredible turnabout.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  Some people treat ChatGPT like some kind of smart search engine, and some use it to get work done. ChatGPT Work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs, and scattered information that you have to grind

• 23:57Speaker 01

  through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro Plans.

• 24:12Speaker 06

  This is Robert Smith from Business History. If you're listening to this, there's a good chance you're a small business owner. And like every small business owner, you started with a dream, to do what you love and watch it grow. What you probably didn't dream about, keeping up with cyber threats. That's where Mastercard can help, with access to tools that help identify cyber threats to better protect your business. Building your dream business, priceless. For cybersecurity in a changing world, there's Mastercard. Learn more at mastercard.com/smallbusiness.

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• 25:49Joe Weisenthal?

  I have this theory, and tell me if I'm wrong, that actually enterprise AI adoption is literally zero. And what I mean by that is-

• 25:59Speaker 05

  Two, 2% not zero.

• 26:01Joe Weisenthal?

  2%. Okay.

• 26:03Speaker 05

  No, no, we just did an analysis, and we said, it's 2%. 2% today.

• 26:06Joe Weisenthal?

  2%. And what I mean, at least in my mind, is like, sure, has every company gotten their employees like a ChatGPT or Claude subscription? Yeah, sure, probably. But like, I'm, you know, if it's the, if it's the usage of like, oh, I'm going on the Outlaws Podcast, who are these Joe and Tracy fellows? What do they ask questions like? I don't really consider that AI adoption in a meaningful sense. That's like glorified search. When you look at companies in the range, have you seen any sense in which incumbent companies are deeply building AI into the workflow, such that it's not just a window on a computer screen that they can ask questions?

• 26:49Speaker 05

  So 2% are the companies who, in their earnings reports, have said, we see an impact on EPS, a positive impact of our use of AI. 2% so far. There are probably 20 or 30% of the companies that have actually implemented strategies to use AI in everything they do. I mean, I think about Goldman Sachs. We, we are, you know, we have enormous numbers of prompts about things that we use AI to do.

• 27:20Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 27:21Speaker 05

  And all of the, the people who are the youngest people at Goldman Sachs are sort of native AI people, working to implement things that we didn't think about a year ago. And now we've found that we can, we can give people more capacity more quickly and get them to think about different types of problems than we did, as I say, even a year ago. So we're beginning to see how it changes the way people work with each other and what they imagine they can, they can achieve.

• 27:47Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, say more about AI in the deal-making business specifically, because I imagine, yes, there are a bunch of junior analysts who are using it to make PowerPoints look even more beautiful than they already do, and Excel spreadsheets, and maybe you're even searching for like potential targets with an AI prompt or something like that. But the other thing you always hear about M&A is ultimately, it's a relationship business. What would you expect actual integrated AI use to look like in the M&A space?

• 28:17Speaker 05

  I think M&A is, it's a business of using trusted relationships and good advice. People are looking for someone who understands the world and is able to synthesize a lot of independent variables. Synthesizing independent variables, it's a gift that many people have. If they're, if they're good at this, they will be better at it if they use AI. They'll be faster at getting to conclusions. They'll be more imaginative at saying, well, this is the first data point that I was able to get when I asked this question, but I don't exactly feel confident that's the right answer.

• 28:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Right.

• 28:54Speaker 05

  Then we go ask the counter question. And so I think people become, it's not that they're becoming smarter, it's if they have access to more information, better information, and that allows them to have more confidence and better judgment. And I actually think it will shape the, the way everybody in this, in this field provides advice and thinks about what the expectations of the clients are going to be.

• 29:15Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, on media specifically, setting aside the deal-making question, I could see two totally, there's probably 10, but two totally different visions of what AI could mean for media. So there is the one view, it's like, anyone could be a media maker right now. Anyone could make video right now from their home office, and therefore, the value of media becomes less, media becomes less valuable, it's commoditized. The other version I could see is if you have IP, if you have a name, if you had, et cetera, AI could be this force multiplier. Maybe Tom Cruise will license nine versions of Tom Cruise, and Tom Cruise could be in 10 movies.

• 29:56Tracy Alloway?

  Are we sure that's not already happening?

• 29:57Joe Weisenthal?

  It may already be happening. I'm curious whether the clients that you talk to are more of like, I'm very anxious. Like, this is like, anyone could do what before. I took years to build a giant lot in Hollywood, and now it could be done on some computer versus, I own this thing, and I have so many more ways to make it extensible.

• 30:18Speaker 05

  Depends on how self-confident the client is.

• 30:20Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 30:21Speaker 05

  I would say if you look at incumbents in the music industry.

• 30:24Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 30:25Speaker 05

  They're very anxious about, uh, banned AI upending something that's been seasoned and built over a long period of time. So they look at, how do I protect myself against somebody misusing content that was created by me, or one of my clients, or one of the people that I represent, or I have a license with? So I think that's got to get sorted out. Uh, at the same time, if you are the creator, and you think, well, I just have a tool that makes my creativity that much more potent, and I've got to do something I only imagined about doing, but I could never figure out how to do it myself. Suddenly, I can create music with themes and experiences that I don't have the competence to do on my own.

• 31:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 31:07Speaker 05

  But I can figure out how to get it. And that's incredibly powerful. And I believe that will be a phenomenon that impacts how media is both created and what becomes popular, and people's expectations for how do they get entertained? What's going to be vivid enough that they want to buy it? Or, uh, you know, download it?

• 31:26Tracy Alloway?

  Do you have a sense of whether back catalogs or libraries of content are getting more valuable or less valuable right now?

• 31:33Speaker 05

  Well, they have been getting more valuable over the past, uh, let's say 10 years. In part, you've had people who'd wanted to securitize the cash flows coming from them, right? I actually think that there's a lot to be said for familiarity and, uh, things that have already been seasoned, and they're widely appreciated. So I actually think it will get more valuable, and I think AI is likely to make existing contents in catalogs more valuable, because it will find more uses for existing content. We're going to be, maybe AI will create an environment in which we're going to find, it will be pulsed by different types of media content in ways we never imagined before. And rather than be barraged by it and resent it,

• 32:17Speaker 05

  AI is going to be smart enough to figure out, how do I do this so it's actually appealing to people? You know, you think about a, maybe a progenitor of AI, that it is actually created with all the same tools. What makes TikTok so, so attractive to people?

• 32:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Sure.

• 32:32Speaker 05

  Why are people drawn to TikToks? It's because the algorithms designed by Yikeng Zhang, you know, a decade ago, and the teams that he built in China to develop the way that the system worked was incredibly positive. He is, by the way, uh, the one person who would say, he is, uh, the only Chinese person, or only Chinese, uh, company, to have created something that the rest of the world really wants to buy, because it's totally unique, and it was developed there.

• 33:03Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it's really extraordinary, and it's a really breakthrough. If Tracy and I went to LA, could we find a, um, startup, agent, or et cetera, pitching us on the idea that, like, let me clone your voice, and, um, have, you could produce 10 extra content? Is that a thing that's happening right now?

• 33:23Speaker 05

  I believe it is. I believe you'll find lots of people encouraging you to try things that are out of your comfort zone, but have great upside potential.

• 33:31Tracy Alloway?

  All right, so one of the reasons we wanted to talk to you is you've been in finance, there are a number of reasons, but you've been in finance for many decades now, I think since the 1980s. So you've lived through multiple cycles of, you know, top of the market, and then the inevitable bust. From your vantage point as an M&A guy, you see a lot of deals that come to fruition. I imagine you see a lot of deals that just remain in the sort of talked about stage. Are there certain ideas that you start to see when markets are beginning to get a little bit crazy, a little bit irrational, that you think to yourself, well, wait a second, maybe we're getting ahead of our skis a little bit?

• 34:11Speaker 05

  It's interesting. I think there's a, um, not a frenzy, but an appetite for deals right now, on the part of people who think about changing what they have, or making it better by doing a deal that they didn't imagine they would be able to get done five years ago. There's a sense that now the world is open to this kind of transaction. And if you don't do it, you're probably going to lose the opportunity. This is not something that we found is a persistent condition. There will be other things that get in the way. Uh, you know, the financial markets won't be as open. You'll have a regulatory environment that would be more resistant. So I actually think the bias on the part of corporate boards and decision makers is to be pro-deal, in a way that we see from time to time.

• 34:55Speaker 05

  But I don't think we see it as something that lasts forever. You have to take advantage of it when it's there.

• 35:01Joe Weisenthal?

  I have one last question. A friend of mine said something to me very interesting. We use this term M&A, it's come up. And he's like, and he does M&A professionally. He's like, you know, Joe, it's just, hey, there's no mergers anymore. And I started thinking, it's like, yeah, you know, it's a Citigroup travelers, that's old, AWO all-time.

• 35:19Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, but this was always true. Whenever there was a merger, someone would always be acquiring someone else.

• 35:24Joe Weisenthal?

  But almost it all seems acquisitions. Are there still the M's?

• 35:28Speaker 05

  Look, M is just a way of describing you're putting two companies together that generally are in the same size category.

• 35:34Joe Weisenthal?

  Roughly the same size, yeah.

• 35:35Speaker 05

  Right, and then sometimes you'll end up with board members coming from both sides, and you split the management teams. That part of M never, never lasts. There are things that are done to make the deal happen. You're giving people, uh, the space to say, I, I think this is a smart thing to do. I was able to sell at a premium, or I was able to merge at a premium, so my shareholders will be comfortable. But a year after the deal is done, you have to get used to the, the world that you have. And, uh, leadership and the influence to make decisions for the company tends to, uh, consolidate into a set of hands that may not be exactly where you started.

• 36:12Tracy Alloway?

  All right, Gene Sykes, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. Thank you Futureproof for having us once again, and thank you to our lovely audience. Really appreciate you being here today.

• 36:20Joe Weisenthal?

  Thank you so much.

• 36:34Tracy Alloway?

  That was our conversation with Gene Sykes, recorded live at the Futureproof Conference.

• 36:39Joe Weisenthal?

  Really enjoyed it, learned a lot. I am more inclined to maybe come.

• 36:43Tracy Alloway?

  This is the question, are you going to come in 2028?

• 36:46Joe Weisenthal?

  I still think it sounds like a mess, but he made a pretty compelling sales. I mean, he's a banker at Goldman Sachs. If there's someone who I would expect to be able to make a pretty compelling sales pitch, it would be him. But maybe it won't be the total mess that I have in my head of what it'd be. So I'm open to it.

• 37:04Tracy Alloway?

  I'm going to watch it on TV and contribute to the air rights financing.

• 37:08Joe Weisenthal?

  You know what I might do? I might get like some really cheap tickets, like the kayaking event, or something like that. Or ping pong would be really fun, and probably not too expensive compared to, say, track and field. So I'm open to it.

• 37:22Tracy Alloway?

  All right, shall we leave it there for now?

• 37:23Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's leave it there.

• 37:24Tracy Alloway?

  Okay, this has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at TracyAlloway.

• 37:29Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at TheStalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at CarmenArmond, Dashell Bennett at Dashbot, Cale Brooks at CaleBrooks, and Kevin Lozano at KevinLloydLozano.

• 37:41Tracy Alloway?

  And for more Odd Lots content, you should check out our daily newsletter. You can find that at Bloomberg.com/oddlots.

• 37:46Joe Weisenthal?

  And you could chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.

• 37:53Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoyed this conversation, then please like the video, or leave a comment, or better yet, subscribe.

• 37:59Joe Weisenthal?

  Thanks for watching and listening.

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