00:00:02 Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios. 00:00:04 Speaker 2: Podcasts. 00:00:05 Speaker 3: Radio. News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the OddLots Podcast. I'm Tracey Alloway. 00:00:21 Speaker 1: And I'm Joe Weisenthal. 00:00:23 Speaker 3: Joe, we are here in lovely Huntington Beach at the Future Proof Conference. 00:00:27 Speaker 1: I love coming to this conference. 00:00:29 Speaker 2: You can't complain. 00:00:30 Speaker 3: The beach is right there. 00:00:31 Speaker 1: They do such a good job. 00:00:33 Speaker 4: 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. 00:00:51 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:00:52 Speaker 4: And it's like it was right there. And the question I have is, why doesn't everyone live here? 00:00:56 Speaker 3: OK, 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 on stage 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. 00:01:16 Speaker 1: Gene, thank you so much for joining us. 00:01:18 Speaker 2: Happy to be here. 00:01:19 Speaker 1: Let's start really simple. 00:01:21 Speaker 4: We can save the tough questions for the end, but let's start really simple. 00:01:25 Speaker 1: You wear many hats, Goldman, the Olympics. What are you up to now? 00:01:29 Speaker 2: Tell us who you are, maybe. 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. 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 spent 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, I became a member of the International Olympic Committee. So I sort of see the entire Olympic, Paralympic landscape. 00:02:47 Speaker 3: When I think about the Olympics, I'm not big into sports. OK, like I'm not not Sidney 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? 00:03:05 Speaker 2: The vibes? 00:03:06 Speaker 3: What does it actually look like? 00:03:07 Speaker 2: 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 Liu 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 skews toward women more than toward men. 00:03:40 Speaker 3: Really? 00:03:41 Speaker 4: 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 like 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? 00:04:09 Speaker 2: 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. 00:04:20 Speaker 3: That's enough. 00:04:21 Speaker 2: Not that much. 600 athletes, let's say. I mean, 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 the World Cup. You know, it's not everything, but it's maybe 90% of everything you can imagine in the world of sports. 00:04:59 Speaker 3: 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 LA games? Because I keep reading headlines saying the first privately funded games. I'm not sure that's true. 00:05:19 Speaker 2: 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 quite a security event for sure. The idea of the privately funded games 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 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. 00:06:21 Speaker 1: I have some friends in L.A. and they have a house here. 00:06:24 Speaker 4: And they're like, by the way, we're thinking of renting out the house to people coming. 00:06:28 Speaker 1: But if you wanted to come, we would let you stay in the house. 00:06:31 Speaker 3: They would give up the money for you, Joe. Yeah. 00:06:33 Speaker 2: But to my mind. That's a good deal. I take it. 00:06:35 Speaker 1: I know it's a good deal. 00:06:36 Speaker 4: 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 buy a ticket. 00:07:04 Speaker 2: I mean, L.A. 00:07:05 Speaker 3: Traffic is bad at the best of times, right? 00:07:07 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:07:08 Speaker 2: Well, I don't know. The best of times, it's not bad. 00:07:11 Speaker 1: Four in the morning, the best of times, it's not bad. 00:07:15 Speaker 2: To give you some comfort, people said the same thing about the 84 games. We hosted the games in 1984. A lot of people said, I'm going to leave because the traffic is going to be so bad. And 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 going to happen. They do. People behave based on what they know and what they're expecting to happen. That plus the fact that you're going to have a lot of very elaborate planning for how you get traffic moving around through what will be called Olympic lanes. Today, they're high occupancy vehicle lanes, HOV lanes. 00:07:58 Speaker 4: Oh, yeah. Am I going to have to download three apps to buy a ticket or whatever? 00:08:02 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:08:03 Speaker 2: One app, you're either going to buy your tickets in advance. Literally half the tickets have already been sold. So you want to register for the tickets. The next time the tickets are available is next year. Okay. So I think tickets you'll get 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. 00:08:29 Speaker 1: You're selling me. 00:08:30 Speaker 2: Well, think about it. All of these venues have enormous events all the time that people who operate them know exactly what to do. 00:08:37 Speaker 3: You already have accommodation, Joe. 00:08:39 Speaker 1: You should just do it. Just do it. 00:08:40 Speaker 3: So I know it's not a perfect apples for apples comparison, but, you know, the World Cup was the 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? 00:08:59 Speaker 2: 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 and Americans to be exciting and interesting. And the image that we Americans made of ourselves to the rest of the world was incredibly positive and constructive, even when the public image of American politicians may be very mixed. So I think it was a huge positive. 00:10:12 Speaker 4: I don't think in my lifetime there has been a single sporting event that the week before. 00:10:20 Speaker 1: You see all these headlines. The stadiums aren't ready. 00:10:23 Speaker 4: The grass isn't growing. The seats are still being installed. 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, etc. 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 U.S., which we could talk about in a million different ways, is going to affect attendance in one way or another. 00:10:51 Speaker 2: No. 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 priced at the market. And it's going to 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 want to 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. 00:11:24 Speaker 3: 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. 00:11:44 Speaker 2: Well, the demand is 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 2036. We don't even know where the games are going to be in 2036. And they're committed to be the media partner in the United States for those games. That's a significant amount of money. It's a billion and a half dollars or more per games to have the rights in the United States. 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 that there is huge corporate interest in sponsoring these games. They want to be part of it because they know this is going to be the biggest event in the history of the world. And I mean, that sounds crazy, but I think it will be that. And if you're here for it, you're going to say, I have just been part of something which is going to be remembered forever. 00:12:55 Speaker 3: So I lied before when I said I don't like sports. I do like football slash soccer. But one of the criticisms of of FIFA was rampant commercialization in the games, right? So, you know, 15 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? 00:13:16 Speaker 2: 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, 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 going to be any sort of advertising, it's the brand and the brand is offstage. It may be where the athletes are putting a helmet on or something. Yeah. 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. 00:13:53 Speaker 4: Let's talk about the media landscape, because you've been a dealmaker in that space for a long time. And I got first got my interest in markets during the dotcom 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 dealmaking. This very strange condition where it's not going to be the public companies making the big acquisitions, etc. 00:14:34 Speaker 1: It's like something is completely flipped. 00:14:37 Speaker 2: Well, on the one hand, this is the biggest M & A year in the history of the world. 00:14:43 Speaker 3: Really? 00:14:44 Speaker 2: Biggest year by far. We expect the M & A market to be much bigger than it was at the peak. The last peak was 2021, inflated by COVID. 00:14:54 Speaker 3: Sure. 00:14:54 Speaker 2: So just keep that in mind. And it's deep. And for the past several years, 40% of the M & A market has been selling companies that were owned by private equity sponsors. 00:15:05 Speaker 1: 40%. 00:15:07 Speaker 2: This year, that's 30%. 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, 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 & A when everybody wants to have proprietary semiconductor technology. So what's what's driving the M & A market is the same phenomenon that we see driving interest in almost everything. And it's actually incredibly strong. 00:15:50 Speaker 3: Can companies buy their way into, I guess, like AI fluency or nativity? Because you see, I was reading the Goldman Sachs M & A Outlook on the beach, which is the best place to read it. And you were talking about DNA deals and this idea. 00:16:04 Speaker 2: Don't get sand on our stuff. Sorry. 00:16:07 Speaker 3: And you were talking about this idea that like a lot of the M & 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. 00:16:32 Speaker 2: Well, every startup, even in AI, has to think to themselves, what's the end game? And for 80% of the startups, the end game is selling themselves to somebody else. So I think that's in the mind of the entrepreneur who is 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. that 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. 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. 00:17:55 Speaker 4: Am I going to read an S-1 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? 00:18:12 Speaker 2: 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. 00:18:24 Speaker 4: I've always thought if people only read the S1s, they would never invest in another company because they're always so frightening. 00:18:30 Speaker 2: Maybe that's a sad comment about what people read. 00:18:32 Speaker 1: That's probably the case. 00:18:34 Speaker 3: Wait, when I read an S1, I always flip straight to the risk factors. Is that bad? 00:18:38 Speaker 1: We always do that. That's what we always do. 00:18:40 Speaker 2: We always want to see that. It's our natural draw. It's a risk. No, no, that's the journalist prerogative. That's the journalist prerogative. Fair enough. 00:18:48 Speaker 3: 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 build out 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. 00:19:04 Speaker 2: It all got used eventually. 00:19:06 Speaker 3: It all got used eventually. But in the meantime, there was a big bubble. Do you see parallels between what's happening now? 00:19:12 Speaker 2: Well, certainly there's no way to know for sure 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 build out of the TMT internet phase in sort of 2000, 2001. Now the investors in this build out 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 an incredible turnabout. 00:20:09 Speaker 4: I have this theory and tell me if I'm wrong, that actually enterprise AI adoption is literally zero. 00:20:17 Speaker 2: And what I mean by that 2%, not 2%. 00:20:20 Speaker 3: Okay. 00:20:21 Speaker 2: Well, no, we just did an analysis and we said it's 2% today. 00:20:26 Speaker 1: 2%. 00:20:26 Speaker 3: And what I mean, at least. 00:20:28 Speaker 1: In my mind is like, sure. 00:20:29 Speaker 4: Has every company gotten their employees like a chat GPT or Claude subscription? 00:20:35 Speaker 2: Yeah, sure. Probably. 00:20:36 Speaker 4: But like, you know, if it's the if it's the usage of like, oh, I'm going on the Oddlots 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 a glorified search. 00:20:52 Speaker 1: When you look at companies. in the range. Have you seen any sense in which incumbent. 00:20:59 Speaker 4: 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? 00:21:09 Speaker 2: 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 are. 00:21:33 Speaker 2: You know, we have enormous numbers of prompts about things that we use AI to do. And all of 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 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 achieve. 00:22:07 Speaker 3: 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? 00:22:36 Speaker 2: I think M & A is 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 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. Let me 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 way everybody in this field provides advice and thinks about what the expectations of the clients are going to be. 00:23:35 Speaker 4: You know, on media specifically, setting aside the deal-making question, I could see two totally– there's probably ten, 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 valuable. 00:23:58 Speaker 1: It's commoditized. 00:23:59 Speaker 4: The other version I could see is if you have IP, if you have a name, if you have 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. 00:24:15 Speaker 3: Are we sure that's not already happening, Jim? 00:24:17 Speaker 1: It may already be happening. 00:24:19 Speaker 4: I'm curious whether the clients that you talk to are more of like, I'm very anxious. 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. 00:24:37 Speaker 2: Depends on how self-confident the client is. Okay. I would say if you look at incumbents in the music industry, they're very anxious about bandit 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. 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'm going 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, 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 download it? 00:25:45 Speaker 3: Do you have a sense of whether back catalogs or libraries of content are getting more valuable or less valuable right now? 00:25:52 Speaker 2: Well, they have been getting more valuable over the past, let's say, 10 years. In part, you've had people who want to securitize the cash flows coming from them, right? I actually think that there is a lot to be said for familiarity and 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, AI is going to be smart enough to theoretically How do I do this so it's actually appealing to people? You think about maybe a progenitor of AI. It is actually created with all the same tools. What makes TikTok so attractive to people? Why are people drawn to TikToks? It's because the algorithms designed by Yiping Zhang 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, the one person who would say he is the only Chinese person or only Chinese 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. 00:27:22 Speaker 4: Yeah, it's really extraordinary and it's really a breakthrough. If Tracy and I went to L.A., could we find a startup agent or et cetera pitching us on the idea that like, let me clone your voice and have you could produce 10x the content? 00:27:40 Speaker 1: Is that a thing that's happening right now? 00:27:42 Speaker 2: 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. 00:27:50 Speaker 3: So one of the reasons we wanted to talk to you is you've been in finance for, 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? 00:28:30 Speaker 2: It's interesting. I think there's 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. 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. But I don't think we see it as something that lasts forever. You have to take advantage of it when it's there. 00:29:20 Speaker 4: I have one last question. A friend of mine said something to me very interesting. We use this term M & A. 00:29:25 Speaker 2: It's come up. 00:29:27 Speaker 1: And he does M & A professionally. He's like, you know, Joe, it's just A. There's no mergers anymore. 00:29:32 Speaker 4: And I started thinking, I was like, yeah, it's a Citigroup Travelers. 00:29:36 Speaker 2: That's old. 00:29:38 Speaker 1: Wait, but this was always true. 00:29:39 Speaker 3: Whenever there was a merger, someone would always be acquiring someone else. 00:29:43 Speaker 1: But almost it all seems acquisitions. Are there still the M's? 00:29:47 Speaker 2: Look, M is just a way of describing you're putting two companies together that generally are in the same size category. 00:29:54 Speaker 1: Roughly the same size, yeah. 00:29:55 Speaker 2: 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 lasts. There are things that are done to make the deal happen. You're giving people the space to say, 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 world that you have and leadership and the influence to make decisions for the company. tends to consolidate into a set of hands that may not be exactly where you started. 00:30:31 Speaker 3: All right, Gene Sykes, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. Thank you, Future Proof, for having us once again. And thank you to our lovely audience. Really appreciate you being here today. 00:30:40 Speaker 1: Thank you so much. 00:30:41 Speaker 3: Thank you. That was our conversation with Gene Sykes, recorded live at the Future Proof Conference. 00:30:58 Speaker 1: Really enjoyed it. Learned a lot. I am more inclined to maybe come. 00:31:02 Speaker 3: I was going to say, this is the question. Are you going to come in 2028? 00:31:05 Speaker 4: 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. 00:31:22 Speaker 3: So. 00:31:23 Speaker 1: I'm open to it. 00:31:24 Speaker 3: I'm going to watch it on TV and contribute to the air rights financing. 00:31:27 Speaker 4: You know what I might do? I might get 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. 00:31:39 Speaker 2: So. 00:31:40 Speaker 1: I'm open to it. 00:31:41 Speaker 2: All right. 00:31:41 Speaker 3: Shall we leave it there for now? 00:31:42 Speaker 2: Let's leave it there. 00:31:43 Speaker 4: Okay. 00:31:43 Speaker 3: This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. 00:31:48 Speaker 4: And I'm Joe Weisenthal. 00:31:49 Speaker 1: You can follow me at The Stalwart. 00:31:51 Speaker 4: Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arman, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. 00:32:00 Speaker 3: And for more OddLots content, you should check out our daily newsletter. You can find that at Bloomberg.com forward slash OddLots. 00:32:05 Speaker 4: And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord, Discord.gg slash OddLots. 00:32:12 Speaker 3: And if you enjoyed this conversation, then please like the video or leave a comment or better yet, subscribe. 00:32:18 Speaker 1: Thanks for watching and listening. 00:32:28 Speaker 3: So so