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

Is Hollywood just screwed? Writers are earning less. There are fewer shoots taking place in Los Angeles. And people are freaked out about AI. But according to Hayes Davenport, things were starting to feel bad in Hollywood before chatbots showed up to the scene. Davenport — who’s written for shows like Family Guy and is now creative director of LA Material and the co-host of the fantastic Hollywood Handbook podcast — joined us on stage at the Vermont to give us a history lesson on Hollywood's steady decline from the pandemic to now. We also get into the changing norms of AI use among entertainment professionals and why Davenport is jealous of New York right now. Read more:Jon Voight Spent Months Courting Trump on Tax Help for HollywoodParamount to Settle Lawsuits, Paving Way for Warner Bros. Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News 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 Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Social media is really strange these days: Increasingly, our feeds are starting to look uncanny, as AI slop proliferates all over the Internet. And for the professionals who are tasked with making content, whether it is social media managers or creators, it has been a head-spinning time of change. In this conversation, recorded at the Vermont in Hollywood, we get a primer on social media's AI era with two veteran Internet commentators, Rachel Karten (social media consultant and the author of the Link in Bio newsletter) and Taylor Lorenz (founder of User Mag). We discuss why people are afraid to admit that they love some genres of slop, why the AI discourse is evolving so rapidly, and whether our time online is moving away from scrolling feeds to engaging with chatbots. Read more:US Rebukes Australia for Plan to Target Social Media AlgorithmsMeta’s New Muse AI App Tops Charts, Draws Strong Reviews 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 Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The story you hear nowadays is that America is struggling to make things and can't compete with China when it comes to advanced manufacturing. But of course, there's tons of high-tech stuff being produced in the US, and more and more companies are doing it out of Southern California, with factories sprouting up around Los Angeles to build things like precision metal parts and jet engines. Two founders who are actively engaged in building things in LA are Tom Mueller, founder of Impulse Space (and Employee No. 1 at SpaceX), as well as Hadrian founder Chris Power. Impulse Space is building in-space transport vehicles while Hadrian is creating autonomous factories. This episode, which was recorded live at the Vermont Hollywood, is from our first ever Odd Lots live show in LA . We talk to Chris and Tom about how the US lost its manufacturing edge and why LA is becoming a destination for people who want to make and build hardware.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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 MonthGoldman’s Snider Says Fears of US Earnings Bubble Are Misplaced 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 Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 2014, the economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick were asked by the Treasury to conduct a study on the tax burden of private business owners. It was tricky to figure out how much these sorts of business owners — auto dealers, contractors, the like — actually owed in taxes: After Reagan's 1986 tax reforms, pass-through businesses and other accounting tricks became widespread enough to obscure this class of wealthy Americans hiding in plain sight. The research they conducted led to their new book The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There, and one of their central findings is that there are about three million private business owners who have an average wealth of around $25 million. They call this group “Main Street Millionaires” and their influence on the economy and politics in the US is considerable. We speak with Zidar and Zwick today about how they measured the actual number of rich people in America by sifting through reams of tax forms, why income inequality started to rise in tandem with the growing number of pass-through businesses, and how it's possible that the collective revenue of the nation's dentists far exceeds that of the NFL. Read more:Tech’s New Rich Are Suffering From ‘Sudden Wealth Syndrome’Jobless Tech Workers Are Being Left Out of San Francisco’s AI Boom 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 Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Francis Fukuyama's essay “The End of History?” was published in the summer of 1989, a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The essay's argument — that liberal democracy would not only defeat communism, but that its partisans might, in victory, miss the “courage, imagination, and idealism” that defined the ideological battle — lives on as one of the most cited pieces of political theory in the last three decades. In his new memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man, he revisits “The End of History?” and for today's episode he talks to us about how his essay's argument has evolved in a world now defined by the intense technological change brought on by AI and by the many electoral defeats liberal democracy has suffered as of late. We also talk about how the Internet and social media are helping fuel the listlessness that “The End of History” brought about, how he uses AI, and what, if anything, will come after liberalism. Read more:Trump’s Midterm Plan Centers on Tax Cuts, MAHA and HimselfIran Ready to Escalate War Trump Says Will End After US Election Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News 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 Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

According to OpenAI President Greg Brockman, the models that escaped their sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face's servers had yet to go through alignment training. That they were able to break free of the testing environment was not a surprise to OpenAI, but what has happened since has forced them to rethink some things. Today, we talk to Brockman about what OpenAI has learned since the hacking incident and we discuss why he thinks the conversation around model development has to change. We also talk about how OpenAI collaborates and communicates with competitors like Anthropic, how he thinks models should be evaluating what counts as “good writing,” and, of course, we get his thoughts on how seriously we should be worried about the AI doomsday scenarios. Read more:OpenAI Is Open to Slowing Cutting-Edge AI, CEO Sam Altman Tells StaffTech’s New Rich Are Suffering From ‘Sudden Wealth Syndrome’ Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News 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 Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Copper demand is booming, with the metal surging another 15% this year. Copper demand has always been tightly linked to economic activity, but now it's in overdrive, thanks to data centers, electric cars, and the global push to reindustrialize everywhere. Copper prices are also rising because it's caught in the crossfire of trade wars and resource nationalism; the US is expected to place tariffs on the refined metal. According to today's guest, Robert Friedland, the founder and executive co-chairman of Ivanhoe Mines, we're not even close to having enough copper for what's coming. We talk to Friedland about opening and running copper mines around the world, and what he's learned in his 40-year long career in mining (which includes a cameo from Steve Jobs). See Odd Lots live in Los Angeles!Read more: Copper Steadies With Dip-Buying From Funds, Chinese Industry 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/oddlotsJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Greg Jensen was one of the earliest backers of both OpenAI and Anthropic, and at Bridgewater Associates, where he is the managing chief investment officer, he leads the hedge fund’s AI strategy. As an early adopter of the technology, he has a lot of thoughts on where things stand right now in terms of model capability and safety, as well as the broader economic impacts of AI. Just recently, he published an op-ed in the New York Times that proposes a “token tax,” to help mitigate the job losses that AI might cause. (Bridgewater predicts as much as 18% of US jobs might be displaced in five years.) We last spoke with Jensen in 2023, and so much of what we discussed then (like AI hallucinations) seems quaint now that models have come so far — capable of lying, cheating, and much worse. On this episode, Jensen tells us how Bridgewater is currently using AI, why there needs to be a stronger AI regulatory state, and why it feels like the AI discourse is starting to resemble the months before Covid-19 took over the world in 2020.See Odd Lots live in Los Angeles!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.