I mean, LA traffic is bad. Yeah, the best of times, right?
Well, I don't know at the best of times. It's not bad at four in the morning. The best of times is not bad. But to me, to give you some comfort, people said the same thing about the '84 games. Okay. We hosted the games in 1984. A lot of people said, I'm going to leave because the traffic's going to be so bad, and the traffic was totally manageable. The thing about LA and traffic is if you tell people in advance that 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.
Thank you for the great introduction and thrilled to see all of you out here at Future Proof. Gene, thank you so much for joining us.
Let's start really simple. We can 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. 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, health care 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. Yeah. 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, I became a member of the International Olympic Committee. So I sort of see the entire Olympic Paralympic landscape at all levels.
So this is one of the reasons why we wanted to talk to you, because we can talk about finance and the LA games. So truly the perfect guest for this particular event. But when I think about the Olympics, I'm not big into sports. Okay. Like, I'm 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 costs down as much as possible? The vibes. What do you actually look like?
A 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.
Really? I would not have guessed that at all. You know, we obviously just had the World Cup in the US, 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 Olympic Games?
Well, 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 host for the... it's not that much. 600, 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. And it's, you know, it's not everything, but it's maybe 90% of everything you can imagine in the world of sports.
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.
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. And 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. But the idea of the privately funded games. And 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.
I have some friends in LA 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 and then they would give up the money for each other. Yeah, but to me, that's a good deal, I take it. But the flip side is like, oh my God, the traffic and the standing in lines. These are like some of my least favorite things to do in the world. Make the argument to me that if I come down to LA for the Olympics, I will actually find it a smooth experience rather than an experience where I was spending half of 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.
I mean, LA traffic is bad. It's the best of times, right? Well, I don't know at the best of times. It's not bad at four in the morning. The best of times is not bad. But to give you some comfort, people said the same thing about the '84 games. Okay, we hosted the games in 1984. A lot of people said, I'm going to leave because the traffic's 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.
Oh, yeah. So I think there will be plenty of things that they will do to make... Am I going to be standing in line forever? Am I going to have to download three apps to, like, buy a ticket or whatever?
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 it 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.
You're selling me well. Think about it.
All of these venues have enormous events all the time that people who operate them know exactly what to do. You already have accommodation, Joe. You should just do it. You should just do it.
So I know it's not a perfect apples-to-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?
Well, I certainly 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. Yeah. 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 you know that that public image of American politicians may be very mixed. Yeah. So I think it was a huge positive.
I don't think there's a single... We'll get... I want to get to media dealmaking in a second. But I don't think 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 installed, and then it all works out fine. And then in more recent sporting events, like, oh, the international tourists are 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 US, which we could talk about in a million different ways, is going to affect attendance in one way or another?
I know that 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 in a very compressed period of time, that it's a premium price to experience.
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?
Well, the demand is great. So some of this is done. It's pretty basic. 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. And 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 their media partner in the United States for those games. 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. Well, 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 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.
So I lied before when I said I don't like sports. I do like football, soccer. But one of the criticisms 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?
