Hey everybody, it's Kai Rizdahl. Thanks for downloading this episode of the Corner Office podcast.

This time I'm talking to Dan Beckerman. He's the president and CEO of AEG. That's one of the

world's biggest presenters of sports and entertainment programming, also a subsidiary of the

Anschutz Corporation. A.EG owns or operates or is affiliated with more than 120 of the world's

biggest facilities and entertainment district. Staples Center in LA Live here in LA, the O2 in London,

Mercedes Plots in Berlin, and both the Barclay Center and PlayStation Theater in New York.

And they own a couple of sports teams, the L.A. Kings, for one, a share in the L.A. Galaxy as well.

We went out to L.A. Live and the Staples Center the other day. It's about a mile and a half away from Marketplace World Headquarters here in downtown to talk to Dan Beckerman. He gave us a little tour.

We're expecting you. Won't you have a seat?

Ready to go to work? All right, so I have to tell you, I honestly thought you'd be like up on the 50th floor of the Marriott or something instead of like the third floor or some low-rise. This is it. This is where the magic happens. One would figure the boss would have a better office. I'm just saying. You know, it's funny. We used to have offices down the street in a big office building overlooking this site when we were developing Stapel Center. So we were on the 50th floor of that. There you go. You had a better view back in the day. But you know what? It's almost like indicative of our culture a little bit. is we want to be kind of hands-on right in it.

Yeah, that makes sense. All right, so we are walking out like onto the plaza here.

Is that the deal? Yes.

Lovely day in L.A.

That's right.

So 10 years ago on this site was Staples Center and that's about it.

Yeah, it was 1998. We broke ground on Staples

Center. This was not the best part of the city. I think back then downtown LA was just known

as the Financial Center. Right. And when you look around today and you see these buildings

popping up all around us, it's become so much more than that. It's still the business center and the

financial center, but it's also the sports and entertainment center. It's the culinary center. It's

the cultural center in a lot of different ways. More to the point, it's a place where people come at night.

Absolutely. I mean, you see, so much of the development that you see as we walk around is actually residential.

...