Is this 'the World’s Craziest Investor'?

32:06Yeah, well, I'm surprised he's not a little bit more crazy about it because you basically, is it because it's trading off him, his name and his reputation? Is it like a cult of personality gone wrong in a sense? Well, it can go right as well if you think about it because without Masa, what would SoftBank be? Well, it would be a mobile telephone company business. It would have Arm. But what's called, technical term here, you almost pressed the button didn't you too excited you know it's called a conglomerate discount and what that means essentially is what you were saying that if the sum of all the parts exceed by a long way the share price of the overall group then something's wrong now I think that is a reflection of his you know what is he going to do next kind of thing and how does it hung together and also some questions about the debt i mean soft bank has over the years been one of the most indebted companies in the world i mean we had a bit of a back and forth i can say this on this show me and the uh the company because they say you know you have to take into account this and that and it's not that the number isn't as big as it seems, blah, blah.

33:29And they have been good on redeeming their bonds, often ahead of schedule and stuff. But there's no question that investors have become a bit nervous about the debt levels over time. And nervous about him and his tendency to go all in, right? Well, you want to throw your money behind the sky when you know, like, maybe long-term he's going to come good, but there's a high chance that he's going to go bust or 90 % down at some point. Do you think it's luck? No, I think there's a bit of luck, but I'm a bit more generous about Masa because I think he does really have an appreciation of the entrepreneur who's likely to make it.

34:08Now, I know he got Adam Neumann wrong on WeWork, but Jack Ma, I mean, I described this meeting where he's in Beijing in 1999, the end of the year, and he meets him barely for 20 minutes, the Alibaba co-founder, and he just says he could smell the horse flesh. I mean, this guy was going to be a great success. And he was. And I think he has been very astute at seeing potential, but also, and we haven't really talked about this, but it's very important to understand in terms of his successes, he's a middleman. He's the guy who kind of spots the blockages in the supply chain or sees an American company wants to come to Japan like Cisco or Yahoo.

34:57so I'll be your middleman I'll take a cut and then I'll also maybe use the brand name and build a business in Japan off the brand name Yahoo Japan and stuff exactly right I think you mentioned that he's not really trusted or like in Japan because he's like a bit of a renegade which is good in a conservative society but also like his founders, co-founders and people on the board they find it hard to work with him because he's very impulsive do you think that trickles down to the shareholders like he's got a reputation that he's very hard to predict. So that makes people a little bit nervous. I think that is right.

35:31But there have been times when this has become a problem. And the biggest problem was around 2019, 20. There was a tech bubble. I think you'd probably agree. Yeah. And then you had COVID, which popped it. Then central banks came in. Tech share prices come back up again. And Masa was sort of trading in and out of that. And he really was close to the edge in March 2020 when the bubble pricked. I mean, soft bank share price had just collapsed. By the way, I think that's also the soft bank share price went down very sharply in 2008 in the global financial crisis. So it's these wild swings rather than him per se.

36:18I mean, you can tie it to him. But I would argue, actually, there's a whole load, by the way, of Japanese retail investors who like Masa because he's not that sort of boring, dark suit, white shirt. Good job we're not wearing this. Yeah, I was like, I missed my guy. I got my Japanese t-shirt on. No Japanese colors here. But, you know, they see him as something exciting and offering something different, and they're prepared to take that. But another factor was that why he's maybe not respected in Japan is that he doesn't make anything. There's no, like, he's not a manufacturer. He doesn't produce, and they don't understand that.

37:01And do you think a lot of his desire to succeed is for acceptance within that community? That's a great point about not making something, Because if you think of the Japanese great companies like Toyota, Nippon Steel, the Panasonic, the consumer electronics companies, the computer companies, this is manufacturing. This is making stuff that is very tangible, mass market, and precision. whereas masa's you know it's financial engineering it's venture capital it's sort of intangible and if you add on basic japanese prejudice against koreans i mean there are still people who said to me you know he's korean or even more i mean i better not say who it was because it's a family program.

38:03You know, I asked one of, a very well-known Japanese entrepreneur in the tech area, you know, could I talk to him about Masa? And he was clearly hiding, but because the Japanese have no word for no, they wouldn't sort of, he wouldn't say no to an interview. So I finally gave up and I said, well, what would be the one question you would ask him? Because it's clearly you're very busy. So he said, just ask Masa, Why does he hate the Japanese so much? I mean, what a question. Do you think he does hate the Japanese? He lives there and he loves it, right? Yeah, but because he doesn't fit their mould, right?

38:40Exactly. He doesn't represent the Japanese. Exactly. But it was also, that to me was latent racism. And just to me, again, confirmed the prejudice towards him. And he is one of the two richest men in Japan. The other one is Tadashi Yanai, who is the founder of Uniqlo, the clothing brand, hugely successful. And Yanai was on his board for 18 years. But he too, he's not prejudiced against Masa. He has some respect for him. But he regarded him as unserious. And also has this great line about, you know, what's the problem? He says, well, you shouldn't mix clean water with dirty water. But you said that's not what it really means.

39:25I mean, that sounds awful. It's got like hidden connotations. Who's the clean water? Yeah. And he was really upset about the way Putin embraced him in the G20 summit in Osaka on another time. And he'd seen this and he thought, Masa plays dirty pool. Do you think he will influence a generation of Japanese youngsters? And that their entrepreneurship will change? Well, I think it is changing a little bit. I mean, it already has had some influence because perhaps a personal experience would illustrate this very well, which is, you know, one of my first book events, there were several Japanese in the audience.

40:09And one gentleman, he was in his probably early 30s, came over, asked me to sign a copy of Gambling Man and then said, could he take a photograph of me, a selfie, me and him? and he explained that he was a banker with Mitsubishi Bank. And then he said, because Masa is my hero, he's different. He's exciting. And a lot of the young Japanese do want to work for SoftBank because it's like a breath of fresh air. It's less hierarchical. I mean, it is hierarchical to a degree because nobody has any doubt who the big boss is and it's Masayoshi Son, head of SoftBank. But there's a lot of young, talented people.

40:51And I think the second part is that slowly Japanese companies are becoming a little less rigid in their corporate governance. They're having some, would you believe it, women on boards. Scandalous. Scandalous. Shocking. Scandalous. Shocking. And, you know, thinking about shared buybacks. There's been some quite successful activist investors getting into Japanese companies. So I think things are changing. but it's a still Japanese look it's Japan so it's a bit glacial if we zoom out from Japan and we look at the world you quote an investor who said that Masa is good for the system as long as there's not too many of him god damn you really have just and he hasn't got any underlining his hands and he opened the book this is so impressive thank you do you want a job he's got a job yeah a good job um but no but i just i want to i want to understand what you mean by that and i want to understand you know how influential are these people on the on the global market and should they be that that influential well i don't want to get too philosophical with you on this program but you know i was a financial journalist from mid 80s when i was on the sunday times then i joined the FT, the Financial Times, and I stayed on that paper and used organization for nearly 35 years.

42:15Worked in New York for four years as a senior editor and worked in London. And when I was writing about finance or organizing the coverage, the one thing I learned is that a bit of friction is important in the system. You don't want it either too cozy. You want disruptors. You want people who are going to take risks. Otherwise, you get cartels, price fixing, all this kind of thing. It's all too cozy. If you want to drive innovation, you need to have risk. And you also need to have the venture capital system. Again, it's people who are prepared to make outside bets on moonshots and stuff. And Masa does that.

42:58On the other hand, and I'm now going to come to what you were saying about the, you know, this is gigantic risk. This is betting the company. Well, if you had everybody betting the company, that wouldn't be necessarily a great idea. I mean, we all know that the world's financial system almost crashed, or certainly crashed, but almost melted down in 2008. So too much risk is definitely no good, but a certain amount of friction, and that's what Masa's done and does. So the whole time I was reading the book on this point of 2008, I was thinking, would this man exist if we didn't have near record low rates?

43:38Could he take massive amounts of risk because money was free? Bullseye. very very important to understand masa in terms of a negative or zero interest rate record low interest rate policy in japan after the crash real estate crash and stock market crash in 1989 90 obviously you know if you go back then i was around i was actually in washington at the time But, you know, those land prices in Japan, you know, the Imperial Palace worth more than - California or something. Yeah, it's just lunatic. And so it was always going to get crashed. And after that, they decided the best thing to do would be to have low interest rates.

44:25And it was like a kind of anesthetic. It's like sweet poison, put everybody to sleep. And he benefited from that. He also benefited because if he could borrow low in Japan and then convert on a favorable exchange rate into dollars, and the yen was reasonably strong, then he could make acquisitions in America. He was prepared to take those risks. And he made a number of really quite clever acquisitions in the publishing business, in the trade fair business, before the internet investments. So I think that was one benefit. The second was what we call leverage. Yeah, I was going to say, well, globalization, no, that is definitely a given.

45:17I mean, no barriers to capital flows, et cetera. He was a big beneficiary of that. But by being able to borrow and then borrow on top of borrowing, which he did very effectively to buy Vodafone Japan. Now, Vodafone Japan was part of the Vodafone empire, a great telecoms company, was huge in 2000. Vodafone Japan, not such a great band. The only thing that had going for it apparently was, not apparently, it was David Beckham. Okay. Because it's a brand ambassador motto. So apart from that, they didn't have much of a consumer. Anyway, he bought it, but it was twice as big as SoftBank, his company.

45:58So he did that by using leverage, cheap borrowing, and then paying it back through securitization, which is using the assets as collateral to pay back the loans. A question I wanted to ask you off the back of that then was, I'm going to ask you to get a bit more philosophical and in the clouds, but do you think that if we wouldn't have had massive without low interest rates, would we have had the tech industry we have today if we didn't have the financial collapse of 2008? What I mean by that is, would we have had an appetite to support businesses with no revenues to the point where they changed the world?

46:37Well, I think that was always going to come. And remember that those businesses, a lot of which were loss-making in the late 1990s, and that would include, by the way, Amazon, or an untested advertising model in Yahoo, or subscription model. Those businesses, they were real businesses. The dog walking out, not so much. So that model was already emerging in the late 1990s. So in that sense, the collapse, the dot-com collapse, Masa was right. It was a sort of interruption of a broader trend. Now, after 2008, obviously this period of record low interest rates, I think, has helped tech businesses.

47:39But in a way, isn't it more important the way in which there's been a concentration of power in big tech companies that have, you know, swallowed up the competition? you know the meta the facebook buying instagram for example or facebook buying whatsapp um arguably wouldn't that have been better to have had this competition yeah i was bemoaning uber this morning on the way here and this idea of in shittification of like you own the market by giving away we really are getting technical here so yeah what is in shittification so if you uber is the perfect example you come in and you offer a service that is so much better than the original my business model you can track the taxis and they're cheaper and you also get 10 pound if you invite a friend so they take the market on but what they don't tell anyone is you can't make any money making it that much better once they've become entrenched they then and shitify they make it crap i mean go on google at the minute and search it is notably worse than it was a few years ago because there's just ads everywhere um and uber's the same right it's surge pricing and It's hard to get a taxi.

48:46It used to be really good. So it's this idea that these monopolies, they can come in, they become part of the fabric, and then they make the service worse. So actually, this morning, I was like, just give me a black cab. Where are they? But they've been destroyed out of the market. Okay, sorry, we got sidetracked. We digress. We digress. So going forward, I don't know if you have this question already, but going forward, do you think we're in the right time of, or I guess the right economy or right special set of circumstances where we can have another Massa? Like, could there be another Massa?

49:20Massa could be the next Massa. Could I be the next Massa? Well, first of all, you'd need to seriously cut the heeled shoes. I'd get a bit more Korean. Do you think the little man thing is a thing? Like the Napoleon kind of? Oh, I do. Yeah, because he loves Napoleon, doesn't he? Yes, he does. He's got a Napoleon complex. He's Corsican outsider, Napoleon was, but empire builder, there are parallels here. But the answer to your question is no. I think Maso is really unique in terms of the mixture between operator and investor and gambler. The fact that he's Japanese, Japanese-Korean also makes him unique.

50:02Do we have people who are prepared and capable of massive disruption? Yes, look at Elon Musk in the space industry. Look what he's done to the car industry with electric vehicles. But Elon Musk, he's an innovator. Musk is not an innovator. He doesn't own proprietorial technology or anything like that. So I see him as pretty unique, I must say. He's the great spotter of trends. but there was something that stuck out, which was he sold NVIDIA too early, which obviously he sold in 2019. He made a lot of money, but he could have, that would have been the next Alibaba really, wouldn't it? He would have made hundreds of billions potentially.

50:51And now he seems to be scrambling to get back into the space a bit. What? No question that he is about, or in the middle of his fifth, maybe sixth great comeback, having been written off by investors. having been looked at askance by his big tech friends, you know, because he got it all wrong in the tech bubble. I mean, yeah, people kind of going, well, he was good on Alibaba, but what after that? Vision Fund was very mediocre performance. And then the second Vision Fund was frankly a sea of red ink. So he's now doubling and tripling down on artificial intelligence. Now, he's talked about that for 20 years.

51:38He said AI is going to be the next great thing. And the mystery is why he didn't get into AI earlier, serious, deep AI. And obviously, NVIDIA is a classic example of that, this designer of super fast, super advanced graphics chips.

52:00That company is now worth$3 trillion. was briefly most valuable company in the world. I think he kind of hedged. He took a, he had about just under 5%. And I think he needed some money. So that's why he sold. The mystery is why he didn't hold on to something. Like a 1 %? Yeah, just 1%. And then, of course, he was looking at merging NVIDIA with Arm Holdings, the British advanced semiconductor company. And I think that was where his attention was. And what he didn't realize was that the world's antitrust regulators, not just in the US where we know they've, Nina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission has been a real hardliner, but also in the UK, but also China.

52:55They were saying, we don't think we want these big tech combinations. and he failed to read the politics. So for all those reasons, he kind of took his eye off the ball when it came to NVIDIA. Now, of course, he's desperate and he's just made a$500 million investment in OpenAI, which, you know, invented chat GPT. And he's been desperately trying to woo Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI. He seems to though be, he gets enamored with people and sometimes to his detriment because the AI, you mentioned, he said AI 500 times in a speech, but then had very surface level... Over five years, yeah. Over five years, sorry.

53:36But it's the same speech. By the way, it's the same speech. Oh, is it? Okay, yeah, sorry. But then he has these surface level AI investments where people are slapping AI on as a gimmick and missed, like you say, the deep AI component. So this seems to be quite a weakness in his approach. Yeah, and if I'm honest, I think that I'm not really sure what really went wrong. I've asked some of his closest colleagues what went wrong. And one of the reasons was when he had this vision fund and he has$98.6 billion, he has to get the money out the door rather quickly. And he wasn't really paying attention.

54:15And then he had people working for his vision fund who were being marked on how much money they were literally spending on the companies. You know, that was the measure. Just, well, have you invested? Have you spent your money? I mean, this is lunatic. You're not going to have then discriminate investing. So also he was seeing people for, you know, very short, I don't know, 15, 20 minutes and signing$500 million checks. Wild. This is crazy. Gosto turned him down because they wanted like 100 and he was like, you gave him 500. They were like, we can't spend that. And they're like quite, you know, they're careful thinkers, the Gosto guys.

54:53and they're very like precise and they walked away from the money yeah and i mean i was at um as one does you know i was at a wedding in italy um the other weekend and there were a number of indian venture capital and private equity people and they all were interested in my book on massa because they'd had companies that had gone bellier and then they'd been sort of vulture you know coming in on the back of it. And they also told me a story about how, you know, this force feeding of founders, tech founders, was lunatic. So they knew people, Indian, who'd gone to Massa and literally been given three or four times the money they actually originally asked for.

55:42I mean, this is nutsville, isn't it? Yeah. That's wild. I work in venture capital. That's crazy. Yeah. I mean, we should hear more from you. This is nuts. Yeah, this is my show now. No, it is nuts because normally people go for the minimum. They never offer more than what you're asking for. That's unheard of. If you're looking for one million, no one's going to give you two million. They're probably asking for a bit more than they need anyway. Yeah, that's why everyone asks for more than they need. No one gets given more than they ask for. So it's actually unheard of. Is this because of the 7 % coupon that he promised to the Middle East that he basically needed a return?

56:16Good question. I think that might have played a little part in his mind, but it's more that memorable scene that I describe in the book where he's with Adam Neumann of WeWork, who's once billions more from SoftBank. And he goes to Tokyo and Masa is with the CEO and founder of Didi Chuching, which is the ride-hailing rival to Uber. And Didi has just beaten out your favorite company, Uber. And he calls in Adam Neumann to meet the Chinese guy and says, you know, now, Adam, look, this is the guy who's just beaten Uber. He's the big shot. And by the way, I want to ask you, you know, in a fight, who wins?

57:06You know, the crazy man, the crazy guy or not? And Neumann thinks for about two seconds and says, crazy guy. And that's what Maso is like. dream to be crazy. I'll give you more money. And then the third thing is I actually think he thinks that you can overwhelm the competition just by, you know, stuffing the company with money. And by the way, how would you like it if I say to you, take this money? And by the way, if you don't take it, I'm giving it to Deema. To your competitor, yeah. How would you like that? to take it. That's a good point. Most people would, well, a lot of people would take it, yeah.

57:49It's not a loan. It's, you know, you don't have to pay it back, right? If the business goes bust, the business goes bust and you walk away. Yeah, but it's still, yeah, you don't want your business to go bust. there's a pressure, but like, if I come to you now and go, I'll give you 300 million quid, you'd probably take it and go, I'll figure it out. Yeah, it's definitely. It's going to be hard to turn that down, isn't it? it is. Especially if the alternative is, I'll give it to your competitor. And then you're definitely done. And he was doing that. Then you're definitely done, yeah. And he would do that all the time.

58:13He did it on Uber. He said, well, I'll put it into Lyft. You know, I'll put the money. And similarly with Yahoo, if you don't take the money at Yahoo, I'll put it into Excite. It's a crazy type of hostile takeover, isn't it? Well, I think it's more than a hostile takeover. It reminds me of Al Capone. Yeah. Going over and saying, nice place you got here. Pity if something happened. Yeah, it's like racketeering almost. Yeah, yeah. You need protection. Yeah, yeah, you need protection. Yeah, yeah. You don't want something to happen to this venue. What next? Because you paint, you know, like this side of him seems, this is the side that scares me, you know, in terms of me giving me, if I was giving him my money.

59:01Do you think, coming away from it, that he's got another chapter? I do. And I think it will be through AI. I think he's still got his relationships intact. He has an important relationship with Apple. We haven't mentioned it, but I'll say that, of course, he got... The phones. Exactly. The iPhone. I read the phone, paid attention. I paid attention. Yeah, yeah. But we took over the phone company and then he bought lots of the phones. He got Steve Jobs, the legendary Apple founder, to give him the exclusive distribution contract for the Wonder product, the iPhone. And that was in 2007-8. I mean, amazing.

59:43So that saved his mobile phone business in Japan, or at least made it number two to NTT, which is the overwhelming player in telecoms and mobile. So I think he really does have another comeback act, and I think it is around AI. Because he's a big proponent of the singularity. Do you want to hit the button? You were too quick. I was like, ooh, singularity. It's broadly the idea when tech, when computers become smarter than humans, but a lot of people speak about it almost as like it's like switching on God, isn't it? It's like the moment that every problem gets solved, including dying. And Massa is on that end of the scale, isn't he?

1:00:32He thinks, I will live. 120, 130, he told somebody I absolutely believe, and I'm the guy for 20 years, he's a top Indian businessman. And Massa, with a straight face, said, you know, 120 or 130. And this singularity, this notion of when the robots become smart. When Skynet goes online. When Skynet goes online. And, you know, he thinks there's going to be amazing scientific innovation. Life will change. Society will change. And he says, and that in the last interview I did in this, you know, you've got to remember it's in Tokyo. It's in his private office. He's sitting at the head of a table, which is even longer and bigger than the one that Vladimir Putin has in the Kremlin.

1:01:21in um you know he he says that's what i want to be remembered as my legacy because i asked him that and he said i want to be at the center of the artificial general intelligence revolution which is that moment you're talking about i love it because i love that a man that is so willing to spend his money is backing that because you know i want to live forever too i'm happy that he's pouring billions into it you know go for it go for it you've got a while to go yeah yeah well Some Tesla robots with our brains in it just sitting here. Jeff's trying to get to space and says, Elon, I've not got time for that.

1:01:53I don't want to go to Mars. It's a horrible place. But him pouring his money into that, yeah, go for it. He sounds like an optimist, a tech optimist. But then the quote, it made me sad this. What a shitty life. I've done nothing that I can be proud of. This is just a mediocre shitty life. That does not sound like someone who's very optimistic about themselves or believes in themselves. so i read that quote and i used it and i've often used it because i wrestled with what he was trying to say because you could read it as he's trying to get it's sort of self-pity and get me to feel sorry for him somehow i don't think that feels quite right he's got a whole thing about his physical appearance he doesn't like being photographed he doesn't like being portrayed with his face so i think he does feel unlike all three of us that you know he's not a handsome person i mean i'm just speaking for myself you hit the nail right on the head there a bunch of dapper looking lads over here we are aren't we but so i think there's a there's a bit of that and then there's this bit which if i he pushed me i'd say this is what it's really about is he uses that that kind of self-criticism very harsh self-criticism say i haven't achieved anything as a spur to try and do greater things and it's sort of saying i'm not satisfied so you think some people may think i'm finished but actually i haven't done anything so i think it's that yeah so when he does the next ai chapter that might be his like the leg because if he's talking about legacy but he's scared to have his he doesn't like his picture taken they're kind of Again, opposing things, which seems to be a theme with him.

1:03:39But for the long term, do you think he wants to do something big with AI and be like, okay, now I've done something? To be remembered. I do. To be remembered. I absolutely do. But I also think that he's going to have to be carried out in a coffin. I mean, he is Mr. Softbank. The idea is he talked about retiring age 60 and my life will have been served. no i mean he's never going to be satisfied and i sort of liken him a bit to that greek classical tragic hero um or tragic figure sisyphus the one who's rolling the boulder up the hill and then it rolls back down and then he's got to push it back yeah that that's a sucky job

1:04:27i've done nothing that i can be proud of up and down all day you know it's like sisyphus yeah yeah yeah because something about the human condition this is it because you know reading it it's very easy to focus on the failings and go how did he pick himself up to me it's more of a marvel to have a hundred billion and be like let's go because it's like you've won you have won the game you know 35 billion now i'd be i'd be sitting comfortably he's lost a quarter of a trillion he's lost elon musk's whole net worth that i you know he's still doing very very very well yeah if he just stopped and just compounded it, you know, in relatively safe investments for a long period of time, he'd probably be right up there, wouldn't he?

1:05:05Yes. I mean, you know, if anybody's listening out there and says, I think, you know, Lionel Barber's good, his son's wrong, it's not a quarter of a trillion, it's 400 billion, that wouldn't be right. But if he says it's too high, I mean, I was just doing that in my head. You know, I only did maths. Maybe it's 150 billion. No, it's more than that because if you think, you know, anyway, it's a lot of money. He's lost enough money to put him in the top five on the rich list, you know. And it's, I mean, a lot of these guys share that trait, right? They keep going. And I think if you're the kind of person who would tap out when you get there, you're never going to get there.

1:05:44That's right. You know, you're militant. Exactly right. Yeah. I mean, I thought he was a fascinating individual. You completely changed my mind on him. I thought he was just like some degenerate gambler who was rich from birth and probably, you know, because his dad did make money and he did have a leg up. But there was also this kind of extreme poverty before it. So he's been through it all. I hope people kind of pay attention to him and the book because I do think we assume language barriers put up a big barrier, don't they? Well, that means a lot to me that if you read the book and you felt differently at the end of it, That means that I've kind of done what I was trying to do, which is get people to revisit.

1:06:25And also, you know, I don't want to get too high and mighty and in the clouds about, you know, cultural differences. But we kind of look at people we don't understand because we don't have the language. Or we have an image of, you know, somebody says, I'm like Yoda. Or talks about, feel the force. Okay, so he's small. So he's like Yoda. So he's this. And that's the instant rush to judgment. It's not a nuanced view. I mean, I think that I was trying to put something a bit like, it's a bit more complicated. I mean, yes, he's reckless, but he's also incredibly visionary. And you can have the two things in, you know, heart and one's soul.

1:07:06You know, it's a combo. And I think the lesson is for everyone to take a bit more risk, to be a little bit more master. You don't need to risk the whole empire, but you should take those risks because this guy keeps coming back and surviving. And I think if, especially in the UK, we're not very entrepreneurial. We don't stand up and... Well, I'm sure you would agree that it's taking risk. And also it's saying, okay, failure isn't a terrible thing. That's what I got from the book. It made me feel better about my small failings because they're not quite as big as his. But then again, my wind's not as big as.

1:07:38But you learn from your feelings. Jeff Bezos always says this, there's good failure and bad failure. I mean, if you're doing the same thing, exactly the same thing over and over again, that's different. but a good failure where you're trying to do something different, you're an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur, somebody put this really well for me, and it's so obvious, but it's true, is the very nature of entrepreneurialism is risk-taking. It involves risk, and if you're taking risk, that must, per se, involve failure. Yeah. With Jeff, he says around one-way and two-way doors, the decisions that, one-way door, you step through it, you can never step back.

1:08:16Prime was that. If I promise next day delivery, I can never take that away because it ruins the business. We think long and hard about that decision. But a two-way door, make the decision. If it's bad, come back. And I think most people, the risk that most people have are two-way doors. You start a little side company or hustle, it goes badly. Oh, well, I've still got my job. You know, I quit work. I can always go get another job. And I think, yeah, that was, the people you've interviewed, the greatest minds, like they're amazing. and I've added mass now to my list of people that I want to look at as someone to learn from because I am guilty of probably only following people that kind of look like me, you know, white Western males.

1:08:54Are you pointing at me? I wasn't pointing at you. You're not white Western. We're brothers, mate. We can look just alike, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, do you think that all the people that you've interviewed from Putin, Obama, do they all share a similar trait, do you think? Or are they all very different? They are different, but political leaders, by their nature, they have a pretty powerful ego. I mean, you're not a shrinking violet if you become president of the United States. Look at all the figures in history. Now, Putin is a different figure because he wasn't really elected to anything. He comes from the dark side.

1:09:35He's a secret agent. He's a KGB. and you know when i interviewed him um you know that was a completely different experience i mean it was quite chilling um but what i realized with him is that he wanted a certain degree of respect and when i prepared for the interview i i did it my prep i i talked to some people and they all said, you know, if you start trying to get at him and the interview straight up, you won't get anywhere. So give him the credit, mention the fact that, and this was in 2019, you know, he'd been in power for 20 years. Of course, he's an autocrat. He's a killer. And what came later has come later with the invasion of Ukraine, you know, but if you're going to be in there for an hour and a half, and that's what the goal was, even hopefully longer, then don't start the interview by trying to make a point.

1:10:38Or also don't do what Tucker Carlson, the TV anchor in the States, did. He goes over to the Kremlin and sort of asks a rather daft question. And Putin made him a gibbering wreck in a matter of minutes by just saying, I thought this was going to be a serious interview. With Putin, I made sure it was serious from the beginning. Do you think ego is the thing that they all share then? Oh, as leaders, yeah. Even Masa, there's an ego element. I think you talked earlier or asked earlier about self-doubt. Now, I think good leaders do have just a level of humility. I mean, not self-doubt, but humility.

1:11:22They are capable of checking in from others, with others. But I think what unites political leaders is, yeah, ego. Not much self-doubt. Speaking about ego. So we would love to get some feedback from yourself in terms of interviewing people, considering who you've interviewed and where we're at. We're very early in the game, aren't we? We've been doing this, are we 18 months? Yeah. So I have a YouTube channel, which was the start of me being a creator. And then the podcast was, Will, the producer approached me and said, do you want to start a podcast? And then we've been doing this 18 months. And I quickly learned it's a very different skill set to speaking alone to a camera.

1:11:58yeah so we'd love some feedback if you have any well this i'm not buttering your parsnips i don't eat parsnips i love that i love that or as they say in north carolina or south carolina i ain't buttering your biscuits but i think you guys have you're well on the way to doing a very good interview because you've done prep. Both of you are very good at looking at the person when you're interviewing them, which is also helpful. Whereas if you're kind of like that, that's a no-no.

1:12:42And I suppose, again, I'm just saying this because I, you know, it took years for me to get this right. I think for my first 25 plus years, when I'd be interviewing somebody important, I feel it was very, you know, I needed to be a bit overly deferential. Whereas there's a way of being politely deferential. Because, you know, when I interviewed Trump, I mean, the idea that, you know, you're going to be overly deferential with Trump and you're in the Oval Office, I mean, he's just going to wipe the floor with you. So I deliberately, you know, tried to say something that would get his attention to realize, you know, I'm not a pushover here.

1:13:26I'm serious. I'm not rude. But, you know, I said, Mr. President, thank you for seeing us today. And thank you for subscribing to the Financial Times.

1:13:41He said, that's okay. You lost. I won. You do some very good impressions. Yeah, you do the great impressions. Yeah, so did you check the database? And was he subscribed? No, I knew because the Times, Michael Gove, who was then on the Times. Sorry, yes, he was on the... No, he was a minister. Why was he in that interview? No, Rupert Murdoch interviewed Trump in Trump Tower, and I think he brought Michael Gove, but I could be wrong on that. I need to check. double check but certainly and in trump's office there was a pile of financial times on the desk and if you look at the times photograph so i knew he was a subscriber have you sat down beforehand and thought what can i say you know to to assert that little bit of power in that moment yeah i mean i spoke to putin in german so although i was polite because i speak fluent german i'm a german student and I still speak it and read it and I knew he was a KGB agent in East Germany so I thought I will say thank you very much for seeing us but I'll say it in German and I mentioned this to my colleagues said oh no and I said no no I'll do it and he spoke back to me in German he couldn't resist of course and so it went back and forth and I almost got it wrong because he he said where did you learn your german and i said actually oxford university but also in germany and he said what did you study in oxford university and i said german and modern history and it's all going well and all this is in german and then he says in german to me and what is modern history and it's it was like being hit i just shot myself exactly you know it was like being hit by a kind of sledgehammer punch right on the chin and your brain freezes and i'm thinking i've got to answer i've got to answer i've got to answer and i and it came to me after about two seconds and i said in german every modern history is everything after 1989 and he loved that and then he said okay now to business so what was the thing with masa what was the key that unlocked him Do you know, the first time I went to Tokyo, it's October 2022.

1:16:08I'm all geared up. I've read a lot of articles. I've probably done about 15 months of research. Get to Tokyo, and they say, he's too busy. I go, what? I'll come all the way to Tokyo. And the softbank flunky goes, sorry, I better not call him flunky. Nice man with smile says, you know, but there's nice weather in Tokyo. and I said, look, I'm serious. I'm going to do this book, whether you like it or not. I'm serious. I'm disappointed that Master's too busy. I know he's, you know, it's been COVID and all the rest of it, but I'm coming back and next time I want to see him. But meanwhile, I'm off to go to his hometown in the island of Kyushu and I'm going to do my homework.

1:16:58I'm going to walk around, see the schools. I'm going to go to the port where his parents, grandparents came, everything. And I'll come back. And do you know what? The key thing was when I finally did the first interview in February 2023, I'd done all that homework. I could say, no, Masa, but when you were five, you did this. Or your mother said that. And he was mind blown. He went, oh, Gajan, understand. Sorry, very politically incorrect. Didn't mean to do Masa accent. But, you know, he was saying, that's amazing, you know this. But I was kind of in a strange way, having been, you know, blown off the first time.

1:17:41I turned it into an advantage and I was able to show that I really understood his roots, his position as an outsider and where he came from. And that's the key to this biography and the key to the man.

1:17:58so master is clearly at the extreme end of the investing spectrum throwing billions on got instinct but before he got there he needed to start somewhere so what we've done is we put together an email that shows you one way that you can start investing today to main where do people access that email in their inbox in the description below well where do you access emails from Oh God, this guy. Will just said, we're gonna send one email as a cheat sheet. So how is it gonna be in the description? Wear it, wear it, wear it. Own it, own it. Just leave it, just leave it. Don't worry about it, he was right.

1:18:36He was right, I asked him, I asked him. I asked him where do you get the email? You get it in your inbox. Thank you, good night.

1:18:56Thank you.