Gambling Man: The Secret Story of the World's Greatest Disruptor, Masayoshi Son with Lionel Barber
Fresh out of the studio, Lionel Barber, former editor of the Financial Times and author of "Gambling Man" joined us in a conversation to unravel the enigmatic figure of Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank Group. We began with Lionel's career journey as the former editor of Financial Times and why inspired him to work on this book. We progressed how he put together a nuanced portrait of Masa as a resilient outsider whose Korean-Japanese heritage fueled his drive to succeed in Japan's stratified society and shared stories of Masa's evolution from software distributor to global tech investor with Vision Fund. Lionel explains how this "eternal optimist" has consistently ridden technological waves for four decades while making and losing billions. He unpacks Masa's unique investment philosophy of thinking big, his revolutionary $100 billion Vision Fund that disrupted venture capital norms, and his latest half-trillion-dollar bet on AI. Throughout the conversation, Lionel reveals the complexity behind the caricature, arguing that history will remember Masa as an extraordinarily consequential figure in global tech investing despite his mixed record of spectacular wins and losses.
"They will judge Masa to have been an extraordinarily consequential investor and historic figure in world investing and tech investing because he has made not just spectacular bets—but he's made so many people rich. I mean, with other people's money. All these founders, he's given them money, he's been an enormous disruptor, and he's built global businesses. He's built a huge business in Japan on the mobile operator. So for all these reasons, I know he sometimes feels dissatisfied with his legacy, and he's now trying to build his greatest legacy in the march to artificial general intelligence. Maybe the legacy will finally be judged by whether this bet pays off. What will his role be in the AI revolution? I would say to him, 'You've done pretty well so far.' " - Lionel Barber, author of "Gambling Man"
Profile: Lionel Barber, Author of "Gambling Man: The Secret Story of the World's Greatest Disruptor, Masayoshi Son" (Amazon, Apple Books), former Editor of the Financial Times. (LinkedIn, X - formerly known as Twitter, FT Profile, Wikipedia, BlueSky)
Here is the edited transcript of our conversation:
Bernard Leong: Welcome to Analyse Asia, the premier podcast dedicated to dissecting the pulse of business technology and media in Asia. I'm Bernard Leong, and Masayoshi San, CEO of Softbank Group, remains to be one of the movers and shakers of global tech. What's the one common line that makes him larger than life? With me today, Lionel Barber, author of "Gambling Man, The Secret Story of the World's Greatest Disruptor, Masayoshi San", and former editor of the Financial Times, which I'm a lifelong subscriber as well, to help us to demystify the Japanese tycoon who is now making headway even in the area I'm working on: AI. Lionel, welcome to the show.
Lionel Barber: It's great to be here, Bernard.
Bernard Leong: Of course, it's a tradition on the podcast to start with origin stories. How did you start your career and eventually became the editor of the Financial Times?
Lionel Barber: I began my career as an Englishman in Scotland, so that wasn't easy, on the paper called The Scotsman in Edinburgh, where I was a reporter, and then I worked briefly in Glasgow. From there, I went to London two and a half years later.
Bernard Leong: So you have an illustrious career in journalism and also chronicled some of the biggest, major business stories of our times. Before we dive in, how do you describe the journey of covering these stories in your own words?
Lionel Barber: Well, I was on the Scotsman and I had needed to find a speciality and something I was passionate about. I remember Mrs. Thatcher's intellectual guru, Sir Keith Joseph giving a speech in Glasgow about how interesting business was and why weren't journalists more interested in business and risk taking and entrepreneurs. So I decided to follow his advice and I became a business journalist. That's what I was on the Sunday Times. Then the Financial Times hired me in 1985. That was my passion. I did write about politics [and] I've interviewed a lot of world leaders during my time, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Li Keqiang, Wen Jiabao, not Lee Kuan Yew, unfortunately, although I've met him. So, but all through this time, I was trying to write about business and the economy and understand how the modern world worked.
Bernard Leong: I will add some of the really great investigative journalism that's done by the Financial Times as well.
Lionel Barber: Yes, I led the Wirecard story, which we did some great work on [see FT's coverage on Wirecard]. That was probably one of the biggest investigations that I oversaw as editor during my 14 years at the Financial Times. I was very proud of that story, but we did other work too. I've always thought that investigative journalism, i.e. deep reporting is a very important part of being a great journalist.
Bernard Leong: Yes, and it still is today. So looking back, what were the biggest lessons you learned from your career journey that you can share with a younger audience out there?
Lionel Barber: Stay curious. Don't be cynical. You've got to be able to have an open mind when you're a reporter and journalist. Reporting is not about having opinions, it's about finding facts. And then show a bit of humility and humour, because if you're sitting opposite a very powerful person, male or female, you need to listen.
Show some humility. Don't think that you're the most important person in the room. My final advice is when you're interviewing somebody, don't fill the silence. Actually wait for the other person to keep speaking. The biggest mistake of all for journalists is to fill the silence during an interview.
Bernard Leong: Thank you for the advice. I'll bear that in mind when I interview my next guest.
That comes to the main story of the day. I want to talk about your new book, Gambling Man, because I have been looking forward to a book. Because the only other biography about the person you cover, Masayoshi San, the current CEO of SoftBank, has been a fan-boy book. So to start off, of course, I've really enjoyed the Gambling Man. It took me within two days to finish the whole book, reading page to page. So having covered global business leaders for years, what stood out to you about Masayoshi San?
Lionel Barber: Well, he's just been there at the heart of the action. In all the big tech investing stories, for more than four decades. I describe him as this "Forrest Gump" type character. He's there and he's either trying to buy the company or a piece of the company. He's made some of the most spectacular bets on Yahoo early, on Alibaba, and latterly on Arm, the British semiconductor design company. They've come up, but he's also lost lots of money. He lost about 97 percent of his paper wealth when the dot com bubble burst. So that made him a very interesting character to me because, bottom line, follow the money. If there's lots of money, there's bound to be good stories and a lot of good characters to write about.
Bernard Leong: What is the one thing you know about Masayoshi San after researching and writing this book that very few do?
Lionel Barber: I think he is enormously resilient. I think people overlook this. They look at the big mouth, the big promises. The talk of creating trillion dollar companies lasting 300 years, all this and what they miss is the essence of the character and crucially, and I'm sure we'll talk a bit about this, the fact that he's an outsider in his own society in a very stratified society in Japan. He's Korean-Japanese, and that gives him tremendous motivation to succeed. Somebody said to me, the thing you need to understand about Masayoshi San is: he has the biggest chip on his shoulder that of anybody you'll ever meet. I think that's a bit harsh, but there is something which we can discuss about his character that I find very interesting.
Bernard Leong: That comes to the core part of the title: Gambling Man, suggests that risk taking part as the defining trait of Masa San. Can you elaborate on the core themes of the book then?
Lionel Barber: Obviously, somebody who loses and gains tens of billions of dollars in personal wealth and takes this giant risk taking is something of a gambler. Now, he would say that he's worked it all out, I don't believe that all the time. I think he acts on instinct, so that sense of explaining the giant risk taking appetite. How do you do that? Why does he do it? That's a very important thing. The theme of the outsider and also the theme of riding the technological wave of the last four decades from the microchip to the internet, to the mobile internet, and now artificial intelligence. I mean, he's ridden that wave consistently for more than four decades. Guess what? He still survived. He's not given up. He's not moved on like Jeff Bezos at Amazon or Bill Gates. He's still there at the head of SoftBank.
Bernard Leong: I also find that he's like an eternal optimist. He's always thinking about the next wave and the next and the next next wave there as well.
Lionel Barber: Yeah, that's a very good way of putting it, Bernard, that he's an eternal optimist. I think he's never down, or he can be down, but he's not a pessimist about what he thinks is the right thing to do or the right direction of technology or markets. He looks long term and he's always bouncing back because he thinks there's another opportunity to make money, to succeed with an interesting idea.
He is, by the way, very curious still, which is a strength. But yeah, the power of optimism, but there's also something which I think you asked a great question, which is what does some people do they or don't they not know? I think there's something slightly unfulfilled about him. There's something a bit sad. He's never satisfied. I describe him once as like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill and then it always comes down, but he's back again. So there's something. Yeah, that's optimism, but there's also something slightly tragic actually.
Bernard Leong: Yeah, that's true. There's never an end point to something for him.
Lionel Barber: Yes, exactly. That's about that. He talked to me about that in the last interview that I did with him in Tokyo.
Bernard Leong: Because he's based in Japan and most Asian leaders tend to be secretive and don't really talk much about their story. What are the biggest challenges in documenting his story for you?
Lionel Barber: Bernard, he is very secretive. He's one of the most secretive people I've ever met. He really doesn't like to talk about where he lives, what he's doing, his schedule, his plans. Everything is secretive, because he wants to surprise people, but also he's a very private man. I mean, I decided not to go deep into his family, not because there are dark secrets, I don't think there are, but it's very difficult because he doesn't want to talk about that.
He did face, in the late 90s, some kidnapping threats because he got close and worked closely with Rupert Murdoch when they were buying and setting up a satellite TV joint venture. So you've got to respect him on that, but also there's a cultural problem. I mean, I don't speak Japanese. I visited when I was editor of the Financial Times because we were bought by Nikkei. I visited Japan 14 times in four years to cement the relationship, but I don't speak Japanese. I did five trips to Japan in 14 months to see Masayoshi San. By the way, twice he said he was too busy which he talked about the challenges. That's a challenge. The other challenge is just trying to penetrate what is a very well constructed narrative where he tells the same stories again and again and again that everybody else has retailed. So I wanted to penetrate that. So one way of doing that was to talk to other people who've worked with him, particularly in the West. But that's another story. But there were significant challenges. It cost, by the way, a lot of money to travel around the world all the time to Japan and to Silicon Valley, you know, more than half a dozen times. So that's a challenge too.
Bernard Leong: Of course, it comes up to this, the product of this work. And I probably been looking forward to a book like this to read. So one thing that I do draw from the biography is that Masayoshi Son's Korean heritage and his father's pachinko business have actually played quite a big role in shaping his worldview. How does his upbringing influence also his approach to business?
Lionel Barber: Well, his father grew up. He was born in 1936, so he went through the war, which was terrible. Obviously, for Koreans in Japan, they were non-citizens. Remember the family? The grandfather came in 1917 and worked in a coal mine and the grandmother 10 years later. So they were economic migrants, and father born in 36 after the war. It's a catastrophe. The war for Japan. Obviously, after [the devestation of] nuclear atomic bombs, they go back to Korea and they're rejected by their own families and cousins. So they go back to Japan and they're living in a slum. I mean, it's a shantytown. Masa is born in 1957. His father was originally a bootlegger selling moonshine, and then a pig breeder, and then a loan shark, and then Pachinko, he buys pachinko parlors. So he's in the underground economy. I mean, dealing with the underworld a bit, it's very dark and shady. He makes money, but Masa, crucially, the influence of his parents is one, he is a hustler. Two, he decides: "I don't want to go that way. I want to work in the open, in a new business. The way he deals with this is he tells his parents, I'm leaving for America. I'm going to go to high school, I'm going to go to college in America." Now that's a huge break. He's the second son in the family. It's a liberation to learn English because it gives him a new tool. But it also makes him very special when he goes back to Japan because he says, first of all, I'm going to be Korean Japanese. I'm going to live under my own name. Not like my parents, not have a Japanese alias, Yasumoto, I'm going to be called Son. I'm going to have a new business, which is software distribution. So all this makes him very different from his parents and his father, but he certainly knows how to hustle.
Bernard Leong: You have clearly laid out the aspects of that family background that somehow has been overlooked in terms of understanding his entrepreneur mindset. He does have a very unique entrepreneurial story. What do you think from the coverage of the biography? What do you think were the defining moments that shaped him as a business leader?
Lionel Barber: Well, the first was he couldn't get credit. He couldn't get bank loans as an entrepreneur with starting his own company. Can you believe that? For a new business. I mean, can you think of the greater odds and obstacles? So he needed people to help and he got some help from older people who gave him some advice and also stood for him right at the beginning. So that's the very first serious moment where he breaks that he can get the money. He's living a bit on the edge, but he's also chosen a new product line, which is distribution of software in 1981. That's important. Another defining moment was that he decides to invest in America. He's buying businesses in telemarketing and then a trade fair, very important in Las Vegas. Because suddenly he's meeting all these famous people and he's running the show at the trade fair, you know, people like Larry Ellison of Oracle, Steve Jobs of Apple. That's how they meet. So he's a great networker. I think that was very important. I mean, there are numerous places, but I'd say in the early days the other one is obviously he makes loads of money, richest man in the world for three days. Think about that in February 2000 and then it all goes. He loses 97 percent of his wealth in the dot com bubble, but he pivots to saying, "I'm going to create a broadband business". So those are some of the pivotal moments and obviously buying Vodafone Japan, the mobile operator and creating his own mobile phone business.
Bernard Leong: So that's where I find it's very interesting about Masa. How did he manage to build from this small software distributor where the origins of when Softbank started, followed by purchase of tech conferences, and getting distributorship, then subsequently, pivot into a kind of a global tech conglomerate with a telco that challenges the likes of KDDI and NTT DoCoMo? Then there was his ownership of ARM. Okay, because I'm from Cambridge University. ARM is one, it's almost like the Intel to Silicon Valley. The ARM founders helped Cambridge University with all the sponsorship. I know the founders myself as well. Then that was Masa's reputation of a great investor.
Lionel Barber: You know, these are great questions. First of all, he understands where technology is going. So starting with software distribution is fine. I mean, he becomes the number one distributor, but that's obviously not enough for scale. He's always been interested in investing. So you have to distinguish these two roles, which by the way is often overlooked.
He can play the role of both investor and operator. When he focuses, but he's looking to build an empire. I mean, he talks about empire almost like Imperial Japan. He wants to be a global player. So it's never enough just to be number one in Japan. He wants to build an empire so that first manifests itself with having stakes in more than 400 companies. Can you believe that during the dot com bubble? But when he goes into broadband and takes on the most powerful operator, once the most valuable company in the world, NTT Docomo. He understands he needs scale for the empire. That's why he goes in for the lever. I believe it's bit of Vodafone Japan, but then that's not enough. He wants to replicate the model in America. So he buys Sprint. He talks about a company worth a trillion dollars. Then there's the pivot to "I need to be investing. I see that the giant tech bubble, maybe not a bubble, but you know, these companies like Google, like Facebook, like Amazon, they're huge companies, I want a piece of that". So that's when he starts investing and he creates the vision fund: to invest or turbo charge tech companies around built around the Internet and mobile.
Bernard Leong: Yeah, it would have been bad of me not to forget about Yahoo Japan as well.
Lionel Barber: Very important. Well, Bernard, that's very important because of what we're seeing now with Open AI. The key thing is when he buys the stake in Yahoo, he gets 40%. There's this great conversation with co-founder Jerry Yang, who I interviewed. Yang basically says, "I don't need your money, and I don't need 100 million." Masa looks at him and says, "Everybody needs 100 million". There's a bit of the mafia about that. But the crucial thing is, he says, "I'm investing in you, I'm giving you the money, but I want the name Yahoo, and I want to have my own Japan e-commerce business. So you give me your whole Japan" Jerry Young says, "Well, we can't fund or give you all the people". Then Masa says, "I'll do it myself. I just need the name." That's what he does. He brings American technology and know-how to his domestic market. He's the great middleman in that respect.
Bernard Leong: So this is the part where I find pretty interesting and because you have actually met and interviewed Masa. Masa has seamlessly switched between being a business operator and an investor. From your conversations with him and your research about him, do you find one of these roles are more natural for him? Or maybe for him, it's just both sides of the same coin. They see he's able to switch between them.
Lionel Barber: I think he can play both roles. He's flexible, but what people who worked with him a long time and know him say is the question is when he focuses or not, and his mind works very quickly. I mean, he falls in and out of love with people. He has enthusiasm [on something]. One day he will be spending six weeks designing in great detail the new city of Neom with all the tech around it. He's like an architect. He has that artistic streak, by the way. I mean, he can go into tremendous detail. He can be an operator like with Sprint, but on the other hand he likes to go to the tables. He likes to be investing in companies. So there's a tension between the two roles. Sometimes that tension proves to be quite strong. But I definitely think it's wrong just to call him a gambler or just an investor. I think he really does go deep into technology. He can operate. Whether by the way, we haven't talked about this, but how good is he at managing people? I mean, that's maybe a question mark. So if you're talking about an all-around CEO leader, I mean, he does tend to fall in and out of love with people. He plays and lets people feud and fight within the company, which is sometimes not great.
Bernard Leong: That's where the audacious bets comes in, right? You think of Alibaba and WeWork. What does his investment philosophy actually reveals about his mindset?
Lionel Barber: Think big. I mean, he just falls in love with people who think that they can take over the world. People like Adam Neumann, this Jesus Christ like figure from Israel at WeWork. And, you know, they almost egg each other on. They're encouraging each other to talk bigger. The other thing is: he'll never talk to you about profit and loss. He's not interested in that. He's just interested in growth, in revenue, total accessible market. He wants to see if he'd go on a plane and he'd come and see people, people would come to Tokyo and I've talked to somebody who was hoping to get 50 million. Masa said, "No, not 50 million. You need 500 million." The guy didn't know what to do with the money. But Masa is saying, you need the money, think big and go for scale.
Bernard Leong: That's the part that some people can think that scale and go beyond that. We're talking about some of the successes like Jack Ma of Alibaba, maybe Sam Altman with Open AI and et cetera. There are some very good stories as well, but then there's also the spectacular bets that gone south to like the WeWorks and others.
Lionel Barber: That's right, yeah. Bernard, let me just say one word on Alibaba. The fact is that Jack Ma did not say to Masa in that first meeting in Beijing in 1999, he didn't say, I'm going to take over the world. Massa understood the potential of a Chinese eBay with Alibaba, and then Masa also really helps. I interviewed Joe Tsai, the co-founder of Alibaba. He mentioned that Masa really helped to develop the B2B business with Alibaba and should take great credit for that.
Bernard Leong: That's the part where you actually review some things that people thinks that he's just only investing, but the bets that come out, actually his involvement, his involvement is far more greater than what is actually shown in the open. This is the part of the story that I really enjoy books like yours, when you dive very deep into that person and really figure out what are the things that are real and what are the things that actually the normal people's perception is not correct. I mean, I hear a lot of U.S. podcasts. They are always looking to him as like some fool, clown or joker, but I don't think they understand what is Masa really good at.
Lionel Barber: Again, Bernard, you've put your finger on the button there that that's exactly right. It's easy to see him in terms of a caricature, like he's this Yoda figure just because he's not very tall, and he does joke, but that doesn't mean to say he's actually a very serious person. By the way, he used the joker role to obscure his serious intent. He has also read Sun Tzu's Art of War. He's very good at deception. That's the way he plays things, so people underestimate him.
Bernard Leong: Given SoftBank's mixed record, there are two parts to the Vision Fund. The first part is there was a very good coverage from your book about how the vision fund is actually assembled together. Many people just read the headlines, but I think as in how he came to doing the fund. Would you want to elaborate on that?
Lionel Barber: Well, he clearly imagined that he would completely change the model of investment funds. By the way, I'll explain why I don't think this is a VC [venture capital] fund. I mean, everybody, he definitely disrupted the venture capital market, but the way the fund worked was not like a venture capital fund. Basically, he decided to throw a wall of money at everybody at founders, but also at the venture capital industry. So while normally people would go for say a 5 billion fund, that would be high. He said, not even 20 billion. He suddenly says he's on an airplane to the Gulf. He's going to Qatar, and then on to the UAE and Saudi Arabia. He basically says, "No, I want a hundred billion dollars." Now this is completely different from everybody. Then he gets the 60 billion: 45 billion from Saudi Arabia, 15 from the Emiratis. So he's got a gigantic war chest. Now, there are two issues here, at least. One is, he guarantees as part of the negotiations to give the Saudis, the Emiratis and the other LPs, a 7 percent coupon. So he's already down, he's having to give 7 percent annually, right? Irrespective of the returns. The second thing is he's not investing in startups. He's investing in companies that have been around for, say, five to six years. WeWork, Uber, and he's force feeding the companies. He says turbocharging. I like force feeding. He thinks that's the fastest way to growth. When he gets into difficulty with WeWork, instead of saying, well, okay, it didn't work, because in venture capital, you know, some work, some don't. It's about moonshots. He decides to stick with it. He bails it out, goes in even deeper. So he's breaking all these normal rules. But overall he's trying to make a huge amount of money off a huge amount of money. As people say, most people can only make a huge amount of money off a low amount of money. That's the way it works in and this is what's called the power law.
Bernard Leong: Yes, he got the ARM deal correct. The DoorDash deal is also correct.
Lionel Barber: Correct. I mean, on ARM, by the way, he bought ARM, this wonderful company that, as you say, based in Cambridge, and I did interview the founder, Herman Hauser, Masa was ridiculous, talking about the Internet of Things and ARM. But he paid 32 billion in cash, and he got the company in 15 days. Can you believe it? In 2015, but that was a year before the vision fund. So he put ARM in the vision fund later for a large portion of it. Actually that transaction took place before.
Bernard Leong: So given the relentless drive and also the willingness to take risks, do you think that Massa has actually changed the way how modern tech investing actually works? Because I do recall VCs making this point to me once is there's another exit strategy, sell to SoftBank.
Lionel Barber: Yeah, he obviously has changed the way investors work. People felt that they had to respond in this venture capital arms race. So he comes up with 100 billion, Tiger Global, they suddenly were amassing large amounts of money. Look at Anderson Horowitz now on around the AI fund. Look at Sequoia in Silicon Valley. They all had to bulk up to match Masa's firepower. Now, he disrupted their party, so he's really despised by a lot of people in the venture capital industry in Silicon Valley. He's admired in some quarters as very creative. Basically they didn't like the competition, but they also didn't like the way in which he arguably unrealistically forced up valuations by putting so much money in and increased the risk of a crash. You had something of a crash just before the COVID pandemic and Masa obviously then lost a lot of money. The Vision Fund now is okay. I mean, you would have done slightly better with in just investing in ordinary equities. The Vision Fund too is, you know, not good at all. So his record in that sense is quite, somewhat indifferent, although you've mentioned a couple of hits. I mean, it is a bit like a pop album, isn't it? He's got a couple of great songs, but the whole album, not so good.
Bernard Leong: Yeah, but the story still remains to be told, right? I mean, there's still Open AI and we still do not know how far this is going to go as well.
Lionel Barber: Yeah. Well, this is the big new story. And I was very pleased because I've just come back from America. I've been there for just over two weeks. And would you believe it, but the day of the publication of my book, Gambling Man, Massa announces that he's not putting just a hundred billion dollars in OpenAI. He's putting five hundred billion dollars. He's teamed up with Sam Altman's OpenAI and Larry Ellison of Oracle. I mean, he couldn't make this up in the Stargate venture.
Bernard Leong: So I have two more questions. My first one is, what's the one question you wish more people would ask you about Masayoshi Son and the book?
Lionel Barber: I think, I ask him what was the hardest question.
Bernard Leong: Okay, well, I'm going to ask you now. What was the hardest question?
Lionel Barber: The hardest question was when I asked him about where he lived in Tokyo because it's a giant secret. So that was a delicate matter. You know, but I said to him, look, I've interviewed 16 people have been in your house. It's an amazing house. And you know, somebody called it Wayne Manor, which is the [ficitionalized] Batman's home because it's so secretive and underground. So I think that that's probably the hardest question.
Bernard Leong: That comes to my final question, Dan, how do you think business history will judge Masayoshi Son and what would you think his legacy would be?
Lionel Barber: I think they will judge Masa to have been an extraordinarily consequential investor and historic figure in world investing and tech investing because he has made not just spectacular bets, but he's made so many people rich, I mean, with other people's money, but all these founders, he's given them money, he's created, he's been an enormous disruptor, and he's built global businesses He's built a huge business in Japan as the mobile operator. So for all these reasons, I know he sometimes feels dissatisfied with his legacy, and he's now trying to build his greatest legacy around the march to artificial general intelligence, and maybe the legacy will be finally judged as to, you know, does this bet come off? What will his role be in the AI revolution? I would say to him, you've done pretty well so far. Let's don't mess it up at the end.
Bernard Leong: Yeah. And I just have to point out one interesting fact from your book that I really enjoyed was the part where he was announcing his so-called retirement. Then his lieutenants went to Tadashi Yanai, who is also the founder of Uniqlo, who's supposed to be Japan's richest man. Then he said, "What retirement?"
Lionel Barber: Yes, he did. There were some magic moments with people who know him. I really enjoyed talking with Mr. Yanai. He's a great figure, as you say. He is seen still as a big outsider in Japan. He's mistrusted by the elite in Japan. So he's had to overcome a lot of prejudice, and he's managed to do that.
Bernard Leong: So, Lionel, many thanks for coming on the show. I really enjoyed this conversation because this is the conversation I want to have. In closing. I have two quick ones: Any recommendations which have inspired you recently?
Lionel Barber: Of course, Bernard. I wish I could have written as good a biography, as great a biography of the one I have just read, which is a book called Titan, which is the biography of John D. Rockefeller by Ron Chernow. I think it's a brilliant, brilliant business biography, which tells you about one of the great robber barons of the late 19th century. By the way, Massa looks at the robber barons and sees what they did, wants to be, you know, in that pantheon, but that's a great book.
Bernard Leong: Yes, and my 13 year old daughter has read that book and I practice a little bit of the Masa's father parenting onto my son as well.
Lionel Barber: Oh, wow. Oh, Bernard. She's going to be amazing.
Bernard Leong: How do my audience find you and the book?
Lionel Barber: Well, do find me on Twitter, or Blue Sky at Lionel Barber. And, you can also see me in the Financial Times books that I've read. And the book is Gambling Man, you kindly mentioned, by One Signal, or Penguin Random House in the UK, and you can see that on Amazon. Anybody who likes the book, please write a recommendation.
Bernard Leong: Yes. I will definitely add a recommendation to the book on Amazon. I bought it in the Apple Books immediately to try to read it as quickly as I can. So, you can definitely find this podcast anywhere, whether Spotify, YouTube, and definitely subscribe to on LinkedIn newsletter. Lionel, I definitely think you'll be writing better and greater books and let me know when and we can come on the show and have a chat again.
Lionel Barber: Well, I've really enjoyed this, Bernard. You've asked some great questions, and I really appreciate how you've dug deep into the book and understood what I was trying to do. For a writer and an author, you know, we're very sensitive souls, so we love it when somebody appreciates what you're trying to do.
Bernard Leong: Yeah. Thank you so much for your time.
Lionel Barber: Great, I loved it. Thank you, Bernard.
Podcast Information: Bernard Leong (@bernardleong, Linkedin) hosts and produces the show. Proper credits for the intro and end music: "Energetic Sports Drive" and the episode is mixed & edited in both video and audio format by G. Thomas Craig (@gthomascraig, LinkedIn). Here are the links to watch or listen to our podcast.