It's a vision of a society transformed or soon to be transformed by artificial general intelligence.

I think he's now talking about super intelligence, where, I mean, frankly, the robots are going to be smarter than the human beings,

and they're going to take over an awful lot of tasks.

And what he wants to do is insert himself in the middle of this system.

I'm Mary Long, and that's Lionel Barber. He's the former editor-in-chief of the Financial

Times, where he worked for several decades. He's also the author of

the new book, Gambling Man, a biography about Masayoshi-San, the storied founder and CEO of SoftBank.

My colleague, Ricky Moldi, caught up with Barber for a conversation about what makes

Masayoshi-San tick, his skills as a salesperson, life at the Vision Fund, and some important questions for anyone who's tempted

to put their life savings into SoftBank.

Heads up that this interview was recorded in early January,

before it was announced that SoftBank would be working to fund

Stargate, the joint AI infrastructure venture between OpenAI, Oracle, and others. That announcement doesn't change any of the information shared in this conversation,

but we think it does make it all the more relevant.

We hope you enjoy, Fools.

As we dive into your biography, there's plenty of current events to talk about with Masa's son,

but there's an easy place to start with your book because you describe him as a fool with the

capital F is a jester. And for the fools listening, I know they'll be interested to hear why.

It's something we take seriously here at the Motley fools. You want to be foolish with the capital

F. So why is Masa son a fool? Well, in the great King Lear tradition, the fool is the person who

speaks truth to power, but also is the kind of the fly in the ointment. And in Japan, which is a very

hierarchical society, top down, they're very

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