Episode Transcript
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This week we're in the Bahamas with Sir Richard Branson.
The business tycoon, adventurer and founder of Virgin Group
details some challenges along the way to billionaire status.
The head of British Airways, youknow, came out with a sort of
caustic comment. Too young to fly, too old to
rock'n'roll. They're never going to succeed.
Reflects on his optimistic mindset.
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I think as of being just a generally positive person, you
can make positive things happen.And lessons learned from even
the most difficult days. Test pilots are incredibly
brave, you know, by pushing themselves to the limit that
particular incident will never happen again.
Our 2018 interview begins with Branson really illustrating his
passion for pushing the limits. So I wanted to start off by
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talking to you about adventure. That's obviously been such a key
part of your life, notably some of your record setting balloon
expeditions. And I wanted to take you back to
when all of a sudden you unexpectedly lose 2 full fuel
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tanks and climb perilously high.What could have happened if the
balloon continued elevating? And what are you thinking at the
time? It wouldn't have been very
pretty they if the balloon had just carried on going up, which
it looked for a horrible moment that it was going to do.
The capsule would have imploded and I wouldn't have seen you've
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seen or got got to know my grandchildren.
So, so you know, it's a strange thing when, when you, when you
embark on these wonderful adventures, you know, trying to
do something that you know, mankind has and womankind has
never managed to achieve before.You think, you know, we, you
thought of everything, but, but just because it hasn't been done
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before, there are things that gowrong that you know that, that,
that you'd never expected to go wrong.
And, and then you just have to, you know, you have to do your
best to, to deal with them. And on that particular crossing,
when we were trying to be the first to cross the Pacific and a
hot air balloon, it on paper, you know, when when, when we
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lost the fuel tanks, it looked like we didn't have a chance to
survive. I mean, I mean, you know, the
chances were, yeah, less than 1%.
We needed a needed a miracle to survive.
We knew that we'd have to go at speeds of over 200 miles an
hour. And a balloon had never been
faster than, you know, 80 miles an hour at the very, very, very
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fastest. And that was when we did the
Atlantic. You know, we managed to fly it
right into the core of the jet stream.
You know, like it this the equivalent of being right in the
middle of a river when you've, you know, you throw in a, a
stick in the river and you've got the absolute fastest stream.
And I just suddenly saw the speedometer going, you know, 100
miles, A110120130140150160170182100210220230
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and we're in a balloon. We're travelling at 230 miles an
hour. And at that speed, if we could
keep up that speed, we had a chance of making land and, and a
chance of survival. And we were aiming for Los
Angeles. We missed Los Angeles by nearly
2 1/2 thousand miles. We we ended up in the Arctic on
a frozen lake 800 miles from thenearest person.
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The only thing that saw us was aknotter that came up and gave us
a sniff and, and then just walked off.
And but we were the first to cross the Pacific in a hot air
balloon and and we'd survived, so we'd live to tell the tale.
Another moment you hadn't slept for more than 24 hours, and your
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captain jumps off the capsule, going 100 feet down into the
freezing ocean. Take it from there.
You know, our first balloon flight was to try to be the
first people to cross the Atlantic.
And a hot air balloon and pair had thrown an explosive boat and
had been worried that the cableswere cut most of the way through
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but not the whole way through. So he threw himself out of the
capsule into the sea. And because his weight had gone
and, and he wasn't a light, a light man, the, the balloon just
soared, soared back up into the air, you know, 10,011 thousand,
12,000 feet through the clouds. And I was standing on top of the
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balloon as it went up and I'd only just learnt to fly a
balloon three weeks before. And there was, you know, my my
experienced balloonist was now no longer with me.
And you're in the biggest balloon in.
Ever the biggest balloon ever flown.
And I was in trouble and I climbed back into the capsule
and, you know, I didn't think I had a lot of chance of survival.
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So I wrote a, a, a, a short noteto Holly, Holly, Sam and my wife
and telling them how much I lovethem.
And then I put my parachute on, put a life vest on, climbed back
on top of the capsule and prepared to jump.
And I knew this was the last, you know, few moments of my
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life. And, you know, I mean to be a
parachute. He's jumping into the North Sea
where it's freezing cold. Never jump.
Never done a parachute jump intowater before.
I'd lost all communication with the outside world.
So nobody knew, you know, knew where I was.
And so the chances of survival were, yeah, very, very, very
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unlikely. And, and I was looking down at
the clouds and, and I, because Iknew that the, I mean, the fuel
was almost finished, but I, I knew I had about another 20
minutes of fuel on board. And I decided just to, you know,
before I jumped, you know, just to have another 5 minutes of
life. So I climbed back into the
capsule and and I also wanted some thinking time and, and as I
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was climbing back out of the capsule, I looked up and I saw
the balloon and I thought, screwit.
I've got the biggest, you know, the biggest parachute in, in the
whole world right above me. The balloon is the parachute.
What on earth am I doing? And it sounds sort of simple
looking thinking back at it now.But anyway, so I then got back
into the capsule and I just started burning and, and taking
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the balloon down towards the sea.
About 100 feet before I hit the sea, I climbed back onto the top
and just before I hit the sea, Ithrew myself off the capsule,
away from the capsule and the capsule hit the water and then
the whole, the balloon without my weight, you know, soared back
up to 10,000 feet and, and thereI was in the sea.
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But I am a lucky jammy bastard, as they say in England.
I had arrived in the sea and a military Navy helicopter
exercise was going on at exactlythat time.
And one of those helicopters sawme jump and, and within 4 or 5
minutes there was a helicopter dropping a rope down to me to to
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hold onto and, and they yanked me to safety and, and we then
were able to go and rescue, rescue pair.
Tell about being almost docked next to a refueling ship for
seven hours, meanwhile your vessels riding 50 foot waves.
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Yeah, so we were. We were trying to break the
record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic in a boat and
and America held this beautiful trophy, the Hell's Trophy.
But we called, we called and it was for the blue ribbon of the
Atlantic. And and we ESO had put a
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refuelling ship halfway across the Atlantic and and somehow it
made a mistake. And when they filled us up with
fuel, half of it was water, halfof it was fuel.
And so when we turned the engineon it just, you know, clouds of
smoke came out of the back of the engine.
And while we were doing this, you know, this massive big
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refuelling boat was rising. We were rising.
And yeah, we were being thoroughly ill, all of us, the
smell and the stench of kerosene.
And, and, but we had a brilliantengineer on board and he used,
you know, the, the, the few filters we had left to filter
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out the water. And we then headed off towards
the UK again. But he started to run out of
filters. And Margaret Thatcher was in
power in Britain at the time. So we contacted the Prime
Minister. She, she scrambled a Nimrod.
This Nimrod flew over us. The whole, the whole of Britain
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was sort of on the edge of theirseats.
So we, we, you know, so it was afun, it was something which
everybody was participating in. This Nimrod flew over and
parachuted more, more, you know,more, more filters to us.
And it was so exciting and, and,and we on the 1st occasion we
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sank as you do and and got rescued by a banana boat.
And then on the second occasion we we were successful and
brought the record back to Britain.
And governments aren't always asnice as Britain obviously was.
What do you remember from havingto once negotiate mid air with
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the Chinese and how that strangely then resulted in
Virgin being granted rights to commercially fly to China?
So we were attempting to fly around the world in a hot air
balloon. We'd done the Atlantic, we'd
done the Pacific. To fly around the world in a hot
air balloon was going to take about 18 days.
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We, we took off from Morocco andwe headed across the
Mediterranean. We skirted Iraq.
And as we were skirting Iraq, there were American planes
coming in to, to bomb Iraq. And we were wishing, they were
wishing us good luck. We were wishing them good luck.
And we, we, we then carried on over Kazakhstan and you know,
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some of the sort of the remote places.
And then we got sucked into the Himalaya chain and it, it was
beautiful. But we were going where we
weren't meant to go. And that was towards China.
We hadn't got permission to fly over China.
And we flew over Mount Everest, we flew over K2, and we were
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just marvelling at the beauty. But the Chinese made it clear to
us that if we came into Chinese territory, they would have to
shoot us down. And so as we got closer and
closer to China, you know, I wasgetting on the phone and, you
know, to everybody I knew in Hong Kong to ask them to, you
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know, Cathay Pacific and, you know, the, the British
ambassador in China and, you know, asking them to try to
intervene with the Chinese and wasn't getting far.
And, and then I rang up my secretary at the time and I
said, can you, can you ring Downing Street so I can talk to
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Tony Blair? And, and she said, I, I don't
have the number of Downing St. and, and, and I was getting very
tired by now and I just said dial 192 directory inquiries and
ask please for the number of Downing St.
Anyway, I remember it distinctly.
I don't, don't like to behave like that.
But anyway, I did. And anyway, then Tony Blair
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intervened and, and finally the Chinese, just before we get went
into, you know, Chinese territory, they said, you know,
that, that, that, that, that we had to get, get through Chinese
territory quickly and get out ofChinese territory and they
wouldn't shoot us down. And, and the bizarre irony was
that as we flew over Shanghai, Igot another e-mail from our
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airlines saying, you won't believe this, but the Chinese
authorities have just given Virgin Atlantic permission to
fly to, to Shanghai. And we've been trying for years
to get permission. So a few minutes ago they were
planning to shoot us down. Now, Virgin Atlantic had been
given rights to fly to Shanghai and and I'm not sure whether it
was coincidence or whether they'd taken pity on us and
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decided that actually it was quite an adventure after all.
So you've rightly said you don'twant to risk your life for those
sorts of adventures anymore, butwhat do you think the chances
you'll ever do anything like that again?
I can't resist saying yes, if there's a, you know, if there's
a challenge that, that I got to regret sitting and watching
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somebody else doing on television and having said no
myself. So, you know, I think if the, if
the right challenge comes up, I,I will, I will still jump in
and, and say yes. You know, the, the, the
challenge that we are concentrating on right now is
one that, you know, has been perhaps the biggest challenge of
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my, my life and that, and that is building a space line.
And it's taken 10 years to get to, you know, to get to where we
are today. We are literally months, months
away, I think, from the space line B, you know, beginning
operations. And we're months away from
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myself and, you know, and my, you know, grown up kids going
into space. And then we're, we're months
away from, you know, from the, the sort of 750 people who
signed up, you know, starting togo into space.
So, you know, it's tremendously exciting.
It's been, you know, we've had high moments, we've had tears.
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You know, rocket science is tough and, and but we've got,
you know, the 700 best engineersin America working with us and
you know, we, we're just going through the very, very, very
final stages of the test program.
So, you know, so that will be, you know, that would be the
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culmination, I suppose, of yearsof a, of doing adventures, you
know, the day that strapped myself into a seat and, and, and
head off on Virgin Galactic intospace.
And yeah, the, the, the there's one moment in that journey where
you go from nought miles an hourto over 3000 miles an hour in
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seven seconds. And that's going to be some
rush. And, and, and then, you know,
when you actually go into space,the, the sudden hush from the
roar of the engines to complete complete tranquility and being
able to unbuckle and float around, look out through these
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beautiful windows back at back at the earth and, and, and it's
been a long time coming, but youknow, we're, we're, we, we, we
all believe that we're just about there now, right?
And that would obviously be the ultimate adventure, and you
would have succeeded in creatingthe opportunity for private
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citizens to enter space, among many other things.
Before we get into the details of that, you know, I've read
both of your books and loved them, the autobiography and then
the the new book which talks about your more recent years and
one thing that you know, was kind of interesting.
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Losing my virginity was the autograph and now finding my
virginity is the update. There you go, I was.
I was in Russia last week and they have no idea what losing my
virginity or finding my virginity means, so I had to
explain it all that well. And you almost never even we're
able to get Virgin is the name of your company because you had
to battle. Yeah.
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No, we we always. Back in the day, yeah, we had a
Really. Bizarre situation where the
authorities decided the word virgin was rude and for three or
four years they wouldn't protectit.
Protect it. And in the end, I, you know, got
the English Dictionary house. And there it said, you know,
pure, untouched, unblemished, you know, perfection.
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And so I wrote wrote to them andsaid this is the opposite of
rude. And they finally caved in and
let us register the. But but so in reading your
books, you seem to have this keen ability to almost do
whatever it takes to figure out how to make something happen.
And some of the stories are particularly funny and I wanted
to bring some of them up and getyou to recall them.
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The first of which being Tell About volunteering to your
school's headmaster that you were seeing his daughter and
then subsequently faking a suicide scare.
Well, I was the only Protestant in a Catholic school.
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The, the, the, the positive thing about the school was that
the headmaster's daughter adopted a a boy every term.
I, I, I was adopted for this particular term and, and it was
all going swimmingly well. But one day I got caught
climbing, climbing down the drain pipe from her window and,
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or from a, from the house that she was the matron of.
And, and the headmaster had me into his study.
And he said, well, I, you know, I, I, I want to know what you're
up to. And I said, well, I can't tell
you, Sir. So I, I said, he said, well, you
know, I'm, I put you on your word of honor to tell me, you
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know, and then, and I was just going through a little bit of a
religious stage. So I well said, well, something
to do with your daughter, Sir. And, and he, he, he exploded
and, and told me I was expelled for even suggesting such a
thing. And, and for some strange
reason, I wanted to finish, you know, finish the school
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schooling. So that night I, I wrote a
suicide note. I gave it to the one boy and you
would open it. And I said, you know, hand this
to the headmaster tomorrow morning.
And then I started walking very slowly up to love and sleep.
And fortunately, after a few 100yards up the hill, all the
lights of the house started going on and, and then I could
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start seeing, you know, 100 boysrunning, running after me.
And I started hurrying up a bit just to add to the, to the
excitement. Anyway, they, they, they rescued
me just before I leapt and, and they, they decided not to expel
me. And, and he gave me, yeah, he
gave me a, a, a good thorough birching instead.
So, but I think I should have just accepted being expelled.
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It would have been a lot easier.But I think I quite still quite
fancied the daughter. Your first real business student
magazine. How would you go about using a
company's competitors to get advertising?
Well, I was working out of the school phone box and you know,
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in those days you had to put money into the phone box in
order to keep keep the phone calls going.
And early on I put some money inand I got cut off.
So I rang up the operator and I said, operator, I've been cut
off and I put some money in the box and they went, oh, no
problem. So we'll just put you through.
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I thought, well that's good. And so I would keep ringing the
operator and saying I've been cut off and they would keep
putting me through. So now I had my own secretary
working for me, which was the British Telecom operator, and I
wasn't paying for the phone calls.
And then I sort of started to learn from trying to sell
advertising. In order to get the magazine
going, I didn't have any money. I needed to sell £4000 worth of
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advertising to cover the printing and the paper cost.
I learnt early on that if you said to Coke that Pepsi, you
know, were interested in taking an ad, that they would jump in
and say, well we'd better take an ad too.
If you said to National Westminster Bank that Barclays
were interested in taking out then they would jump in.
So, so I learnt the art of poolsas we call this in England quite
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early on and ended up having, you know, Pepsi and Coke because
you know, and and the National Westminster Bank and Barclays.
And how did you know manage to get enough advertising to pay
for the printing in the paper of50,000 magazines.
And the headmaster said to me, you know, you either stay at
school and do your school work or you can leave the school and
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do your magazine. And so I said, you know, just
turning 60 and I'm off, thank you very much.
And then and I left and I left school.
Why? Wouldn't journalists would come
to visit you to do stories on you?
Would you make the phones ring off the hook?
We, I would have people downstairs, the journalists
would be doing interviews and. And yeah, and I mean, it was
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going to be a very dull interview unless I could get
some excitement going. So my phone started ringing and
alas, Mick Jagger on that phone,I don't know.
Anyway, yeah, when you're, when you're building a company
without any financial backing from scratch, you need to make
it a little sexier than it than it really is.
And, and, and those early days, we, we, we just threw everything
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we could at trying to make it succeed.
So you get an interview with John Lennon.
Explain why you ultimately hireda lawyer to threaten to sue and
what ended up happening. So, so Derek Taylor, who managed
The Beatles, had promised us after I'd done an interview with
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John Lennon and it's all gone very well, that for the first
issue of the magazine we'd have a John Lennon Yoko and a single
on this on the front cover of the magazine.
And so we had Alan Aldridge do beautiful artwork around it.
We had 50,000 copies printed up and they somehow forgot to do
the single. So, so they decided that they,
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they, they said, we have an idea.
So I, I went, turned up at Apple's headquarters and John
and Yoko were there and Derek was there and they played the
record that they were going to give us.
And then Yoko and who burst intotears and, and I said, well, you
know what, what exactly is it? And they said, oh, it's that the
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heartbeat of Yoko and his dead baby that, that had, had, had
died And, and that's all it was.It was just boom, boom, boom,
boom for, you know, for 4 minutes.
And, and I said, it's not really, it's not really what we
were expecting. And I suspect foolishly, you
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know, decided not to, not to go with it.
I, I, I just think people might have felt a bit cheated, but,
and, and we, we sent a couple oflegal letters saying could you
please give us, give us a, you know, you know, get, get us a
proper record. And it didn't, it wasn't
forthcoming. And then I just, I wrote to
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Derek Taylor and just said, look, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll
survive without it. And Derek wrote me a note
saying, you know, thanks, Richard.
All, all, all, all everybody needs is love.
And, and, and we called it a day, but we had to, we had to,
you know, we had to get rid of 50,000 magazines without a,
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without that cover. And, and that set us back quite,
quite a lot at the time. Much later on in your career,
you call up The Rolling Stones manager.
What did he say to you that you almost took as a challenge and
it it seemed. Like it was, yeah.
So Prince Rupert was The RollingStones manager.
We had a record label at the time and, and I've always wanted
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to sign The Rolling Stones and, and, and their contract was
available. And I can't remember the exact
figure, but I mean, he said, right, If you can get me
6,000,000 by Monday, you know, I, I, I would seriously consider
doing a deal with you. And he was only getting 3
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million from other, other people.
So this was on a Thursday. So I then flew off to Germany,
to France, to Italy, to, you know, as many countries as I
could over the weekend getting pledges of money from all these
different territories. And, and on the Monday I rang
him up and said, you know, we have, we have your 6,000,000.
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And, and what he did, which was,you know, was fair enough.
He just went to EMI and, and, and got them to increase their 3
million to 6,000,000. And, but in the end, after a few
years later, when, when their contract came up again, he took
mercy on me. And, and by then Virgin Records
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was the most successful Independent Record label in the
world. You know, we had, you know,
Janet Jackson, we had Culture Club and Genesis and Phil
Collins. And anyway, it was really going
great guns. And we signed The Rolling
Stones, and it was a yeah, great, yeah, a great turning
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point for the record company. So the majority of your success
up to that point had been in music with Virgin Records.
And you've said before the easiest way to become a
millionaire is to start as a billionaire and buy an airline.
What are your partners say to you when you come to them with
the idea to start your own airline and when they realized
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you were actually serious? Well, Simon Draper, who ran the
record label with me, basically said that that if I went into
the airline business, our friendship would have to end or,
or, and, and that, you know, we couldn't, we could no longer
work, work together. He, because he just thought I'd,
I mean, he thought he should, heshould ring up and get the white
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coats to come and take me away and have me locked up.
Because you know, what on earth is somebody who's in the, in the
entertainment business doing, wanting to start an airline.
I was, I'd, I, I'd had a, a bad experience.
I, I've been trying to get to see my lovely lady in the Virgin
Islands and we'd been bumped, bumped by American Airlines.
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I was in Puerto Rico and, and itwas 6:00 one evening and I was
determined to get to see her. I was about 28 years old.
I went to the back of the airport and I borrowed a
blackboard. I had a plane I wrote as a joke,
Virgin Airlines one way, $39.00 to to the BBI and I went around
all the people who'd been bumpedwith me and I filled up my first
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plane. And then and when we got, when
we got to the Virgin Islands that night, you know, it was the
next day I rang up Boeing and said, do you have any second
hand 74 sevens for sale? And this wonderful salesman
called RJ Wilson, I said, if we happened to have one, but
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whatever happens, he said, Richard, you know, change the
name from Virgin because nobody will think that a name with a
company, an airline with the name Virgin would will go the
whole way. So, so, but anyway, we didn't
listen to him on that. We did get the second, the 747
and, and I think, you know, I, Imean, the reason I think my
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partners were wrong was travelling on airlines in those
days was abysmal. I mean, they, they would dump a
bit of cold chicken on your lap.There was no entertainment.
The cabin crew didn't smile because they were treated so
badly. The planes were old and rundown.
And so, you know, bring somebodyin from the entertainment world
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and liven it up and make it makeit make it a wonderful
experience. And yeah, but I'm sure.
They're rightly thinking, what do you know about an airline?
You're not a music guy. Yeah.
And the head of British Airways came out with a sort of caustic
comment. Too young to fly, too old to
rock'n'roll. They're never going to succeed.
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And then funny. Enough though, you know soon
enough you had had them pretty concerned.
What? What made you realize somebody
was messing with your airline and starting to create problems
for you? So we had about 3 or 4 planes
after two or three years and British Airways launched what
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what became famously known as the British Airways Dirty Tricks
campaign and IT and it was a kneecapping job to try to put
Virgin Atlantic out of business completely.
And we learnt about what they were up to from people who
actually worked for British Airways who were really
embarrassed to be working for a company that behaved in this
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way. So, you know, for instance, they
would have a team of people behind locked doors of British
Airways who would be ringing up our passengers pretending to be
from Virgin Atlantic, telling our passengers that the Virgin
flight was delayed and then switching them on to British
Airways. They had people intercepting our
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passengers at the airport and switching them on to British
Airways. They had teams of people going
through my rubbish bins and, andif there was a journalist that
I'd talked to, they would be going through the journalist
rubbish bins. They had people, they had people
that we had a gay nightclub in London and they would go through
the, the rubbish bins there to see if they could find any
needles or, you know, any, any signs of drugs and then report,
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report it to the newspaper. And then they would be trying
to, you know, disparage our finances and so on in the press.
So, but fortunately, you know, they denied all this.
What was the point? In which you realized you had to
take. Them to court rumors they were
managing to get the press to write about was becoming very
dangerous and very damaging. You know, if the press write
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that, you know, write about an airline and say that it's, you
know, on the verge of bankruptcyor something, you know, it can
actually become a self fulfilling prophecy.
When they denied all this, we'd sued them for libel and we ended
up winning the largest libel damages in in British history.
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It was Christmas time, so we distributed them to all our
staff equally and became known as the British Airways Christmas
Bonus. And all our staff were very,
very happy and, and, and it was such a big, you know, reward
against British Airways that they, it, it really did shut
them up. And, and, and from then on,
yeah, we've had lots of competition over the last 35
(31:43):
years, but it's been, you know, basically, you know, relatively
fair competition, not the sort of dirty tricks sort of
competition. Lord King, who was the infamous
head of British Airways. What did your interaction with
him entail when you guys ran into each other after your
victory in court? And yeah, he wasn't best
(32:03):
pleased. And actually, he ended up
stepping down from British Airways because.
Of your victory, basically. Because of our victory.
And and then but, you know, I think what it what it
illustrates is, is your reputation is all you have in
life. And you just got to be very
careful not to yeah, not to not,not to destroy that reputation.
(32:25):
And by, you know, by doing something that is, you know,
verging on illegal. I mean, you know, arguably was
it was illegal. You end up selling your music
business for a billion U.S. dollars in effort to fight off
British Airways during their attack.
(32:47):
While for a lot of money, very painful for you, not something
you wanted to do. What's the likelihood, looking
back, that you could have foughtoff British Airways without
having sold the business, you think?
It's a good question and I suspect we, we, I suspect we may
have just got away with it, but it was a hell of a risk.
(33:10):
And you know, if we'd failed to get away with it, we could have
brought both companies, our record company and our airline
crashing down. So by, by selling the record
company, the jobs in the record company were secure.
It still has the Virgin, you know, the Virgin brand on it.
It's still the most successful record label in in in Britain
(33:34):
and maybe even in the world at the moment and and and there and
all the jobs that the airline was secure as well.
So I think it was the right decision.
It gave us the financial muscle to not only combat British
Airways, but also to move Virgininto a whole, you know, a whole
(33:54):
massive new areas and and Virginbecame a sort of way of life
brand and became very exciting as a result of us having that
the resources to do it. What?
Got you interested in space, in allowing private citizens to
travel to space to begin with a.Long time ago, just as
(34:16):
perestroika was happening in Russia, I got a telephone call
and I was told that President Gorbachev was on the phone, who
was president of Russia at the time.
And he invited me to go up on a Russian spaceship, not for free
for something like, you know, 40or $50 million.
(34:39):
But nobody else had ever been, no, no private citizen had ever
been to space. And, and I, you know, I might
have been able to just about pull that money together, but I
felt it would be perceived as being a waste of money for, you
know, one individual to, to go to space.
And I, and I felt that I could put, put that money to better
use. So, so I said no, but it did, it
(35:04):
did get me thinking. And that was, you know, why not
spend that kind of money building our own space line one
day? And I didn't do it right away.
I, I waited to see whether the American government or the
Chinese government or the Russian government, whether
they'd be interested in putting you or me or people watching
this program into space. And it soon became apparent they
(35:25):
had no interest in that whatsoever.
And yeah, so in the 1990s, I registered the name Virgin
Galactic Airways. I'm I'm an optimist.
I also registered the name Virgin Intergalactic Airways.
And and we, we, we went out looking for a genius who could
build a spaceship for us. And, and we were lucky enough to
(35:48):
come across Bert Ruta, who is, was that genius and is that
genius. And he got, you know, he got
building a spaceship for us. Explain the significance of
winning your first military contract.
We, we have Virgin Galactic, which is putting yeah, people
into space. We also have Virgin Orbit, which
is putting satellites into spaceand, and, and Virgin Orbit has
(36:15):
has won quite a number of contracts recently, including
Department of Defence contracts from the American government.
And the, and the the exciting thing about that is it shows,
you know, a faith in what the team at Virgin Orbit and Virgin
Galactic are doing to have such a reputable organization
(36:36):
actually make an order from us. What role do you see space
playing in Earth's future? I, I mean, space has already
transformed how we do everythingback here on Earth.
So, you know, whether it's your mobile phone or whether it's
your iPad or all the way we communicate with each other, you
(36:58):
know, space is most likely playing a, a part in that.
What we see Virgin Galactic as and Virgin Orbit as is a, a
means to try to improve things back here on Earth.
So there's 4 billion people who are not connected.
If you're not connected, it's unlikely you're going to be able
to start a business. It's, you know, it's difficult
to get proper education for yourchildren, you know, health
(37:21):
information. It's a whole, a whole lot of
things going to hold you back. So one of the things that we're
working on is a wonderful company called Oneweb that we're
involved in to put a massive array of satellites around the
Earth. You know, maybe as many as 2 or
3000 satellites to connect those4 billion people are not
(37:44):
connected. And that's one, you know, what
111 of these sort of prime, prime purposes of, of, of our
spaceship company. Another area is point to point
travel. When Concorde disappeared many
years ago, it was the first timereally that a breakthrough
technology had just gone backwards.
I mean, we don't have supersonicair travel anymore.
(38:04):
You know, Virgin Galactic will is going to be one of one of the
companies that are going to be there pushing supersonic air
travel and, and creating supersonic air travel.
And we'll be working with partners like Boom and others to
bring bring that to the world again.
And that that's tremendously exciting.
How? Do you balance the desire to
(38:26):
pursue extraordinary achievementwith the inherent risk
associated with that? Test pilots are incredibly brave
their their job is to test a craft to its limits, to find
out, you know, all the sort of things that could potentially go
(38:47):
wrong, which is very difficult to find out on the ground before
it actually goes in the air. And, and, and, and test pilots
can make a mistake because, you know, because they're again
testing something for the first time.
And, and, you know, we had the incredibly unfortunate incident,
(39:11):
which, you know, where, where, where a test pilot did lose
their life and where the programwas set back, you know, by
nearly 3, three years. But, you know, by you know, by
pushing themselves to the limit,you know, that that that
particular incident will never happen again.
And the program will be that much more inherently safe by the
time we actually finally get passengers to fly.
(39:34):
You know, we had to ask ourselves after the accident,
you know, you know, is it worth it?
We asked the 750 people who had signed up to go to space, you
know, did they feel we should push on almost with one voice.
They said we should. We asked the 700 engineers that
work for us did they want to push on?
They they with one voice. They said they did.
(39:57):
And I think, you know, most of the public, you know, wanted us
to push on. And, you know, so we actually,
you know, took all the business in the house.
We're using another company's test pilots.
We're using another company to build the spaceship now.
Everything is in house. We've got our own test pilots,
we've got our own engineers and we feel, we feel it's extremely
(40:21):
unlikely that we'll have a repeat of what happened, but you
can never be sure when you're going through a test program.
Safety obviously is so importantto you.
You know, when your train company that had a crash many
years ago, that was solely the fault of the the track had
nothing to do with the train company.
The reason why so many lives were saved was because of the
(40:43):
extreme measures you went when construction of the train and
just, you know, making it safe. So what's it like for you
getting a call like that when there's been loss of life?
Well, it, it's happened to me twice in my lifetime and, and
I've, you know, and one of the positive things is we've, we've,
(41:04):
we've got three airlines flying millions and millions of
passengers for 35 years. And, and we've never had such a
call. So, so it's happened, you know,
once, once when a train went offits tracks and obviously with
Virgin Galactic. And then, and I mean, I with,
with Virgin Trains, I was in a cinema in Zermatt with my
(41:28):
children and like this vibratingphone just kept going in my
pocket. And, you know, generally
speaking, I don't answer phones,but there was just something
about the, the consistency of the vibration that made me look
at the phone. And, and the moment I knew that
we'd, you know, the, the train had come off the tracks, you
(41:48):
know, I knew that the first thing you've got to do as an
owner of a company, whether it'syour fault or not, you just get,
you know, get to the scene of the accident.
And, and, and that's what I did.I drove through the night and
couldn't, I couldn't get a planeat the airport was closed and
got to the, the scene of the accident first thing in the
morning. And there was an elderly lady
(42:12):
that had been killed and, and I went to the morgue to meet her
children and, and we all had a big hug.
And, and then I went, you know, to, to Meet the Press in the
field. And, and, and I think, you know,
if you, you know, you know, I think all that anybody who runs
(42:32):
a company, if, if, if there's a bad incident, the, the critical
thing is, you know, confronted head on and anybody who's
affected by it, make sure that you're there to come for them.
What? Would you say has been your
biggest failure over the years and what do you think you most
learned from it? I suspect the most notable
(42:54):
failure has been not knocking Coca-Cola off their pedestal.
Virgin Cola, Virgin Cola, we hada, we had a good try for a year
or two. It looked like we were going to
take Coke for everything they had.
We were out selling them in, in Britain in, in all all the
retailers that we were stopped and we were out selling Pepsi.
(43:16):
I then got a bit too big for my boots and I arrived in Times
Square with a Sherman tank from Britain.
I crushed all these Coke, Coke, Coca-Cola and Pepsi cans.
You know, cola was flying everywhere.
And I then turned our Sherman tanks turret onto the Coca-Cola
sign in the middle of Times Square.
(43:37):
Anyway, Coke didn't take that too kindly and the the next day
in Atlanta headquarters, they got bag fulls of suitcases of
money. They got ADC 10 on the on the
runway at Atlanta. They filled it with squat teams.
They arrived in England and retailers suddenly became very
(44:00):
wealthy and all our virgin kola disappeared off off the shelves.
Oh, for. For real, Kneecaptus.
Yeah, I mean, it was that quick,no?
No, they kneecap. They kneecaptus.
I mean, very, very systematically.
And we did not know this was going on.
I mean, they, yeah, I would ringup Tesco's and say, what are you
doing? You take a Virgin Kohler off all
the shells and they would say, Idon't know.
(44:22):
They would come up with some excuse.
But so it wasn't until about a year later that the a lady
arrived who announced to me thatshe was the new manager of
Virgin Group at Lloyd's Bank. And she we went out to dinner
and it turned out that she was the lady at Coke at the time
who'd been in charge of the kneecapping exercise.
(44:43):
And now she was my bank manager and I wasn't sure whether to
strangle her or not. You said before real leaders see
opportunities where others only see challenges.
Explain that I I. Look at everything as an
opportunity. So, you know, I'm, I'm positive
about life generally and I generally feel that you can, you
(45:05):
can find ways of solving problems and making things work.
And you know, I'm definitely a sort of glass, you know, nearly
full kind of person rather than a glass half full.
So, you know, I think I think out of, out of being just a
generally positive person, you can, you can make positive
things happen. What?
Do you think about during your decision making process?
(45:27):
So, so if I, if I come up with an idea for a new business, I
don't bring in accounting firms to cost analysis and analyse it,
you know, because one accountingfirm will say it's a good idea.
Another accounting firm will sayit's a bad idea.
So if I, if I for instance, it'sbrought in an accounting firm to
(45:48):
say, will Virgin Atlantic work? When we, when we started the
airline, I'm sure they would have said no way, but but I, but
what I knew was if I could create the kind of airline I'd
want to fly on that was exceptionally better than any
other airline flying that it waslikely that more money would
come in, in the year than going.And I'd have money left over at
(46:10):
the end of the year. And, and that turned out to be
the case because people love Virgin Atlantic.
They went out of their way to fly it.
The planes were full. And at the end of the year, you
know, we ended up getting our 2nd 747 and the end of the next
year our third and 4th 747. And so it grew.
So yeah. So my whole attitude to life is,
(46:32):
you know, if you create a new business that's the best in it's
field, it's likely to survive. When we when we took on
Coca-Cola, a can of cola, VirginCola and a can of Coke, you know
that ours may taste a little bitbetter than theirs, but we're
not exceptionally better. And, and therefore it was easy
for them to, you know, just their share might and their
(46:52):
share market dominance. They could, they could put us
out of business. But when you got British Airways
versus Virgin Atlantic, when they tried to put us out of
business, Virgin Atlantic was a much better airline.
So, you know, people didn't desert us in droves.
Explain. How you learned the difference
between net and gross? So I'm dyslexic and I was
(47:13):
hopeless at school, which is oneof the reasons I left school at
15. But I, I, I could never
comprehend things like, you know, net, net or gross.
And I would just ask people, is this is that good news or bad
news? And, and it wasn't until I was
50 that I was in a board meetingand one of the directors said,
(47:33):
pop outside a minute, Richard, you just said, is that good
news? Did you not realize whether that
was your profit or your turnover?
And I said, all right, I'd, you know, I'd admit it.
So he said, well, look, here's asheet of paper.
And he penciled in the sheet of paper blue.
And then he put a fishing net inthe, in the, in, in the blue
(47:54):
sea. And then he put some fish in the
net. And he said, right, the, the,
your, your, your profit at the end of the year, that's your net
profit. The rest is your turnover.
The sea as a whole, the fish arenot in the, in your net.
And I went, hey presto, I know the difference between net and
growth. And I never said how.
Old were you then? 50 We had the biggest private
(48:16):
group of companies in Europe andI did not know the difference
between net and growth. And so ever since then I've
been, you know, net this gross that I've been name dropping,
name dropping the 2 words, but nobody seems to be that
impressed because they all all knew the answer anyway.
But, and the other sad thing was, of course, I, I thought, I
(48:38):
thought that net was, you know, gross was the profit and, and I
realized I was making much less money than I thought I was.
How does your dyslexia affect you today I.
Think being dyslexic by and large helps people and, and I
know that when kids who are maybe watching this program and
they're struggling, struggling at school will not necessarily
(48:59):
agree with me. But I mean, the great thing
about being a dyslexic is you concentrate on the things that
you're good at and you often excel at those things.
And particularly as you get on later on in life as a dyslexic,
I, I had to become a good delegator very early on.
So I had to surround myself withgreat people, you know, because
(49:19):
I wasn't good at at mass or something, you know, had to find
people who were good at it. You know, most likely virgin who
now employs 90,000 people would not have been successful if I
hadn't been dyslexic. What about when you went
skydiving? Skydiving, different dyslexia
comes out in different ways and different people, but, but I
(49:41):
went skydiving for the first time and the guys thought he's,
as I remember him saying to me, Richard, you don't need to go
down with an instructor. You're, you're, you're, you're,
you're bitmatcher and you can, you can do it yourself.
And little did he know that I was dyslexic.
So I'm, I'm, I'm coming down on my own with two instructors
(50:02):
either side of me. And the instructor on my right
is going as I, as I'm, as I'm doing this sort of manoeuvre.
And the instructor on my left isshaking his head and I decided
to, you know, I like the instructor of my rights and he,
you know, he was doing this. So I, I pulled the cord and it
(50:22):
turned out that I pulled the cord that actually got rid of
the parachute, not the one that opened the parachute.
And that's not a great idea. And that was my dyslexia or
whatever coming out in rather a bad way.
It's rather an unfortunate time.What?
About when you were a kid. When I was a kid, nobody had
heard of the word dyslexia. It's a very strange word anyway
(50:44):
for, you know, I mean to call dyslexics because it's a really
difficult word to understand. But, and I, the people just
thought I was fake or stupid at school.
I got beaten regularly. I mean, it was a sort of English
boarding school thing that they used to do.
I, it was, it was brutal. I mean, they, they would take, I
mean, I was, I was at Santa way to boarding school at 7 1/2.
(51:07):
You know, you, you, you, you were called into the headmaster
study in your, in your pyjamas. You had to take the pyjama
bottoms down and you, you often beat until you bled.
It was, it was a very archaic system which fortunately I think
it's been banned finally in Britain a few years ago.
(51:28):
In a story that's since become famous, you're 4 years old near
your grandparents house, and your mom pushes you out of the
car a mile away. Why?
Well, I suspect I was being a bit of a brat in the back of the
car, but but she also was the kind of mother that felt that we
needed to stand on our own 2 feet.
(51:48):
And so she she would do things which most likely she would get
arrested for today. But and and I got lost in the
fields and and it ended up beingrescued by a farmer.
She. Did claim she was honking her
horn as it started. To get there, and I think I was
trying to get my own back on heras bit as well.
So even even at four I was thinking, damn you, I'm going to
(52:10):
make you sweat. How?
Did you convince your parents tolet you leave school at 16?
It took three walks around the lawn.
So the first walk my dad understandably said, you know,
you, you know, you, you should really try to finish your
education. The second way around the
(52:31):
garden, when when I said I really had decided I wanted to
leave, he started to mellow. And on the third walk around the
garden, he said, well, look, youknow, I didn't know what I
wanted to do when I was 21 leaving, you know, college.
And at least you know what you want to do, you know, go and
give it a go. And if it doesn't work out,
we'll try to get you a formal education again.
(52:53):
And, and then they were very loving, very understanding
parents. And then and it was great to
have their support. I think it helped that I was so
hopeless at school. So I suspect they also felt
there was nothing much to lose by me doing something different.
How? Much Do you think your mom being
an entrepreneur helped get you interested in business?
(53:18):
Maybe, maybe it did. I mean, yeah, she she always was
trying things. She never was successful at
trying things, but she was always trying new things.
And I'm sure that some of that must have, must have rubbed off
of me. What?
Role would you say each of them played in your lives over the
years? My mother was the most sort of
dis disciplinary. My dad was more overtly loving,
(53:42):
loving father. So I'll give you an example.
We live next to a sweet shop andmy dad used to leave his loose
change in the top drawer, his inhis bedroom and myself, my
sister one day when, when I was about 6 or 7 and she was about
four or five, we, we, we climbedonto a chair and we took some
(54:02):
money out of his top drawer. We went to the sweet shop next
door and we bought this enormouspile of sweeties.
And Missus Avonel rang up my dadand said, I think you ought to
come to the sweet shop. So he turned up and she said
that I think that you know, yourmaybe your children have
borrowed some money from you. And he looked at us and he
(54:23):
looked at Mrs. Avon and he just turned, turned on her and said
how dare you accuse my children of stealing.
He then left the left the suiteson the on the counter, took us
by our hands and walked us home.Never said anything.
And we never stole from him again.
Very. It was a very, very, very good
lesson. On another occasion my mother
(54:46):
asked him to spank me and he took me into the next door room
and he just clapped his hands very loudly and told me to cry
and, and and he gave me a bit ofwater and we wet and I went
running out and pretending to cry.
So both of them are very loving.Anyway, you were.
Married once before your marriage to your current wife,
(55:09):
Joan, of nearly 30 years, about 40.
Years. Nearly 40 years before marrying
Joan, you were thinking marriagewas starting to become less
appealing to you. What?
Before marrying Joan, I had beenmarried very briefly when, when
I was very young and she fell inlove with a musician and, and
(55:31):
went her own way and, and, and Ididn't really fancy the idea of
being hurt again and getting andgetting married again.
And so when Joan and I got together, you know, we, we
decided just to live in sin and,and have our children not get
married. And it wasn't until Holly was
(55:52):
about 10 years old, you know, I'd, I'd just come back from Los
Angeles and I, I turned to her and said, you know, do you think
mum and I should get married? And she said, yeah, that's a
lovely idea. And then she said, you know, I'm
not sure she'll have you. So I said, well, do you mind
going and asking her? So anyway, so anyway, she she
(56:12):
she went and asked for me and all, all was good but.
A key moment for you in that relationship seems to be you'd
just come home. Joan was gone.
She'd left a note for you on thetable, I believe, telling you
she was pregnant. Yeah, so I came home one day and
to to find that she was pregnantand, and, and and had left me
(56:35):
and just said if I, yeah, if I want to see her again, to give
her a ring. And why'd?
She left you. Because she wasn't sure whether
I wanted children at the time. And, and she decided she did
want to have children. And I wasn't necessarily, yeah,
ready for children. But so I sat down, thought about
it for a few moments and gave her a ring and and it couldn't
(56:56):
have been a better, you know, I mean, men are, men are terrible.
We don't, we don't like to be tied down, to be honest, you
know, and sometimes it takes thewoman to, to do the job for us.
What'd you say on the phone? We should have, we should have
dinner. I can't remember what it was,
but we, we, but no, I mean, look, it was, it was, it was
(57:19):
absolutely fantastic and, and, and it's only been, you know,
better every single day of, of our lives since.
And it was the best, the best decision of our lives.
So I'm very happy given. All your professional success in
the constant travel associated with it.
How challenging did it make it to be a present father when your
(57:43):
kids were growing up? Do you know, I would say that
I've spent more time with my kids than most fathers I know.
And the reason for that is I'm agreat believer in delegation and
I'm a great believer in working from home.
So we lived on a houseboat and Iworked on the houseboat and, and
(58:04):
the kids would literally be crawling around the floor.
I might be changing their nappy,having a meeting.
So I think I spent a lot more time with my kids than the most
fathers and, and, and as a result, you know, we're an
unbelievably close family. And I, and actually I do try to
encourage our companies to, you know, be very flexible with, you
(58:24):
know, people that work for the company.
So they can, they can, if they want to work from home, they
should be able to work from home.
If they want to work from home on a Friday and a Monday, they
should be able to do so. Not feel that you know they they
have to rigidly be in an office all the time.
Holly and Sam, you're 2 grown kids now.
What role do you see them playing, if any, long term in
(58:48):
Virgin? They're.
Both wonderfully personable. They're great with people.
Holly runs our foundation and run runs it really well.
You know, Sam has got his own little film company.
He's done wonderful films on thethe war against the war on drugs
and, you know, breaking the taboo and on about, you know, on
(59:08):
trying to sort of campaign to stop the death penalty and other
and other and other areas. You know, one day, you know,
when I decide to move on, they they will be very capable, I
think of together, you know, being a ambassador, you know,
being the two ambassadors for the Virgin Group.
And I think I think companies benefit from having faces
(59:33):
instead of just being faceless companies having, you know,
having front people. And I think that I think they'll
they can play that role really well.
Explain. How teaching Queen Noor of
Jordan's family to fly a hot airballoon uniquely positioned you
to negotiate with Saddam Husseinfor hostages.
(59:53):
So I got to know King Hussein and and Queen Noor of, of
Jordan, Yeah, through flying them in a hot air balloon over
Amman, their capital city, with their children on board and
going across the chimney tops and.
The, the people looking up at this balloon and then just
(01:00:14):
seeing their king and their queen and the Princess were
waving down at them. It was a it was a quite a
moment. And then Saddam Hussein was
holding some hostages to try to avert the allies invading him.
And I was wanted to try to see if we could, you know, get these
hostages out. And so I went and saw King
(01:00:38):
Hussein at the royal palace and I wrote a letter to Saddam
Hussein and I asked him if he could translate it for me, which
he did. And he then sent a messenger to,
to Saddam Hussein. And Saddam Hussein responded and
said, you know, yes, if you're willing to come and in, in, in
one of your 74 sevens to Baghdad, I will come to the
(01:00:59):
airport. I will bring the ill.
I'll hostages to the airport. You know, if you could bring
some medical supplies for Iraq, that would be wonderful.
And three days later, you know, we, we flew into Baghdad.
It was an eerie, incredible experience.
I mean, no plane had flown in for months and months.
(01:01:21):
The lights went on at the last minute.
And we met Saddam Hussein at theairport and, and he handed over
the hostages and, and as we leftIraqi airspace, there was a, you
know, almighty chair. And you know, when when the
second Iraq war looked like it was going to happen, you know,
I, for one was vehemently against the idea of it.
(01:01:43):
I thought it was a dreadful mistake, one of, you know, one
of the worst mistakes since the invasion of Vietnam all those
years ago. And because I got to know Saddam
Hussein, you know, briefly I thought maybe I could try to
persuade him to step down and goand live somewhere else in order
to avoid the war. And you've later reflected on
this being the biggest regret ofyour life.
(01:02:04):
Yeah, yeah, ISIS came and because of the invasion of Iraq,
I mean that that, that it was the sacking of all those police
and all the, all the military and giving them no hope after
the, after the successful invasion of Iraq that resulted
in ISIS and all the all the other horrors that have gone on,
that the whole balance between Sunnis and Shiites has has been
(01:02:27):
ruined because of it. So, so you know, so we were, we
were trying to stop it. So, so we asked Saddam Hussein,
you know, would would you be willing to entertain Nelson
Mandela coming and seeing you? And the idea was that Nelson
Mandela would arrive in in Baghdad, would persuade Saddam
(01:02:49):
Hussein to leave Baghdad to to save his countrymen and to save
an unnecessary war, and then go and live in somewhere like Libya
for the rest of his life. I asked Mandela if he would go,
and he said he would go if Kofi Annan, who was then secretary
general of the United Nations, would go with him.
I asked Kofi Annan if he would come as well, and he he agreed
(01:03:10):
to go. And then, sadly, a couple of
days before they went, the bombing started and the meeting
never took place. And, you know, who's to know,
you know, whether, you know, howhistory might have been changed
if that meeting had taken place.But but one positive thing came
out of it. And that was, you know, an idea
(01:03:32):
that, you know, if these elders like Kofi and Anne or Nelson
Mandela could have such influence over somebody like
Saddam Hussein, maybe we should get a group of elders together.
And, and Peter Gabriel and myself set up with Nelson
Mandela, a, a, a group of globalleaders who now go into conflict
(01:03:54):
regions to try to resolve conflicts.
And, and the elders started under Nelson Mandela's blessing,
with his blessing. And then you had Archbishop Tutu
running them. Now you have Kofi Annan running
them. And it's just 12 incredible men
and women who've got the, you know, maybe the, the biggest
(01:04:16):
moral authority in the world, the biggest respect in the world
of any group of people. And and they've done some
fantastic work. How about the most interesting
conversation you ever had over the years with Nelson Mandela?
Anytime he came to lunch, he would try to hit, hit you up for
a lot of money for good causes, you know, and he had lots of
(01:04:38):
good causes. So I had lunch with him and
Grash Michelle's wife, and myself and my wife and children.
And we we got through the 1st course, the second course, the
third course. We're on to the coffee.
And I was thinking, I've got away with it.
And then and then, and then he turned to me and said, oh,
Richard, by the way, last week Ihad lunch with Bill Gates and he
(01:05:01):
gave me $50 million for our halfanyway.
But no, I mean, he, he, he was just an extraordinary man who
was all always thinking about other people.
Yeah. Somebody that I, I, I think the
whole world has looked up to. And Archbishop Tutu has, you
know, continued, you know, to carry the banner ever since with
(01:05:24):
a lot of grace and good humor and.
You ended up rescuing a lot of South African health health
clubs that were in Yeah, so. So, so, so he rang me up one
day. I just got back from South
Africa. He rang me up, I was in the bath
and he said, Richard, a chain ofhealth clubs with, you know,
(01:05:45):
6000 people working there is about to go bankrupt.
I want you on the next plane down.
I want you to come and rescue the health clubs.
And, and I did get on the next plane and we did rescue the
health clubs and, and actually it's become one of our success,
most successful businesses. And so now Virgin Active has, I
don't know, over 200 health clubs in, in South Africa.
(01:06:07):
So it's the kind of thing that he is a president.
You know, not many presidents would ring up and think, you
know, he didn't even know that we had a couple of health clubs
in England, you know, wouldn't, wouldn't you know, ring up and
say come and rescue these jobs And, and it was great tell.
About the meal you once had withPresident Trump.
Well, it was the first time I'd met President Trump and he
(01:06:29):
wasn't president then. It was back in the 90s and rang
me up to invite me to his flat to have a have a meal.
And I turned up and there were just the two of us.
And it was a fairly extraordinary lunch.
He spent most of the lunch talking about his bankruptcy,
his latest bankruptcy. And during the time he was sort
(01:06:50):
of trying to save the company, he'd rung up a number of people
and asked them for financial help and how 5 people had said
they wouldn't give him financialhelp.
He then went on to say that it his life's mission was going to
be to destroy these five people.I've been brought up to look for
the best in people to. Yeah, to forgive people who, who
(01:07:12):
you know, you feel have let you down.
And and in any event, I don't believe that these people had
really let him down. They just said no when he'd
asked for financial help when itwhen, when his companies were in
trouble. So I said to him, you know, I
think it's going to eat you up. It'll won't do them any, any
good. And it seems counterproductive.
(01:07:34):
But but he he was going to have none of it.
And so I left feeling quite, youknow, it was quite a strange
lunch because I was also quite battled by why it was the main
subject of discussion rather than, you know, talking about
something maybe a bit more worthwhile.
When you had a rival television show on an American network
(01:07:55):
competing against his then show The Apprentice, what did he
write in the letter he sent you?Well, our show wasn't really a
rival, but although you seem to think of, think of it in a
letter that he wrote me, ours was more an adventure based
show. So I would take people to
different countries and put themthrough, yeah, really extreme,
(01:08:19):
extreme adventures. And but he wrote me a letter
basically saying, first of all, the show shouldn't be called The
Rebel Billionaire because I'm inthe airline business.
And I couldn't possibly be wortha billion because because people
in the airline business, you know, never make any money.
(01:08:40):
And therefore I should be effectively changing the name of
the show to something called something like the Rebel
Millionaire or something. I mean, anyway, it was just a
rather, rather a churlish letter.
And so in my new book, Finding My Virginity, I thought it would
be interesting for people to seethe correspondence and to tell
(01:09:02):
one or two of these stories because it, it, you know, it, it
shows, you know, it, it, it, it shows quite a lot.
I think about the president of America at the moment.
What did he? Subsequently, say when you next
heard from him in 2015. So in 2015, he wrote to me,
yeah, congratulating us on Virgin Galactic and yeah, very,
(01:09:26):
very pleasant note and, and. Your impression of that was
what? You know, I'm a I'm a great
believer in making up and being friends with people you may have
fallen out with in your life. And I think if it wasn't for the
fact that he was running for presidency of America, I would
have, yeah, I would have been delighted to have responded.
(01:09:47):
And, you know, but, you know, I was slightly suspicious that
that he most likely was sending notes like that to lots of
people because he was running for running to be president of
America. But anyway, you know, he's done
extraordinarily well. So, so, but it's just, I think
it's interesting for people to hear stories and people can
judge for themselves, but you know, based on stories like
(01:10:10):
this. Necker, your Oasis of a private
island in the Caribbean. How have you gone about building
the island up over the years? And what's been involved with
working to make Necker and the sister island you bought,
Mosquito Carbon Neutral? Well, we didn't have any money
(01:10:31):
to do anything with it when we bought it.
So over the years, if, if The Rolling Stones had a hit, we
bought, we'd build one house. If Janet Jack's had a hit, we'd
build another house. If the Sex Pistols had a hit,
we'd build another house. If Mike Oldfield had a hit, we'd
built another one and Genesis another one.
And so over the years we've created a beautiful island.
And then, you know, we, I, I spend a lot of time on issues,
(01:10:54):
global issues, and one of them is climate change.
And therefore it's very important that that we can set
an example ourselves. And we have a big array of solar
and, and you know, wind and, andyou know, we're almost
self-sufficient on clean energy.And by hopefully by the end of
(01:11:16):
next year, we'll be completely self-sufficient.
And then and we're also trying to roll out to many, many
islands throughout the Caribbeanand help them become
self-sufficient. How many hurricanes have you
been in? I've been in one hurricane every
10 years. The first three were
(01:11:38):
extraordinary, magnificent, beautiful.
The seas were unbelievable. Skies were unbelievable.
The wind was unbelievable, but the damage was not jet by and
large, too bad. The last hurricane was anything
but beautiful. I mean it was actually a
(01:11:58):
category 7 hurricane over 200 mile an hour winds and the
damage was horrendous. How?
At the time, were you witnessingthe severity of it?
I was with with my team in a bunker under the main house for
4 1/2 hours. We heard the screaming,
(01:12:20):
screaming wind and then sudden hush.
And then we poked our head out of the door and saw the utter
devastation that had that had happened in those first 4 1/2
hours. And then we realized that we
were in the middle of, in the eye of the hurricane.
And, and then the winds hit us from the other side.
And then we threw ourselves backinto the hurricane shelter for
(01:12:43):
another 4 1/2 hours. And then and at the end of it
all, yeah, I've never seen any, any devastation like it, you
know, buildings that are literally disappeared, not one
tree left standing. And what we were really worried
about was, you know, next to us were all our all the people who
(01:13:04):
worked on Necker Island in little, you know, wooden huts
and things. And, you know, later that day we
went over there and, and, you know, people had lost their
homes and fortunately very little life was lost, I think
because it was the daytime storm.
But the Caribbean people are so resilient and they've just, you
(01:13:24):
know, they run it around, they've helped each other.
And, and we, you know, we've gota, a foundation there with, with
Larry Page and that's done a lotof good work there.
My son's been great. And anyway, everybody,
everybody, you know, just run itaround.
I think I, I, I mean, I think one thing that this teaches us
is the reason that the hurricanewas so strong and the strongest
(01:13:46):
in history was that the sea levels were had never been so
high and so hot at, at, at this time of year.
So, and, and this is, this is the big danger of climate change
is that as, as the sea gets hotter, the Hurricanes are going
to get more strong and the damage is going to get stronger.
And, and that's one of the reasons that, you know, we're,
(01:14:09):
we're working very, very hard trying to address climate change
on a global basis and, and, and,and we'll continue to do so.
So this has been about five years in the making.
I never thought this would have happened, much less bumping into
you in North Africa only then toa month later be sitting down
(01:14:32):
with you in the Bahamas. But thank you very much.
It's been, it's been a pleasure.Thank you very much.
Cheers. After the interview, Branson
took me out for another tennis match, this time in front of the
cameras where I expectedly was awful, and we got to tag along
while he went kite surfing in the Atlantic.
You can watch all that on our YouTube channel,
youtube.com/graham Bensinger andif you enjoyed what you just
(01:14:54):
heard, please let us know. A rating and review would be the
best way to do that and would help us a ton in continuing to
grow this podcast. Thanks again for listening.