Sir Richard Branson: British Entrepreneur and Virgin Group Founder

31:00Yeah, and the head of British Airways came out with a sort of caustic comment, you know, too young to fly, too old to rock and roll, they're never going to succeed. Funny enough, though, soon enough you had them pretty concerned. What made you realize somebody was messing with your airline and starting to create problems for you? So we had about three or four planes after two or three years, and British Airways launched what became famously known as the British Airways Dirty Tricks campaign. And it was a kneecapping job to try to put Virgin Atlantic out of business completely. And we learned 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 way.

31:54So, you know, for instance, they would have a team of people behind locked doors at 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 passengers at the airport and switching them on to British Airways. They had teams of people going through my rubbish bins, and if there was a journalist that I'd talked to, they would be going through the journalist's rubbish bins. They had people, we had a gay nightclub in London, And they would go through the rubbish bins there to see if they could find any needles or any signs of drugs and then report it to the newspaper.

32:39And then they would be trying to disparage our finances and so on in the press. But fortunately, they denied all this. What was the point in which you realized you had to take them to court? The amount of rumors they were managing to get the press to write about was becoming very dangerous and very damaging. You know, if the press write about an airline and say that it's on the verge of bankruptcy or something, it can actually become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When they denied all this, we sued them for libel. And we ended up winning the largest libel damages in British history. It was Christmas time, so we distributed them to all our staff equally.

33:24And it became known as the British Airways Christmas Bonus. and all our staff were very, very happy. And it was such a big reward against British Airways that it really did shut them up. And from then on, yeah, we've had lots of competition over the last 35 years, but it's been basically 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? Yeah, he wasn't best pleased. And actually, he ended up stepping down from British Airways.

34:09Because of your victory, basically. Because of our victory. But I think what it illustrates is your reputation is all you have in life. And you've just got to be very careful not to destroy that reputation. And by doing something that is verging on illegal, I mean, arguably 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. 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 fought off British Airways without having sold the business, you think?

35:02It's a good question. And I suspect we may have just got away with it. But it was a hell of a risk. And 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 selling the record company, the jobs in the record company were secure. It still has the Virgin brand on it. It's still the most successful record label in Britain, and maybe even in the world at the moment.

35:39And all the jobs at the airline were secure as well. So I think it was the right decision. And it gave us the financial muscle to not only combat British Airways, but also to move Virgin into a whole, you know, whole massive new areas. And Virgin became a sort of way of life brand and became very exciting as a result of us having the resources to do it. What got you interested in space and allowing private citizens to travel to space to begin with? A long time ago, just as peristoika 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.

36:30and he invited me to go up on a Russian spaceship, not for free, for something like$40 or$50 million, but nobody else had ever been, no private citizen had ever been to space. And 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 one individual to go to space, and I felt that I could put that money to better use. So I said no. But it did get me thinking, and that was, why not spend that kind of money building our own space line one day? And I didn't do it right away. 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.

37:24and it soon became apparent they had no interest in that whatsoever. And yeah, so in the 1990s, I registered the name Virgin Galactic Airways. I'm an optimist. I also registered the name Virgin Intergalactic Airways. And we went out looking for a genius who could build a spaceship for us. And we were lucky enough to come across Bert Routard, who was that genius and is that genius. and he got building a spaceship for us. Explain the significance of winning your first military contract. We have Virgin Galactic, which is putting people into space. We also have Virgin Orbit, which is putting satellites into space.

38:11And Virgin Orbit has won quite a number of contracts recently, including Department of Defense contracts from the American government. And the exciting thing about that is it shows a faith in what the team at Virgin Orbit and Virgin Galactic are doing to have such a reputable organization actually make an order from us. What role do you see space playing in Earth's future? I mean, space has already transformed how we do everything back 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 know, space is most likely playing a part in that.

39:02What we see Virgin Galactic as and Virgin Orbit as is a means to try to improve things back here on Earth. So there's four 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 difficult to get proper education for your children, health information. There's a whole lot of things that are 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 two or three thousand satellites to connect those four billion people are not connected.

39:46And that's one, you know, one of the sort of prime purposes of our spaceship company. Another area is point-to-point travel. When Concorde disappeared many years ago, it was the first time really that a breakthrough technology had just gone backwards. I mean, we don't have supersonic air travel anymore. Virgin Galactic is going to be one of the companies that are going to be there pushing supersonic air travel and creating supersonic air travel. And we'll be working with partners like Boom and others to bring that to the world again. And that's tremendously exciting. How do you balance the desire to pursue extraordinary achievement with the inherent risk associated with that?

40:34Test pilots are incredibly brave. Their job is to test a craft to its limits, to find out all the sort of things that could potentially go wrong, which is very difficult to find out on the ground before it actually goes in the air. And test pilots can make a mistake because they're, again, testing something for the first time. And, you know, we had the incredibly unfortunate incident, which, you know, where a test pilot did lose their life and where the program was set back, you know, by nearly three years. But, you know, by pushing themselves to the limit, you know, that particular incident will never happen again.

41:28And the program will be that much more inherently safe by the time we actually finally get passengers to fly. You know, we had to ask ourselves after the accident, you know, is it worth it? We asked the 750 people who'd 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 worked for us, did they want to push on? With one voice, they said they did. and I think most of the public wanted us to push on. And so we actually took all the business in-house. We're using another company's test pilots. We're using another company to build the spaceship.

42:10Now everything is in-house. We've got our own test pilots. We've got our own engineers. And we feel it's extremely 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 important to you. You know, when your train company had a crash many years ago that was solely the fault of the track, had nothing to do with the train company. The reason why so many lives were saved was because of the extreme measures you went in 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?

42:58It's happened to me twice in my lifetime. And one of the positive things is we've got three airlines flying millions and millions of passengers for 35 years. And we've never had such a call. So it's happened once when a train went off its tracks. and obviously with Virgin Galactic. And then, I mean, with Virgin Trains, I was in a cinema in Zermatt with my children and this vibrating phone just kept going in my pocket. And generally speaking, I don't answer the phones, but there was just something about the consistency of the vibration that made me look at the phone. and the moment I knew that the train had come off the tracks, I knew that the first thing you've got to do as an owner of a company, whether it's your fault or not, is just get to the scene of the accident and that's what I did.

43:59I drove through the night. I couldn't get a plane. The airport was closed and got to the scene of the accident first thing in the morning and there was an elderly lady that had been killed and I went to the morgue to meet her children and we all had a big hug and then I went to meet the press in the field and I think that anybody who runs a company, if there's a bad incident, the critical thing is confronted head on and anybody who's affected by it make sure that you're there to comfort them. What would you say has been your biggest failure over the years and what do you think you most learned from it?

44:52I suspect the most notable failure has been not knocking Coca-Cola off their pedestal. Virgin Cola? Virgin Cola. 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 Britain, in all the retailers that we were stocked. And we were out selling Pepsi. 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 Coca-Cola and Pepsi cans. Cola was flying everywhere. And I then turned our Sherman tank's turret onto the Coca-Cola sign in the middle of Times Square.

45:38Anyway, Coke didn't take that too kindly. And the next day in Atlanta headquarters, they got bagfuls of suitcases of money. They got a DC-10 on the runway at Atlanta. They filled it with squat teams. They arrived in England and retailers suddenly became very wealthy and all our virgin cola disappeared off the shells. And they basically kneecapped us. For real? Kneecapped us. I mean, it was that quick. No, they kneecapped us very systematically. And we did not know this was going on. I mean, I would ring up Tesco's and say, what are you doing? You've taken virgin cola off all the shells. And they would say, I don't know, they would come up with some excuse.

46:25So it wasn't until about a year later that a lady arrived who announced to me that she was the new manager of Virgin Group at Lloyds Bank. And we went out to dinner, and it turned out that she was the lady at Coke at the time who had been in charge of the kneecapping exercise. 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 look at everything as an opportunity. So, you know, I'm positive about life generally, and I generally feel that you can find ways of solving problems and making things work.

47:09And, 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 out of being just a generally positive person, you can make positive things happen. What do you think about during your decision-making process? So if I come up with an idea for a new business, I don't bring in accounting firms to cost analysis and analyze it, because one accounting firm will say it's a good idea, another accounting firm will say it's a bad idea. So if I, for instance, had brought in an accounting firm to say, will Virgin Atlantic work when we started the airline, I'm sure they would have said, no way.

47:56But 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 was likely that more money would come in in the year and I'd have money left over at the end of the year. And that turned out to be the case because people loved Virgin Atlantic. they went out of their way to fly it um the planes were full and um at the end of the year you know we ended up getting our second 747 and the end of the next year our third and fourth 747 and so it grew um so yeah so my whole attitude to life is you know if you create a new business that's the best in its field it's likely to survive when we when we took on coca-cola a can of cola, virgin cola and a can of coke, you know, that ours may taste a little bit better than theirs, but we're not exceptionally better.

48:49And therefore, it was easy for them to, you know, just their share might and their share market dominance, they could put us out of business. But when you've 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 hopeless at school, which is one of the reasons I left school at 15. But I could never comprehend things like net or gross. And I would just ask people, is that good news or bad news?

49:26And it wasn't until I was 50 that I was in a board meeting, and one of the directors said, pop outside a minute. And 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 admit it. So he said, well, look, here's a sheet of paper. And he penciled in the sheet of paper blue. Then he put a fishing net in the blue sea. And then he put some fish in the net. And he said, right, your profit at the end of the year, that's your net profit. The rest is your turnover. The sea is a hole. The fish are not in there in your net I went hey presto.

50:12I know the difference

50:1550 we had the biggest private group of companies in Europe and I Did not know the difference between netting gross and so ever since then I've been you know Net this gross that I've been name-dropping and then dropping the two words But nobody seems to be that impressed because they all knew the answer anyway And the other sad thing was, of course, I thought that net was, gross was the profit, 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 I know that when kids who are maybe watching this program and they're struggling at school will not necessarily agree with me.

51:00But 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 had to become a good delegator very early on. So I had to surround myself with great people, you know, because I wasn't good at mass or something. I had to find people who were good at it. 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 in different people.

51:42But I went skydiving for the first time, and the guys thought, I remember him saying to me, Richard, you don't need to go down with an instructor. You're a bit macho, and you can do it yourself. and little did he know that I was dyslexic. So I'm coming down on my own with two instructors either side of me and the instructor on my right is going as I'm doing this sort of maneuver and the instructor on my left is shaking his head and I decided to, I like the instructor on my right and he was doing this so I pulled the cord and it 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.

52:30And that was my dyslexia or whatever coming out in rather a bad way at a 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 to call dyslexics because it's a really difficult word to understand. and the people just thought I was thick or stupid at school. I got beaten regularly. I mean, it was a sort of English boarding school thing that they used to do. It was brutal. I mean, they would take, I mean, I was sent away to boarding school at seven and a half. You know, you were called into the headmaster's study in your pajamas.

53:14You had to take the pajama bottoms down and you're often beaten until you bled. It was a very archaic system, which fortunately, I think, has been banned finally in Britain a few years ago. In a story that's since become famous, you're four 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 she also was the kind of mother that felt that we needed to stand on our own two feet. And so she would do things which most likely she would get arrested for today. And I got lost in the fields and ended up being rescued by a farmer.

54:01She did claim she was honking her horn as it started to get dark. I think I was trying to get my own back on her as a bit as well. Even at four, I was thinking, damn you, I'm going to make you sweat. How did you convince your parents to let you leave school at 16? It took three walks around the lawn. So the first walk, my dad understandably said, you know, you should really try to finish your education. The second way around the garden, 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, you know, I didn't know what I wanted to do when I was 21, leaving college.

54:45and 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. And they were very loving, very understanding parents 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 or help get you interested in business?

55:18Maybe it did. I mean, yeah, 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 rubbed off for me. What role would you say each of them played in your lives over the years? My mother was the more sort of disciplinary. and my dad was more overtly loving, loving father. So I'll give you an example. We lived next to a sweet shop and my dad used to leave his loose change in the top drawer in his bedroom and myself, my sister, one day when I was about six or seven and she was about four or five, we climbed onto a chair and we took some money out of his top drawer and we went to the sweet shop next door and we bought this enormous pile of sweeties.

56:10And Mrs. Avonle rang up my dad and said, I think you ought to come to the sweet shop. So he turned up and she said, I think that maybe your children have borrowed some money from you. And he looked at us and he looked at Mrs. Avonle and he just turned on her and said, how dare you accuse my children of stealing. He then left the sweets on the counter, took us by our hands and walked us home, never said anything. And we never stole from him again. It was a very, very, very good lesson. On another occasion, my mother 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.

56:56And he gave me a bit of water, and I went running out and pretending to cry. So both of them were very loving anyway. You were married once before your marriage to your current wife, Joan, of nearly 30 years. 40 years? Of nearly 40 years. Before marrying Joan, you were thinking marriage was starting to become less appealing to you. Why? Before marrying Joan, I had been married very briefly when I was very young. and she fell in love with a musician and went her own way. And I didn't really fancy the idea of being hurt again and getting married again. And so when Joan and I got together, we decided just to live in sin and have our children not get married.

57:50And it wasn't until Holly was about 10 years old, And I'd just come back from Los Angeles, and I turned to her and said, do you think Mom and I should get married? And she said, yeah, that's a lovely idea. And then she said, I'm not sure she'll have you. So I said, well, do you mind going and asking her? So anyway, she went and asked for me, and all was good. But a key moment for you in that relationship seems to be you had just come home. Joan was gone. and she'd left a note for you on the table, I believe telling you she was pregnant. Yes, I came home one day to find that she was pregnant and had left me and just said, yeah, if I want to see her again, to give her a ring.

58:40Why'd she left you? Because she wasn't sure whether I wanted children at the time 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 it couldn't have been a better. I mean, men are terrible. We don't we don't like to be tied down, to be honest. You know, and sometimes it takes a woman to to do the job for us. What did you say on the phone?

59:13We should have we should have dinner. I can't remember what it was. But we but no, I mean, look, it was it was it was absolutely fantastic. and has only been better every single day of our lives since. And it was the best decision of our lives. I'm very happy. Given all your professional success and the constant travel associated with it, how challenging did it make it to be a present father when your 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 a great believer in delegation and I'm a great believer in working from home.

1:00:00So we lived on a houseboat and I worked on the houseboat. And 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 most fathers. And as a result, you know, we're an unbelievably close family. And actually, I do try to encourage our companies to, you know, be very flexible with people that work for the company. So 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 have to rigidly be in an office all the time.

1:00:40Holly and Sam, you're two grown kids now. What role do you see them playing, if any, long term in Virgin? They're both wonderfully personable. They're great with people. Holly runs our foundation and runs it really well. Sam has got his own little film company. He's done wonderful films against the war on drugs and breaking the taboo and trying to campaign to stop the death penalty and other areas. One day, when I decide to move on, they will be very capable, I think, of together being the two ambassadors for the Virgin Group. And I think companies benefit from having faces instead of just being faceless companies, having front people.

1:01:38And I think they can play that role really well. Explain how teaching Queen Noor of Jordan's family to fly a hot air balloon uniquely positioned you to negotiate with Saddam Hussein for hostages. So I got to know King Hussein and Queen Noor of Jordan through flying them in a hot air balloon over Eman, their capital city, with their children on board. And going across the chimney tops and the people looking up at this balloon and then just seeing their king and their queen and the princes waving down at them. It was quite a moment. And then Saddam Hussein was holding some hostages to try to avert the Allies invading him.

1:02:32And I wanted to try to see if we could get these hostages out. And so I went and saw King Hussein at the royal palace. And I wrote a letter to Saddam Hussein and asked him if he could translate it for me, which he did. And he then sent a messenger to Saddam Hussein. and Saddam Hussein responded and said, yes, if you're willing to come in one of your 747s to Baghdad, I will come to the airport. I will bring the ill hostages to the airport. If you could bring some medical supplies for Iraq, that would be wonderful. And three days later, we flew into Baghdad. It was an eerie, incredible experience.

1:03:18I mean, no plane had flown in for months and months. The lights went on at the last minute. And we met Saddam Hussein at the airport, and he handed over the hostages. And as we left Iraqi airspace, there was an almighty cheer. And when the second Iraq war looked like it was going to happen, I, for one, was vehemently against the idea of it. I thought it was a dreadful mistake, one of the worst mistakes. since the invasion of Vietnam all those years ago. And because I got to know Saddam Hussein briefly, I thought maybe I could try to persuade him to step down and go and live somewhere else in order to avoid the war.

1:04:01And you've later reflected on this being the biggest regret of your life. Yeah. ISIS came because of the invasion of Iraq. I mean, it was the sacking of all those police and all the military and giving them no hope after the successful invasion of Iraq that resulted in ISIS and all the other horrors that have gone on. The whole balance between Sunnis and Shiites has been ruined because of it. So we were trying to stop it. So we asked Saddam Hussein, would you be willing to entertain Nelson Mandela coming and seeing you? And the idea was that Nelson Mandela would arrive in Baghdad, would persuade Saddam Hussein to leave Baghdad 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.

1:05:00I 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 agreed 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 whether you know how history 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 that you know if these elders like Copian and 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 group of global leaders who now go into conflict regions to try to resolve conflicts and and the elders started under Nelson Mandela's blessing with his blessing and then you You had Archbishop Tutu running them.

1:06:09Now you have Kofi Annan running them. And it's just 12 incredible men and women who've got maybe the biggest moral authority in the world, the biggest respect in the world of any group of people. 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 he had lots of good causes so I had lunch with him and Grasha Michelle his wife and myself and my wife and children and we we got through the first course the second course the third course and we were on to the coffee and I was thinking I've got away with it and then and And then he turned to me and said, oh, Richard, by the way, last week I had lunch with Bill Gates and he gave me$50 million for an hour.

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1:08:08Anyway, but no, I mean, he was just an extraordinary man who was always thinking about other people. Yeah, somebody that I think the whole world has looked up to. And Archbishop Tutu has continued to carry the banner ever since with a lot of grace and good humor. And you ended up rescuing a lot of South African health clubs that were in financial trouble thanks to a call for him. 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 of health clubs with 6 ,000 people working there is about to go bankrupt. I want you on the next plane down.

1:08:51I want you to come and rescue the health clubs. And I did get on the next plane and we did rescue the health clubs and actually it's become one of our most successful businesses. And so now Virgin Active has, I don't know, over 200 health clubs in South Africa. So it's the kind of thing that he as a president And, 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 ring up and say, come and rescue these jobs. And it was great. Tell about the meal you once had with President Trump. Well, it was the first time I met President Trump.

1:09:30And he 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 of trying to save the company, he'd rung up a number of people and asked them for financial help and how five people had said they wouldn't give him financial help. He then went on to say that 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 forgive people who you feel have let you down.

1:10:15And 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 his companies were in trouble. So I said to him, I think it's going to eat you up. It won't do them any good. And it seems counterproductive. but he was going to have none of it. And I left feeling it was quite a strange lunch because I was also quite baffled by why it was the main subject of discussion rather than talking about something maybe a bit more worthwhile. When you had a rival television show on an American network competing against his then show, The Apprentice, what did he write in the letter he sent you?

1:11:05Well, ours show wasn't really a rival, although he seemed to 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 them through really extreme adventures. But he wrote me a letter basically saying, first of all, the show shouldn't be called The Rebel Billionaire because I'm in the airline business and I couldn't possibly be worth a billion because people in the airline business never make any money and therefore I should be effectively changing the name of the show to something called something like the Rebel Millionaire or something.

1:11:47I mean anyway it was just rather rather a churlish letter and so in my new book finding my virginity, I thought it would be interesting for people to see the correspondence and to tell one or two of these stories because 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 congratulating us on Virgin Galactic. And yeah, a very pleasant note. And your impression of that was what? You know, I'm a great believer in making up and being friends with people you may have fallen out with in your life.

1:12:38and I think if it wasn't for the fact that he was running for presidency of America, I would have been delighted to have responded. But I was slightly suspicious that he most likely was sending notes like that to lots of people because he was running to be president of America. But anyway, he's done extraordinarily well. But I think it's interesting for people to hear stories and people can judge for themselves based on stories like 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?

1:13:31Well, we didn't have any money to do anything with it when we bought it. So over the years, if the Rolling Stones had a hit, we'd build one house. If Janet Jackson 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 build another one, and Genesis another one. So over the years, we've created a beautiful island. And then, you know, I spend a lot of time on issues, global issues, and one of them is climate change, and therefore it's very important that we can set an example ourselves. and we have a big array of solar and wind and we're almost self-sufficient on clean energy and hopefully by the end of next year we'll be completely self-sufficient and we're also trying to roll out to many many islands throughout the Caribbean and help them become self-sufficient.

1:14:29How many hurricanes have you been in? I've been in one hurricane every 10 years. The first three were extraordinary, magnificent, beautiful. The seas were unbelievable, skies were unbelievable, the wind was unbelievable, but the damage was not by and large too bad. The last hurricane was anything but beautiful. I mean it It was effectively a Category 7 hurricane, over 200-mile-an-hour winds, and the damage was horrendous. How at the time were you witnessing the severity of it? I was with my team in a bunker under the main house. For four and a half hours, we heard the screaming wind, and then sudden hush, and then we poked our head out of the door and saw the utter devastation that had happened in those first four and a half hours.

1:15:34And then we realized that we were in the middle, in the eye of the hurricane and then the winds hit us from the other side and then we threw ourselves back into the hurricane shelter for another four and a half hours. 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 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 And fortunately, very little life was lost, I think, because it was a daytime storm.

1:16:21But the Caribbean people are so resilient, and they've just, you know, they've rallied around, they've helped each other. And, you know, we've got a foundation there with Larry Page, and that's done a lot of good work there. My son's been great. And anyway, everybody, everybody, you know, just rallied around. I think one thing that this teaches us is the reason that the hurricane was so strong and the strongest in history was that the sea levels had never been so high and so hot at this time of year. And this is the big danger of climate change is that as the sea gets hotter, the hurricanes are going to get more strong and the damage is going to get stronger.

1:17:06And that's one of the reasons that we're working very, very hard trying to address climate change on a global basis. 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 to a month later be sitting down with you in the Bahamas. But thank you very much. 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.

1:17:49You can watch all that on our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Graham Bensinger. And if you enjoyed what you just 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.

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