- Hey, everybody how's it going?
I'm Chase, welcome to another episode
of The Chase Jarvis LIVE Show here on CreativeLive,
you guys know this show.
This is where I sit down with the world's top
creators, entrepreneurs and thought leaders,
and I do everything I can to unpack
their brains to help you live your dreams
in career and hobby and in life.
My guest today is probably, well he definitely
needs no introduction, but I'm just gonna
try and actually not give an introduction
because you'll know who he is the second
I say his name, it is the guest today,
Sir Richard Branson.
- Nice to see ya. (laughs) - Thank you.
(upbeat electronic music)
(audience applauds)
They love you.
- Thanks - Welcome.
You just got in yesterday from the other side of the pond?
- I got in from Washington, actually.
I was
trying to see if we could rally
the World Bank and the IMF
to help the Caribbean
that's been trashed from the hurricanes,
and then of course I came here to watch Virgin Sport
do a great performance,
and now Sonoma and Napa Valley are being trashed as well,
so it's a strange, a strange,
the world is,
yeah, there's strange forces
at work. - So many.
So many strange things happening right now.
Your book just dropped, a congratulations
- Thank you. - The first one,
Losing My Virginity,
20 years ago this year, I think?
So we'll talk about that in a little bit,
but I did wanna mention,
I like to open up the show when I can with current events,
most recently, I think it was two days ago now,
maybe three, you introduced Hyperloop One.
Now in partnership with Virgin,
so it's Virgin Hyperloop One.
How long has that been in the works?
You've got so many things going,
what was the arrangement behind that?
- Well, there's a guy called Shervin
who took me out to the Nevada Desert
some months ago,
and I saw this wonderful tunnel
outside Las Vegas,
where they were test running Hyperloop One,
and the chief engineer happened to be
somebody I knew from Virgin Galactic before,
and it was very exciting, and I'm in the rail business,
we have the number one rail network in the UK,
but our trains are restricted to about 135 miles an hour
because of the track.
So the idea of being able to transport people
at 600,
650 miles an hour
was too good to miss.
So, Virgin Hyperloop has been born,
and there are countries all over the world
who've expressed an interest in taking it.
It'll transport both freight and transport passengers,
It'll, I think
transform,
you know like cities like, places like Scotland
that are
miles from London,
and suddenly they will only be 45 minutes away,
and so it will make such a big difference
in bringing people closer to each other.
- Yeah, just the fact that cities
that are separated by states or vast spaces
are gonna be like metro stops, basically
- Exactly. at 700 miles an hour.
- Yeah, and if, I mean actually, technically,
if you, if it's a straight line,
you could almost go a 1,000 miles an hour.
It's just the g-forces if you've got corners,
anyway, realistically 600 to 650 which is pretty damn good.
- Well, Shervin founder of Sherpa Ventures,
I know Shervin a little bit,
also early in
Uber and a couple of other investments.
Supersmart guy, was that a relationship,
I think a lot of folks at home are curious
about how that kind of stuff happens.
Is it just because you're you,
and you've transcended all kinds of different
transportation environments that you get
to be on the inside of this?
- I think we're lucky that the
people trust the Virgin Brand.
So, you know like, whether it's Virgin Atlantic,
Virgin America, Virgin Australia,
you know, our previous transportation businesses
have been successful.
And so companies that have got,
come up with cutting edge technology,
I think quite like the idea
of being associated with the Virgin Brand,
so, yep, you know we put an investment in the company,
but the thing that excites me the most
was the fact that it became Virgin Hyperloop,
as long as we put the brand
on to products that are exciting,
that enables us then,
the next exciting project that comes through,
it makes it that much easier for us.
- Well one of the things that,
we serve sort of a couple of different audiences here
at CreativeLive.
I think of them in certainly two markets.
One is the bucket of people from zero to one,
and that people who are just figuring out
what they wanna do and can they make the leap
from their full-time job,
to do something more entrepreneurial or as a creator,
and then there are people who are already identify
with being a creator and, I think you stand
as an inspiration to both of those groups.
What, you've talked a lot about your dyslexia,
and I surveyed some of the folks in our community
and said, you know, If you could sit down
with Sir Richard, as I have the good fortune of doing,
what would you talk to him about?
And that was one of the things I think,
when people think about moving on in their career,
they think about their barriers first,
and you've talked at length about it
in other interviews, but I was wondering
if you could just put a little
context on this, what was it like in school
and then how did you in a sense,
I've heard you talk about using
your dyslexia to your advantage.
- Right.
- How should you think about that?
Or how should the folks at home?
- So it's interesting, three days ago
I climbed a mountain in Morocco,
and it was 18 hours up and down,
and so a lot of times on my feet,
and I talked a great length about dyslexia.
And first of all, just the basic name dyslexia,
you know, why have they come up with a name
that is so negative, and so difficult to spell,
and so difficult to pronounce for dyslexics,
so by the time we got to the bottom,
we thought, right, we're gonna push alternative thinker
as the new name for dyslexia.
And I'm gonna blog about in the next few days
so if anyone's got any better names for dsylexia,
- Right - We thought we'd
come up with something. - That has to be brand new,
that, I mean, maybe 10 or 20 years old, probably.
They didn't even have the term when your were--
- No, they didn't have it when I was young.
And I think dys anything, it sounds pretty nasty.
- Yeah - But, anyway,
yeah, so, I think I was pretty hopeless at school.
You know the conventional education passed me by,
but I think that was a good thing
cause come 15, I decided to quit school
and bizarrely for a dyslexic started a magazine
to campaign against the Vietnamese War,
and
my dyslexia
really helped me become a really good delegator,
and I think that's been one of my great strengths.
So I've had to find brilliant people around me
over the last 50 years in all
the different ventures we've done,
and be willing to give them a lot of freedom,
freedom to do good things and freedom to make mistakes
and by and large it's worked.
And that's freed me up to
worry about...
- The next Hyperloop One?
- Well, the next projects,
but also just to look after one's self,
and spend time with one's family,
and be ready to troubleshoot when something goes wrong.
So not to get bogged down by the minutiae.
And I think the best bit of advice
I can give any entrepreneur is
find somebody better than yourself,
give them the freedom to step into your shoes,
and then clear the decks yourself,
and all those things that you were doing,
hand over to them.
Then you'll find very quickly,
that the desk will be full up with new ideas
which you can then hand over again,
and you can keep doing that.
And then you can become
a
serial philanthropist
as well as a serial entrepreneur.
- So let's go back to, speaking of entrepreneur,
go back to the magazine for just a second
because often people's first projects
are indicative of where they're gonna go
and that was in publishing, right?
You published a student magazine.
Why magazines,
and how did you get it off the ground?
I think people are interested in the tactics.
- Yeah. - But what did you actually
do?
- So the last thing I thought
was that I was becoming a businessman or an entrepreneur.
I just wanted to be an editor of a campaigning magazine
to campaign against the Vietnamese War,
which was one of the most unjust wars ever,
in fact, pretty well every war is unjust,
but this was a ghastly,
a ghastly
war.
Young people between the age of 15 and,
you know, 30 were all marching on streets
and trying to bring the war to an end.
I didn't have any money.
There weren't such things as mobile phones in those days.
We had a mobile phone box at the school
with a fix line telephone,
and if you wanted to make a call,
you had to keep putting money into the phone box,
and, if I chose the times of day
where other kids were not using the phone box,
to go and ring up advertise, potential advertisers
to see if I could persuade them
to advertise in my magazine.
And there was one occasion where I was putting money in,
and I lost the money and like didn't get through,
and I rang up the operator,
and they said, "oh don't worry, we'll put you through."
So then I started using the operator as my secretary.
I'd just ring up, say I've lost the money,
never put any money in. (Chase laughs)
And so I had these posh operators being put through,
"I've got Mr. Branson for you."
So I finally had my free telephone calls.
And I just had to hope that I didn't get
the same operators two or three times in a row.
And then I would talk to Coca Cola and say,
Pepsi's just taken a full page add out,
I learned these tricks quite early on,
and, "Oh well, if Pepsi's doing it, we'll have to do it."
National Westminster Bank, well if they're doing it
then Barclay's would do it and so on.
When I got about four and half thousand pounds
of advertising promised,
I was 15.
- From Huge brands.
- Yeah from big brands, yeah. - All of them.
- I think, you know, there was this young, enthusiastic,
but actually they wanted to get to young people,
so there wasn't a magazine for young people in those days,
so, somehow we persuaded them.
And then the headmaster had me in and said,
"look,
"you either run this magazine and leave school,
"or you stay at school and you don't run the magazine."
I went, thank you. (laughs)
And I sort of waived him goodbye.
And the magazine became my education,
and I suppose I became an entrepreneur by default
because I had to worry about the advertising,
worry about the distribution,
worry about the printing and the paper manufacturing,
and being an editor was important,
but
it was at least 50% of the time
was becoming an entrepreneur.
A word that didn't exist 50 years ago.
Becoming by mistake.
- Some French dictionary probably had it in there.
- Yeah, I'm sure the French
knew what an entrepreneur was,
but in those days,
every company in Britain was run by government ready.
So you had British Telecom, British Gas,
British Steel, British Coal,
and they were awful,
badly run.
And then
myself and women called Anita Roddick
who started Body Shop,
there was just the two of us as entrepreneurs.
And you know, if anybody wanted to interview
a woman they interviewed Anita,
if they wanted to interview a man, they interviewed me,
so we got more than our fair share of publicity
for what we were doing.
And the fact that I was young
gave me an added advantage, too.
And then just one thing led on to another.
I found that music was really expensive to buy
so
I thought, screw that, let's,
we'll use the magazine to start selling music
much more cheaply than anybody else.
Of course we were selling music we liked
so it didn't have, we wouldn't have had Andy Williams,
it would be Frank Zappa, it would be, you know,
we'd start having a credit, we got a lot of credibility
by the quality of the music we sold.
- The Stones, Sex Pistols. - The Stones, exactly.
And then we started, I came across tapes
of artists that we loved and nobody would put out.
So we thought, screw that, we'll start a record company
and Virgin Records was born,
and it became the most successful
independent record label actually in the world
with
Janet Jackson, anyway, a whole lot of,
Phil Collins,
Peter Gabriel,
Boy George, et cetera, et cetera,
and was
a lot of fun.
- Well you said two things in there
that I wanna hold onto.
One was that the magazine was your education.
So, what do you have to say about traditional education,
I mean, frankly, CreativeLive exists
because I don't feel like that the traditional education
is preparing people for the future
and future skill based and what not,
and obviously you're an investor in CreativeLive,
so there's an overlap there,
but talk to me about how you think
about traditional education versus just the doing.
- One of the reasons we started the magazine
was because
I couldn't stand the education system at school.
You know, people left school
after years and years and years of learning French
but hardly speaking a word of it.
People left school after years and years of learning Latin
and hardly spoke a word of it.
It was just facts being crammed into you.
And one of the reasons we started the magazine
was to campaign against the system.
Many, many years later,
we're still having re-imagining education,
conferences on Necker Island and things,
and I just still think, you know,
we ain't sorted the problem out, yet.
What you are doing is tremendous,
and there needs to be more of what you're doing,
but
schools
still are very
fact based and exam based.
I'm determined to see in the next sort of 10 years
of my life whether we can really make a difference.
Maybe we'd love to work with you in thinking
how we can properly re-imagine education,
and
make kids bounce into school,
really being
stimulated
in a wonderful way.
- You call yourself a grand dude.
(Richard laughs) - Got a couple
of grandchildren,
and do you think about the world that they'll go
to school in, and do you think it'll look
anything like the one that we're in now?
Or how do you think about the--
- Well I think, I mean in Britain
the education system has not changed that much
in the last 50 years.
And it still needs to.
Yeah, with four grandchildren all two years old,
I would like to try to get it,
help get it right sooner rather than later.
- Right, we're on it. - Great.
- The second thread that you were working off of
that I wanna pull on is you started with the magazine.
The magazine allowed you to sell music,
music translated into a record, a record label,
you used the financing as I understand
from the record label, sale of the record label
for the airline, and et cetera, et cetera.
Is that a,
what you prescribe because everyone wants to,
not everyone, but the people that are least
listening and watching to the show here,
they want to find their thing.
And that is a question that I hear so often
in entrepreneurial circles
is how do I know what to focus on?
What advice would you give someone
who's wondering, like how to do I find my passion,
and how do I pull on these threads
and where are they gonna lead to?
Help us understand how you got started
and how they should think about it?
- Well I think, I mean most, most people
listen to this show know what their passion is,
and it could be a hobby,
they could love reading,
they could love playing tennis, they all have passions.
And if you have a passion, it makes sense
to spend a lot of your life involved in that passion.
And quite often you can turn your passion into a business.
You can see
that maybe there's some aspect
of your passion that people are not doing that well,
and
you can say screw it,
I could do it better.
And I think all, you know, if you spend
your life with your eyes open looking for,
looking for things that frustrate you,
looking for gaps in the market,
that's all a business is.
It's fulfilling that, filling in the gap,
and doing it better than it's been done by anybody else.
And you know, people who don't have closed minds
will most likely find those opportunities.
Now I suspect there will be a 100 people
who will have come up with that idea before you,
but those 100 people
won't have had the courage
just to go and do something about it.
It's those few people who just say,
right, I'm gonna give it a go,
that often end up
being successful.
- You, starting small, I think is another thing
that I see people
miss. This is the second
time you've been on the show,
and we recounted
how you got started with Virgin,
you were in Puerto Rico,
and I'll let folks go listen
to the other show for that story,
it's a beautiful story,
but
you had one plane.
You were an airline with one plane,
and I think that's, to me that's remarkable
that the concept of an airline,
you think of American Airlines or something
that has vast fleets of planes,
and is
is starting small,
Hyperloop One it's not exactly small, right?
There's, now you've got this massive vision,
but how do people go from zero to one?
Like you have to start somewhere.
And you happened to start with a 747,
so it's not like it's a small plane,
but is there any advice that you have
on getting started?
Cause I think that first step paralyzes so many people.
- Yeah, I mean,
the rules I set myself was first of all I was sure
that the airline business
stank and it was,
the quality was ghastly.
It wasn't fun.
And it was, yeah, pretty miserable experience
to travel from a to b on British Airways
or any of the other airlines.
So I thought if we could throw into the mix
a plane that was great fun,
which was beautifully designed,
that had staff that really loved what they were doing,
you know, where the food was great,
the seating was nice, where there was stand up bars,
where the, you know, the entertainment was great,
that we'd have a chance.
We couldn't be sure.
And so first of all I did a deal with Boeing,
so I could hand the plane back to Boeing
at the end of the 12 months,
you know, if I was wrong about this.
And that was protecting the downsize,
so at least I knew the worse that could happen
was about 50% of the profits of Virgin Records
for the year if it all went wrong.
And then we threw this one plane in against
Pan Am with 300 planes, TWA with 300 planes,
British Airways with 300 planes,
Air Florida with a couple hundred planes,
People Express with a couple hundred planes,
British Caledonian with a 100 planes,
Air Europe, Dauair, et cetera.
- The odds, talk about the odds.
- And we,
and people loved it.
I used myself to make sure we got
on the front pages of the newspapers,
not on the back pages.
And come the end of the first year,
we rang up Boeing and asked for a couple of more 747's
for Florida and for a couple of more routes.
And slowly but surely we grew,
and as we were growing,
British Airways decided they didn't like this at all,
and even although we only had sort of 4 or 5 planes,
and they launched what famously become known
as the dirty tricks campaign.
We took them to court,
we won the biggest libel damages in history.
We distributed it at Christmas time,
and it became know as the British Airways Christmas bonus,
and all that stuff, we were smiling and happy,
and British Airways backed off somewhat.
And as we were growing,
every one of other competitors went bankrupt.
TWA went bankrupt, Pan Am,
British Caledonia, anyway, the whole lot,
Air Florida, the lot disappeared.
The only reason, I think, British Airways survived
was they had a monopoly of the slots at the main airport.
You know, so it is possible for a much smaller company
to be the David taking on the big Goliaths.
And as long as you've got quality
and panache and fun and style,
you can actually beat them or at least,
yeah, you can beat most of them,
and that's what Virgin Atlantic did.
- And the fact that you've done that in so many
different industries, is that a method?
Like you've always had, Apple needed Microsoft,
there's always a bad guy,
and clearly British was this crappy service,
you talked about, you know, state runned,
interstate subsidized,
and you talked about panache and style
and all these other things,
does, is that a requirement to the dynamic
that there's something that needs changing or disrupting,
or is that just the way that you think or build businesses?
- I think it's not a requirement,
but I think
competition is good for everybody.
And having a bigger competitor with a,
a fat belly to
prod
makes it a lot more fun,
than if you just suddenly
had a monopoly in a whole new industry.
It makes you much more sleek of foot,
than I think if you were the only player in town.
- So 20 years later,
you have written
Finding My Virginity after the Losing My Virginity release.
Let Matt get a good shot of the cover there
for the folks that are watching.
Explain the concept behind the book, would ya?
Cause, Finding My Virginity,
I thought virginity could only be lost.
(Richard laughs)
- Well, I'm sort of finding my virginity
all the time with new ventures.
My final book in another 20 years
will most likely be Virginity Found, hopefully.
I'll finally get there, I'll finally get there.
First of all, I think everybody should write a book.
I think
every single person on this Earth has great stories to tell,
which they can share with their children
and their grandchildren,
and,
you know, it's a pity that everybody's life
is not captured.
The stories your parents taught you when you were young,
your friendships, everything,
I think are worth capturing.
I mean, I've,
I've led, I've been luck enough
to have a very full on, I think quite interesting life,
and therefore I think
sharing my stories
with others hopefully people can learn something from them.
Losing My Virginity
sold millions of copies,
and I've met a lot of people who said
it effected their lives, they maybe dropped everything,
started their own business,
they've done very well as a result.
And I hope Finding My Virginity will have the same
sort of
effect on people's lives,
and
that they will take a few bits from it,
and
learn from it.
I'm a storyteller, I love telling stories.
I think that's the best way of getting messages across.
Humor is important.
And there's quite a lot of humorous moments as well.
- Well having steamrolled through it in the last 72 hours.
- Well thank you for doing that.
- No, it was brilliant.
And also speaking of the other books,
like I've collected biographies of amazing artists
and entrepreneurs my whole life.
Those have been inspirational to me,
and so your original book certainly did that.
This strikes me as a little bit more,
almost of a leadership book.
There's so many, in modern times,
where our own leaders were able to start
a company with basically nothing.
We've got more access to tools
and technologies than we ever have before,
all these things are democratized,
folks who used to be followers are now becoming leaders,
and I feel like leadership is a huge area
of growth and opportunity.
I myself had to figure out how to be a leader
as CreativeLive and turning to you and others,
you taught me how to mitigate the downside and what not,
but what, and do you have information or ideas
or any advice for the folks that are leaders
in businesses that you feel like is often missed or ignored,
or what has been the key to your success in leadership?
- Well, I think
a good leader is a bit like,
you know, being a good father really or a good mother.
I think what you do at home and what you do at work
should be almost one and the same.
If you're a good father,
you, you know, look for the best in your kids,
you praise your kids,
you love your kids,
and a good leader is exactly the same.
You've got to lavish praise
on the people you're working with,
you've got to be a good listener.
Make sure that you're listening all the time.
You're absorbing what you learn
from the people who you are working with.
I just hate when I see
leaders jumping down people's throats,
or lauding it over people,
or not listening and hearing their own voices all the time.
It's so counterproductive.
So I think
the traditional sort of
stereotype of you know, the sort of Dallas,
if anybody can remember that TV series,
sort of leader that treads all over people
to get to the top is the absolute opposite
of what one needs in leaders today.
Yeah, Trump I suspect is the absolute opposite
of what one needs in a leader today,
but fortunately, that's the exception to the rule.
Most modern day leaders are great with people,
and they bring out the best in their people,
and therefore they get a really
loyal group of people around them.
To us, somebody to leave a company
should be so rare.
Generally speaking you can,
if you're talking about a company as a real family,
you find another position for them within the company,
that suites their role better than the one
that maybe they're not working out in.
This whole sort of
slightly more American approach
of
firing and hiring people about to readily
is,
I think, very wrong.
- How important is vulnerability and authenticity
to leadership?
You've, you show great empathy whenever you,
I've spent time, a lot of time with you,
and you're always concerned about folks,
as you said, like firing.
Is that something that you're very cognizant of?
Like empathy and vulnerability.
You share a lot about being scared in the wine cellar
when the hurricane hits your house,
just how important is that for folks at home
that are in that role.
- I think you need to, you know again,
yeah, you need to be human,
you need to be willing to cry on occasion.
When our spaceship went down,
I met, I talk about it in the book,
met the 700 engineers,
and, you know, we all cried together,
we all had a big hug together,
and then we picked ourselves up,
and we've moved on to create VSS Unity,
our new spaceship which will hopefully
be going up in a few months time.
So don't be, people shouldn't be afraid
of being human beings.
And with all the vulnerabilities that human beings have.
- The space component was also really big.
I think your, can you talk to me about your
fascination with space?
Is it literally space in and of itself,
or is it the concept of space being something
that's so vast and that's the next frontier for you,
besides of course, Hyperloop One,
but
why space?
Why you and space?
- Why not, I suppose I would say.
(Chase laughs)
I think
it's
something that,
I would say 80% of the people I meet
would love to go to space.
And it's up to us to produce
spaceships that enable them to go safely and,
and affordably,
and that's the challenge that we've set ourselves.
You know, creating a space line, look it's fun.
You know, you only live once.
If I've done nothing else in my life,
but created space line
that could take people into space,
I'd feel pretty chaffed.
And there's a lot that can be achieved through it.
I mean, we're putting up, you know,
2,000 satellites around the world
with one web
as part of,
we have a company called Virgin Orbit
that is
putting up satellites,
and that will make a big difference back here on Earth.
And because our spaceships are designed like,
you know, they're real spaceships,
like you know, in the shape of airplanes,
we can move in to point to point travel one day.
So it's ridiculously good fun,
it'll be great for the Virgin Brand,
and you only live once,
and it's horribly expensive.
(Chase and Richard laugh)
But
we'll, if you can pull off the best in an industry,
generally speaking, you'll find that
you'll get your money back one day.
So you just gotta create the best in the first place
which we're nearly there in doing.
- One final theme I wanna explore in the book
is that of, that you talk about The Elders.
Folks like Nelson Mandela have been
a big inspiration to you.
How important is mentorship and a peer group
and community
to you and to building, not just a brand,
but a life that you're proud of?
- Yeah, really important.
I was lucky enough to get to know
Nelson Mandela really well.
He has a wonderful sense of humor,
as does Archbishop Tutu,
who, they're both very, were both very close,
and building The Elders with them,
I think is one of the most important things
that we've done, Peter Gabriel and myself actually,
have done in our lifetimes.
The Elders have been going about 10 years.
They go into conflict regions,
try to resolve conflicts.
They set up some wonderful organizations,
things like Girls Not Brides and so on.
They've spoken out strongly on things like
climate change.
So it's magical being involved with that,
and about 50% of my time is now spent
on not-for-profit ventures,
like campaigning against the war on drugs,
and trying to get governments to treat drugs
as a health problem not a criminal problem.
Trying to protect the species in the oceans
through Oceans Unite and the Oceans Elders.
Trying to rally businesses to become
forces for good and make a difference in the world
through The B Team.
Getting the Carbon War Room and the Virgin Earth Prize
to try to help tackle climate change,
so there's a lot of really, really great people
running these wonderful not-for-profit organizations
that hopefully can make a difference as well.
- So you've, your chronicles as an entrepreneur
are well documented,
and also I'll reference our earlier conversation,
it's been very popular.
There's a lot of talk about your near-death experiences.
Your film had just come out at that time
so if folks wanna hear all the numerous ways
that you've almost done yourself in from ballooning.
I wanna flip the script in this particular,
I think
so much of your
world
is giant for people
and wildly aspirational,
but you have to get outta bed just like everybody else.
You have to put your pants on one leg at a time,
what are some of the tackle things that you do?
Maybe for example, in the morning,
how do you get started with your day?
What are some things that you do
that have provided a really good life for you?
And health is dramatically, you know,
really important to you, I know that about it.
- Yeah, I mean,
I mean, looking after yourself, your body
is the most important thing you can do
because if you don't look after yourself,
you can't look after you children,
you can't look after your wife,
you can't look after your businesses,
everything else falls apart.
So the first thing I do in the morning
is
get up early,
go and play
tennis with somebody that's a tennis pro,
that's better than me,
and we have a full on couple of sets of singles tennis,
and I'll do the same again in the evening.
Then if the wind is up, I'll go kite surfing.
And then I would have done all that by 7 o'clock,
I'll then go and have some breakfast,
and yeah, try to make sure the breakfast
is relatively healthy,
and then, you know I'm setup,
setup for a really full on day.
At least once a year we set ourselves
as a family, a big challenge.
And we try to raise money
for
an organization
for young people
that my children setup called Strive.
And to do with education actually, for young people.
So last year, the kids rang me up
and said, "dad, I'm not sure you're gonna wanna
"come on this one, but you can if you want to."
So foolishly I said yes.
So we started at the Matterhorn.
We did a eight day hike across
the Italian
and Swiss Alps.
We then did a two and a half thousand kilometer
bike ride through the mountains
from the North of Italy to the Southernest tip of Italy.
We then swam to Sicily.
We then did a marathon.
Another hike, then a mountain bike,
and then a hike up to the top of Mount Etna.
And at the end of it, I felt like a 25 year old.
I had a body of a 25 year old.
I've never felt so fit, you know for years.
The great thing is by setting these challenges,
you've got to train for them.
Then last week we just climbed the highest
mountain in North Africa called Mount Toubkal,
and it was, you know, 18 hours on our feet.
And you curse and swear at the time,
but afterwards it just feels so good.
So I think setting yourself family challenges,
or
just
every year sort of
set a challenge which you can work towards is a good idea.
- It's, all that's well chronicled in here as well.
So last point I'd like
to hear from you,
in the last interview we also,
I asked you to tell me something
you hadn't told anyone else in a different interview.
You struggled with that for just 20, 30 seconds,
and then you came up with a great story,
you sighted yourself as a storyteller,
about
getting pulled over by a copper.
And I won't, (Richard Laughs)
You pounded a buddy
in the stomach and he was - Okay.
- ill and you were speeding.
I'll leave it at that, but it was a great story.
Instead of a story that no one else had heard,
one thing I haven't heard from ya
is, in previous interviews,
is what's the most important thing to you?
You talk a lot about building businesses,
and you're so good about.
- Oh, I think, Yeah, no, I mean in the end,
in the end everything comes down to your family and friends.
There's nothing, that's
all that matters in the end.
So we've been very lucky,
you know my parents were very lucky,
they loved each other throughout their lives.
I've been with Joan for 40 years.
As I told her last week, she's still a sexy beast.
And because we're happy together,
that has helped with our kids
and helped with their relationships,
and my guess is that they'll stay together,
and they're very happy,
and that'll help with their children.
And so, we've just been very lucky in that way.
I mean obviously 50% of families are not so lucky.
Then they have to sort of pick themselves up,
and try to sort of keep those friendships
and those family together.
I'll end with one fun story,
so my, which I told in the book,
but
my dad when he was about 86,87,
I took him on a,
a hike through Africa
following the migration of the wildebeest,
and he loved Africa.
It was pissing with rain everyday,
and for a poor 87 year old to have to get up,
and go and try to squat down over a hole in the ground
in the middle of the night in the pouring rain
was not much fun for him.
But anyway, he was,
it was a wonderful thing
for a father and son to do.
Anyway, on the last day he woke up,
and he had the biggest smile on his face,
we were sharing a tent,
and I said to dad, did you have a happy dream?
He said, "yes."
I said, did it involve a woman?
He said,
"yes."
I said, did you misbehave with her?
He said, "no."
He said, "but she misbehaved with me, outrageously."
(Richard and Chase laugh)
But,
anyway.
So, yeah, humor, humor's important. (laughs)
- The book is laced with it,
speaking of sexy beasts,
you've got to pick up the book,
if you're watching or listening.
Finding My Virginity by Sir Richard Branson.
I know, we want people to pick up a copy of the book.
I wanna say thanks for
- supporting CreativeLive - Thank you.
- Of course, there's another way that I've heard
you asking people to get involved,
and that's your building, rebuilding the Caribbean,
or doing something to help.
What is the way after recent devastation
from the hurricane there,
is there a particular way that people could
donate funds or time,
or what would an ask be there for the community?
- Well look, there's so many causes that,
I mean here in San Francisco,
and you've got Napa Valley and Sonoma on fire,
and there's so many causes for people
to help.
There is a tiny little foundation called Unite BVI,
that's trying to help rebuild the British Virgin Islands,
but
we can put our resources into that.
Yeah, so, look just, I think everybody out there
have got very important causes
that they'll put their spare pennies towards.
Right now what we're trying to do
is get the
World Bank and the
IMF, et cetera,
to look after the Caribbean as a whole
and really try to get in there,
and try to move the Caribbean into
the coming, you know, being powered by clean energy,
and to help get it back on its feet in a big way.
Actually, the best thing you can all do is
in a years time, once we've got it rebuilt,
come and visit us in the Caribbean
cause that will, that's what people are gonna need.
They're gonna need to get tourists back.
- Amazing.
- (laughs) Thanks a lot. - Thank you so much.
- Cheers.
- Y'all, we'll see ya another time.
Probably tomorrow.
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