Sir Richard Branson — The Billionaire Maverick of the Virgin Empire

Sir Richard Branson (@richardbranson https://twitter.com/richardbranson), founder and chairman of The Virgin Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Group, is a world-famous entrepreneur, adventurer, activist, and business icon. He has launched a dozen billion-dollar businesses and hundreds of other companies. His new autobiography, Finding My Virginity https://www.amazon.com/Finding-My-Virginity-New-Autobiography/dp/0735219427/offsitoftimfe-20, shares the candid details of a lifetime of triumphs and failures and provides an intimate look at his never-ending quest to push boundaries, break rules, and seek new frontiers. I loved our conversation, and we covered a lot, including: Richard's thoughts on "clean meat," block chain, and cryptocurrency How he's coped with dyslexia, and how his parents helped make him resilient Behind-the-scenes stories of deal-making, PR stunts, big wins, and big losses The habits (and life decisions) he's used to maintain high energy levels for decades How Richard masterfully caps/limits downside risk, even though he's perceived as a risk taker How and why he takes regular 1-2-month (sometimes longer) breaks from alcohol Favorite books Lessons learned from Nelson Mandela and other mentors And much more… Enjoy! This podcast is brought to you by Ascent Protein https://www.ascentprotein.com/tim, the best protein I've ever tried. Ascent is the only US-based company that offers native proteins — both whey and micellar casein — directly to the consumer for improved muscle health and performance. Because the product is sourced from Ascent's parent company, Leprino Foods — the largest producer of mozzarella cheese in the world — it's entirely free of artificial ingredients and completely bypasses the bleaching process common to most other whey products on the market. If you want cleaner, less processed protein, which I certainly do, go to ascentprotein.com/tim for 20 percent off your entire order. https://www.ascentprotein.com/tim This podcast is also brought to you by WordPress.com https://wordpress.com/Tim, my go-to platform for 24/7-supported, zero downtime blogging, writing online, creating websites — everything! I love it to bits, and the lead developer, Matt Mullenweg, has appeared on this podcast many times. Whether for personal use or business, you're in good company with WordPress.com https://wordpress.com/Tim — used by The New Yorker, Jay Z, Beyonce, FiveThirtyEight, TechCrunch, TED, CNN, and Time, just to name a few. A source at Google told me that WordPress https://wordpress.com/Tim offers "the best out-of-the-box SEO imaginable," which is probably why it runs nearly 30% of the Internet. Go to WordPress.com/Tim https://wordpress.com/Tim to get 15% off your website today!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Richard Branson?

  No, this is inappropriate, Diana.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:03Tim Ferriss?

  subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink A G one, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out. Hello, ladies and gentlemen. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. I am so giddy, so excited about this episode. And it is one in a series of close to 300 episodes now, where each time around, I try to deconstruct a world-class performer and share with you the stories, the habits, routines, beliefs,

• 1:46Tim Ferriss?

  negotiating skills, in this particular case, that you can test and apply in your own lives. These are the skill sets that help each of these interviewees become the best at what they do. And our guest today is none other than the one and only Sir Richard Branson, at Richard Branson. In pretty much everything, he's Richard Branson on Twitter, Richard Branson on Facebook, R Branson on LinkedIn.

• 2:16Tim Ferriss?

  And if you don't know who he is, Richard Branson is the founder and chairman of The Virgin Group. He is a world famous entrepreneur, adventurer, activist, and certainly business icon. He's launched a dozen billion dollar businesses and hundreds of other companies. The origins are crazy, the later stories are even crazier, and his new autobiography, Finding My Virginity, and I have a long history with Richard's books, which we get into in this episode, but his new autobiography, Finding My Virginity, shares the candid details of a lifetime of triumphs and failures, both of which have been very spectacular and provides

• 2:59Tim Ferriss?

  an intimate look at his quest to push boundaries, break rules, and seek new frontiers. This episode was recorded as he was bouncing around the globe and primarily in Marrakech, or Marrakech, depending on how you want to pronounce it, Morocco. So the music you hear in the background is due to that. We worked very hard to get this scheduled. I loved this conversation. I've heard a lot of conversations with Richard before, including in person. I think this one really delivers the goods. We covered a lot and got into a lot of details, talked about many things I'd never heard him talk about before, including

• 3:42Tim Ferriss?

  his thoughts on clean meat, if you don't know what that means, we'll get into it, blockchain, cryptocurrency, how he's coped with dyslexia and how his parents helped make him resilient, the behind the scenes stories of deal making, PR stunts, big wins, and in some cases, big losses, the habits and life decisions he's used to maintain high energy levels for decades now, how he caps or limits downside risk even though he's perceived as a risk taker, how and why he takes, say, regular one to two months, sometimes longer, breaks from alcohol, favorite books, lessons learned from Nelson Mandela and many others, and much, much more. We cover a ton. I was really

• 4:26Tim Ferriss?

  Nervous about this episode for a host of reasons and could not be happier with how it turned out. So I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed it and definitely find Finding My Virginity at all fine booksellers. You can check it out. I'm certainly going to be digging in myself. And without further ado, please enjoy my extremely wide ranging conversation with Sir Richard Branson.

• 4:56Tim Ferriss?

  Richard, welcome to the show.

• 4:58Richard Branson?

  Thank you very much. Nice to talk to you.

• 5:00Tim Ferriss?

  I have been looking forward to this conversation for more than 20 years.

• 5:08Richard Branson?

  All right. Well, that's, that's, that's, that's a lot to live up to.

• 5:12Tim Ferriss?

  It is a lot to live up to.

• 5:15Richard Branson?

  Anyway, congratulations on all you've, you've achieved as well.

• 5:18Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. No, I appreciate it. We've, we've bumped into each other here and then different points around the world, but I've always wanted to sit down and very selfishly ask you a lot of questions ever since I bought your first autobiography, Losing My Virginity, and have carried it with me since college through starting all of my businesses since. I thought we could just begin, I suppose, with current events. I've been following you around the planet to have this conversation, which I'm thrilled that we're able to have because you've gone through some pretty extenuating circumstances recently. Could you describe for us? I saw your Instagram post, for instance, about retreating into the wine cellar under

• 6:02Tim Ferriss?

  your home or the main building, I suppose it was on Necker Island. Where are you right now? And could you describe what that experience was like?

• 6:13Richard Branson?

  It's a strange thing to say, but I've, I've had the privilege of being through four hurricanes before this one and about one every 10, 10 years in the Caribbean. And, you know, a force one, force two hurricane by and large is magnificent. It's, you know, it's dramatic. The sea, the sea throbs, the, the trees bend, the, you know, incredible lightning storms. And, and it's one of the sort of marvels of life. You know, yes, there's damage, um, you know, trees come down and but generally speaking, you know, the the damages, you know, you could you can overcome that damage. And this hurricane was altogether different. And I mean, the uh you you've got sort of force five category four five hurricanes is the highest it goes.

• 6:58Richard Branson?

  Uh, the hurricane that was coming to hit us was actually category seven. They didn't even have it in the books. Uh, you know, I was definitely gonna stay on island because we had sixty members of our staff on island. Uh, but I knew that it would it would be foolish uh to be, you know, up in the main house, you know, watching nature at its worst. We had to um get into a very, very, very secure area. And so the moment it started hitting, we went down into a sort of concrete bunker uh at the bottom of the house. And for five hours, I mean, it screamed. I mean, it was, um, you know, the whole concrete bunker shuddered and, uh, you know, there there were, you know, young girls as well as guys, or a couple of children in the bunker.

• 7:40Richard Branson?

  Uh, there was there was a number of tears, um, water was pouring through. Um, uh, but I don't think any of us feared for our lives. We knew that we were in a in a strong area. Um, we we felt for uh six hundred flamingos on the lake. We we we felt for the lemurs that that were still outside. We we felt for the people uh of the rest of the Caribbean and the British Virgin Islands who lived in, you know, wooden shacks and uh and buildings that were were nothing as strong as strong. And then equally, suddenly it stopped. I mean, it was suddenly, there was a complete hush outside. And we waited fifteen minutes and we couldn't work out whether this is the end of the storm uh or whether we were in the eye of the storm.

• 8:24Richard Branson?

  And um we we stuck our head out of the door. And I just looked at complete utter devastation. It was as if a hurricane had hit hit the island. Um, and, you know, I don't often cry over possessions or, you know, you know, being damaged. But uh, yeah, definitely, um, I think all of us had tears in our eyes. Within five minutes, the other side of the storm hit and we threw ourselves back in to the hurricane shelter and we huddled there for another four or five hours. And um when we finally came out, um, we we surveyed the damage. And, you know, on our own island, it was pretty devastating, uh, to say the least. Within twenty four hours, we'd

• 9:05Richard Branson?

  We started going around the the um the rest of the British Virgin Islands and I mean ninety percent of homes were destroyed or nearly destroyed. Uh incredible uh that uh more more life wasn't lost. I mean, and incredible the resilience of the uh Caribbean people. I mean, stories, you know, that they told, you know, like, you know, one one person told me of, you know, the house disappearing above their head with their children, their grandchildren in it, uh running to the neighbor's house. Uh that then disappeared, you know, running into a wall. Uh the wall started collapsing, uh and they ended up with the whole family in a cesspit up to their uh knees in in shit and but they survived it.

• 9:51Richard Branson?

  And uh, you know, there's a thirteen, it was a thirteen year old girl who within three days was uh set up a a makeshift school uh um out outside, teaching kids younger than her. And um so anyway, very resilient people and and, you know, the last couple, last month I just spent trying to work out ways of seeing whether the whole of the Caribbean, but the whole of the British Virgin Islands um can come back better and stronger and um uh and, you know, cleaner and, you know, see if we can get some positive things to come out of what's obviously been um, you know, been um a sad event.

• 10:28Tim Ferriss?

  So I'd love to dig into your, I suppose we could call it familiarity with uh what some people would look at as near death experiences. Uh this is from a New Yorker profile, but you hold records and the writer observed you might also hold the record for the number of highly publicized near death experiences. So if this was, this was a some time ago, I mean, this is ten years ago, two thousand and seven, but pulled from the sea five times by helicopters, once from a frozen lake, during one of your attempts to circle the globe, crashed into the Algerian desert, Chinese Air Force threatened to shoot one of your balloons out of the sky at one point, and it goes, it goes on and on. When you are in circumstances like that, and you mentioned you had a lot of staff.

• 11:12Tim Ferriss?

  Down in the in the basement with you, what did you say to those people? If there were people there who were very, very worried or perhaps panicking in some in some sense, what did you say or what did you do in those circumstances?

• 11:27Richard Branson?

  I think humor is important, you know, putting on a brave, putting on a brave face, you know, cracking, you know, cracking, cracking jokes, plenty of hugs. I mean, I think hugs are important, you know, but I think, you know, like when we were all down, all down in the bunker, and I mean, just to try to reassure them that, you know, that we, that even 200 mile an hour winds were not going to bring us sort of concrete, you know, concrete bunker down, you know, with some of my other, some of the other adventures where we were, you know, in a, in a, in a capsule up in the, you know, flying, you know, flying around the world. And when things went wrong, you know, there were just two of us generally, and you, you

• 12:12Richard Branson?

  know, both of you have got to try to keep the spirits of the other, the other person up. And if you're going to survive, the only way you're going to survive is by keeping focused, by, you know, staying positive, even if you are facing almost certain death. I mean, it's, but you know, you're definitely, you're definitely going to die unless you stay focused and stay positive and, and fight to the bitter end. And, you know, there have been circumstances where, you know, on paper, we had a well over 90% chance of not coming home. And, and I think by staying focused, by staying positive and, and with, you know, a, a, a big dose of good fortune, we made it all the way back.

• 12:57Tim Ferriss?

  So if we rewind the clock, then, I mean, these are some of the exploits that you're known for, but if we rewind the clock. Back to childhood, I'd read that one of your headmasters had observed, or he'd said to you, actually, "I predict you will either end up in prison or a millionaire." I don't know if that's true, you have to be careful what you read on the internet. But if that is true, what do you think this headmaster saw in you or observed in you at such a young age that would lead to such a statement?

• 13:29Richard Branson?

  It is true. It was his parting words to me as I left school,

• 13:36Richard Branson?

  aged, just turning 16. And, you know, I think that, you know, first of all, I am dyslexic, I was dyslexic. So conventional schooling definitely passed me by. And I was somebody that felt very strongly about some of the issues in the world. The biggest issue in the world at that time was a very unjust war, the Vietnamese war. I mean, most wars are very unjust, but this was yet another very, very unjust war. And I, like many young people, was determined to try to campaign very hard to stop the war.

• 14:17Richard Branson?

  And I thought maybe the best way of doing it was to launch a magazine for young people that could be distributed not just among schools but universities as well, which would be a campaigning magazine, and it would give young people the voice that they didn't have. You know, I started planning this magazine at school and working out the school phone box, trying to sell advertising and, you know, ringing out James Baldwin or Jean-Paul Sartre or Vanessa Redgrave or anybody I felt who, you know, Tariq Ali and Bernadette Koen Bendit from Germany, anybody I felt that could contribute

• 14:58Richard Branson?

  to a campaigning magazine like this and getting them to contribute. And then... And surprisingly, you know, managed to get enough advertising to cover the printing and the paper costs of the first issue. And so when the headmaster called me in and said, you know, you either must stay at school and stop doing this magazine idea of yours and concentrate on your schoolwork, or you're going to have to leave school to run your magazine. It was an easy decision for me. And I'm grateful to the headmaster for being such a foolish headmaster. I mean, obviously, it would be much better if I could have done both. And I think it would have been good for the school.

• 15:43Richard Branson?

  But and I met him a few years later and, you know, and, you know, he was very gracious and congratulated us on our success and so on. But I think, you know, I did end up in prison for a night a few years later. And I definitely, and that was before I'd become a millionaire. So I think, you know, I remember the headmaster's words and I remember how unpleasant being in prison for a night is. And saying to myself, you know, I will never, ever, ever do anything that warrants me going to prison again. So it was, I think, everybody should spend a night in prison. So he actually got it right on both counts.

• 16:27Tim Ferriss?

  What did you do that led or what happened that led to that night in prison?

• 16:32Richard Branson?

  What happened was that whilst we had the magazine, we started in the magazine, a little mail order company for people who wanted to buy music. And we called this mail order company Virgin Records. Nobody had sold music cheaply before. So we, you know, we discounted it by ten to thirty percent off. And we sold music that we loved. So, you know, Frank Zappa, Captain D thought, you know, it was rock and roll music rather than the sort of anti-Williams and the mixture of, you know, rubbish that, you know, other rubbish that was out there. And so the public loved it. It resonated with young people.

• 17:18Richard Branson?

  And we had good taste and we were aiming at kids with good taste. And then one day, somebody ordered some records from Belgium from us. A big group, a big, large amount of records from Belgium. And so we've, you know, we got a lorry and we drove across the, goes down to Dover and across to France. And when we got to France, they said, where are you selling these records? And we said, in Belgium. And they said, well, you're not allowed to come through France and sell them in Belgium without a carnet, which means that you're not going to leave them in France. So you're going to have to go back to England.

• 17:59Richard Branson?

  And as we were driving back to England, we realized that we had all these pieces of paper signed that said that we exported them. And now if we could sell them in England, we wouldn't have to pay the 35% tax.

• 18:13Richard Branson?

  So foolishly, we sold them in England. And, you know, what we didn't realize was that there were other bigger retail chains doing something very similar and in a much more professional way. And there was a, you know, a group of customs and excise people who were investigating this idea. And anyway, so we got busted and fortunately didn't get a criminal record because, you know, they said you can pay the fine off over three years. And as long as you pay the fine off, you won't get a criminal record. And actually, it spurred on the opening of, you know, we had to open 30 or 40 record stores in order to pay off Richard's fine and keep myself out of prison.

• 18:53Richard Branson?

  And so very grateful to customs and excise for giving us that incentive.

• 18:59Tim Ferriss?

  What did your parents say to you at that time when you got in trouble and ended up in jail? And how old were you at the time, if you could place us?

• 19:08Richard Branson?

  I was 19 years old, so still a teenager, still just about allowed to be naughty. I remember I was in Dover magistrate's court and the judge said he wanted...

• 19:21Richard Branson?

  Yeah, ten thousand pounds bail and and I said, you know, look, there's no way I can afford ten thousand pounds bail. And so he said, well, you know, I'm I'm sorry, but you'll have to go to prison and wait and wait and await the trial then. And my mother stood up and said, well, what what what about if I pledged the family home? Um, would you would that would that be all right? And the judge was good enough to, you know, say that that will be fine if you pledge the family house, you you you that will be fine. So I gave my mother a very, very big hug. Uh, and many, many years later, I mean, you know, right, right, you know, fifty years later nearly, you know, we're now working very hard in America to try to um, uh, help people who can't afford bail get bail.

• 20:04Richard Branson?

  And, um, you know, there's this awful situation in the States, for instance, where, you know, where if you've got money or if you've got a house to pledge, you don't go to prison for six months waiting awaiting your trial. But if you're if you're poor, often black, uh, in, you know, um, you end up languishing in prison for a few months while waiting for your trial, even although you can be completely innocent. So, uh, so obviously lots of personal experiences come back and and and have influenced my life later on.

• 20:33Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I I'd like to talk about influence. You mentioned your mother and in preparing for this conversation, I I took a closer look at your mom and I have to say, what I was going to do is not mention the last name and read this description, but your your mom also wrote a book called Mums of the Word, The High Flying Adventures of Eve Branson. I just have to read a few lines here to give people some context. A classically trained ballet dancer, she appeared in racy West End productions, disguised herself as a boy to take glider lessons, enlisted in the Women's Royal Navy Service, and then embarked on a series of harrowing adventures as a star girl, air hostess on the ill-fated British South American Airways. And it goes on and on.

• 21:18Tim Ferriss?

  This seems to potentially explain a lot. Uh, and I was I was curious to know, uh, specifically, when you were a kid struggling with dyslexia, and I'm not sure if it was even properly diagnosed at the time, but how did your your mom? Respond to that. What did she tell you when you were having trouble with school or having trouble reading? How did your parents or your mother help you navigate that? What was the experience like?

• 21:48Richard Branson?

  Yeah, first of all, I'm lucky. I mean, I have a very extraordinary mother and a lovely father and we're a very, very close knit family and that's fortunately continued with myself, my wife and children and so on ever since. So that's given us a fantastic foundation as a family. When I was young, the word dyslexia, I don't think existed. I don't think the word entrepreneur existed either, except maybe in the French dictionary. And so, you know, so it was just assumed that I was thick and, you know, they just got used to, you know, these dreadful marks that came back on, you know, my maths paper or my English paper

• 22:27Richard Branson?

  and so on. And, and I think that made it that much easier when I actually said that I want to leave school, you know, age 15. I think, although that my dad walked me around the garden, you know, three times instead of just once, you know, by the end of the walk, I remember him saying, you know, look, at least you know what you want to do. At 15, I didn't know what I wanted to do when I was 22. I respect you for that and go give it a go. And if it doesn't work out, we'll try to help you get a formal education again. You know, my mother, you know, she, you know, her whole approach in bringing up her children was one where she would, she would have been arrested today. In those days, she could

• 23:12Richard Branson?

  get away with it. So, you know, at age four or five, she would, you know, shove me out of the car, you know, two or three miles from grandmother's house and tell me to make my own way there. She would, you know, put me on a bicycle age seven or eight and tell me to ride, you know, 300 miles in the pouring rain again to grandmother's house. And her attitude was, you know, if we survived, you know, we'd be the stronger for it. She wouldn't allow us to watch television, for instance. We had to get out there and do things. And, you know, so she would push us out of, out of the house and, you know, tell us to come back in the evening and, you know, and, you know, get out there, go and climb trees, rescue cats, you know, and I'll see you, see you tonight. So, you know, we lived in the countryside

• 23:56Richard Branson?

  and, you know, it was a, you know, it was a, it was a fun. A fun upbringing and very, but a very loving upbringing. I mean, it may not sound like it. She wasn't actually trying to kill us. She did love us as well.

• 24:13Tim Ferriss?

  What, what would she say to you? One, for instance, it's raining out, you're in the car. Would she give you any warning? And what would she say to you if, if it was raining and she wanted you to get out and ride a bike home in the pouring rain? Was there any, any kind of lead up, any, any lesson that she would impart before that? I'm just thinking, I don't have any kids myself, but I think about parenting a lot. What, what, can you replay for us just one of those scenes? So we, we know how it was presented to you?

• 24:43Richard Branson?

  I think the getting out of the, the pushing us out of the car was most likely. I was most likely having a little debate with my younger sister and, and, and say, it wasn't really, you know, this is, this is going to be a life lesson. It was more, um, you know, shoving the, shoving, shoving the brakes on, pushing us out of the car, slamming the door and then driving off. Um, so, yeah, we, we, as I say, we did survive. And I mean, I, I remember distinctly when I was five, on that, that very occasion, walking across the fields. And I was young enough to decide I wanted to get my own back on her. And, uh, and I saw a farmhouse and I walked very slowly towards

• 25:25Richard Branson?

  the farmhouse. Um, so I wasn't too worried because I, I could see the lights of a farmhouse, but I was damned if I was going to do it quickly because I thought she's, she's gonna have, she's gonna have to suffer this time. And she did suffer and, and, and, and I don't think she has readily pushed me out of the car. But anyway, no, it's fun. I mean, I've just, you know, my mom's 19, 94 now and I've just, I've just saw her a few minutes ago and she, she will never stop. I mean, she's got an idea a minute and, you know, we've always had to run to keep up with her and, uh, you know, put the two of us together. It's a dangerous, dangerous conversation.

• 26:07Tim Ferriss?

  So I, I think that many people have the impression of you as a

• 26:14Tim Ferriss?

  Fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants entrepreneur who throws caution to the wind and bets the farm on many, many things. And what I'd love to talk about is maybe the the alternative to that, or the complement to that, we don't have to do either or, which is risk mitigation. Because the more I look at what you've done, in many cases, not all cases, but in many cases, you seem like a master at mitigating risk and capping the downside. So I was hoping maybe you could talk about, I believe it was, I think you were en route, if you could clarify for me, to BVI, and there was a flight canceled in Puerto Rico, but how you actually

• 26:59Tim Ferriss?

  ended up in the airline business? Because I find it such an illustrative and helpful story, if you wouldn't mind telling people a little bit about the origins.

• 27:11Richard Branson?

  Well, I was in my twenties. I'd been away from my girlfriend for three weeks. I was coming back to see her that night. I was in Puerto Rico about six in the evening. I was heading to the Virgin Islands. And American Airlines announced that they were going to move the flight to the next morning, because they didn't have enough passengers. And I was damned if I was going to wait till the next morning. My lovely girlfriend hadn't seen me for three weeks, and I hadn't seen her for three weeks. So I was determined to get there that night. So I went to the back of the airport, hoping that my credit card wouldn't bounce. I rented a plane. I borrowed a blackboard. And as a joke, I wrote

• 27:55Richard Branson?

  Virgin Airlines one way, $29 or $39 to the British Virgin Islands. And I went out amongst all the people who'd been bumped. And I filled up my first plane. And as we arrived in the BVI, about eight or nine o'clock that night, one of the passengers tapped me on the shoulder and said, you know, sharpen up the service a bit, Richard, and you could be in the airline business.

• 28:22Richard Branson?

  So it got me thinking, you know, airlines do bump people. You know, most airlines don't look after people. You know, the staff generally don't smile. The food was dreadful. I mean, so the next morning I was on Necker Island and I rang up Boeing and I asked to talk to the sales department. And a wonderful man who I got to know very well, it was called R J Wilson, answered the phone. And the call went roughly like this. I said, you know, my name is Richard Branson and I'm interested in buying a second hand seven four seven. And R J Wilson said, well, you know, would you mind telling me, you know, what you do? I said, I'm in the record business.

• 29:04Richard Branson?

  I've got the Rolling Stones, I've got the Sex Pistols, I've got Janet Jackson and lots of wonderful artists. And I could sort of feel that he was, you know, like feeling that I was slightly wasting his time. And but he said, and you're based in England. And I said, well, our companies are based in England. And so he carried on talking and subsequently I learned that he carried on talking because they were so fed up with British Airways always legging it over them because they had no competition. They thought, in the back of his head, mind, he was thinking maybe that, you know, by having a competitor to British Airways, they'd be able to have a bit more leverage. So, so he said, look, I'll tell you what, I'll come and see you. You know, we do happen to have one second hand seven four seven.

• 29:48Richard Branson?

  But with a name like Virgin, I really feel you should change the name. With a name like Virgin, people will think you're not going to go the whole way.

• 29:57Richard Branson?

  I, I, I said, well, I'll, I'll, I'll thank you for your advice and I'll think, I'll think about that. So I then, you know, talked to my fellow record company team and, and they went into complete panic mode. I mean, you know, what on earth is Richard doing, thinking of taking us into the airline business? We have the most successful independent record label in the world. We're, you know, we've just signed the Rolling Stones. We've got, you know, we're, everything's going from strength to strength. And, you know, he's putting everything, he's going to put everything at risk by going to the airline business. And So what I said to them was, look, I promised that, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll only go into

• 30:39Richard Branson?

  the airline business on one condition, and that is if I can persuade Boeing to let me hand the plane back at the end of the first year, i.e. to protect the downside. So I knew that the worst that could happen would be, you know, maybe six months of the profits of Virgin Records we would lose if it didn't work out. And Boeing agreed to it. And, you know, when the end of the first year came, instead of handing the plane back, people loved Virgin Atlantic and, you know, we had a, you know, people flocked to it and we had a spirit about it, which is very different from British Airways. We ended up buying a couple of second-hand 747s from Boeing. And, and then, you know, over the years since, we've bought some hundreds of planes from, you know, for three or four different

• 31:23Richard Branson?

  airlines we set up over the years from Boeing. So RJ Wilson certainly deserves a pat on the back at Boeing, I think.

• 31:30Tim Ferriss?

  So how did you convince RJ to agree to allow you to return the plane if things didn't work out? What was the, what was the pitch? Or what was the, what was the approach?

• 31:43Richard Branson?

  Well, we liked each other, which, which I think is always important in, in any negotiation. And, you know, he admitted that, you know, one of the reasons they wanted to see us in business was to, you know, to enable them to have a little bit of competition with British Airways. And, you know, I think, you know, I, you know, I think we showed him that we managed to build a very successful global record company. And, you know, unlike other people, I mean, you know, I argued that being in, you know, being in entertainment, actually, you know, that's important in the airline business, that, you know, that most airline owners just, just, you know, see airlines as a, as a way of transporting

• 32:24Richard Branson?

  people from A to B. But actually entertaining people is, is important. And if people are locked in a tin can for eight or nine hours or 12 hours, they, they want to be entertained. And that, you know, that I felt we could bring our entertainment skills to that. You know, when British Airways heard that we were going to go into the business, they, they dismissively said, Lord Kink famously said, too young to fly, too old to rock and roll.

• 32:52Richard Branson?

  And followed up by saying, you know, what on earth is somebody from the entertainment business going into the airline business for? But of course, that's just what British Airways didn't realise was they were not, you know, they were dumping a lump of chicken on somebody's lap. They were showing, you know, maybe one film that people were lucky on the screen to children, to grannies, to business people. There was no choice. There was, you know, they had cabin crew who weren't given the tools to do a good job and therefore they never smiled. And so it went on. And so, you know, exactly what the airline industry what needed was an airline that could entertain people. You know, so when we launched Virgin

• 33:34Richard Branson?

  Atlantic with our one plane, you know, we had stand up bars, we had, you know, we had cabin crew were absolutely delightful and, you know, loved what they were doing. We had humour. I mean, we showed the film Airplane on the first flight, you know, when in the cockpit, we had, you know, we told our passengers that they were going to see the pilots and, you know, the screen came on and there was the backs of the heads of the pilots and, you know, it became apparent they had quite long hair and then, you know, two famous cricketers turned around and handed each other a split. They were the front pilots and then I took

• 34:14Richard Branson?

  the split, I was the pilot just behind them. And it was deathly hush in the plane. And just as we took off and then I stood up so they could see I wasn't actually in the cockpit. And we pre-recorded that the day before. And the whole plane, the whole plane just fell about laughing. And, you know, the journey, the journey over, the more champagne was drunk, I think than on any flight before or after. And, you know, the pilot, you know, he would, you know, he got into the sense of humour. So, you know, he'd be flying along and he would have the plane slightly leaning to the right. And then he would ask all the passengers on the right hand side of the plane, sorry, look, there's just too many people

• 34:59Richard Branson?

  parting on the right, will some of you move over to the left, please? And then he would swing the plane a bit to the left. Anyway, it was a laugh a minute the whole way. But for anybody who's thinking, my God, I would never fly on this man's airline. You know, I got the chief technical officer of British Caledonian to actually run our airline. You know, obviously, safety is paramount if you're running an airline. And thirty five years later, you know, we have many airlines and it's been, they've all been wonderfully run. But that doesn't preclude you entertaining people. That doesn't preclude humour. That doesn't preclude, you know, we're always trying to be cutting edge. You know, whether it's seatback videos, you know, we pushed the industry to invent a seatback video.

• 35:43Richard Branson?

  And we worked five for British Airways with seatback videos, giving people a choice. And so we love trying to cut through and do things differently from others. And I think that's why Virgin Atlantic has survived, other airlines have done well. I mean, when we set up with one plane, we were competing with T W A, with Pan Am, with Air Florida, with Laker Airways, with People Express and so on. With all of these, most of these airlines with hundreds of planes and we had one plane. And the graveyard of airlines was massive. I mean, like people who tried to go into the airline business and failed.

• 36:26Richard Branson?

  And over the next three or four years, pretty well all these airlines, including a lot of others, Air Europe, Danair, all went bankrupt. You know, and somehow this little David versus, you know, these Goliaths survived, you know, because we offered a better product. And British Airways did not like it. I mean, they were absolutely determined to drive us out of business. And as they had driven out business, a lot of these other airlines.

• 36:57Richard Branson?

  They launched something called the Dirty Tricks Campaign. I mean, it wasn't publicly known as the Dirty Tricks Campaign in the early days because nobody knew what was going on. But they, you know, they set up behind closed doors, a group of people who illegally tapped our computer information. And they would ring our passengers, they would pretend, for instance, to be from Virgin. And they would say, very sorry, your flight has been delayed, but we can move you on to a British Airways flight. Or, people going into the nightclubs that we owned in London, we had a big gay nightclub called Heaven. And they would rustle through the, rustle through the bins outside and try to find easels

• 37:38Richard Branson?

  or anything that would look like maybe drugs would be taken in the club. And then they would leak the stories to the news of the world, rub them in their newspapers and try to damage us that way. Or they would have people going through my own rubbish bins, which they got caught doing. And journalist rubbish bins that we maybe had talked to. And they would try to spread stories about our finances. And in the end, we decided to take them to court. And it was Christmas time. And we won the biggest libel damages in history against British Airways. And we distributed it to all our staff equally. And because it was Christmas time, it became known as the British Airways Christmas Bonus.

• 38:23Richard Branson?

  And I think our staff are hoping that British Airways will get up to their tricks again. But I mean, that helped, it helped anyway, keep them on slightly more honest as the time went on.

• 38:37Tim Ferriss?

  How did you identify the Dirty Tricks Campaign? How did it become discovered?

• 38:43Richard Branson?

  It was, generally speaking, British Airways staff that came to us.

• 38:48Richard Branson?

  I mean, particularly one, one particular individual who actually worked in the, the locked, behind the locked doors tapping our computer information, uh, who felt very uncomfortable about it, you know, and, and others, I mean, you know, for instance, they were, they were, they had a teams of people in New York who were going up to our passengers, I got out of their limousines to board a Virgin plane, uh, again, saying, I'm sorry that the Virgin plane has been, the ladle has a problem, but I, I'd be sent here by Virgin to take a British Airways, and some of our passengers managed to rumble them on this one and, and, and let us know. So, you know, so it was a combination of different things. I mean, there was one person was just caught red handed, uh, going, going through the rubbish bins.

• 39:33Richard Branson?

  Uh, yeah, so we were lucky, lucky to get it exposed. I mean, you know, one of the sad outcomes of this was, uh, they, they, they, they were also dumping capacity on, on the few routes that we had, um, and that's, that's the normal trick of a, you know, big airlines against small airlines. They can afford to lose money on a few routes to drive a competitor out of business, and then they'll jack the prices up once that competitor's out of business. You know, and it was beginning to cost us some money. So, um, so I had to make a, a difficult decision. We had the, you know, the most successful independent record label in the world, uh, by then, and, um, you know, I knew that the only way of being completely

• 40:15Richard Branson?

  sure of keeping the airline going and saving all the jobs at the record company was to sell one or the other. Now that the airline we could never sell, so we talked to Thorny and I, and, um, and they bought, they bought the record company. And, you know, it was a billion dollars, um, so, you know, it should have been an happy day, but actually it was one of the saddest days of my life because, you know, selling. A company is selling a pool. We built this company up from scratch. It's been tremendous fun building Virgin Records. But, you know, we now had the firepower to be sure that the staff of the record company's jobs were secure, but, you know, under different ownership and

• 40:57Richard Branson?

  the airline was secure. And with that billion dollars, we knew that British Airways would have to think twice before, you know, they most likely would realize that we were here to stay.

• 41:11Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for that explanation and context, because it gives me a number of jumping off points. The first being, I suppose, opportunity and risk assessment. So you strike me as a really good negotiator. By necessity, you'd have to be. If you had, say, a would be entrepreneur or a university senior, someone who's about to graduate and go into the real world, and you wanted, they tell you that they want to become a very good negotiator, a very good dealmaker. How would you train them? Or what would you recommend they do or read to become a better negotiator or dealmaker? Because you seem very, very astute and subtle in structuring

• 41:54Tim Ferriss?

  things in very smart ways. What would you say to someone who wants to develop that skillset?

• 41:59Richard Branson?

  I'm sure that there must be ways of being taught it. But in my opinion, nothing beats personal experience. My education was, you know, being thrown into the jungle, being thrown into the real world, aged fifteen or sixteen, and having to survive. And it was an incredible education. And, you know, I learned about everything in life. You know, I traveled a lot. I met people all over the world. I had to do a lot of different negotiations. You know, I think as I've got older, I've realized that one of the most important things

• 42:37Richard Branson?

  about a negotiation is striking a deal that is fair to both sides. I also realized as I get older that you're always going to come across the same people time and time again in life. And so your reputation is everything. You know, in my new book, Finding My Virginity, I talk about our dealings with Delta and how, you know, they felt that they'd

• 43:00Richard Branson?

  Legged us over in a clause in a contract and how they they they came to us to rectify it. And you know, that's that's something I'll never forget and most likely will will be, you know, pardons with Delta for the rest of my life because of that, you know, that that kind of that kind of approach. And you know, so I think, you know, if you if you realize that your reputation is all you have and your personal reputation, the reputation of your brand, then you've got to make sure that you're you're you're negotiating a deal that that you're not going to be unhappy with and that and you think of all the things that could potentially go wrong and how you can get out of it if something goes wrong. But equally important is, you know, is trying to trying to strike a fair

• 43:45Richard Branson?

  balance with the people you're negotiating with.

• 43:48Tim Ferriss?

  And when when we're looking internally, you mentioned how your teammates at the record company thought you were crazy when you brought up the airline. Are there any business ideas that you're glad your coworkers or team have prevented you from doing?

• 44:03Richard Branson?

  As you know, my nickname is Dr. Yes. And, you know, I I have books like Screw It, Just Do It. And I think, to be honest, if I want to do something, one of the advantages of owning the company is I can normally ultimately get away with it. I mean, I'll try, obviously, to carry carry people with me. But and I'm sure there've been one or two things which I where I have bullied bullied the process through where I regretted, well, not regretted, I've never regretted anything, but where perhaps I should have listened more to others. But I can't think of anything that, you know, where they persuaded me not to do it. I think most likely, you know, when it comes to decision about whether to do something or not, I'm like to think of myself as a Neverland dictator.

• 44:51Richard Branson?

  I get that. That's the one. That's the one thing I sort of generally get my own way on. We look, we would never have gone into space travel. We'll come to that, I'm sure, later on in this talk, you know, unless I was to do to do things against the against the sensible, you know, what would, you know, on paper be sensible advice of my fellow directors.

• 45:11Tim Ferriss?

  We will definitely get to space travel. What I'm curious about, because it seems if I look at many of the businesses that you've started, the positioning is often against a particular incumbent. In the case of, say, airlines, for instance, that seems to be a common element in a lot of the company or product launches. And I want to connect that with just some of your well-known adventures. And you'll see where this is going in a second. I mean, you've driven a tank down Fifth Avenue, crossed the English Channel in an amphibious car, took a 407-foot jump off the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas, gone from Morocco to Hawaii in a hot air balloon.

• 45:52Tim Ferriss?

  You are very, very adept at PR stunts, getting attention for the things that you do and the companies that you do. Are there any particular best practices or a playbook that you have found to be very, or principles for that matter, helpful with the launching of a new company or product?

• 46:15Richard Branson?

  I don't think so. I mean, I'm a great believer in trying. If your team work really hard to launch a new business with you or for you, the least I think I can do is make a fool of myself, make sure that that new business ends up on the front page of the newspapers rather than an anecdote on the pages of the newspapers. So if that means having to use myself to put the new company on the map, I will do so. And I will try to do it in a way that makes people smile and that doesn't horribly backfire on me. Occasionally, it has backfired. And I suppose it's like being a host to a party. I mean, if you're the host of the party, if you stand in the corner of the room and

• 46:58Richard Branson?

  you sip your sherry and stand around with your fellow directors all in suits, everyone's going to have a thoroughly dull party. And yeah, nobody will have a good time. If you're the host of the party and you're first in the swing pool and everybody else jump in too, yeah, they may be a bit cold for the rest of the evening, but they're going to have a great evening. And I think the same applies when you're launching a business. Make sure that you put it on the map and just occasionally it will backfire.

• 47:32Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned space travel, which I do want to use as a touching off point to ask you, roughly 50 years after starting your first business, why, why write Finding My Virginity? What was the catalyst for that? Why do it?

• 47:48Richard Branson?

  I actually think everybody should write a book about their lives. I persuaded a number of people to write books about their lives, Steve Possett, for instance. Anyway, a number of people. But you know, you don't have to lead a very public life. I think everyone's led interesting lives. Your children and your grandchildren will be fascinated by the lives, the lives you lead. And so I wrote a book, Finding My Virginity, when I was a young man, about all the adventures. You know, it became a bestseller and sold millions of copies. But you know, I was, I was quite a young man when I wrote it. And

• 48:28Richard Branson?

  the last 20 years or so, I've been very full and very rich and extraordinary. So, so I thought I would write, in a sense, a sequel to Losing My Virginity, which we called Finding My Virginity. And if I live another 20 years, a virginity found, I suspect, will be my last one. But we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll see how we go. But no, but I think, you know, I think it's important. I love reading, reading and learning. And I think others might enjoy, hopefully will enjoy it. And you know, when I write books, I try to, I try not to make them like a, you know, and then, and then we did this, and then we did that. Just try

• 49:10Richard Branson?

  to make it a really good gripping read and, and an enjoyable read. And, and not try to sort of cram in everything one's done in 20 years. But, and hopefully people can get a few gems from it as well.

• 49:23Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I'm looking forward to, to reading it. Certainly, I mean, given how dog-eared and how worn my paperback copy of Finding My Virginity is, I

• 49:34Richard Branson?

  Of Losing My Virginity.

• 49:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, I'm sorry. That's, I need more coffee. I just had some pu erh tea. It's a little light on the octane. But I know exactly where it is. It's actually kept on a bookshelf. This is just a slight digression. But there are a handful of autobiographies and biographies that have had a Large impact on my life and/or that I find very beautiful in many ways. And they are lined up on one shelf in my house that I can see the spines. And yours is there, Open by Andre Agassi is there, and there are a handful of others. So it's very meaningful. So I'm looking forward to, to reading this. And as a meta question, what are the practices, if there are any practices or habits,

• 50:18Tim Ferriss?

  or, or anything for that matter, that helps you to keep your energy level as high as it is over so, over so many years? I've, I've seen you, for instance, you seem to exercise a lot. I've seen you just go for hours and hours skiing, swimming around Necker, kiteboarding. But could you speak to what helps you to maintain such a high level of energy and output over so long? It's, it's, it's really mind boggling to me to even observe from afar.

• 50:51Richard Branson?

  Well, looking after yourself is, is, is obviously absolutely key to everything else. And everything stems from, you know, how healthy and well you are, both physically, mentally, and so on. I generally do it through sport. I'm, I've been very lucky that for many years I've lived on an island. And so I can get up early in the morning. I'll, I'll play a very hard game of singles tennis against somebody who's better than me. I'll then go kite surfing, might maybe go surfing and then have breakfast and, and, and the day begins and, and I'll repeat that most likely later on in the day. And, you know, maybe swim around the island as well. So generally I think I, I stay healthy and fit.

• 51:36Richard Branson?

  As a family, you know, my kids are now taking my adventurous streak on board. So every year they set us a challenge which we do together. So to, to give you a taste of it, last year they set the challenge that we would start at the Matterhorn in Switzerland. We'd do an eight day hike across the mountains. We then get on a bicycle. We'd drive, we'd, we'd ride 100 miles a day on the bike through the mountains, all the way from the north of Italy to the southernmost tip of Italy. Then we'd swim to Sicily. Then we would do another bike ride, a marathon, and then we'd end up the top of Mount Etna.

• 52:19Richard Branson?

  It took us a month, you know, I was shattered about halfway through it, but by the end of it, I felt like a twenty five year old and I just never felt so fit, you know, since I was in my twenties. And and obviously, you know, we'll we'll try to raise money for good cause at the same time. But the ver- the very fact that, you know, we set ourselves these challenges, something like tomorrow, I'm I'm now in Morocco today and, you know, tomorrow we're we're about to climb Mount Tupcul, which is the highest mountain in North Africa together and and a few other little things like bike rides and hikes and things thrown in, you know, s- setting ourselves challenges, doing it together as a family, you know, involving friends and and and and trying to raise money for for good causes.

• 53:04Richard Branson?

  Um, you know, that that that keeps you fit and healthy and your mind, your mind good so that you can then do a lot more as a result.

• 53:12Tim Ferriss?

  So, so speaking of of doing good, which you can certainly do through nonprofits and through for-profits and other vehicles, uh, many of my listeners wanted me to ask you to expand on your reasons for investing in Memphis meats and clean meat. Uh, and so so looking forward to your next twenty years of adventures, could you talk about that that decision?

• 53:36Richard Branson?

  I mean, if you take this beautiful world we live in, you know, one of the things that make it so beautiful is things like the ra- the rainforests. And, um, the rainforests are rapidly disappearing, uh, because of our demand for, um, for beef, basically. You know, for every, every hamburger we eat, the amount of land that is needed to produce it uh, is considerable. And as we're more and more successful at bringing more and more people out of poverty on a global basis, more and more people are starting to eat meat. So the only way of addressing this problem is either to persuade people not to eat meat, which is I don't think it's going to be, you know, some something that we can be successful at.

• 54:19Richard Branson?

  Or coming up with alternative forms of of meat. So, um, you know, there's there's um, a wonderful company, I think, called Beyond Meat, which produces hamburgers that uh taste absolutely like hamburgers, but are made of made of vegetables. You know, there's the other company you just mentioned that we've invested in that is literally, you know, growing uh, you know, taking a little tiny little bit of a live animal uh without killing it and then growing it in laboratories. So um, you know, so you can have uh, you know, you you can have beef or you can uh, you know, have chicken or pig or even even um, even fish, they believe they'll be able to do. And you can make it even healthier than um, the the beef

• 55:03Richard Branson?

  or the or the meats that you get from from live animals. So the challenge obviously is producing it in quantity. They believe they will be able to do that. And if they can do it, hopefully one day, we won't have to cut down the rainforests and and therefore kill kill animals i- in order to get our meat consumption. And um, and I suspect, you know, when when when that happens, we'll actually look back at the wholesale slaughter of animals and the way that we did it and be slightly embarrassed about it. My main main reason for this is more to do with um, trying to protect what's left of our beautiful earth.

• 55:39Tim Ferriss?

  And if if you're looking at other areas of interest, I mean, living as I did for a long time, seventeen years in Silicon Valley, the the question of this protein paradox or protein challenge is a very big one. So some people are looking at insect protein, like you mentioned, some people are growing meat in laboratories, others are looking at vegetable options. Another really active area of discussion is cryptocurrency or blockchain and or blockchain. Um, how do you think about if you do cryptocurrency? I mean, when you're hearing all of the news and so on, are you engaging with that at all? Uh, are you choosing to step back? How are you thinking about cryptocurrency?

• 56:22Richard Branson?

  I I mean, I find it, I don't spend a lot of time on this. I find blockchain very exciting. I think the fact that um, You know, Hernando de Soto has written some wonderful books about how do you pull people out of poverty. And, you know, he's say, taken Egypt as an example, ninety percent of people who live in Egypt, live in houses. But they built those houses just on public land. And they have no piece of paper showing that they own that land. So if they want to start a business, they can't mortgage their home, you know, to start a business. They can't

• 57:04Richard Branson?

  use their asset to borrow money to send their children to school. And so blockchain, for instance, would be the perfect place. You could go and register, you know, the millions, well, billions of homes around the world that have no ownership on blockchain. And, you know, it can all be in one place. And I think it could, it could start a revolution of, you know, wealth among, for very poor people. You know, cryptocurrency, it's not something that I've spent a lot of time on. But I think I marvel at Bitcoin and the genius of the man who invented it and, you know, what it's achieved so far, and, you know, what it could possibly achieve in the years to come. And Ethereum and some of these other

• 57:46Richard Branson?

  cryptocurrencies that are coming up. Again, you know, hats off to these geniuses who, you know, who are producing them. And, you know, but more of my energy, to be honest, is now spent on, you know, on different kinds of issues. But I mean, I'm fascinated by everything in life. And this is one of those fascinating, fascinating areas.

• 58:04Tim Ferriss?

  I want to be respectful of your time. I know we don't have a whole lot left. So I'd love to just ask a few of the audience's favorite rapid fire questions. And then I know you're bouncing from point to point right now around the world. So I'll let you get going. But the, the first question is, what is the book or books you've given most as a gift? And why? Outside, outside of your own books? Are there any particular books that you've given or recommended to others the most?

• 58:36Richard Branson?

  Well, climate change is something which I've, I've spent a lot of time on. I would highly recommend a book by Tim Flannery called The Weathermakers, which was one of the books that opened my eyes to the problems that we have in the world. I'm just reading Homo Deus, which I find is, and I will carry on to read Sapiens, his first book, or one of his first books, and I just love, you know, love the style of his writing and, you know, I love books where you're learning, you're learning something from them and rather than, if I want to, if I want fiction, I'll get a good film out. So if I'm, if I'm reading books, I like to read books which have got some substance.

• 59:21Richard Branson?

  I love autobiographies or biographies as well.

• 59:24Tim Ferriss?

  Do you read most of your books as text or do you listen to audiobooks? I'm just thinking back to the challenges you had with dyslexia as a younger person. Have you learned to cope with those and now read mostly text or is audio something that you use much?

• 59:40Richard Branson?

  I have largely coped with these things now and enjoy, you know, a good solid book with Harback book. I'm just waiting, I'm just doing my own audiobook for Finding My Virginity. It takes a long time.

• 59:56Tim Ferriss?

  Takes a long time, yeah.

• 59:58Richard Branson?

  Yeah. And so, but, but anyway, I know that more and more people do enjoy audiobooks, so I'm sure it's worthwhile.

• 1:00:06Tim Ferriss?

  In the last, let's just call it five years or so, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life? Or what, what habit has improved your life? Could be any new belief, behavior, or habit that has markedly improved your life.

• 1:00:22Richard Branson?

  If we could go back a bit further than the last five years, I think.

• 1:00:25Tim Ferriss?

  Oh yeah, we can, no, we can go back. We can go back as far as you like, absolutely.

• 1:00:28Richard Branson?

  One of the, one of the best things my parents taught me, going back a long way, if I ever said anything about anybody, they would sit me in front of the mirror and for 10 minutes and in order to sort of let me know how badly it reflected on me. So, you know, I like to think, I've never, generally, never spoken ill about other people. And I think that's been one of the, one of the, you know, best bits of advice that I've ever given, sorry, I've ever received or, and obviously then given. Archbishop Tutu, who chaired the elders, which is an organization that we've run for, for 10 years now. Um.

• 1:01:09Richard Branson?

  You know, he was the epitome of forgiveness with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa when Nelson Mandela, you know, took over PAH. And, you know, I think just, you know, people, nations, you know, it should try, we should all try to run based on that philosophy. And I think the world would be a happier place if that, if that happened.

• 1:01:33Tim Ferriss?

  You, you mentioned Nelson Mandela. This is clearly not one of my stock rapid fire questions, but I've, I've heard you refer to Nelson as a mentor. Are there any key lessons or takeaways or memorable sentences or anything that come to mind when you think of your interactions with Nelson Mandela?

• 1:01:54Richard Branson?

  Well, you know, I was lucky enough to get to know him very well over the years, even to the extent that on July the 18th, we shared a birthday and, and he would ring me every single birthday to wish me a happy birthday. And, you know, I remember, yeah, the sadness when I didn't get that call not so many years ago. You know, he had an absolute joy for life and, and, you know, he would dance, he would smile, he would embrace everybody. But he had a, a tough side to him as well. And I remember one lunch I had with him early on in our relationship where, you know, I'd been warned that he was always trying to extract money for, for good causes.

• 1:02:36Richard Branson?

  So, you know, we had the first course, then we had the second course, then we had the pudding and we were on to the coffee and I thought, my God, I've got away with it. And, and, and then, and then he turns to me and says, ah, Richard, last week I had lunch with Bill Gates and he gave me $50 million for such and such a course. And anyway, so he did not miss an opportunity. Yeah. I mean, I, I have, I've not, apart from maybe Archbishop Tutu, I've, I've really never met and I haven't met anybody as extraordinary in my lifetime as him.

• 1:03:09Tim Ferriss?

  When you yourself feel, and maybe you don't feel this, but I'll, I'll assume for the moment that you do, when you felt overwhelmed or unfocused, or if you feel like you've temporarily lost your focus. What do you do or what have you found to help? What questions do you ask yourself? Is there, in those cases, what have you done historically that has been helpful?

• 1:03:38Richard Branson?

  I personally believe that the majority of people who have down moments in their lives, they can actually trace it back quite often to alcohol. So perhaps the only days of my life that I feel lethargic is if instead of having two glasses at nighttime, I had five or six. And if I find that's happened on more than one or two occasions, I then give up completely for a month or two and feel absolutely fantastic, of course, and realize that I'm never going to drink another touch of alcohol again until actually you do.

• 1:04:18Richard Branson?

  And fortunately, I'm so busy that I just can't afford to let myself down too often. But my guess is that for the vast majority of people, if you can be high on life and fit and healthy and if you do find that something like alcohol is just beginning to go a bit too far,

• 1:04:48Richard Branson?

  being high on life is just so wonderful.

• 1:04:52Tim Ferriss?

  For a friend of mine, entrepreneur named Matt Mullenweg, he's been on this podcast as well. He's the CEO of a company called Automatic, which is behind WordPress, which powers around 37% of the internet right now. And he told me at one point that he had learned something long ago, which was alcohol is borrowing happiness from tomorrow. And certainly seems to be the case.

• 1:05:16Richard Branson?

  I think that those are beautiful words and they're very, very, very true words. I mean, my son's just had a year of alcohol and, you know, look.

• 1:05:29Richard Branson?

  You can tell he's just so high on life, he's just enjoying enjoying it like uh like he's never enjoyed it before and and you know so like you know if you could do it in moderation, that's great. Uh you know, I tell the story in the book. There was one one night in when we when we won the Grand Prix in Melbourne. And anyway, I let my hair down to such an extent that it would have made um the film Hangover look like a children's children's film. Uh and and and the next day I woke up and anyway, I gave I gave up for six months. And and so it yeah, it doesn't happen to me too often. Um but um but I think

• 1:06:12Richard Branson?

  you know, gen generally, it's yeah, generally, when that's the one area that I think a lot of a lot of people who do, you know, run into problems in lives, it's it's just from slightly too much.

• 1:06:24Tim Ferriss?

  During those periods when you go off of alcohol, do you avoid circumstances where other people are drinking? Or is there something that you say to people if you are in those circumstances? How do you ensure that you don't have just that one drink that then triggers more drinks if you're trying to take time away from alcohol?

• 1:06:42Richard Branson?

  My trick is simply to have a cranberry and soda in a champagne glass. People don't know, you know, I don't, you know, I just take cranberry and soda in a champagne glass. And but I think, look, I think for a lot of people, especially when people first give up anything like that, drugs, alcohol, they need to walk away completely for a while. Fortunately, you know, I haven't got in, you know, I never let myself get to that that state. But you know, but I think that, you know, the best advice is to, you know, get, you know, get, you know, just, you know, just say, I need to go to bed early tonight and and walk away. And otherwise, it's very difficult for people to stick with it. Are you are you are you somebody who drinks or not or not?

• 1:07:27Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, I don't drink a whole lot. I do enjoy wine. Fortunately, I don't feel like I've had any issues with alcohol, although genetically, my family seems to have that predisposition. I certainly have a fair amount of alcoholism in my extended family. So I do, I think about it quite a bit. I can, I can tell that. I think I have the potential to abuse it, but I haven't up to this point.

• 1:07:52Richard Branson?

  I think that you and I have such fascinating lives that that is the best way of keeping keeping these sorts of things in check. You know, we just, we want to, every day is so interesting that you're just not going to want to waste a day by letting something like that take over your life.

• 1:08:11Tim Ferriss?

  Right. No, definitely. And just two more questions for me. This is one really intended just to give people a window into how you cope with some of the harder times. Do you have a favorite failure of yours? And what I mean by that is, how has a failure or an apparent failure set you up for later success? Are there any particular examples that come to mind?

• 1:08:37Richard Branson?

  Yeah, I mean, I think on the on the adventure side, the first time we crossed the Atlantic and a boat, we were trying to break the record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic and getting the blue ribbon back and, you know, and we sank. And then the next day we built a new another boat and we were successful. And the British people love people who are underdogs. And it taught me that actually, you know, failing and then being successful, most likely was better than just going out there and being successful the first time around. I mean, overcoming difficulties, the public almost preferred than someone who's just successful the first time around. Maybe not so much in America, but in Britain anyway.

• 1:09:22Richard Branson?

  I suppose the most notable business failure that we've ever had was taking on Coca-Cola with Virgin Cola. And for a while, it really looked like we were going to topple Coke and Pepsi. I mean, we were outselling them in the UK. The Virgin brand resonated, that people loved the drink. I mean, and then, you know, we landed in Times Square with the Sherman tank. And, you know, we took on Coke in their homeland in America. And Coke decided to bar back and they filled up DC10s full of money and hit men and hit women. And they landed in the territories that we'd launched and they suddenly Virgin Cola started disappearing from all these shelves.

• 1:10:07Richard Branson?

  And I think the lesson I learned from that was, you know, if I'm going to take on a liar, I've got to be, we've got to be different. We've got to be. Much better than they are. And with a cola, you're just another cola. You're not, you can't be fundamentally different. You can be cheaper, but you can't be fundamentally different. So anything we've launched since then, we've only launched new businesses if we can make a fundamental difference.

• 1:10:31Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. Yeah, that's so, so important to underscore, I think. This is the last rapid fire question. If you, if you could have a giant billboard anywhere with anything on it, so, and this is metaphorically speaking, so getting a message out to millions or billions of people, what would it say and why? It could be a few words, could be a paragraph, could be a quote, you live your life by yours or someone else's. Does anything come to mind if you could get a message out to billions of people? What would you, what might you put on that billboard?

• 1:11:03Richard Branson?

  Trouble is, I think I'm gonna sound like a model on stage about the need to bring peace to peace to the world. And therefore, I will instead go back to be a businessman, which is, you know, I think just something like nothing ventured, nothing gained. I think, I think that in life, if people, you know, if people, you know, try things and stick their neck out, they're gonna have a lot more fun than than if they sit at home watching other people do it. And so, yeah, so I think that old, that old quote, nothing ventured, nothing been gained is important. Having said that, you know, I've, you know, I've been involved for 10 years now

• 1:11:46Richard Branson?

  in this wonderful group called The Elders. And Nelson Mandela set it up, and it's now run by Kofi Annan. And I really do believe that in our lifetime, I've seen so many unnecessary wars. I've seen the Vietnamese war, I've seen the Iraq war, the Libyan war. And these were all incredibly unjust wars, which have, you know, gone on to spawn awful things like ISIS and so on, which would not have happened if it wasn't for Actually, the West taking it upon themselves to interfere in other countries' business and killing and maiming thousands of people. And, you know, we must make sure that we don't have any wars in the future.

• 1:12:29Richard Branson?

  And I think it takes business people, it takes society, it takes all of us to really make sure that our politicians never, never take us down that path again. I mean, one of the saddest things, I think, about the invasion of Iraq was, you know, yes, there were thousands of people on the streets. There should have been hundreds and hundreds of thousands, just like the Vietnamese war, to stop such a foolish excursion. You know, all conflicts should be able to be resolved by negotiation. And, you know, even if you don't get exactly what you want out of it, that is better than all the bloodshed that flows from conflict.

• 1:13:11Tim Ferriss?

  I, I think that's a perfect place to wrap up because it ties in so much. I think that for people listening, whether you want to leave your mark on the world as a business person, as a philanthropist, there's actually a very common skill set when you look at the highest levels. You need to be able to negotiate, you need to know how to deal make. And you were talking about, say, ventures, nothing ventured, nothing gained, which also ties nicely into adventure. If people look at the etymology, I mean, these are very closely related concepts. And I'm just so thrilled that we were able to find the time to jump on the phone, Richard,

• 1:13:56Tim Ferriss?

  and have this conversation. And certainly recommend, because I will be reading it along with everyone else, that people take a look at Finding My Virginity. I can't wait to pick up where I left off in the previous installment. Is there anything that, anything else you would like to recommend to everyone listening, to the millions of people hearing this, that they do or try, ask themselves? Anything at all? Any next action or anything else that you'd like to leave with as parting words?

• 1:14:28Richard Branson?

  Well, I thoroughly enjoyed talking to you and would obviously look forward to seeing you again soon. I was just thinking on, we were talking about alcohol. I mean, no, I think the converse is true, I mean, and to what we were talking about on alcohol, and that is that, I mean, if you say take the war on drugs, that's been going on now for fifty years. As a businessman, I would have closed down the war on drugs forty-nine years ago. I mean, it's been an abject failure, and yet governments have continued to perpetuate this war on drugs, which has resulted in, you know, hundreds of thousands of people being put in prison, hundreds of thousands of casualties.

• 1:15:11Richard Branson?

  It's resulted in, you know, three hundred and ninety billion a year going into the underworld. And yet, there is a simple answer, and that is if you treat drugs as a health problem, not a criminal problem, and you help people with drug problems, countries that do that are getting on top of it. So, you know, and we as business leaders are trying to educate governments into seeing, you know, opening their eyes and saying, look, you know, if Portugal can do this, say, for heroin takers, you, America, should do the same thing. They had a massive heroin epidemic in the year two thousand, and, you know, by embracing those heroin addicts and helping them become normal members of society again, they managed to solve the problem.

• 1:15:54Richard Branson?

  America now has the biggest heroin epidemic in history, and yet the way they're dealing with it is the same old war on drugs. And the way to deal with it is, you know, you ask these people to come forward, you help them with their fixies initially, you supply them with a product, you stop them having to break and enter into people's homes, and you make sure that when they're ready to wean themselves off, that you help them wean themselves off, and you make them useful members of society again. You know, I'm part of something called the Global Drug Commission, and we've got fifteen people who used to be presidents of their country co-putting on it, and we've done a lot of studies on this subject.

• 1:16:39Richard Branson?

  And, you know, we believe that every single drug should be regulated and taxed, and warnings should be very firmly put on these drugs, in the same way you have warnings on cigarettes or warnings on alcohol. But that is the way to overcome this problem, not to carry on. Having, having a war on drugs.

• 1:16:58Tim Ferriss?

  I think this is tremendously important and I'm really glad that you brought it up. Just having seen my best friend, growing up, I grew up on, in rural Long Island. My, my best friend a few years ago died of an opiate overdose. And it's, it's a hugely important problem that is not being, it's being addressed in the most counterproductive of ways, as you noted. And I'm actually, this is probably something we could, we could talk for a long time about, but I'm involved with supporting research at places like Johns Hopkins, looking at even using certain things like, say, psilocybin for the treatment of certain forms of addiction

• 1:17:42Tim Ferriss?

  and end of life anxiety and so on. But the important component of that, or one of the components of that being, looking at how to reschedule and properly supervise and regulate these compounds as opposed to immediately criminalizing them and just compounding the problem with another hundred problems that, that end up fixing nothing. So I, I very much appreciate you bringing that up.

• 1:18:07Richard Branson?

  Yeah, well, thank you. I think, yeah, I mean, it's, it's sad and strange that, yeah, that year after year goes by and it's, it's, you just, if you talk to government, to people who are, you know, in, in positions of power, they, they actually individually, they know what the right thing is to do. They just don't have the courage to do it. And, and we just need a little bit more courage, I think, with some of our politicians.

• 1:18:31Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Richard, thank you so much for being an, an agent of change and also sharing your stories in such a way that you inspire other people to do the same. And I'm, I'm really excited to see what other dents you put in the world. And for people listening, they can find you on social media, Richard Branson, everywhere. Certainly they should check out Finding My Virginity. And to people listening, I will link to everything, including the, the new book and the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. And Richard, you have so many projects and so many things to keep you high on life. So I will let you get back to it, but thank you so much for taking the time to chat today.

• 1:19:15Richard Branson?

  Thanks so much, Tim. And I want to say congratulations. Talk to you soon.

• 1:19:19Tim Ferriss?

  All right. I'll talk to you soon. Thanks.

• 1:19:22Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 1:20:05Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out. And just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.