RICHARD BRANSON INTERVIEW - Wednesday 2nd April, 2008
First he conquered business. Now he's fighting climate change,
hurdles to world peace and hell-bent on bringing commercial space
travel to the globe. Love him or hate him, Sir Richard Branson, the
founder of the Virgin Group and last year's UN Citizen of the Year, is
impossible to ignore. When he was here in Australia recently to
announce his controversial airline's entry into the Sydney-LA market,
George Negus and Sir Richard chatted.
GEORGE NEGUS: "Sir Richard" is hard to get out where you're concerned.
I've often wondered whether that knighthood rests easily with you. Most
unexpected.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: Yes, I think the Queen was very kind in
giving me
the knighthood, obviously since 25 years before I got the knighthood
I'd released the Sex Pistols music and 'God Save the Queen' was
slightly controversial, so
GEORGE NEGUS: God Save the Queen and her fascist state.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: Yeah. When she came down with that sword
I
thought, she's gonna slice my head off. But anyway, all was well.
GEORGE NEGUS: It was almost a microcosm of your life, isn't
it? I've
been going through the notes about yourself, and there's plenty of
them. I heard about probably 9 million descriptions of Richard Branson
and I just wondered which ones you agreed on. Everyone's favourite
wacky billionaire and counter-culture tycoon. Dyslexic risk, gut-risk
capitalist. I like that one very much. From tax evader to UN citizen of
the year. How do you feel when you find journalists going off the way
they do, either with pen or with fingers or with the mouth, about the
kind of person you are? Do you recognise yourself?
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: I think journalists have been pretty fair
with me
over the years and I can't complain. I think we've built, hopefully,
one of the most respected brands in the world and I think I've been
treated fairly. Obviously, there are occasions when people write things
I don't like and I normally shoot off a letter and get it off my chest
and then move on.
GEORGE NEGUS: Do you?
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: I've never sued anybody yet, though there
have
been one or two occasions I've wanted to strangle one or two people.
GEORGE NEGUS: The dyslexia thing is interesting, because a
friend of
yours, I think, probably your closest business associate - your
lieutenant, in fact - said that, "Yes, he is educationally dyslexic and
uses his gut, "which is why he's been able to do what he's done,
"because he does things other people wouldn't even dream of doing." Is
that Richard Branson, the businessman, in a nutshell?
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: Yes, I mean, I - being dyslexic, you just
have to
do things perhaps differently than a normal businessperson, and I rely
much more on gut feeling than I suspect most businesspeople. I mean,
for instance, if I'm starting a new business I don't bring in the
accountants. I just decide, you know, that this particular business has
been run dreadfully by other people and I feel I can do it better. And
if I can do it better and create something very special hopefully we
can pay the bills at the end of it.
GEORGE NEGUS: It's a long, long and varied and exciting
journey to go
from literally selling records out of the boot of a car to space
travel. That's the most ridiculous extreme that I could think of.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: Yes, I mean, I have had a varied life.
GEORGE NEGUS: Never a dull moment.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: Never a dull moment. And I've dreamt of
going into
space ever since the moon landing.
GEORGE NEGUS: Is that right?
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: As I suspect anybody of our generation
who saw
people landing on the moon must have thought, "Maybe one day I'm going
to be able to do that."
GEORGE NEGUS: I guess a lot of people see you as a bit of a
space cadet
anyway.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: And I am a bit up there anyway.
GEORGE NEGUS: This description is mine, if we can get vaguely
serious
for a moment, do you see yourself as a philanthropist a la George
Soros, for instance, or just a capitalist who has got more money than
he needs and therefore has become one of the world's richest
do-gooders?
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: About 60% to 70% of my time now is spent
on
tackling social issues around the world and, you know, I actually think
it's the responsibility of any capitalist to turn their attention -
once they've made enough money - to using their entrepreneurial skills
to tackle some of the intractable problems of the world. And I get
enormous satisfaction from doing that and I think that entrepreneurs
can do it perhaps sometimes better than, you know, people from the
social sector who don't have those entrepreneurial skills.
GEORGE NEGUS: So I suppose you could describe Richard Branson,
therefore, as a not-so-filthy-rich capitalist. Is that apt?
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: I mean, I think the thing about
capitalism is it's
an evil necessity, capitalism. Communism has been tried and failed, and
socialism, that doesn't work very well. Capitalism works, but the
problem about capitalism is it does mean that a few individuals become
very wealthy. Therefore, I think those individuals have enormous
responsibility to redistribute that wealth either by creating new
businesses or creating new jobs and making sure that money just doesn't
lie in a bank account for future generations.
GEORGE NEGUS: How do you pick and choose? How do you pick and
choose
which issues you get involved in, which intractable problems, as you
described them, do you throw your money at? Is that your gut again,
your heart, your mind, or what?
RICHARD BRANSON: I think, again, it's just from travelling the
world
and experiencing things first-hand. I've been in Africa, and I've been
to hospitals of Africa, and they're not hospitals, they're places where
people go to die. And rows and rows and rows of people just dying and
the waiting rooms of the hospitals are full of people waiting to get
into the beds of the people who died the night before, and they're
dying from unnecessary diseases. So we're setting up a war room for
Africa to coordinate the 100,000 excellent organisations that are
trying to tackle those problems, but there's no coordination. There's
just lots of little organisations doing their own thing.
GEORGE NEGUS: What about climate change, because you were a
climate
change sceptic, as I understand it, and now, as a result of probably
the influence of people like Al Gore and our own Tim Flannery, you're
now a true believer. Where do you stop spending money where that sort
of intractable, almost impossible-to-solve problem is concerned?
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: Well, as you say, people like Tim
Flannery and Al
Gore and others have influenced me enormously and I've also just gone
out and read a lot about it. I've been to the Arctic and I've seen
first-hand what's happening and so on. And a lot of our time and energy
is now being put into try to tackle this problem. Once again, there is
no coordination. If global warming is the threat that all these people
believe it to be, if it's a greater threat than World War I and World
War II put together, you need the attack on carbon, which is the enemy,
to be coordinated. So we are actually in the process of setting up a
global environmental war room to tackle this problem.
GEORGE NEGUS: To go with the Earth Challenge, the $25 million
a year
you're putting into someone coming up with an idea?
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: Yes. The Virgin Earth Challenge is a
specific
challenge to try to get scientists and inventors to see if they can
come up with a way of extracting carbon out of the earth's atmosphere.
If we could do that we could actually regulate the earth's temperature
and try to keep it at roughly what it is today, indefinitely. But, so
we've had some thousands of people who have submitted ideas, but it's
unlikely there will be a silver bullet there. I mean, we are obviously
hoping for it.
GEORGE NEGUS: You have your detractors, needless to say, and
there are
those who say, well, symbolically at least, why don't you stop flying
planes in the air? You've got a pretty big carbon footprint yourself.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: We have a very big carbon footprint. In
fact, I've
just announced another airline yesterday flying between Australia and
Los Angeles.
GEORGE NEGUS: How do you reconcile that?
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: If I sold our airlines then somebody else
would
fly the routes, or if we closed our airlines, somebody else would step
in.
GEORGE NEGUS: Who's less environmentally friendly.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: And what we have pledged is that 100% of
all the
profits we make from all our airline interests world-wide for the next
10 years will be spent on trying to develop clean fuels –
clean fuels for planes, clean fuels for lorries, buses, trains, dirty
ships, etc. For instance, about a month or so ago, we proved that a
plane could be flown on a biofuel. Now we need to develop a biofuel
that will not damage the food supply chain.
GEORGE NEGUS: That's interesting, because that's become a
debate,
hasn't it?
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: Yes, I mean, it's right that it is
debated and I
think a fuel like algae can be grown in the future that needn't eat
into the food supply at all, and so that's the kind of area we're
working on.
GEORGE NEGUS: Could I ask you this. You've had to deal with
politics
and politicians and the like as a businessman and as an activist for
all these various causes you're involved in, like the Elders. What do
think is more powerful - wealth or politics? What's the more powerful
influence on the state of the world, for good or bad?
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: I don't think it's one or the other. I
think
entrepreneurs are apt not to become politicians and I think
entrepreneurs have a role to play.
GEORGE NEGUS: Ever considered politics yourself?
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: I haven't because I left school at 15 and
I feel
going back into the political system would be a bit like going back to
school, and I run away from it. But having said that, there are areas
of what I do today which are quite political. Obviously, the Elders, in
particular, is very political.
GEORGE NEGUS: So you would expect then the Elders would get
involved in
areas where you've not really trodden before, like the Middle East, and
like Iran, Iraq, etc?
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: Yes, I mean, the Elders were formed about
a year
ago. Nelson Mandela chose the first 12 elders, and the idea was to find
the 12 most respected people in the world, who were above ego, maybe in
the last 10 years of their life, who had tremendous moral authority,
who had the respect of the world, who could take on intractable
problems that were not being dealt with by other people. For instance,
two of the Elders went to Kenya last month, Kofi Annan and Graca
Machel, Nelson Mandela's wife, to try to resolve a really nasty
conflict between the opposition party and the ruling party. And they
managed to knock heads together and sort that problem out. They're now
looking at taking on a far bigger issue, which is the Middle East,
because the Middle East is not resolved. There's just so much fall-out
from it, and it's got to be resolved one day. I come from a country
where Northern Ireland looked like it was never going to be resolved
and it has been resolved. And so Kofi Annan is one of the elders and
Mary Robinson, and President Carter are three of the Elders going to
spend a lot of time and energy trying to address that.
GEORGE NEGUS: So you've become not a politician but a
political
facilitator.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: Yes, you know, I'm very much behind the
scenes on
the Elders. It was an idea that Peter Gabriel and myself had. We've got
a great team of people behind the Elders to make sure they can act
completely independently and they can hopefully do good works. Before
the Iraqi war I was trying to get Mandela to go and persuade Saddam
Hussein to step down and go and live in Libya, and the plane was due to
go to Iraq the same day the bombing started, so it never actually took
place.
GEORGE NEGUS: Is that right? We'll never know what would have
happened
had people bothered to sit down and talk to him or try.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: We will never know, but there are other
situations
in the world. Idi Amin, for instance, in Uganda, Elders went and
persuaded him to go and live in Saudi Arabia for the rest of his life
and Uganda has become a good democratic country since then, so it's
important people talk.
GEORGE NEGUS: Talking to you like this, it sounds to me like
you're the
sort of person that believes that if your intentions are honourable
enough and you've got enough money, in your case, we shouldn't believe
anything is impossible.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: I personally don't believe anything is
impossible.
With enough determination and effort, almost everything is possible.
GEORGE NEGUS: Lovely talking to you.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: Nice to see you too.
GEORGE NEGUS: Enjoy the rest of your stay.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: Thanks very much.