Grubstakers - Episode 32: Richard Branson

Episode Date: September 10, 2018

This week we talk Richard Branson, the cool billionaire with a giant weird face. He did some stuff with music, space, and airplanes but what the fuck is up with his face?

Hey everyone, today on Grubstakers we're covering Richard Branson, his life, his career, his tax avoidance, his Indian heritage, all of it, and more. I think we disproportionately stop whites too much. I taught those kids lessons on product development and marketing, and they taught me what it was like growing up feeling targeted for your race. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. You know, I went to a tough school in Queens and they used to beat up the little Jewish boys. You know, I love having the support of real billionaires. Hey, welcome to Grubstakers. This is Yogi Paiwa, your co-host.

I'm here joined by my esteemed colleagues. Steve Jeffries. Andy Palmer. Unfortunately, Sean McCarthy won't be joining us this weekend because he's in Brazil. Brazil, great Brazil. And since Sean has arrived in Brazil, the National Museum has burned down. And a right-wing politician has been stabbed. And we're blaming Sean for both.

And I'm going to say they even out. Hey, causation doesn't equal correlation. But in this case, it does. So, unfortunately, Sean McCarthy will not be joining us. So, we will fortunately be able to have a nice conversation on this podcast. He's studying our future billionaire Xuxa, who is a beloved children's icon in Brazil and a billionaire. Oh, really? She's kind of like their

Oprah, but for kids. I didn't know that. I just learned about her. We'll learn more about her on a future episode. Is he going to meet Glenn Greenwald while he's there? Yeah, he'll go to Glenn Greenwald and yell at him for uh distorting the record asad's record and then when he talks to glenn greenwald even though it's in person there's still a delay because every like every single glenn greenwald thing is like on skype or something oh really

yeah yeah you know i uh a friend of mine who is uh of the native population posted an article about how these um amazon river spiritual leaders were getting murdered and i reposted it because i had you know empathy that day and uh then like literally a few hours later my very well-off friend was like yo i I'm going to that village in a week or two on a fishing trip. And I was like, wow, I wonder what that right-wing fishing trip has anything to do with these murdered spiritual leaders on this river. I wonder what that's all about.

Like, well, it's not going to be that crowded for you. I hope you enjoy that fishing trip. But alas, today we are going to be covering the British billionaire extraordinaire, Richard Branson. He is... Lion of the West Indies. Certainly, yes. Yes. Hair like a majestic goddess and god.

And goatee like Kanye West and CK, but without the controversy. And the most disgusting mouth uh anyone has ever seen it's way too big oh yeah its teeth are straight but still unnerving yeah it's got he's got a bizarre face like a like a gorilla his just his face protrudes out too much you know it's bothersome he looks like he got his teeth whitened and then decided he didn't have to brush anymore like that was that's his teeth have a very unnerving color to them or that like he got his teeth whitened and then decided he didn't have to brush anymore. Like, that was, that's, his teeth have a very unnerving color to them. Or that, like, he had regular teeth and went, I want ivory in this motherfucker. He betrayed his heritage.

We will talk about what percentage of him isn't British in a moment. But before we get to all that, let's talk about his early years. What was a young Richard Branson up to? You know, he had dyslexia, which at the time was just called born dumb. In this day and age, he's 68 years old now. And so... Yeah, let's start this off right. He was born in 1950.

Thanks, Stephen. He's 68 years old right now. For some reason, it looks like he's... He was born in Black. Thanks, Stephen. He's 68 years old right now. Yeah. For some reason, it looks like he's... He was born in Blackheath, London. The eldest... I'm just reading off Wikipedia. The eldest of three children of Evie Branson. He is of Pokemon stock.

Oh. And who was a former ballet dancer and air hostess. And Edward James Branson, who was a barrister yeah it's like a lawyer essentially yeah so i mean his parents are you know they're fine they're not uh well off but they're you know certainly middle income i believe yeah um and he's got dyslexia and he sucks at school uh oftentimes in interviews when he's asked about like hey do you got to be good at school to be good at life he's like no uh in fact i suck at everything especially school because school sucks he's also talked about having add though i don't know if uh if that's as uh reported as his dyslexia

but yeah i think that's just reported by every woman he's almost sexually assaulted i think that's a lot of uh them going well he me, but then quickly moved on to whatever else he was doing afterwards. More on that later as well. So he's around 15 years old, and this is when the Virgin Empire begins. He starts the Virgin record label. He starts with a magazine, a little magazine where he interviews people. Even before that, though, he said his very first business venture was attempting to grow and sell Christmas trees during winter. Oh, yeah, that's right. And then trying to breed a type of tropical bird and selling it to pet stores.

And alas, that failed. Both of those failed, so he decided to eschew anything related to reproduction and all his future business ventures i just love the gall of like i'm gonna make a tropical bird like that's the business i'm gonna go into right now like christmas trees seems like a childish dream like you know we know it's seasonal right yeah right right you know selling lemonade paper boy making christmas trees you know whatever you got to do to pay the pay the bills of a child in england jolly old england also how did he fuck up bird breeding i don't know like did he just get a male and a female tropical bird and they're just not into each other

or did they like start giving birth to real fucked up monstrosity birds i mean maybe he felt it was unethical i yeah maybe um so he starts this record label after a couple of failed attempts of first it's like a um record he starts selling records and then um i think it's mail order at first right so it's through the magazine he puts an advert in the back for records that are top 40 i believe and so you can get it mail ordered from the magazine yeah and he basically what he does is he is able to get an edge over other record stores with an innovative technique known as tax fraud where he would buy records that were essentially slated under the pretext that they were

going to be shipped to other countries basically under the pretext that they were going to be exported and so they would have a lower tax cost. And then he would resell them domestically, basically skimming off the taxes that were offered for him. And he was eventually caught for it and fined £70,000. But in the meantime, he made a nice little bit of cash from it. Yeah, from the video I saw about this, it said that they were fined three times the amount you're supposed to be fined for this crime. And what it led them to do were open more physical locations. Because one thing that occurred was that all of their business was being done through the post office.

But then there was, I believe, a post office strike or something so they shut down so all they just had records stacking up and they're like what are we going to do with this so they had to open a physical location and that's how they started out uh having the virgin records location exist and then from then the tax exempt issue happened and then so they have opened more locations to pay off the tax fraud, which does begin a lineage of Richard Branson fucking up. And instead of going to jail or paying for his crimes, just doubling down on the thing he's doing and then making a profit from it. Yeah. So he basically extended this business into, yeah, basically running a record company where he started recording for people, eventually pulling people like, who is he getting? He was getting, he got the Stones, Peter Gabriel, XTC, Paula Abdul. He's getting the hits. Yeah i won the sex pistols so basically

they got uh they got controversial bands and he was able to uh beef up his um his pocketbook from that his his entire thing is branding he knows how to market himself to look like the coolest person in the room at all times. One of the things he does while he owns this record label is run these parties out of this mansion called The Manor. And he would just do these lawn parties and people would be like, this place is great. And then later on they found out, oh, you don't even own this place. You're not even renting it from the owner, I guess, or something like that. There was a controversy in how he procured the lawns of this mansion for his parties basically

so with the records uh doing pretty well he goes into airlines which was it was a weird like direction to turn again this was like one of those things that he credits to his, his kind of ADHD approach to business ventures. And this isn't to like shit on people with ADHD. It's just, it's, it's sort of a, I mean, I had that.

It's just a way that he self describes his own like business approach. And it started out. The story he likes to tell is that he was on a plane to Puerto Rico and it got canceled. So he just rented a plane and charged other people to fly on his plane. And eventually he just bought a single 747. And that was the start of his airline. Yeah, he literally wrote on a blackboard flights to puerto rico if you've been bumped like let's just let's you can you could pay me basically i mean he's you know

he's essentially doing like the lift and uber but on an airplane level in an airport at that time like hey i'm in this airport these people need to be flown to this place i can buy a plane we can make this happen uh afterwards he phones up boeing and hey, do you guys have any older 747s we can buy for my potential new airline? One thing that he had to battle was British Airways because they were the airwaves? Airwaves. Airwaves. I always forget which one it is. Anyway, more importantly, though, they are the the biggest competitor and they put out another

airline out of business and richard branson phoned that company ceo and was like hey how do i do this and that guy was like oh you just gotta out brand them basically with your airline the one thing that british airways doesn't have is a face to them and later on he would say british airways would do these dirty tricks where they would say that the Virgin Airline flight is not going to take off, so you've got to be rebooked on one of our airlines instead. How would they get away with that? Would they just say it at the airport,

like, this flight's not taking off? Yeah, yeah. Listen, you and me both know this plane isn't going anywhere. This Virgin flight ain't doing nothing. Come on now. Gotta get on these british airways they have an american accent for some reason he uh he also started uh virgin mobile and then virgin blue which was uh virgin blue was basically

another airline in australia and he started a number of um a number of different business ventures, and most of them, which aren't written about nearly as much as his successful ventures, but a lot of them he would use his brand and images like the cool guy, the cool millionaire, such as one of them was Virgin Coke coke which he said was going to be the natural succession to coca-cola wow that went under uh he like described brain genius yeah he describes that he wanted the bottles to be shaped like pamela anderson's body in that conan interview like oh yeah that oh was that for virgin coke that's's for Virgin Coke, yeah. They were just going to serve it on his plane. Which is like the most sexist thing, where it's just like, it's Coca-Cola, but it's got boobs on the bottle you can grab. Like, it just...

And if you look at any video of Richard Branson interacting with a woman, he is just grabby as shit. Like on this Conan video, he walks on and just sits on Salma Hayek, then grabs her and holds her while she's saying, like, I have a husband. But she's laughing because, you know, if you're on TV and you're a woman and you're like, hey, fuck you, people are going to be like, look at this bitch. Yeah.

Yeah. Seriously. And so like, like you know there's wow andy i can't believe you said that out of context on this podcast right now especially in like the year the year 2000 i think yeah yeah when that was yeah that happened in the year 2000 but i mean like branson is a fucking creep he like yeah whether or not uh he's been uh convicted of his creepery like he literally sits on salma hayek grabs her and forces her to sit on his lap multiple times he's been uh accused of a handful of weird stuff that involve uh women and him but i mean he was accused of sexually assaulting a woman um and then like for one of his promotional things he takes pamela anderson out on the wing of one of his planes and like holds her up and kind of swings her around and

stuff while the engine of the plane's running he's standing on the wing yeah during this promotional thing uh yeah he's just like a grabby guy and the whole like conan interview conan's like you can only do that because you're a billionaire which is true and also uh the thing that he can only do is yeah sex like borderlines to explicit sexual assault also he is married and has two kids so yeah it's not like a single billionaire extraordinaire it's like no this guy's a dad yeah he goes to the kids and goes hey hey how was school honey like that's that's the same dude that's uh perving out on these chicks yeah with his weird giant mouth i can't get over his mouth it's just it's so large it's like an easter island head yeah with hair but like an easter island head with a bigger mouth yeah it's

it's just gargantuan how big his mouth is and it's like what are you putting in there like it's like a horse's mouth like exactly he'd eat a few carrots at a time he's got like these teeth that are just annoyingly big and his voice is like british but it's not it's like that like third otherworldly british type of sound you know is it trains atlantic accent yeah yeah that like like I'm I was born in England but my voice has been been rugged and ragged by a life of adventure you know what I mean like it's like it doesn't make any sense you could talk about his ballooning yeah he's claimed he's had like like 96 near-death experiences yeah and one of Branson's main things for his self-promotion is doing outlandish stunts. Right? Yeah.

He's done multiple ballooning trips across the Atlantic. What a chode. Classic rich person pursuit. Yeah. He escaped from a cell in the UK to escape your cell which i mean honestly bad job on the writing and the execution i uh i have to say i'm not impressed um like kind of like there's a general progression away from the like the brick and mortar um selling record selling record selling business right towards brand brand management as your business right

right right so he's licensing his brand to other companies yeah and i mean that like you know this begins the the uh human centipede that is the virgin uh empire yeah so it eventually establishes virgin group which is the holding company for all of the virgin subsidiaries including his airline business the spacecraft business which we'll get into yeah some of his other uh endeavors include virgin clothes which launched on the stock exchange in 96 and folded with losses to shareholders uh This is from a Guardian article. There was Virgin Money, which had a glitzy advertisement of Branson emerging naked from the sea. Of course.

And that also folded. Virgin Vi. No idea what that is. Virgin Vision. Virgin Vodka. Virgin Wine. Virgin Jeans. Virgin Brides.

It's actually unnerving. cosmetics and virgin cars he tried to pull a tesla i guess it's interesting the similarities between him and trump yeah yeah i completely agree it's like trump has a lot of different failed attempted business ventures but like one of the enduring thing is just selling his brand but it's also idiotic like it's like's like that list of shit is literally someone going, I mean, I guess we can make some money on clothes. Yeah. There's vodka. Yeah.

Wine. It's like I can put my new spin on this. But like ultimately the like virgin brand is kind of vacuous. It's like the only stuff that really succeeds is the stuff with heavy taxpayer subsidies. Right, right. And it's not even necessarily succeeding. It's just can we make enough money to where if a controversy or if something terrible did happen the entirety of the virgin empire could eat up that uh loss and then continue through like if virgin clothes was breaking even we might still have it around

yeah and it seems like a lot of his ventures have it's not necessarily his money on the line he he wrangles in investors and then uh if it tanks you know he loses a little bit and most people uh lose their money he also um tried to start uh v2 which was a second version of his record company uh wait wait of his record company. Wait, wait, wait. The record company folds and then he starts again and just calls it V2? Yeah. Well, he sold Virgin Records. And so then he started V2.

And apparently there were a couple of brothers who invested 30 million into it and lost all of their money. Oh, my God. 30 million pounds. Yeah. What a bunch of their money. Oh my god, wow. 30 million pounds. Yeah. What a bunch of rubes. They had to file for personal, or they faced personal bankruptcy. Neat.

Yeah. So backtracking slightly, but then coming right back. So Virgin Group was started in 1970, and we've been through a number of his failed business ventures like currently there are 29 active subsidiaries under uh virgin group uh-huh and we've been through a few of them already like virgin atlantic the the overall airline branch right um virgin active which is a gym chain yep yeah and i think you talked you did some research there virgin active which is a gym chain yep yeah and i think you talked you did some research there virgin active uh is a company that is essentially just gyms and um one of the there's about 270

locations uh worldwide but 130 of them are in south africa and the reason he opened so many branches there is because nelson Mandela called him and said, Hey, this gym is going under. 5,000 people are going to lose their jobs. Can you help out, basically? So he flew back and built these gyms. Now, that's a relatively good thing. Nelson Mandela needs more gyms to employ these people who are about to lose their jobs. However, 130 gyms in South Africa is way too many gyms. And there's something that they broke the competition tribunal or something like that. And basically

what I gleaned from the articles I read was that their gym was running a monopoly in South Africa. Oh, so they basically forced a monopoly on South Africa in order to stay afloat? Yeah, essentially. And I mean, Richard Branson is only the 20% owner. 80% is this other... That seems to be his general trend. Yes. He's only like a minority, like a sizable minority owner.

Why does he got to be a minority, Andy? Well, actually, like, if you look, he's the 100% owner in almost half of the current, like, first of business ventures uh-huh and then but the other ones you know it's like eight percent twenty percent like with virgin active i mean like that's the thing virgin active has uh they call them health clubs not gyms but they have it in south africa namibia italy spain portugal australia singapore thailand and the UK. And I mean, you know, the 257 of them total, 133 in South Africa, one in Botswana, two in Namibia. Like, this is not an African health club.

This is a purely South African health club that has one or two locations in a few other countries in Africa. Well, it's a big country. It is a big country. That is true. Not enough gyms in Sierra Leone. Not enough one-limb gym equipment that would be necessary.

Diamonds are killing people's limbs, ladies and gentlemen. Get used to it. Oh, for all of you corporate governance heads out there, Virgin Group has kind of an unusual setup. They have a traditional conglomerate structure, you know, where you have a pyramidal structure with Richard Branson, of course, towards the top. But at the same time, Richard Branson himself subscribes to this Japanese principle called keiretsu, which is like, yeah, it's like a corporate governance technique. It literally means

I think it's like a business with no head, basically. Where there's a web of companies that each have stakes within each other. Oh, interesting. What's that one theory that talks about that?

Spider theory? Websense? What the fuck am I talking about? I don't know. Does anyone know what am i talking about i don't know does anyone know what i'm talking about andy nope spider sense spider series spidey spidey sense no i'm not talking about peter parker it's a spider web theory um this theory states that anything a person does affects those around them no this is the opposite This is literally the opposite of what you're saying. The butterfly theory? No.

Butterfly effect? We'll talk more about it on podcast. Yeah, it's like, so you have 29 subsidiaries, and Branson has a large stake in many of them, but not all of them. And it's, K-Retsu is sort of a way of combining management and ownership in a way that makes it so that you don't face that much competition within your your sphere of operation so it's like you have suppliers who are also it's an integration technique oh yeah so the subsidiaries uh all under the virgin group yes so it's a conglomerate basically where there's the ownership by the Virgin Group over a number of subsidiaries.

Many of them have like Virgin in the name. Yeah. And like some companies that aren't direct subsidiaries are utilizing the brand name. Okay. So they have the Virgin name, so they're they have the virgin name but they're not parts of the airline group um they're majority owned by non-virgin groups and they just utilize the brand they're owned by groups that fuck yeah wait so is it like they're franchised like they they they whore out the name essentially but he just licenses the name yeah oh interesting so if

tomorrow like trump yeah certainly definitely like trump yeah the parallels between branson and trump are uh pretty uh pretty uh parallel i mean it's the same i'm gonna put my branding on this thing i mean with trump it's his last name with branson he realized they're both kind of weird personally i mean you know what's crazy like branson airlines does not ring nearly as well as virgin the only the only misstep trump is making is not having a better brand name to brand things with you know what i mean like virgin atlantic virgin records is a lot better than branson records virgin is kind of weird too but yeah but his whole thing is he's selling sex like this is literally a guy in the uk who

knows how to do one thing and that one thing is we can sell sex i've heard sex sells get fucked yeah either we're gonna fuck or we're gonna get fucked apparently i mean i think he he said the name was because they're virgins when it comes to business when they started right right right right so you know what the fuck they were doing apparently, I mean, I think he, he said the name was because they're virgins when it comes to business, when they started. Right, right, right,

right. So you know what the fuck they were doing. I mean, I didn't literally fuck either. We don't know that. Oh, I know, but they did do tax fraud.

They did. It was their first time though. So, you know, well, the first time wasn't good. Like many first times, my first time,

not that great. Their first time at tax evasion didn't work out so well, but they eventually got to where they were pretty competent at and also hired an army of accountants to set these things up. Not including in 1978, a little bit before in our story, he figures out how to purchase Necker Island, any C-K-A-R for you racists online. But the way he does this is that the island is listed for six million

dollars and he finds out that you can buy one of these islands so he calls up the real estate person and says like hey uh i'm thinking about buying this island they go oh yeah come out and he's like all right i'll come out but only if you let me bring uh someone else and he brings his girlfriend at the time who he's trying to fuck who later becomes his wife but by the way hey i'm gonna go check out this island i might buy that is a pretty baller move that's a move that says we're gonna fuck later help me check out an apartment that is an island so he gets to the island he doesn't have enough money and they go all right how much can you offer us he goes i can give you all 100 grand and they. And they're like, get out of here.

And so then about a year or two later, the island owner is desperate to sell the island. And he's like, I can offer you. And I found some conflicting reports. I found between $120,000 or $180,000. Either way, not six million. And the island owner sells on the one condition that you have to put a luxury resort on this island eventually. And Branson goes, yeah, sure. So he gets this island on pennies by being assertive, asking for what he wants, and kind of falling backwards into it. Is the seller, who is the seller anyway?

I have no idea. Does he have a stake in, as part of the deal, does he have a stake in building the resort? I don't think so, but I bet the person that owned that island owned multiple islands. And so he thought that if this kid builds a resort on this island, we'd be able to sell this area as, I mean, it's kind of like. And this is in the british virgin island group yes the caribbean as it uh is also known as now or near the caribbean it also has the advantage that um the british virgin islands uh have much lower tax rates yes yes so he has basically made himself, he lives there largely to dodge taxes. Yeah.

He denied it on the Conan interviews for people who want to look it up. We'll link the Conan interview on our Tumblr. But not, he didn't, he probably didn't deny it to his accountant. No, no. It's just self-evident really. I mean like, so he's got his own island, and he bought it out of steel. And he's like 28 when he's doing all this shit at that time. So, you know, he's falling ass backwards into success in a way that is unprecedented.

But really, he, you know, he should be celebrated for being a master criminal with all the tax fraud he has done. Yeah. So Necker Island is also where one of the most recent sexual assaults happen against Richard Branson. By Richard Branson. Yes, by Richard Branson as well. I don't think anyone's sexually assaulting Richard Branson.

I mean, yeah, that's actually fair. So the singer Joss Stone was performing on a different island, and she was invited to come to Richard Branson's Necker Island. And the eyewitness account by Joss and the people around her is that while Richard Branson was leaving, he was saying bye to people and then put his face in Joss Stone's boobs and motorboated her and then walked off.

And everyone's in shock, including Joss Stone, because she's like, did that motherfucker just motorboat my tits just now? And Richard Branson supposedly doesn't recall this incident at all. Oh, wow. This incident that happened on his island, where only he resides for most of the time could have never happened by him. Well, it's so out of character for a guy who in every public appearance where he's near a woman grabs her. Yes, precisely.

I also love that this guy has an island. So it's like, well, what about security footage? It's like, well, we didn't put any cameras up. I mean, like we own the island what are you gonna coordinate it so the camera is wherever he is the camera is off but there were there were eyewitnesses there are eyewitness accounts of this of this uh ordeal but i mean here's the thing nobody if you think that this is a fabrication which unfortunately some people believe uh do not believe the victims of sexual assault, why would anyone lie about fucking

motorboating, like, that is horrendously childish when it comes to an assault, but it's still assault, I think that it is terrible that any guy can just think to himself, you know, I'm gonna put my face in those boobs real quick, I'm a great time i'm a billionaire come on branson just had a little too much to drink tonight come on what a fucking perv he's yeah he's realistically one of the wealthiest where's my hug guys in the world right right it's in all the like accounts of all the articles i've seen online about anything branson related on the island at every point in one paragraph certain another someone just goes also obama was there a few months ago like it's like they have to mention obama kite surfed on on this island yeah and so there are some even more fucked up stuff that went down on this island

yeah um the sex cult nexivism uh it's like n-E-X-I-V-M, I believe. They are linked to Necker Island because, if you don't know, there is this Hollywood sex cult that Allison Mack was a part of. She was off of Smallville, I believe. It was her secret world. She played Chloe on Smallville. What was that, Andy? It was her secret world. It was her secret world. It was the secret world She played Chloe on Smallville What was that Andy? It was her secret world It was the secret world of Valet

This was pretty tough for me because I watched all of Smallville And she was one of my favorites Oh really you watched Smallville? I didn't know that It was a pretty good show But earlier this year she was busted Off of basically running Nixivism, whatever it's called.

Yeah. I mean, so this sex cult, well, what they did was they operated out of the island two times, I believe. Well, formally, it was a multi-level marketing company. Yes. For business skill like leadership business skills right well that's the that's a pretty great front for something that is a sex cult i mean like something that says we're going to give you leadership empowering tools we're going to get up at seven and we're going to train you how to be better that is a perfect way to reprogram a person

to um fondle and to take advantage of plus you get to get fucked and make money. And so they had a leadership retreat on Necker Island. Yes, and one of the things they were trying to do was to get Richard Branson into this sex cult. So what could have almost happened was Richard Branson could have been in this sex cult and

motorboating women from time to time as well. My guess is he took a demo and then turned down the full product. Yes, unfortunately that laugh was about Richard Branson maybe joining a sex cult, but instead sexually assaulting Joss Dome. So regardless of if you think his business practices are pure or evil, he is somebody that has publicly been a creep to women constantly. Yeah. basically been able to make his money off of besides abusing women and tax fraud is he's essentially created his current business out of getting government subsidized contracts and then

kind of like running them as cheaply as possible to extract as much profit as possible in a natural monopoly that generally comes with government subsidized contracts. And the most famous of these is Virgin Railways, which is a company he started up in the early 90s as one of the subsidiaries of the Virgin Group right and it started with um as a result of this uh thatcherization of great britain which basically meant taking a lot of stuff that was run by great britain uh run by the british government and then privatizing it as part of the austerity regime of britain like the entire developed world yeah you're privatizing formerly public health goods like rail yeah and the word neoliberal has you know kind of been used as a pejorative to the point where it's almost lost

all meaning but this was literally the neoliberal revolution where it's uh pursuing a program of privatization under the theory that a privately owned good will be better managed than the government so let's see how that plays out in the real world uh so richard branson took over uh several rail lines in great britain and uh ran them on his own uh for a couple decades the since then um the mirror has reported that Britain's railways, rail lines, are the most overcrowded and expensive in all of Europe. Oh, really? To the point where one Virgin employee told them that basically it's only a matter of time until someone gets killed.

Essentially from the trains being so crowded that if someone has a heart attack, medical people can't get to them or an epileptic fit commuters are kind of crushed in and also there are all these different programs to kind of drive up ticket prices oh really to make it so that it's basically tickets will have like two prices and the cheaper one is much more difficult to find. Basically, from all these privately run like ticket kiosks and stuff. What a fucking snake. Yeah.

So recently, this kind of made it into the British political tabloids when Jeremy Corbyn, while running for re-election as labor leader took a virgin train and he had with him uh just some media director from his campaign and he couldn't find a seat uh or a pair of seats so he could sit next to his wife so he ended up having to sit on the floor and so then the guy like recorded him and he was like yeah you know unfortunately this is a pretty uncommon thing or pretty common thing in British railways is that you got to sit on the floor. And it's my Corbin impression. I'm working on it. And immediately Virgin just had this like massive PR campaign where they released CCTV images, cameras from inside the train saying like look at these empty seats and they were like you know weird angled right pictures saying like jeremy corbin's clearly lying uh

which apparently was uh against the law in britain to release the like like without special uh reason they couldn't release those cctv images but richard branson still retweeted corbin and also children with their faces yeah yeah and um after that like it was uh there were a bunch of other people like taking pictures inside the train and a number of other people taking like private video and they're all like no what corbin said is true like that train was super fucking crowded but you could just kind of see in because and you could see in slow motion or in uh kind of directly the corporate uh like they called it train gate uh that was supposed to sink jeremy corbin uh but you could see the like corporate machinations to try to keep the rail privatized. Because one of Corbyn's big things is deprivatizing and nationalizing the railways.

Renationalizing. Renationalizing the railways. So there was clearly this massive effort to delegitimize him. Because that's one of the Virgin the Virgin group's more profitable enterprises is the the Virgin Railway is highly subsidized by the British government and they they get a good chunk of profit something like 200 million pounds a year in profit out of the railways uh and that's like in dividends to the investors so i just love that they're like no our trains aren't crowded we're we're good

see look at the cctv footage we shouldn't release like it's like yeah doing a bad thing to prove you're not bad it's like wait wait yeah you're clearly fucked up then like no i didn't punch that baby i was kicking this dog then. It was a cell phone. Yeah, that's right. I mean, like, this is something you see time and time again with the virgin group is that they're very keen on keeping the media relations very pure. And so there's a lot of propaganda that's pro-virgin in all forms of the media.

I mean, like, I think that I was talking with somebody who said that they're going to miss the American Virgin line was recently merged with Alaska Airlines. Alaska Airlines, I believe, bought the Virgin Air domestically in the United States. And so one thing they were going to miss, my friends, was the Virgin Americans safety video because it's a whole bunch of people singing and dancing and shit i mean honestly it's very bad for a safety video and very good for i've flown like virgin america once and that was probably the worst part of my flight yeah it's really bad it's a baby rapping at one point it's it's a nun dancing it's they don't tell you how to exit the plane. Right, right.

It's the modern day YMCA. It's all over the place. But the YMCA at least had some charm. This is just soulless, like a patchwork of, kind of like an algorithm of everything that was on YouTube that year or everything that was just kind of penetrating popular culture

and they tried to turn it into a safety video. Just have the flight attendants do the thing with the seatbelt. Give me the worst strip performance ever, which is them showing me how to put a belt on and how to put my life belt on. Yeah, everyone enjoys that. Seeing the plastic thing and then pointing to the different things on and how to put my life felt on yeah everyone enjoys that the seeing the the plastic thing and then

pointing to the different things and showing you how to put on the mask that's all you need it's very informative but I mean so the main thing is is that that's how well that's what we're going to differentiate

yourself though yeah it's a competitive market you know like like all airplanes should be but that's I mean if there's anything virgin does is they say hey we're better why because look at this cool shit we did and it's like oh nobody nobody wants that it's like yeah but we did it and it's like all right also we got cool girls with big old boobies it's like to have pamela anderson be the uh one of the spokesmodels also kate moss is one of the models that was eventually used as the Virgin America

model line. Conan, in that interview, asked him, like, oh, you went up to Kate Moss? And he's like, well, she was a little young. We talked to her mom. And it's like, okay, Branson, you're just going up. That's creepy. That is probably the most responsible thing I've heard of these things.

Yeah, so, I mean, the rebranding that Virgin america does is cheap if you ask me it's very plastic um and it shows in this train bullshit that's going on right here i mean it's like these trains are overcrowded the privatization of it is not working and yet to cover their asses they're gonna push corbin out of the way on top of that they uh also won in an overwhelming landslide yeah oh really great yeah yeah he leader yeah he crushed in the labor party and then he's kind of turning the polls around to the point where uh the conservatives no longer have a majority and had to make a weird uh political alliance with the psychotic right-wing Northern Ireland or Northern Irish group that violated the Good Friday Accords.

But anyways. Also, I think nationalizing rail has attained majority support. Yeah. That's great. Good. Another thing that happened on Virgin Railways is that they changed uniforms recently and the female uniforms were made a very cheap very thin fabric that uh showed would show like the outline of dark bras and so all the like female employees were like what the fuck guys i don't want to have to wear this at work right and eventually virgin gave them a concession where they're like okay here's 20

pounds to buy new bras and underwear yeah like to buy a shirt to go under your uniform wow 20 pounds that that was their big concession what a what a fucking chodes yeah like you first of all you design shitty uniforms. Why? Fuck you. Yeah. Secondly, it's like, you know, I don't know how much of their staff is male to female, but none of that matters. But there's a significant population of your staff that's like, we can't work like this.

And you're just like, here's 20 pounds. Yeah. Horrible. So Richard Branson doesn't uh fuck people over on the ground he does it in planes he also likes to do it in space air land sea space he he wants he wants to fuck people over at every level uh he hasn't gotten into submarines yet he's left that to musk but well virgin oceanic is a thing though oh oh really yeah yeah oh great uh well not submarines but ships oh gotcha gotcha gotcha well good good on him fucking people over

in the water too he um wherever you are there's a virgin that wants to fuck you and that surgeon is richard bramson he's never fucked that's yeah that's why it's still called virgin yeah like all he's got he's got you know we we were before as we were watching videos of his dumb ass kids like they were just uh artificial insemination kids like he's so committed to the brand uh but yeah virgin galactic uh is his attempt to send people into space. And it was basically after the success of Spaceship One, which was the first privately owned spaceship to, yeah, first privately owned vehicle to travel into space. It was in some like competition run by Google or something. And they won a million dollars for going into

space in uh their space plane which was pretty neat uh so then richard branson immediately bought it and made virgin galactic which was going to be basically his airline into space so that people so that rich people could fly into space and experience zero gravity for four minutes four minutes four whole minutes? Four whole minutes. What a version. It wasn't even orbital. Something you can already do. Oh, really? Yeah, simulated.

With the Vomit Comet. You can ride the Vomit Comet for much cheaper. For longer than four minutes. So what's the difference between the Vomit Comet and this fucking Space Atlantis? This goes to suborbital. This one actually does go into space. So it just breaks a couple of more stratospheres is that what it is yeah yeah it goes up a little higher whereas the plane just falls really fast yeah sure okay yeah but yeah basically if you fly in a parabolic arc you will get zero g the zero g experience but uh this one

yeah it goes a little further and higher yeah so you can say the best minutes of your life you were in space um that's how branson sells all the sex excavations for the best minutes of your life are about to happen so when he launched when he uh launched this uh enterprise he cited statistics that in previous space flight about 1 in 50 astronauts die yeah when you count for like challenger columbia uh i don't know if apollo one counts but like and countless duis over pressure yeah uh richard feinman did like a study and he found yeah it was essentially like 1 in 50 astronauts dying so uh richard branson made the statement like, you know, we have to, of course, make this as safe as possible. Right. Because a company that kills one in 50 of its customers isn't a good business model.

And since then, well, four people have died trying to build this rocket. And one seriously injured. Three of them died while trying to test the new kind of engine that they've created, which is a kind of like hybrid rubber engine. Basically, he's trying to start. I don't think he's ever started a company that actually required research and development. And so he doesn't seem to have much of an understanding of it. Well, why don't we just put tits on it? And that way we go faster.

He's still in a record-selling tax avoidance mindset yeah yeah usually he just like buys something that already exists well usually what i do is just put boobs and tits everywhere and that's how i make most of my money in my virgin atlantic co-atlantic properties so he uh i guess he assumed he was doing this because you know me and obama kite surf on my island necker island spaceship one was a success so i guess he just kind of assumed that like oh it already works i'll just buy it and then i'll like charge people to fly into space and then the engineers were like yeah you can't you can't do that with this plane it kind of is a one-shot thing so he kept uh yeah they tried to design this special kind of hybrid solid liquid fuel,

which is actually pretty interesting. But yeah, that one while testing it. Oh, you mean five scientists went, we got all this money. We might as well do something good with it. I mean, Spaceship Two you're talking about? Yeah, Spaceship Two. It was like somewhat, it's pretty innovative. No, I'm saying that like scientists were like, we can do some good with the equipment we got we might as well uh try to make something innovative and awesome instead

of fucking take idiots into space yeah yeah i mean nothing against uh the scientists at uh virgin galactic like they're doing or the and the engineers they're doing some pretty interesting work but yeah branson he's he's gotten to the point where he, like, when they first started, he was like the maiden flight would be by the end of 2009. What a rube. Only like a two-year time frame. Wow. Yeah, to build a spaceship. And eventually, like, it got to the point, you know, it's private, so it has to make money, unlike NASA.

Right, right. So, like, the price constraints are much lower or much higher and it got to the point where recently after uh essentially so one of the engines exploded uh while they were testing it or they were doing an engine test and there was an explosion and three people got killed uh by the shrapnel and then there uh was another flight in 2014 where uh it was i think one of one of their first maiden flights where they were doing the full engine. It was the maiden flight for their new kind of engine. And so the plane dropped out. It has like a little carrier plane that takes it up and then the rocket drops down and shoots into space.

And I guess the co-pilot wasn't very well trained because you know training costs money and uh you know if you can if you can cut corners you cut corners and so he flipped a um a switch that would activate its re-entry feathering mechanism it was called which was meant to basically slow the um the airplane in the atmosphere when it's reentering. But when you're accelerating and there's massive airspeed and you're at a much lower altitude, the air pressure was much higher and ripped the plane apart, killing the pilot and severely injuring the co-pilot. Not too much unlike what happened to the Challenger, which was actually ripped apart by air pressure. But so that set them behind.

Also, the investigation into the accident found that most spacecraft are designed with several redundancies, which means that basically a system within the spacecraft, like if one aspect of it fails, there's a backup system to like make sure that it still works. And the shuttle was filled with these, which is why all the shuttle's failures were purely mechanical. Like it was from something like coming off during launch in both the case of the Challenger and Columbia. You know, Challenger, it was part of the rocket opened up and fire shot out. Part of the structure of the rocket itself failed. Yeah, yeah, the structure failed.

And, you know, Columbia was a piece of foam hitting the heat shield. But there was never, the shuttle never had any problems with its internal guidance systems or anything like there was not never any or never any major failures in the internal like piloting system of the shuttle it had tons of redundancies it was incredibly complicated but in developing uh these uh spacecraft you know're private. They've got to cut their costs. So basically, if a co-pilot screws up and activates the slowing down mechanism, there's nothing that says, you know, we're ascending. That's bad.

And then stops it from happening. So usually there's fail-safes for every single point of contact, including human beings, for making a mistake. Yeah. Because that happens when you're trying to fucking fly a space plane. Yeah, when you're trying to fly a fucking spaceship. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, it wasn't in place this time.

Yeah. And so that set them back because they had to build a whole new spaceship. The first one was called the VSS Enterprise, and it did not engage uh except for the slowing okay but um they got that one down yeah they got that one engaged the problem was that they it over engaged uh so they got a new one called the unity and unity and like richard branson keeps saying that things are six months off to the point where like they interviewed his mother and she was like yeah richard says that you know the the maiden flight could be six months off and then like in that interview like in that quote at the follow-up is like he always says six months off like his own mother is just calling his own bullshit to the media. So, yeah, there's.

So basically he thinks he can be, you know, space explorer extraordinaire. But the reality is, is that we're still not close enough to the tech to where lives wouldn't be lost to do that right now. Not without taking into account the needs of capital. Right. Yeah. right now not without taking into account the needs of capital right yeah and and also like even then like the company is bleeding like bleeding money like it hasn't it hasn't it's got like a partnership with nasa to uh do some like launch some small satellites in the future right so it's making some money but not enough to make profit and not enough to do what... I think they only ended up turning a profit when they transitioned into satellite launch.

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Are they turning a profit yet? Well, I bet Virgin is claiming them as a profit because they could look at it that way. Because they won't liquidate something that even... If on paper it looks like it's making profit, they wouldn't liquidate. But even if they're not necessarily making profit even if they're breaking even that would still be beneficial to stockholders to be like look we're going to space with shit

you know like it's just a reputable idea not necessarily a reputable company like their spaceship to like virgin galactic generally but spaceship Spaceship Two specifically, where that idea benefited from the world's general trend away from funding things like NASA and the European Space Agency and just going on this austerity budget where you use only Russian rockets to get to the ISS and stuff like that. Yeah, basically the privatization of spaceflight, more of the neoliberal revolution. Yeah, as it was with the trains,

so it is with space rocketry. So one last thing to talk about with Branson is his background. It's his weird interest in his ethnic background. Right. So his ancestral lineage, his great-grandfather, three generations up, spent some time in India. And many British individuals spent time in India. They kind of owned that country for a little bit.

And so Richard Branson went on one of these ancestry shows, I believe it was called Finding Your Roots, and he found out he is 97% European and 3% what, Andy? Well, it looks like, whether the family knew it or not, I may have some Indian blood in me. Yeah. So Branson is a couple percentage Indian, which in my money means that one of his great-grandfathers had sex with an Indian woman. Maybe not consensually, if you know what I mean.

And by Branson's track record, I think we can see where he gets it from. They, on the show, find that the mother's name's not on the baptism paperwork. And so they deduced, because he's 3% Indian, that she must have been an Indian woman. And they treat it very cheerfully, like, wow, would she look at that? And not the reality, which most likely could have been, yo, your great-grandfather raped an Indian girl and swept it under the rug, the Afghan rug,

if you know what I mean. So, you know, Branson's part Indian, so technically this is a brown episode and I mean anytime a Englishman takes advantage of the world India's definitely gonna be in there what words does he is he now allowed to say because of that I mean technically speaking he can use all the words that the British have been using since the beginning of time. And so this is a relatively minor thing. It doesn't really matter to me that he's part Indian.

However, he's got these two kids, and they both suck, Holly and Sam. They're perfectly okay individuals, but boy, they are born to wealth in the worst ways. And Holly did this talk for the We Foundation, which um it was a glorified ted talk essentially yes that is precisely what it is and she spent time talking about this region in india it's called it's called the we foundation which it's not like you may like hear that and be like oh is it is it like oui like on we or is it like O-U-I, like on Wii, or is it like Nintendo? Like, is it a company name? No, it's just the word Wii. W-E.

It's short for on Wii. Their logo is three fingers in the air, like a W. It's pretty sad. It's the most bland name for any kind of foundation. It was how creative they were. So Holly speaks to this group of kids for this foundation, and she talks about her perils of traveling in India, where she is technically related,

and spending time among poverty. And incidentally, she happens to go to where my family... I went to the homeland. And I lived amongst my people. Well, she goes to Rajasthan which is uh where my roots are from and um maybe i shouldn't be this uh uh distasteful distasteful of her views but uh fuck holly and her face um basically she equates the big city that um that i'm that my family lives in here as being uh very downtrodden and very hard and difficult and for a billionaire's, of course, it seems like the worst, most dire conditions.

But the worst thing she does possible is in this entire diatribe of her time among poverty, she says such a glaring statement about how she lives in the world. Well, first she tells everyone to close their eyes and imagine the world in this city. What was the name of the city? Udaipur.

Udaipur? Yeah. their eyes and imagine right right the world in this city what's the name of the city they pour oh they pour yeah so she's like imagine you have no no running water you have now first keep in mind this is a heiress to a billionaire yeah yeah and also that this is the big city from where i'm from so like i like you know if if this is albany if i'm from albany this is new york city you know it's a it's a modern third world city yes and this this video was taken from five years ago so she's like close your eyes on top of that she's also if her dad's not there she's speaking to this big crowd she is very likely the richest person yes yes in this large crowd for a hundred mile radius let's be honest here 100 kilometers and she's telling people to close their eyes and picture other people's poverty yeah and she's trying to shame people to get out of their comfort zone and imagine this poverty despite being

the antithesis so much richer than all of them yeah Because this is the shit that billionaires pull. And I'm excited to talk about this on the episode. But this is... They love to start a foundation and then shame regular people for not caring enough about poverty. Imagine a world where you had no electricity, no running water,

no access to the truth. And then she says this. Your day just consists of sleeping and working and repeats over and over again. Oh, you mean a regular person's existence? Yeah. Is that what you're talking about? Oh, like non-millionaires. Yes.

Yeah, right, right, right, right. Like, it completely destroys the billionaire myth. Like, one thing that I think we might have mentioned in passing is that, like, Richard Branson, you know, he likes to do these massive stunts. He likes to ride in hot air balloons. And, you know, he tried to circumnavigate the world in a hot air balloon i don't know if he succeeded or not but that fact itself completely blows out of the water any myth that a billionaire works hard right right because like basically he's still raking in money while sitting in a balloon yeah over you know just floating around the world. Yo, he's luxury traveling the world.

What does he have to do? He has to do it in a dirigible instead of a hot air balloon? Then it validates it? Ballooning is hard work, dude. I mean, ballooning is hard work. I'm not going to take anything away from the hard-working class ballooners. Just recognize hard work where'm not gonna i'm not gonna take anything away from the hard working class ballooners uh but just recognize hard work where it's where it happens he's he's making money completely unrelated to his ballooning and he doesn't have to work to make that money because it's just he's making money from his ownership and mind you it's not virgin balloons it's not his own balloon company he's contracting other people to do this job the most heinous thing about all this

is that this is a person who has raked in a dickload of money from fucking over other people is sexually abusing people left and right and has shitty stupid kids that give terrible speeches because there is hope

free the children's wonderful adopt a village program brings running water to the villages and creates access to education and health care okay it's nice that the running water thing is there but like creating access to education and health care if you have enough money you already have access right to education and health care. It's a modern... I mean, it's third world, but it's a modern city.

Mind you, I'm sitting in this room because my dad had good access to education. I just want to get that clear. So you want to talk about... Your dad who grew up in this... In this state, yes. Yeah. So, I mean, like, you know... The famous British education system.

Yes, precisely. I mean, you know, fuck the Bransons. Fuck them being part Indian. I'm sure that the blood test was messed up because he was eating an Indian child at that time. You can cut that. But I mean, like, you know, I think that... Yeah, he was, you know, in the British Virgin Islands in the West Indies. And he's like, well, after eating the natives, I guess I have some Indian blood in me.

He was like, what's the island name? Oneka. I guess I'll buy that one. Oh, you mean East Indian, not West Indian. All right. I think that is just about everything we've had to say about Richard Branson. I think we can deduce that he is not a good person, let alone morally evil.

But with that, this has been Grubstakers. My name's Yogi Paulywall. I'm Steve Jeffries. And I'm Andy Palmer. We'll see you next week. Jared Ferguson, it's a funny name.