Four-day weekends and beef with Putin: Sir Richard Branson drops into Sydney to launch Virgin Voyages Resilient Lady

We sit down with Sir Richard Branson on why he's gone from being a non-cruise lover to a cruising convert, the future of AI and why he’s got beef with Putin.

He’s a billionaire, an astronaut, he’s signed The Rolling Stones to his record label, started an airline, a hotel brand, plunged to the oceans depths in submarines and now a cruise line owner. Sir Richard Branson, 73, is quite frankly, a bit of a legend.

We recently sat down with the entrepreneur to chat about his latest venture, Virgin Voyages, onboard Resilient Lady as it made its debut into Australian waters.

Joined by Virgin Voyages CEO, Nirmal Saverimuttu, he tells us why he’s gone from being a non-cruise lover to a cruising convert, the future of AI and why he’s got beef with Putin. Here’s what he had to say.

Turns out the naming of Sir Richard Branson’s ships are an ode to the strength of women.

“In my family the ladies are the most resilient. My mother was incredibly resilient, every mother out there is incredibly resilient. I've got a resilient daughter, and sisters and grandchildren - ladies are much more resilient than a lot of men give them credit for."

Resilient Lady is part of the fleet of Virgin Voyages ships that are breaking the mould.

Virgin Voyages is shaking up the cruise industry with its adult-only, buffet-free ships

"It sets Virgin apart from your run of the mill cruise companies", says Branson, who said one of the most common complaints from frequent cruisers they talked to was having kids onboard.

“I’m in big trouble with my grandkids,” he said after they petitioned him to let them come onboard for his birthday, to no avail.

“The whole ship has been designed like a yacht for adults 18 upwards and young at heart adults and it’s worked,” he says.

Branson is known to be a secret shopper when it comes to his products

Branson says he often notes “the completely unsexy things”.

“We’re now discussing whether we should have some of the loos as unisex loos as at the moment you have to walk around with the male loos on one side [and the females on the other.] If you get in and clean the loos regularly and there’s no urinals in them… then make them unisex,” he says. "We’re going to do that," he confirms.

Sorry kids, it's adults-only.

The one place Branson would like to go, but hasn’t?

“I’d like to go to Russia and sit down with Putin and have a word with him because this war is so sad and so unnecessary and so miserable."

Richard Branson the astronaut

Branson is a big campaigner for a better world and has spent the last 20 years building not-for-profit organisations that tackle conflicts, climate change, ocean issues, species degradation, even drug reform.

 “I went to space quite late in life,” he says. “When you’re in space you come back with increased vigour because it’s just this beautiful little jewel that you look back on, this beautiful earth that we live on and you know that you’ve got to do everything you can to protect it.”

What about AI?

“I think by and large AI is going to be spectacular for the world.”

“AI is going to revolutionise medicine, your health, so many things.”

“People will have more leisure time but they need to be able to afford to have more leisure time so I suspect we’ll go to four day, three day working weeks in the future years. But then people need to be paid the same as they’re getting paid for five day working weeks.”

Branson has visions of clean fuel flying in the future.

His plans for clean fuel flying

“Last week we were incredibly proud when we flew a Virgin Atlantic plane with clean energy fuel from London to New York which everybody had said would be impossible ever to do with a long haul plane and it’s wonderful to be at the start of that kind of revolution,” he says.

“Twenty years ago we flew a plane around the world with all carbon composite material to show Boeing and Airbus that you could build planes with carbon which would be half the weight of metal or less and now almost all planes are now being built with carbon so it may take a few years before all planes are flying clean fuel but it’s the start anyway.”

As the founder of Virgin Records, Branson knows his music

“The first single I bought, I’m rather embarrassed to say, was called Summer Holiday by Cliff Richard, and I can still sing it” (yes, Branson sang to us, see video above).

Of course, Branson is known for signing some of the biggest names to his record label including Sex Pistols, the Rolling Stones, Janet Jackson and David Bowie.

The future of cruising

His next idea? A marathon on one of his cruise ships.

“I was visiting Athens, the birthplace of the marathon, and I thought, we’ve got a running track the whole way around this ship so why can’t we do a marathon that starts at the birthplace of marathons then people come onto the ship and carry on with their marathon and we’ll sail down to the different Virgin Islands and they can finish their marathons on some of the islands we come in at,” he says. “We’re having lots of fun ideas like that.”

Resilient Lady - the most affordable super-yacht at sea.

Any final words for the cruise haters out there?

“The whole idea of Virgin Voyages is to win over people who would never go on a cruise, and I think we have won over a lot of those people and that’s great for the cruise industry,” he says.

“We’ve built a yacht that is better and more beautiful than Abramovich’s yacht (the Russian oligarch and billionaire, Roman Abramovich, that is) but at a fraction of the price”.

Game on billionaires.

Originally published as Four-day weekends and beef with Putin: Sir Richard Branson drops into Sydney to launch Virgin Voyages Resilient Lady