Upstream - Be More Pirate w/ Sam Conniff

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

What do you typically think of when you think of pirates? Parrots? Peg Legs? Eye patches? Treasure? Is there more to pirates than these things, than corny jokes and a Disney franchise starring Johnny Depp?  Our guest for today’s episode certainly thinks so. Sam Conniff’s book Be More Pirate: How to Take on the World and Win, was published in 2018, and sparked a sequel How To: Be More Pirate, a podcast titled “Be More Pirate,” and a movement of people studying the principles and strategies of Golden Age Pirates to bring them into activism and leadership in the 21st century.  In this conversation, we learn about pirate history, including their symbols, ethics, and labor policies; we discuss David Graeber’s last book published posthumously, Pirate Enlightenment, or the real Libertalia which covers lost forms of social and political order that inspire hopeful possibilities for today, and we explore invitations for how we can each be more pirate in our projects, organizations, and social movements. Although 1690 to 1725, was the so-called Golden Age of Piracy which is the focus of this conversation, elements of piracy very much still exist—for example, Ansarallah, or the Houthis in Yemen, have been likened to pirates in popular narratives recently. You may know them as the group that’s been in the news lately for attacking Israeli, US, and UK-connected ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Ansarallah see themselves as acting on their obligation to international law to do all they can to help stop the genocide of the Palestinian people.  As Sam Conniff shares “Rather than simply voice their complaints, (pirates) choose instead to do something about the situation. No longer prepared to sit quietly and accept the bad deal on the table, they decide to break the rules and then remake the rules ... with a new social code built on purposeful principles such as fair pay, fair say, social equality, freedom, and justice. And rum.” Thank you to Storm Weather Shanty Choir for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond Further Resources: Sam Conniff Be More Pirate This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

This episode is brought to you by a Bookkeeping Cooperative. Want to learn about values aligned financial management? A Bookkeeping Cooperative offers engaging online workshops on organizational finances to develop the skills and confidence of those working towards a just world beyond capitalism. Sign up at www.bookkeeping.coop. That's B-O-O-K-K-E-E-P-I-N-G dot C-O-O-P. The pirates truly belong on the long arc of the fight for equality, whether that's civil rights or workers' rights or female rights. And they've seen us there at the time, I would posit. And that's the most interesting bit and arguably why they were such a threat. Because as we know, those fights became bloody, became violent. And I think the crucible of much of them you've seen in this dynamic force that stood up for

itself and showed that you can declare war on an unfair world and have a chance of winning. You are listening to upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Robert Raymond.

And I'm Della Duncan. What do you typically think of when you think of pirates? Parrots? Peg legs? Eye patches? Treasure? Parrots? Peg legs? eye patches? treasure? Is there more to pirates than these things than corny jokes in a disney franchise starring Johnny Depp? Well our guests for today's episode certainly thinks so Sam Kahniff's book Be More Pirate How to Take on the World and Win was published in

2018 and sparked a sequel How to Be More Pirate a podcast titled Be More Pirate, a podcast titled Be More Pirate, and a movement of people studying the principles and strategies of golden age pirates to bring them into activism and leadership in the 21st century. In this conversation, we'll learn about pirate history, including their symbols, ethics, and labor policies. We'll discuss David Graber's latest book, published posthumously titled, Pirate Enlightenment or the Real Libertalia,

which covers lost forms of social and political order that inspire hopeful possibilities for today. And we'll explore invitations for how we can each be more pirate in our projects, organizations, and social movements. Although 1690 to 1725 was the so-called Golden Age of Piracy, which is the focus of this conversation, elements of piracy still very much exist today.

For example, Ansar al-A'la, or the Houthis in Yemen, have been likened to pirates in popular narratives recently. You may know them as the group that's been in the news lately for attacking Israeli, US and UK connected ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Anzara Law see themselves as acting on their obligation to international law to do all they can to help stop the genocide of the Palestinian people. As Sam Kahniff shares, rather than simply voice their complaints, pirates choose instead to do something about the situation.

No longer prepared to sit quietly and accept the bad deal on the table, they decide to break the rules and then remake the rules with a new social code built on purposeful principles such as fair play, fair say, social equity, freedom, and justice. And run. We'll dive into our conversation with Sam in just a second, but before we get started, in case you missed it, we've got a big update. We finally launched our Patreon this month. You can head over to patreon.com forward slash

upstream podcast to subscribe and listen to our two so far bonus episodes this month, an episode with Doug Henwood on the problems with modern monetary theory, an episode with Roger Keirin and Joe Jameson on their book Socialism Betrayed Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union, and soon to come part seven of our ongoing series on Palestine. As a Patreon subscriber, you'll also get early access to certain episodes, and we also have a variety of thank you gifts at different tiers. And of course, you'll be helping us to keep upstream sustainable and helping us keep this whole project going. And if you're already a recurring donor, you have the option of simply keeping your current

donation through Flipkaz if, for whatever reason, Patreon just isn't for you, or you can easily cancel your recurring donation and sign up for our Patreon instead. And you can also always make a one-time donation at upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Thank you. And now here's Della in conversation with Sam Kahn. So let's start with an introduction. How might you introduce yourself? Hello, I'm Sam and I'm the author of the bestselling international book Be More Pirate. Sorry. Hello, I'm Sam Conniff and I'm the author of Be More Pirate. I'm an entrepreneur and I'm very lucky to have several adventures over the last couple've been a writer, I've been a writer, I've been a

writer, I've been a writer, I've been a writer, I've been a writer, I've been a writer, I've been a writer, I've been a writer, I've been a writer, I've been a writer, I've been a writer, I've been a writer, I've been a writer, I've been a writer, I've been a writer, I've kind of, I think I must, because I hear so many, it's great. Yeah, there's a few that stick in my mind. What is a pirate's favorite letter? R. Yeah, you'd think it'd be R, but his first love be the sea. I love it. What happens when Bluebeard fell into the Red Sea?

His beard turned purple. He got marooned. That was close. Okay. How do you make a pirate angry? Take away the pee. Yeah, it got me. There you go.

Because then he's irate. I love it. Exactly. Well, I had one for you. What do you call a pirate who steals from the rich and gives to the poor? Ooh. Robin Hook. Oh, my God.

Thought it was, you know, in alignment with our conversation. Yeah, yeah, yes. Good. Where does a pirate buy his hook? Oh, man, I don't know that one. The second hand store. Oh, of course. Of course. Thrifty. Indeed, but it cost him an O on the leg. I love it. I love it. What inspired you to dive into all things pirate, Sam? In an attempt for inner honesty, and because I had started to write the most boring book

on it, I was leaving an organization that I was desperately in love with that I'd started in my 20s. I'd always said that I'd leave when I was old and as I approached my 40s naively thinking that was old I wanted to prove a point and and I live and subscribe to the notion that if you want to know what you should do next You shouldn't do what scares you most and as a Mildly dyslexic totally non-academic chip on my shoulder about everything to do with business and the success that I'd had to that point I never felt like I truly deserved or yeah, owned. And so I had this notion, right, that writing a book would be the right thing to do. And I could write a book and I wanted to make this argument about purpose driven business and a reinvention of modern capitalism and why governments alone cannot fix

the entrenched problems that humanity faces, but how these levers of business brand and influence could be aligned to a greater force than they are. And I called it Purpose First and I got a book deal and I wrote maybe 20,000 words of the most boring book ever. Someone trying to be a grown-up, like I read bits of it back and my use of long words was so childish. And I took this, you know, attempt at maturity and professionalism. And I knew enough to know that I needed to test it with audiences and other people I knew the entrepreneurs, people that have been part of my networks in this fairly radical outfit that was really did seek to change the lives of many hundreds of thousands of people. And I started reading some of the contents of them

They were like what the f happened to you granddad Where's it? Where's it? Did you swallow a dictionary? Did you read the Financial Times and? Where all the fucking rocket ships where are all the pirates where all your usual stories? I've always relied on stories to communicate and motivate. I didn't really know why I'd always used stories of pirates. And I remember writing it clearly on a post-it note, where are all the pirates? And I went back to my desk and I started wondering why I've always used pirates as a euphemism for making a change and pushing back. And I took myself off to the British Museum and then to the Greenwich Maritime Museum

and I started to explore the true history of pirates. And then I suddenly fell into a race against time because the metaphor for the time we were in, this is 2015, 16 that I'm writing this. So the ascension of Donald Trump, the Brexit vote in the UK, the arrival of Macron, I mean all manner of things are going on in the world,

feels like it's changing and my argument feels like it's Important and I just thought fucking out surely someone's someone spotted this right? This is the perfect message for the times that we're in this is about a small group of individuals Deciding to stand up against an unjust world and prove that all that's needed to change the world It's a brave crew and Yeah, so I found myself going completely It's a brave crew. And yeah, so I found myself going completely full cycle from the most possibly boring book that would have been read by the three people who know me and already agree to very unexpected

and timely methods of change. Beautiful. Yeah. And so just to echo that a little excerpt from your book, 300 years ago, a small group of frustrated and underappreciated, mostly young professionals finally had enough of living in a society run badly by self-interested and self-serving establishments. Disruption had become the constant backdrop to their lives as they faced ongoing uncertainty

and mass redundancy in a world plagued by ideologically influenced international conflict. This generation felt entirely abandoned and they were right. The odds were stacked against them in every single way and the rules of the day favored an elite few. And for the majority of people, life was unclear. Unfair and unfulfilling. Sound familiar? I love it.

So this really speaks to this. And then you go on to say they came up with a new social code built on purposeful principles such as fair pay, fair say, social equality, freedom and justice and rum. I love it. And what I'm hearing from you is you went into the history and then you did some unlearning or some relearning, right? And so let's go over what is it that people assume about pirates and then what is it that you discovered or you and then what is it that you discovered or you had to unlearn when you did this research for the book?

Well, exactly, yeah. It's funny hearing that back to me. So I was just enjoying it. Great deal. So the one word that surprised me most that comes consistently through the, as much as we can trust historical accounts is accountability, which isn't the first thing anyone would associate. So in terms of unlearning, what are the things that we assume around pirates?

We assume that they are drunken and dastardly and a little bit Kurdish, but slightly romantic. And there is maybe this underpinning of kind of community. I think people have picked that up. But there's lots of people like that in history. You know, Pablo Escobar was widely understood to invest heavily in his community, but no one's ever sent their kids to a Pablo Escobar fancy dress themed party. And yet there's something in the story that holds true with us. And Disney can be held accountable for a large part of it because the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and before that Peter Pan and Treasure Island and many of the modern imagery of piracy has been caricatured thus. But then if you go right back, there aren't, you know, and it all has to be understood that it comes with

a heavy degree of interpretation because there are not reliable records at the time. But of the most reliable, seemingly reliable, and then the interpretation of good quality historians. The truth is very different from this characterization. And that's on average in their 20s. So it is a generation who felt pretty like they didn't have a home because there was a huge tectonic shifts going on at home. Largely the pirates came from the Great Britain at the time. There was the dawn of its empire building, but the powers of the world were heavily shifting. And so the Brits, they had been a hundred years, pretty much of intergenerational back-to-back wars, including wars with themselves. And the rules had changed fundamentally. And so on these ships, they were seeking escape from people regularly being pressed gang aka kidnapped

to fight for the Navy. And so their responses, which now seem very forward thinking, progressive and even libertarian, were actually just a natural response to the unfairness of the time. So yeah, they created fair pay structures. But in a way, that's kind of understandable. If you have the chance to pay your own, make your own rules and other systems will deliberately be unfair in their structures. They had decision making but that's also understandable because there was no agency otherwise. There was pensionable schemes because being wounded on a ship was highly likely and in other areas you might be left for dead. So all these kind of traits that then got characterised like the camaraderie or the pieces of eight or the eye patches and

wooden legs have truth because they were looked after. They wasn't injury allowance. There was fair pay. People did have a share of the booty and crew and collective decision making was really pronounced. And it seems particularly interesting, I think, because that comes with such a strong contrast with the cartoon imagery that we're given. But I think the most interesting thing when we zoom out is this stands on a journey of a fight for equality that began in Britain with the levelers and the charists and that exported into workers' rights movements that spread across Europe and then to the US. It joins a conversation around democracy, which was nascent in the UK. There had been debates about it, but we were still a monarchy and we were less than a century away from the formation of the Parliament Act, which was then

pretty much copied and based it across Europe and then in America. The next follow on movement is the cooperative movement. And there is a direct trace of aspects of the pirate code found in the cooperative movement following that's the trade unions movement. The suffragettes were known to cite stories of the female pirates in their proto literary feminist circles. I mean, the pirates truly belong on the long arc of the fight for equality, whether that's civil rights or workers rights or female rights. and they've seen us that at the time I would posit and that's the most interesting bit and arguably why they were such a threat because as we know those fights became bloody became violent and I think the crucible of much of

them we've seen in this dynamic force that stood up for itself and showed that you can declare war on an unfair world and have a chance of winning. Thank you. Yeah, and I love how you do that in the book. You really share examples and ideas and then you kind of say, you know, and then this is how we can see this thread through to today from the golden age of piracy. And I love also how you started with accountability, being a surprising thing that you learned

that pirates really did well. And when I've looked at the cooperative economic world and cooperatives and the solidarity economy, one of the things I've really seen is that in order to really build that economy more, we need to learn better and also practice the skills of self and peer accountability. Because it's

one of it's an unfortunate thing that one of the best elements of capitalism if we're going to say that is that there's a very clear structure of accountability very clear top-down from bosses to workers for example and then of course there's unions to bosses but if we're going to switch to more horizontal governance more solid heuristic and cooperative models we're going to have to hold horizontal governance, more solidaristic and cooperative models, we're going to have to hold ourselves and each other more accountable. And that is a skill to develop. So how was power shared? How was accountability distributed on pirate ships? What did you find out? There's a dichotomous conversation around capitalism, isn't there?

And I think I've contributed to as well. I think one of the things to understand or to try and understand is that there's an evolutionary aspect to all things. And the reason these pirates were accountable wasn't they weren't designing these, it's amazing how we've inherited aspects in a non direct way of their principles around fair trade, non hierarchical systems and democratic principles. But they didn't design them for them, they designed them for themselves. And there is something to be said for what happens to people

when they're given the chance to write their own rules. There's a great line here, when you really give people power, they decide that they want you to decide for them. But in these instances, the accountability that comes, and I run this, having seen this book take off and its ideas and I had to like work out different ways to bring it to life, one of the things I often do is encourage people to break some rules at work in an organization. And I'm asking how it feels. And more often than not, the feeling is one of exilederation

and agency and power. And that's not what you associate with rule breaking, right? It's not what's what's primed in our minds rule breaking should make you feel guilty or ashamed for or responsible, not powerful. And usually the first thing I encourage people to do is break a really small daft rule, you know, like walk on the wrong side of a corridor or speak up for something or, you know, some light bit of rule breaking. And then we ask people to criticise a bad rule, and everyone finds that very easy, of course we know that. And then I ask people to consider what their new rule would be.

And that's when the accountability really steps in, because these guys invented new rules that some of which, you know, they had same sex marriage, right? That was, that was a crime punishable by death. Now you just word crime in inverted commas, of course. And something about that accountability, something about the negative space. There's something about the human act of being critical. Here's all the things that are wrong. We can all do that. And then if you were to take away the things that are wrong, that space invites creativity and invites collaboration because they're going to do something together. And if

we're going to have a chance of rewrite the rules of capitalism, if it truly is evolving, it's got to be something that's written by everyone for everyone as much as that can be humanly possible. And then people feel responsible and they feel ownership. Right. These are good rules. Well, these are fraud rules, but whatever, we're going to try and make them work because they're our rules. So, yeah, the notion that things are imperfect is an opportunity to make them some better. And I think there's a real opportunity for some active disruption and pushback on the way things aren't working. Knowing that, that is an invitation to make them better and step into it. And that bit of accountability I think is often missing

from the debates that take place currently. So let's go back to the question, how is power shared and border pirate ship and what might be draw from that? There's something, a principle I really love that the pirate captain who in the game and the characterizations is seen as this autocratic dynamic leader. When in truth, what's seen in the surviving pirate codes is the pirate captain could be outvoted at any moment in time. If they did not demonstrate the right level of confidence, clarity, strategy and honesty. Now imagine that in terms of accountability, imagine any firm that you've worked out or or part of you collaborated with. Imagine the CEO be voted out at any time.

Just just let that ripple through the organization that that figure that we hold the CEO you know the must know it all that has to sum it all up so brilliantly and have a clear vision could be outvoted at any time if they didn't demonstrate enough Cloudy strategy and what level of accountability is that? There's only one organization in the world that I found that has that same clause. And it's a cooperative or it's an employee owned business in the UK and it's never been enacted. But I really love it. And then what I think is even more impressive is that if that pirate crew came into a place of conflict, if they were giving

chase or they were under siege, that principle disappeared dynamically, not with a vote just dynamically, everybody knew that the captain couldn't be challenged. And in that moment, he became the or she became actually predominantly he became the autocraft and everything every order had to be followed. And then once the threat had passed, it switched again. And that dynamism, I think is, you know, beautiful example, and there are many more examples, the principle of an equity amongst pay, not even just fairness, but equity. So everybody had a percentage cut of the treasure that was stolen, let's be honest. But those percentages were kind of index links between the highest and the

lowest pay. So captain might get four shares and the quarter, you know, cabin boy might get half a share. but at least everybody knew Transparency what that was going to be just one of the key recommendations after the global financial collapse They needed to be that kind of transparency that allows for higher and lower levels of pay of course in organizations And it kind of goes on but the you know, I can list out several other things but it seems you read the book So I think that the thing on reflection that intrigues me most is really trust and trust to funny word in organizations now trust is one of those words that gets you know, that's a that's a corporate value right that gets written on the wall and on the paper and on

the shareholder's report but nobody I mean, then the key list me more than a handful of companies that you actually trust, they would trust. And yet there's trust here between team, there's trust here that's, you know, written in blood figuratively or metaphorically. And I think that's an interesting place for us to go in the conversations we're having about the times that we're in values, values upon which you can make decisions. It seems few and fair between values upon which you know a crew holds so dearly, they might be invisible to you or unreachable to you but you know by and large that they're going to interpret the values to make the best decision they can and we'll all end up

at a shared point. And when we don't have infrastructure, we don't have international consensus, we don't have principles or policies that we can agree on. But we don't even agree on whether the technology that we're inventing where it's going to go with. We're trying to hold ourselves to account for targets that have already been missed, that can only be achieved by technologies that don't even exist. How do you get there without some kind of underlying alignment? And that's the bit that really interests me. So these principles of power, these principles of decision making were shared and that can only be upheld on a really deep level of trust. And again, trust and accountability, not what you'd associate with pirates. Yeah, it's reminding me right now I'm co-creating an organization. We're developing a worker self-directed nonprofit.

So it has the tenets of a worker cooperative, but it's not for profit. And as part of it, we're using sociocracy circles. I was elected to be the management circle coordinator, which is effectively an executive director position. But the election comes up every year. So it is this really interesting feeling of really resonating with what you're saying, where it's like, I really can't get comfortable at it because, you know, my position is coming up for election again soon.

So I'm really accountable to the role and it's not forever and it's not guaranteed. And also, it does, I really do take it as one of great trust from the team. And this relates to something else that you talked about. You said that there's an agile organizing principle within pirates where they could switch between quasi-socialism and a temporary dictatorship in times of conflict. And I really appreciated that too because sometimes folks think that horizontal governance

circles, that kind of thing, sociocracy is really time consuming and like very slow. And so what that told me was like, if you have that relationship building and that level of trust and the principles that make it work, then in times of conflict or times of quickness is needed,

that leadership can arise. I mean, you use temporary dictatorship, but I know what you mean to make quick decisions while knowing that you still have the faith or the trust from your group. So anything else you'd add to that agile organizing principle in piracy? Yeah, I think the word that I might now lean to is nuance. I think a skill of leadership at the moment is nuance. So it's so needed and it's so absent in so much of the overarching debate.

We are pulled towards these polarised positions and in there you know I'm making light of it but everyone bats at their team right whether it's the quasi socialist organizing principles of non-hierarchical systems and we all want to be teal or you know thank god for the benevolent dictatorship because at least someone's going to tell me what to do and everything works and the truth is always going to be we need both sides. And we really need to appreciate that and look out on the world and you can see the heartbreak and tragic consequences of not being able to see and feel the true perspective

of the other side. And it doesn't do us very well. And to think that we're these oscillating societies that can only ever switch between conservative and liberal, conservative liberal, conservative, whatever brand you wish to hold onto these ideas were actually both necessary. We need periods of time to go through one discipline and we need another period of time to go through another. We get caught in good versus bad so often. And it's very rare that there is truly good versus bad in an objective sense of the 9 billion

different realities that make up this world we're trying to make sense of. And so yes, I think the agile aspect of this is there is a nuance, an allowance for nuance. They rewrote the rule every time they went out on a new adventure. And I just said that I hadn't seen any organizations that had the same principle of accountability. And luckily you've just informed me that there are several. So thank you for educating me. But the leader that can hold a capacity to say, I don't know what to do. And we need to rewrite the plan each time we go out.

I mean, it sounds exhausting, doesn't it? Having to be re-voted in every year. What? But I sat in our boardrooms to know there isn't accountability. I've watched enough presentations from senior C-sweets to their shelters and know there isn't the accountability that holds humans to the best of us or to values that matter, or an ability to stay in the muddy middle of nuance, doubt and discovery. And I think those things are really, really important. The etymology of rules, as I've looked into this more, why is this book taken hold of

so many people and taken hold of organizations? It's this linear idea. And when on earth is anything in this world governed by linear ideas, it's not the world we live in. And yet we get the system of rules can feel so anachronistic, yet necessary, but the idea that they could be a bit more fluid, a bit more agile, a bit more nuanced, a bit more responsive and appropriate to the challenges that we're going through is incredibly important. And yet we found ourselves in a place where a debate and we're not going to get into like criticizing the balance between media as a form of accountability and also opposition in political circles. But we're very far away from the kind of nuanced decision making and understanding of problems that

we need to be. And yet in this moment of agile positioning and an ability to reposition, you know, I see an honesty in that. And honesty and being able to reflect the world around you and show up to it truly as what it is. and without such a fixed mindset. Yeah, it still appeals to me greatly and I have heard better examples over the years of people applying it and deploying it. But yeah, that messy middle is definitely where I still try to spend the time that I can. It's where I draw upon my pirate principles to say that. Yeah.

Well, we are certainly in the messy middle now for sure, in times of uncertainty. Let's talk about Libertalia, the great utopian experiment that you write about, but also is the theme of the late David Graber's book, Pirate Enlightenment, or the New Libertalia, which was his final post-Thumus book. So tell us that story and also what you've learned from that time for now, but also maybe what you've learned from David Graber's book. So I'm a huge fan of him and his work and I took it as a great honour and a sign that that book came out shortly after mine, and And means we must have been writing about pirates almost exactly the same time. And similarly had him from his preface, you know, he's been using references to pirates as a kind of proxy for innovation and leadership for a long time as well. So yeah, I took a sense of pride and connection

in that. There are two thoughts about whether or not pirates ever took their ideas off ships. One of the definitions of pirates, people say about Somali pirates, etc. is that pirates created these lives in these societies at sea. And one of the questions that has to be asked is, are these ideas so effective that they could only exist on these communities at sea? Is there something about that principle of being transient that allowed them to succeed? Or were they truly robust ideas that could hold purchase and gain foundations? There's two tests of this. One is in an undisclosed location somewhere off the coast of Madagascar possibly in a utopian place known as Libertalia.

And the other is in a known location called Nassau in the Caribbean. And things happened in both these that are very interesting. And there's more that we know about Nassau and there's less that we know about Nintalia. And like all pirate history and partly why it's so beautiful is that it's open for a lot of interpretation and story projection.

What David does incredibly well is he plots out the history, the true history of a series of events that are really interesting, kind of almost anthropological, how invaders and the oppressed, the local populations began to trade, how pirates exhausted from the travails of pirate life and culture and being hounded began to then take on and adopt the lives and cultures of those who had been oppressed and then the integration that begins to take place, the families that begin to grow and the cultural exchange that begins to happen, the new invaders, the new pirates and now this group of pirates have become the local population.

And he zooms out as he does wonderfully and begins to reflect this on the other big mash nations that are taking place at the world because this is the beginning of the industrial revolution that says the dawn of capitalism it's the beginning of the English Empire which mirrors previous empires but you know the footprint of the English Empire in terms of its colonial legacy obviously has huge ramifications for the world we're in now. And he gives a beautiful different lens on the prejudices and the violence, the kind of poetry of it all. I loved it. I found it really charming. And there's also a reason why I didn't choose to go on that part of the story. I found it also a little... I was looking for something to get my teeth into.

I really was. I was really looking for a non-utopian ideal. I didn't want role models that continued to exist in this semi-romantic notion of poets. I had enough of the dystopian picture that we get presented with every new revelation that takes place, whether it's the weakening of our democratic channels or the inventing of new technological channels. Each one only seems to exist to create an even scarier vision of the future, from which we only go into ever decreasing circles of fear that narrow our view of what might be possible. And if on the other side of it all we can ever sell ourselves is this blood, sustainable, eco-text future of scene in in movies the kind of utopia of what might be

But you know, I don't buy it what I want again It's like an idea that this messy place in the middle can be a thing of discovery that this doubt that we must hold might lead to some You know discovery. There's no great success that ever comes without mess and I just don't know I didn't I Wanted something I could hold on to I needed something to get my head around. And the idea of pirates who were freeing slaves, who championed and allowed women in their ranks to hold equal status, who made grand speeches about the unfairness of nascent early-stage capitalism and the totalitarian-style regimes that the monarchy had. And they took these organizing principles of democracy and fair pay and put them on land

and began to build them and lay down roots and demonstrate how that could be followed. Man, that's just, that's what I felt at the time. You know, we were both looking out on a similar world. And so I enjoyed the prosaic, you know, the poetry and the, but I didn't fulfill the hunger I have, for examples of of action. I'll be goddamn if what the world needs is inspiration right now we need inspiration plus action or action minus. Talk about action equals shit as the old equation goes and I really believe that and so I left myself feeling nicely inspired but but my appetite for inspiration wanes. And in the stories of the Pirates of Nassau, my examples were fed, my desire for rock solid examples of how these ideas could

be exported and were and were picked up as stories that then traveled the world. And they weren't these hugely debated, could this be the formation of a, you know, the went back and inspired certain ideas? It was like robustness. Here are the names, here are the people, here are the principles, here's the surviving pirate code. That's how we organize things. And I think the reason that his book is great and his prose is wonderful, I would never

get near. And it's necessary because there are some great big philosophical questions that are required. And I think the reason my book has had success, which has surprised me and why every week I'm still in an organization taking people through practical workshops is because that's what we really need as well. And so that's not really meant as a criticism on him, but I felt a really, I wanted to read it and I was really scared he'd just written the same book, but better better which was a very real chance and I got to the end thinking that's lovely and I've kind of heard that and again

that's exactly why I thought I was in a race against time to write the book that gave us a bit of an update to the playbook of pirates you know and it's the Pirates of Nassau the Golden Age Pirates of Nassau whose stories we follow now, not the horse, the utopian idea of the pirates of Libertalia. So that is a criticism. Okay, that is a criticism. But I'm proud to be able to be in a position to make it. Thank you. And I found the very complimentary. I think that maybe there's the time for the visioning and the utopian dreaming and even finding utopias that have existed throughout history and even today.

And then there is the, what do we do with this? What is the how? Like you said, the playbook. And I really do love, there's be more pirate and then how to be more pirate. And you've come up with the five Rs. And like, so there's all these tangible ways and very real questions for how we can take this work

into our lives. So since I mentioned them, how would you introduce the five Rs of being a good pirate? What are they? Well, the first book, you know, I'm very proud of the first two thirds is very funny and does really drive people towards action. And I think I drew the lines quite well. And but as I go back and read the last, I realized I didn't know, you know, it's my frustration. It's my love letter to rule breakers and change makers. It's everything that I've seen wrong with with how this goes next. But also they got in I got scared. I didn't know, you know, it's my frustration, it's my love letter to rule breakers and change makers, it's everything that I've seen wrong with how this goes next, but also at the end I got scared. I don't necessarily know where, what's going to happen with this. And so when the book came out,

and then I started receiving messages from people the world over, to be really completely honest, and this is said with love and respect and gratitude to anyone who sent me messages in those early months, I had to create a folder in my email account to hide them in because I didn't know what to do. People were messaging me saying, I've read your book, it's fantastic. I've left my job and I've decided to fulfill my passion. I've set up a community enterprise. I've challenged my boss.

I've decided to get divorced. I've resigned. It was a huge litany of people taking control over their lives. So here I am just saying what I want to actually, I was overwhelmed by it. And I was like, stop, wait a minute, I just made it up. So you know, whereas I'm sure David would have responded with a risen up to the call to arms,

I actually backed down from it. And I was going through an awful amount of change in my own life. I got divorced and I'd see little kids and the book is inscribed to them. And I think part of it was written to my subconscious in a place of unhappiness and kind of sense of success or shame that comes with them or the separation and a promise to oneself to be true, even though that can be really difficult. And so there was a lot that was caught up

in it. And so other people then taking action on something at exactly the moment that I was feeling not inauthentic because I meant and mean every word in there but I don't think I knew how much I meant it. And also I was going through a period of time which really, really does pull the rocks from under you. And I went back to the book actually to answer your question about the Rs. And I had a very, very successful divorce, which isn't what I thought you could ever have. I'm very proud of it. So is my ex and I and as we are about co-parenting skills and we live just around the corner from each other and kind of a piracy spirit is like, does what I've written apply to all aspects of like, am I willing to do this? And so I followed those principles in there and really tried to hold true to them. So the the Rs are the

first is to break rules. And I advocate breaking at least a rule a day just to keep your rule, rule breaking muscles strong and make them small rules just so you can feel how it is to break rules. And I advocate breaking at least a rule a day just to keep your rule breaking muscles strong and make them small rules just so you can feel how it is to push against the paper walls of the reality of the world around us. And in particularly the norms and cultural behaviors that govern us. And when you feel that you're on the wrong side of that,

when you feel the risk of cancellation or judgment, when you feel the shame, when you're trying to do the right thing, you know, which is very much where I was, to try and do that well and not to conform is really, really hard. And I say that as a middle-aged middle-class white man from England, you know, my privilege is in the minuscule amount. So I should be hard against the doors and walls that I can push open. But then lots of people will ask me, well, you know, isn't so-and-so, isn't Donald Trump a pirate because he breaks rules or isn't Nigel Farage or, you know, choose your lunatic and whatever country you're from and people would ask me the same question and my answer would be no, they're dickheads.

The next thing becomes very much about redistributing power. It wasn't just about breaking rules for the sake of it, it was about breaking rules not as a chaotic act but as a creative one to make things better. And the redistribution of power is really what separates pirates and it makes them accountable, it makes them something worth looking at, it makes them role models worth looking up to. And then there's reorganizing themselves, you know, finding different ways to have, be they flat, or be they hybrid, or be they responsive, you know, there's lots of different exciting organizational principles around and there's the stuff that we see in the pirates

through the cops to the responsive movement, but they were just trying something new and they were organizing themselves in a very different way and that felt to be the most important part. And then there's a redistribution of power, and I say that one, which is both in terms of money, wealth, decision-making power, that level of dynamism that we just touched on. These things, that level of dynamism that we just touched on, these things are what made them able to declare a war upon the world, when the world declared war upon them. And for a lifetime, they won. And they out-foxed and they out-performed and they out-fought everybody. And there was simply no way they could have outgunned or just won by sheer force and strength alone. It had to be down to dynamism. In fact, it was too long

a period just to be down to luck as well. And there's something in that, you know, it's not enough just to be in the group of thoughtful committed citizens, how well we organize ourselves. And so these things made a huge deal to me. We organize ourselves really well. We didn't follow all the rules we were told about divorcing separation. We mediated. We really kept our principles absolutely clear and at the top of everything we've entered. So the kids didn't suffer and our reputation and what the things that were important to us. And we did so in terms of sharing everything, in terms of decision making and finances and all the different stuff that you do. And we set our own rules for doing it. And we organized

our way of going about it. And then at the end of it, final R is to retell these tales so that others will follow. And the pirates were masters at this. There was a really deliberate and strategic act in the way that they created their brands and their flags. They all had real meaning, as did the flag system of the navies at that time. But they created these characters of death's head and skeletons dancing with glasses of wine to represent and celebrate and drink over your death.

And all manner of different stories until they ultimately were culminated on Friday the 13th of October into the black flag that we all know and understand. And it's a remarkable piece of branding. I mean, it's, it's endurance is phenomenal. And it's still widely understood, known what it means. And it drove their success. And those stories were told and told and told again, continue to be told and we're still discussing them and their relevance is more potent than now because exactly the same forces that brought them into being are returned.

And I haven't read that opening line in the book, so it was interesting hearing it back and you could tell that it kind of paused me for a second and that's what we then did as a couple. We were asked again and again and again by our friends, our kids, school friends, parents for advice about getting separated and doing it well. And I never ever would have ever thought I'd be proud. And I know my ex would

say the same, ever be proud of something that felt like such a failure and such a shame, and to be able to shine a light so that others could follow and try and do something so difficult and do it well. So yeah, I can say that those five hours are way things that you can use in organizations in your personal life. They they're principles that allow you to take Control over rules and have some accountability with them to enjoy them to have the sense of agency and power that comes with that and In retelling them and a way that you can help others and to return as right back to the beginning of course by lining up five hours In the center of the book it allowed me to call them the five up five hours in the central book it allowed me to call them the five hours.

You're listening to an upstream conversation with Sam Kahniv. We'll be right back. Oh, what drop of nurses blood wouldn't do us any harm? And we all hang on behind, and we'll roll the old chariot along. We'll roll the old chariot along. We'll roll the old chariot along, we'll roll the old chariot along, we'll roll the old chariot along, and we'll all hang on behind. Oh, a bottle of rum wouldn't do us any harm, a bottle of rum wouldn't do us any harm, a bottle of rum wouldn't do us any harm, and we'll all hang on behind And we'll roll the old cherry at the long We'll roll the old cherry at the long We'll roll the old cherry at the long And we all hang on behind And we'll roll the old cherry at the long We'll roll the old cherry at the long

We'll roll the old cherry at the long And we all hang on behind We'll roll the old cherry at the long, we'll roll the old cherry at the long, and we'll all hang on behind. And we'll roll the old cherry at the long, we'll roll the old cherry at the long, we'll roll the old cherry at the long, and we'll all hang on behind. And we'll roll the old cherry at the long, we'll roll the old cherry at the long, we'll roll the old cherry at the long, how we all hang on behind. Hey! That was A Drop of Nelson's Blood by Stormweather Shantyquire.

Now, back to our conversation with Sam Conniff. I'm loving hearing about how your personal life has connected with the book and the book's themes. You know, both the book that you wrote before, like you said, the most boring book in the world. And then the book, the second book, right? Be more pirate. And then of course, the story with divorce. And, you know, you're reminding me of what I looked up, the meaning of the Greek word for pirates, pirates, I think, is literally anyone who attempts something. So just the bravery, the courage, as you say in your workshops,

like the edge of the map, what's on the edge of your map, you know? And then the rule breaking, which has come up again and again, and I wanna bring another quote in, which is one that you uplift from Banksy. You say, the greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules, but by people following the rules. I love that. Just what are the rules that are really hurting us and

that need to be broken and just the real invitation that you're giving us to really, yeah, question, question rules, question what's going on and then rewrite them. And I know that for me, my mythopoetic identity, I call myself a renegade economist, and that's inspired by Kate Rayworth, who I would say is a modern pirate in the way that she really challenges and questions mainstream economic thinking. And I would also say the same about David Graybur. I was reflecting as we were going to speak about his life and how he was actually so radical and politically engaged that he was sent into academic exile from the US.

And so in a lot of ways, he was a modern pirate and I love that you bring in that frame. Any other modern pirates that you'd like to uplift or share right now? Well, there's a story that I tell in House Be More Pirate because it is a book of me then trying to catch up with all these great stories that I heard from other people and then understand the interpretation.

And in many ways, if I could, I'd just go back and stick House of Beemaw Pirate as the last chapter in Beemaw Pirate because it answers how this stuff can actually work. And actually, because she's in my mind at the moment, and I just posted she was just being hauled off and arrested for a protest in the UK, is Grettenberg. When my daughter asked about pirates, and I tried to explain to her, she was six, and she'd gone through her a lot. And I was trying to explain about rule breaking

in a way that's appropriate to a six-year-old, and I failed. And I know I failed because I got a call from her school teacher who said, Scarlett's normally such a nice girl. and she's been causing chaos in the classroom like throwing kids jackets on the floor and pushing stuff around and i so i had to have a conversation with scarlet obviously that caused some tension you know between me and her mother and what are we going to do and so i had to try and update my metaphor in an appropriate way for the mind of a six-year-old looking out on this world.

And they were starting to study the suffragettes at school. And a great example of a pirate is Gina Miller, a woman who was walking through Westminster Square in the middle of London, passed her house as a parliament, and she noticed that all the statues in the square were of men. And so she started a crowdfunding campaign to have a statue put up of a female leader who deserved to be there, of course. And the vote was cast, it should be Millicent Fawcett, the founding pioneer of the Suffragette movement. And so there she stands with her sign, a placard held in her hands, saying courage calls to courage everywhere. And so he was able to take Scarlet and she could tell me the story of the Suffragette.

And I could then help her reflect on whether or not the Suffragette did the right thing, which of course, we can both agree, 46, 16, yes, they did. However, at the time, we could also conceive that they probably got told off. So there is a line between doing the right thing, and sometimes it not being seen as the right thing. And over time, the morality begins to emerge. And as I looked around the square and I'm not a historian as you will know because you've read the book, it seems many of our great leaders don't get statues for doing what they're told. And there is a judgment that all of us have to make and all of us are going to have to make it in this period of time that we're living through. When is it

the right thing to do the wrong thing? When David's getting himself exiled, what rule are you going to push against so hard that you're going to get into trouble for it? Because you believe it is the wrong rule and it needs to be updated. And then you'll be following the rules when those rules change. But they may only change because of your willingness not to follow them. And it's garlic's now 10. And Gresselsunberg would be amongst her heroes. And it's not lost on me the It's garlic's now 10 and Gretchen Berg would be amongst her heroes and it's not lost on me the mirror imagery of another young woman holding a placard and how that's the enduring image of her and then there she was this week just being hauled off once again for holding some of the big fossil fuel companies to account.

You know, breaking the rules again. There's no way that encouraging millions of kids to bunk off school successfully could be seen as doing the right thing. But I don't think history will disagree with the idea that threats are both the wrong thing. So yes, she's a pirate in my eyes, at present. And you know, one thing that came up as I was reading both your books and also the David Graber book was, are we really talking about the golden age of piracy, you know, 1690 to 1725? I mean, how do we reconcile modern piracy? Because when I think of modern piracy, I think of the Somali pirates in that movie with Tom

Hanks or I think about Thich Nhat Hanh talking about how Vietnamese refugees in the 1980s were really plagued by Thai pirates. So, you know, how, like, how do you reconcile this kind of golden history element with modern piracy? So the phrase the golden age pirates refers to a period of time. The coalescing factors are this to me that they're governed by a pirate code. The first pirate code is that of Henry Morgan, I think. No, it's not Henry Morgan. Bartholomew Roberts. One of the big original, the OGs of this whole thing, right? The Sugar Hill mob pirates that came before everything else.

And then the last one, it's seen in 1721. And they are these principles. Again, like I was saying, there's a set of values which is so well known and well understood that you could rely upon everybody else within the pirate community to broadly do the inverted commerce right thing. They would stand by those those values and principles. There are six of these surviving things, but they were known to be many, many more of them. Of course, they were destroyed regularly because you'd been hung if it had been found on you. And a time they didn't need to keep them because people knew them. Like, imagine knowing off by heart the rules of the organization you work for.

You know, like a sophisticated devil, off by heart. And you know that everyone is going to follow the same set of principles and they're all based on what you all believe in. And it's, you know, no wonder they were fucking unbeatable. Or even the mission statement of organizations. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some bland, and that's it. I make that joke in the book, but it's worth repeating.

The amount of organizations that put words on the wall that no human being should have to remind themselves of in seven foot letters, like be brave or be honest. And it's become so, this is dichotomy that we see. I think that the world economic form I can't remember some like governing body claiming to have some oversight of what we should be focusing on at work Claims the number one skill for the 21st century is creativity. And actually, I don't think that's you know, that's far off In its broadest term, but I've never been in an organization that doesn't reward conformity

And so we enter into this space, which is like, yes, creativity is the most important thing, but if you want to get ahead, conformity is the answer. And those two things are odds with each other. And it won't get the best harvest. And so it excites me to kind of like, think about the conflict between those two parts, because we mean that the potentially get to somewhere more interesting as a result of it. So, and so it's only over that period. And by the end of that period, there's more violence, returns, the Navy has then sent in to destroy and crush the Golden Age of Pirates. My theory would be that they were sent to cross them because they could have come across them at any time, right? It was a matter of force. They were completely, they were a relatively small

community in the single thousands. And my impoverty would be that the reason they got crushed at the time they did was because they'd now become such a threat to democracy. And in fact, that's not my theory alone. Several pirate historians would say the same thing. Their ideas had begun to permeate. And this is seen by the famous picture of Anne Bonney that was then found in the studio of Christian Delacroix.

Actually he's a fashion designer, isn't he? The fellow who painted Lady Liberty leading the Brave, that image is then said to inform the Statue of Liberty. This is really stretching history, but the stories were affecting these other new areas and that those principles were then found in the co-ops, that the overlap that begins to take place between the colonial governors who become the founding fathers are then talking in similar tones about the exact principles that were seen in this Petri dish of Nassau. So of course they had to be crushed and the defining factor, this set of ideas is then handed on like a relay baton

as it was picked up from the Charter's the levelers the partly debates the things that happened before them and then it's passed forward and so I think that to me is the thing that happened before them, and then it's passed forward. And so I think that, to me, is the thing that defines them. For a while, on the great kind of unbroken chain of people fighting for justice and rights, this period, it was handed over to piracy. And in other periods, it's been handed over to other groups or aspects of society, sometimes marginalised groups, sometimes workers, and they continue this long ongoing fight. And since then and before then I don't believe that pirates were necessarily part of that chain of events. And so these other pirates are interesting. There's lots of aspects to their story. Some of them are marginalised, some of them are fighting for moral

basings and others are outright thieves. But like the Somali pirates are certainly an economic response to, you know, a very broken economy, which arguably was influenced by others, yet their response to it wasn't to create a new set of governing principles. So yes, the Golden Age of Pirates, I think is defined because there's a set of, there's a kind of governance based on principles and values that held them together. And that's why they particularly are so worth learning from, not the other aspects of piracy aren't. You know, it's seen again and again that there is an innovation that overlap with pirates.

The dawn of music piracy, internet piracy, I get fascinated by the notion that there are now space pirates as asteroid mining becomes a big thing. And what that really is, is a call to look towards the edges. I think this idea that there will be, as there always is, and I think you can look into this in gangsterism, you can look into this in any kind of informal economy,

there will be leapfrog moments when people will be so desperate to find a new way of doing things that they will hack their way to the adoption of a technology or technique that then will drive that overall thing forward. Not necessarily because they were doing it in the interest of the advancements of human society, but their own betterment. It doesn't mean it's any less worth learning from. You're reminding me of another quote from your book. The pirates had been pushed to the edges of society and the fringes of capitalism and there in the shadows, outside society's gaze, beyond the rules they were free to innovate

and create their own methods. So you wrote Be More Pirate and then you and your colleague Alex Barker wrote How to Be More Pirate, then we have David Graber's book Pirate Enlightenment. But now you are, my understanding is you're deep into a project called the Uncertainty Expert. So I want to ask you about that and how that follows from the work you've been doing on being more pirate. But I, when I heard and when I read about uncertainty experts, it reminded me of a quote from Martin Shaw, who's a mythologist in the UK. He says, paradox and uncertainty are the acrid tang in the strangulated throat of our times,

the very passport to entry, and a whispered desperate currency amongst our youth. They are the identifying brands of now, our hashtags, our tweets and our sat navs into the murk of consequence. So that's what I thought of when I thought about uncertainty experts and the focus there. So tell us about that project and what is your live inquiry there? I really love that quote. I might have to hook you up for that please.

So the uncertainty experts has a clear red line. My working liberty for 15 years working with incredible young people from the edges of society taught me more than anything. It was truly a pirate organization and it was trying to represent my boring book to those smart young entrepreneurs that helped me get back to pirates. And being a pirate is a love letter to those young people the world over, not just young people, but that spirit, that spirit of there's a need to do things differently and a realization that the game is just bloody rigged. And that generation shouldn't be expected to play by the rules once they've worked that out. And, you know, because that's not how the rules

are written in the first place. So once you finally learn that, then there's an invitation to be a pirate. And Uncertainty Experts follows that. It is a hypothesis that leadership through times of uncertainty will default to previously tried methodologies, even if they didn't work before. Seen in the extremes by your classic dictatorship or extremist agenda, promising false certainties to appease a nation in turmoil. And that's been seen over the last hundred years, if not more, and it's certainly seen today. But it's also seen in businesses. The desperate need to present a clear vision even when no one knows what's going on. And the last couple of years made me really think that this is becoming so apparent

when the only honest answer to so many questions is I don't know. There isn't part of the leadership handbook which tells you how to say I don't know in an authentic and inspiring way. And very few and far between the teams who want to ask their boss what the heck they should do and their boss say, well, I don't know. But not knowing seems not knowing well Making it up, you know being off the edge of the map and knowing how to navigate seems really important and Right in front of us are all around us. Are people who live through life's uncertainties and do it well Yeah, I don't know what the stats are in some of the other countries around the world who might be paying attention to this But in the UK, there's 12 million out of our 60 million population who are on the bread line in poverty.

There's nearly 2 million homeless. There's 8 million single parents. There's 300,000 veterans. There's 200,000 young people in gangs. I mean, they make it to the end of the week. They make a success of their lives in success and invert commas. It's incredibly hard to get through some

of the circumstances they did. And they did it, and I've known them, worked with many of them, with humor, and with values, and with family, and with friendships, and with bonds. And yes, it's questionable and difficult to understand the success of a franchise drug dealer, or for someone who's having to make ends meet or somebody who maybe has arrived illegally

In a country, you know, there's a lot of stigma and prejudice attached to that But there's a lot of humanity too and there's a lot of lessons learned and you know You take away the less dramatic emotions just try to get to the end of the week being you know I have my my own experience that being a single parent amongst rising costs So I wanted to shine the light in a different direction and find people who are very good uncertainty had practical lessons others can learn from. What the empty quotes coming from up top and i started looking to it i found many of them and so i created definition for uncertainty experts they have to be exposed to uncertainty for long enough that they seem to have neurologically rewind. enough that they seemed to have neurologically rewired. They were default opportunistic when the shit hit the fan. They were unfazed by chaos and a changing landscape, unlike most of us. And as things sped up, their ability to make decisions slowed down. They weren't

scared of doubt or rushed to a decision. Instead, they could wait and seize the moment. And that meant working with some people who had some pretty spicy upbringings, some smugglers, some people who had been through the prison and justice system, some people who had been through severe mental health issues, prisoners of war. But they'd all had this kind of story of a narrative arc which led them into a space that was more recognizable. So the refugees were now CEOs, people who had been through prison system were now legal activists, refugees have become running human rights organizations. And just to be clear, there's no more uncertainty in my mind or shadow aspects I'm trying to associate with any of the backgrounds of those individuals. But the stories of gender transition, mental health,

justice system, these are uncertainties that are hard to understand on a just a human basis. So in interviewing them all, what I really looked for was people who learned skills from certainty that they still applied those same skills. It wasn't that they dropped the skills that they learned from the uncertainty on the streets or in prison, but they still applied the same school skills. Now they were leading companies or leading scientific research, and that gave them validity in my mind, kind of a two-stage level of expertise. And I interviewed them, I recorded their stories, and I taught myself, I did an online course about online courses and an online course about documentaries, and I tried to combine

those two interesting genres into one and make a hybrid of a documentary and course. And I interviewed a remarkable set of scientists whose specialism is in uncertainty, and I found a niche laboratory called the Decision Making in Uncertainty Centre who had a number of different theories they've been working on for a decade since the financial collapse about individuals and organisations might better work in uncertainty. And it now exists as a three-part documentary online.

The three one-hour episodes, I was lucky to be approached and given some innovation kind of funding from Netflix into really brilliant execs who helped me shape the thing. So it tells a really great story. It'll make you laugh. It might make you cry. It'll make you think you'll make characters that you've never really ever heard so directly from. And it will tell you their techniques for navigating uncertainty that they learned both coming up in a very uncertain world and now still apply in a more certain world that you'll recognize.

Then I interview the scientists who say, this is what's going on in your brain and body. This is why we respond to uncertainty in the way we do it's primal, it's neurobiological. And then a series of reflections that I developed working with those scientists, prompt on the screen, and it has the effect of therapy. You know, we take a rigorous pre-assessment, it's a scientific set of assessments that measure your ability to turn uncertainty into opportunity. And it's several valid scales and it's taken again after watching the three episodes, it's just three one hour episodes. And we have a statistically significant increase on a marker called uncertainty tolerance, which is a psychological trait, but it has an impact on your decision making, problem solving, empathy, collaboration skills, need for closure, comfort with ambiguity and a

range of other really fascinating aspects of how we tolerate uncertainty. And yeah, I probably sound surprised because I am still surprised. It was a kind of almost a lockdown project. How do I try and help the world when I can't do the kind of events and workshops and things that I have been doing? And it's taken off. It's really taken off. There's been now three papers published about it. We shot, reproduced the version that I first made in my kitchen with a green screen with my two little doors holding boom mics and stuff. We've now made a really nice version that I first made in my kitchen with a green screen with my two little doors holding boom mics and stuff. We've now made a really nice version that's quite comfortable and enjoyable to watch.

And we've had nearly 20,000 people go through the research phase of it. So we know that the impact is really, really valid. It's really triggering my impostor syndrome. If it was an impostor-ish enough thing to act as an author, try being a scientist. And it's remarkable. It's really fun and it's really delivering a lot of good. And I have huge ambitions for it. We're currently trialing it in the National Health Service in the UK. We've begun some conversations with different groups that are facing huge uncertainty around conflict resolution, around climate negotiation, areas of life where human beings are terrible at finding new answers to things

because uncertainty, low uncertainty tolerance is correlated with low psychological safety. If you do not feel safe, you're not going to be able to tolerate other people's ideas, especially if they conflict with yours. And if we can't tolerate other people's conflicting ideas of ours, we are not going to arrive at new solutions to old problems. So whilst it began as a kind of idea or hypothesis, an idea to try and help, I really believe it can have far-reaching consequences. If you think about communities that are going to go under huge amount of pressure, essentially as resources fragment, communities with high tolerance to uncertainty will stand together.

Communities will go low on search tolerance and more likely become divided. So yeah, I'm very interested and excited where I take this, but through line, hopefully is clear. The lessons once again, the leadership once again, very often can be found at the edges. Beautiful. Yeah, leading in the midst of uncertainty is such a skill to develop. And I was I really heard what you say about if we're not tolerant or not open to uncertainty, we can embrace it, then it makes us more closed off to new ideas and to one another.

And then I also really heard you about, you know, what, what do leaders decide in times of uncertainty? Do they fall back on former patterns or ways that they think they're meant to lead? And what that just tells me is, you know, as we look towards, you know, increasing neoliberalism and privatization, it's like, has that been working really? Like, do we really need more tighter borders and higher walls and more corporate consolidation

and privatization? Is that really what's working in these times? And no, it's not, right? So what are the, what are the rules that need to be broken and the rules that need to be broken and the rules that need to be rewritten? So very, very happy to hear of that project and its success. Thank you. Thank you. The lead scientist on it, she observes me closely now and she thinks that I tried

to answer the question that I obviously didn't think I answered again. Like the end of Beemaw Pyra, I think if I go back and read the last chapter be more you I think I was really writing that to myself in a very difficult moment and but it doesn't have an answer be more you is a really difficult thing to say to someone and I struggle with it be yourself I'm not which one and in uncertainty You know being a part of been very very good at helping people step off the edge of the map, decide that they're going to create change. And then it

turns out, change is harder than you think. And that's really what happened to me. I've been advocating for change for such a long time and being a part of my loveless change. And then when change really came, not just knocking at my door, but knocking down my door, I didn't, I didn't rise up to it as well as I would have wanted to. And uncertainty experts is the next exploration of when once you're in a place of change, knowing that you want to stay there and get good at it, how do you tolerate that? So there is a real through line in that sense, for exactly the reasons that you just said, because we simply can't be pulled back once again to the same old stories we've been told before, because we know where they go.

Yeah, and not just tolerate it, but embrace it, right? There's that quote, changes the one thing we fear, but the only thing that gives us hope. I love that. So I want to close with some, some invitations and I love how you said in the uncertainty experts that you give reflection. So it has a therapeutic like quality to it. And I really found that with your books and also in reading about the workshops that you lead around, around Be More Pirate. So I want to offer a few of the questions that I heard that resonated with me and then see if you have any closing invitations for our listeners. So one thing that you ask us to consider, and I ask those listening to consider, is what is your North Star when you're lost?

What do you stand for? And are you really living your principles day to day? And maybe even to broaden out to not only your North Star, but your communities North Star, right? Because I'm thinking about that pirate ship, that collective endeavor. And then what is at the edge of your map? What big opportunities are just off the edge of the horizon? And then if you could break any rule, what would it be?

And maybe as Sam said, start small, try to be a little bit of a renegade or a surreptitious or trickster energy, but then what bigger rule could you break? And how might that be a part of your livelihood or your calling or your activism or art making? And then finally, what new rules are you writing and how are you going to make them real? So Sam, any other closing invitations or thoughts for our listeners? Yeah, I really come to respect the notion of questions as tools. And I have to thank my editor for making me put those questions at the end, because in the first draft I wrote them and then the second draft I took them out so I thought it might be cheesy and I'm so grateful for the amount of times I've been showing people's pages

and the answers that they do and And now being quite a bit uncertain to you, because it's based on a similar kind of framework of stimulation and then reflection. The question I find myself asking a lot and a lot of people at the moment is as to whether or not we're in whether we're competing or comparing. It's a very difficult time, I think, working out what it is that we should be doing. eating or comparing. It's a very difficult time, I think, working out what it is that we should be doing. It's almost impossible to do that objectively without thinking that we're comparing ourselves to that around us, which is good or bad or others. And I don't just mean in the kind of social media sense of comparison, but I do mean that as well. And I think there's, you know, whilst I stand for the values of this book and the principles, I think that we both probably agree with. I think I say it in the book, there's a time when knowing what you stand for counts for

a lot, right? But after a while, there's knowing what you'll stand up to. I think that idea that knowing the values that you would fight for is really important. And there's a dark energy, perhaps, that comes from competition. But I think we need a healthy balance of the dark and the light energies right now, because I think there's a fight brewing. And I mean that in a good way, a positive way, a chance for the fragility of the moment to lead to some creativity, to the cracks with the lights and all those kind of thoughts. But knowing that we're competing

and not comparing feels really, really important. To step into the unknown means that comparison won't help. To compete with the old, to to make something better and not faltering, not falling between those two lines. And another way that shows up is I ask a lot at the moment whether you'd rather be seen as having made a bad decision or to have suffered from indecision. It's a really difficult one. I'm not quite sure what the right answer is and I know in organisations indecision like is a killer. But we see around us bad decisions. We see rushed decisions We see people making decisions based on heuristics rules of thumb and experiences They had before stories

They've been told that aren't relevant to where we're going to go and then Inability to hold space for not making a decision and I think it there going back to the idea of nuance What do you choose? or a moment of indecision I Think that space is not quite knowing and letting yourself not know for a little while longer is probably like the one I want of uncertainty work and my belief is and I can't make this as a promise but my belief is staying in the unknown in the doubt and in the indecisive a little bit longer is where we need to be. I

think we're defaults towards bad decision. We know that's done. Stay with the messiness, stay with the mud, as you said earlier. And I really hear you around one of the biggest insights I had in visiting Mondragon, the cooperative ecosystem in Spain, was at first I was so inspired by the project of great equality and great camaraderie amongst workers, but then I found the ways that they were betraying their own values, and I realized it was because they were still competing within the global sea of capitalism. And so I had this realization that capitalism is very competitive. And so if people and organizations try to compete within it, they will lose because they're valuing things other than growth or

profit maximization at all costs. And so just to go again to, you know, competing in the system and also being willing to break the rules and rewrite them. Just reminded of that. And I think that often doesn't happen. We still, there's a kind of tracker success that so many people follow. And then when you find yourself there, all of a sudden you are playing by the rules. We set out to do things differently, find some degree of success and now all of a sudden you've been taken into the pirates and it's something that I really try and keep a check on myself for as well. You know the only competition can really over be if we're trying to fix a problem is to put yourself out of business.

Redundancy is very associated with success, but I think it should be more so, because otherwise so many organisations begin to exist solely to perpetuate the problem that they originally designed to dissolve. But anyway. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for your books and your offerings in the world and certainty experts and everything else. Thank you for this time and the work that you do. Thank you, Dana. Very, very much, much indeed. It has been a real pleasure. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Sam Comet, author of Be More Pirate.

Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Storm Weather Shanty Choir for the intermission music and to Carolyn Raider for the cover art. Upstream Theme Music was composed by me, Robbie. Upstream is entirely listener funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways in which you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes,

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