4.9 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 13 February 2024
⏱️ 75 minutes
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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
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0:04.0 | Want to learn about values-aligned financial management? |
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0:11.0 | on organizational finances to develop the skills and confidence of those working towards a just world beyond capitalism. |
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0:21.5 | Bookkeeping. co-op. That's B-O-O-K-E-P-I-N-G dot C-O-O-P. Oh, uh- Oh. The pirates truly belong on the long arc of the fight for equality, whether that's civil rights or workers' rights or female rights. |
0:59.0 | And they were seen as that at the time I would posit. |
1:02.0 | And that's the most interesting bit and arguably why they were such a threat. |
1:07.0 | Because as we know those fights became bloody, became violent, and I think the crucible of much of them was 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. |
1:21.0 | You are listening to upstream. |
1:24.0 | Upstream. Upstream. |
1:26.0 | Upstream. |
1:27.0 | 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. |
1:37.0 | What do you typically think of when you think of pirates? |
1:40.0 | Parrots, peg legs, eye patches, treasure? |
1:44.0 | Is there more to pirates than these things than corny jokes in a Disney franchise starring Johnny Depp? |
1:51.0 | Well, our guest for today's episode certainly thinks so. |
1:54.0 | Sam Conif's book, Be More Pirate, How to Take On the World and Win, |
1:59.0 | was published in 2018 and sparked a sequel How to Be More Pirate, a podcast titled Be More Pirate and |
2:07.7 | a movement of people studying the principles and strategies of golden age pirates to bring them into activism and leadership |
2:16.1 | in the 21st century. |
... |
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