This season of power corrupts is brought to you by you, the listeners, who are generously supporting our work and allowing us to keep bringing you episodes that are editorially independent.

In fact, we were contacted recently by a Russian oligarch who offered us quite a lot of rubles to make an episode funny and over him, and we said,

no thank you, we've got listeners who are joining us on Patreon at patreon.com's-power-corrupts and other listeners who are pre-ordering my new book, Corruptible, who gets power and how it changes us, so we don't need your dirty money.

I'm just kidding about this story, by the way. He was Ukrainian.

If you join us on Patreon, you can get access to part two of this episode right now rather than waiting another week for it.

The book, by the way, Corruptible, which have I mentioned you can pre-order now, comes out on November 9th.

In one chapter, you're learning about why psychopaths are better at getting power and why narcissists earn more money.

The next, we're exploring how our Stone Age minds harbor baffling biases that manifest in modern-day racism and misogyny when it comes to selecting leaders based on superficial characteristics.

And then, we figure out why monkeys riding high in their social hierarchy choose banana pellets over cocaine, while the lower status monkeys get hooked on the drugs.

In a couple of weeks, I'll drop most of the first chapter of the audiobook onto the feed before its release, so you can get a flavor for it.

Thanks for listening and for your support.

Next time you're enjoying avocado on toast.

Think of pirates.

Or actually just think of one pirate.

A man named William Damper, an English pirate who sailed the seas in the late 1600s and early 1700s.

His tale is a larger-than-life epic of the adventures that awaited those who became pirates in this period, the golden age of piracy.

Damper first joined the pirate crew of Captain Bartholomew Sharp in the late 1670s, sailing around Mexico and the Caribbean before completely circumnavigating the globe.

Something he would do two more times, making him the first human to do so three times in total.

He later joined a series of privateer ships, which were sort of like officially sanctioned pirates, raiding places as diverse as the Galapagos, Guam and the modern-day Philippines.

At one point he was marooned on an island in Southeast Asia, but managed to escape by obtaining a small canoe, the canoe capsized in a storm, but he again somehow managed to survive.

Damper was also one of the early naturalists, a precursor to Darwin who took detailed notes and sketches of the flora and fauna he encountered across the globe, including in parts of Australia that had never been visited by white people previously.

These notes were later used as part of later expeditions and represent the initial origin story of Botany Bay in Australia.

...