Be More Pirate, Build the Future | Sam Conniff

The future is how.

Have you asked yourself today, what's next for me? You're not alone. We've all felt that way at some point. My name is Frederik Pferdt, and for years I've helped the brightest minds at Google and Stanford and people around the world shape their futures. Now I want to help you to do the same. Because the future isn't just something that happens. It's something you can create. Starting right now. From within. Instead of waiting to see what happens next, let's explore how you can make it happen. Each episode dives into one key area. Like sleep, nutrition, relationships, creativity, storytelling, mindfulness, beauty, movement, or purpose, and brings you real stories and practical tools you can use to shape a better future for yourself. So what's one step you can take today to create what's next? Let's dive in and explore how to build a better tomorrow, starting right now.

What if breaking the rules wasn't reckless, but responsible? What if the future doesn't belong to those who played safe, but to those brave enough to rewrite the rules entirely? Welcome to The Future Is How. I'm Frederik, and on this podcast, we don't predict the future. We learn how to create it. Today, I'm joined by someone who's made a life's work of practicing courage in the face of uncertainty. He's an international keynote speaker, social entrepreneur, and bestselling author of Be More Pirate. He is also the creator of Uncertainty Experts, the world's first science-backed immersive program to help people thrive in times of change. Please welcome Sam Conniff.

Hello, Frederick. Thank you very much indeed. What a lovely and concise introduction. That usually makes me squirm. And actually, everything you just said there makes me really proud. So thanks very much.

Perfect. Yes. Sam, I have to ask you the first thing. Show me your nails. Show me your hands.

Here. I have just had these done at the beginning of this week. It's beginning of term time. So I took my daughters to the nail salon and we all decided what colors would give us confidence. For the new season and match with the changing season. And I've gone for a very matte black with a little bit of kind of, you probably can't see it, a little sparkly overlay.

Wonderful. Thanks for showing that. And I have to say, last time we took this nice walk at the San Francisco Wharf, you inspired me to also get my nails done. So I have this monthly ritual with my daughter as well now to go into the nail salon and I picked the same color. I picked a matte black for my feet and my nails. And so tell us more about this. Like, what is it about?

Well, firstly, let me recommend next time you go, get your nails done black and then get a little chrome. You remember Hot Wheels, the cars?

Of course.

Get Hot Wheels flames done in chrome over the top. And you won't, you won't make it to your next destination because everyone wants to stop and talk about your nails. It's just, it's, that's my last configuration. It's a good one. It's an interesting piece of social science that I'm progressing as a bit of a side hustle. I took my daughter to see Harry Styles 2 years ago. She said, let's get our nails done. I thought that sounded fun, so we did. Monday morning rolled around, I tried to take them off and I couldn't because we'd had shellacs and I didn't have time that week. And by the end of the week, I'd had 4 or 5 conversations with men that you never normally have. And obviously topics around identity and gender and masculinity are very present in the media, on social media, and they're quite challenging to know really where you stand. But amongst my men friends, they're quite few and far between. And somehow these nails acted as a signal and a symbol. And of course, it always starts with a bit of a banter or a joke or an assumption that maybe I'm going through some kind of great big change or crisis. But very quickly ended up talking about violence against women or the worries that we have around masculinity or our own inner fears. It was remarkable. And so I continued to wear them and I started to write about it and I wondered whether or not it was all so close to the surface for so many men but so difficult to get to these topics that if somehow this, I don't know, invitation, this very visual invitation would take us somewhere. So I got a small group of men together and we tested it out. I got them to keep diaries and a similar thing happened. They all found themselves starting conversations, being approached on public transport. But also they felt a discomfort as well as an exploration, as you described it. It's curious and it's creative. They also felt judgment, and they felt unsafety, and they felt themselves not going into certain environments for fear of being teased. And they were predominantly middle-aged men from different walks of life, different ethnicities. But for many of them, they'd never had this experience, and they started to wonder, is this what it's like being a woman at night? Is this what it's like being a gay man in the wrong part of town? Is this what it's like trans at the moment. And of course it's none of those things, but for a very small moment in time, these very privileged men living in London as they are had a tiny indication of what life can be like in a less privileged space. And so this May we ran a really robust trial. I got 450 men to take part. We ran it against control groups of 40. We got them to undertake the Man in a Box scale, which is a really well-known and well-trusted measure of positive or toxic masculinity. And it has 4 areas. One is that strength is demonstrated through dominance. One is that vulnerability and emotions are a sign of weakness. One is that success is kind of an independent and heroic journey. And it's stuff that all men will recognize. All men will recognize. And our lives, we've been at different aspects on that. And how you respond to the world around you may then feel more violent or aggressive or contained or frustrated depending on where you are on that scale. And it was the most remarkable experience I've ever been part of because not all the men took part. A lot of them dropped out. A lot of them were very scared. Of those who did get their nails done, they went from the salon and they went into the street expecting violence. They expected to get into fights. They expected to be attacked. And over the next 24 hours, there was a serious sense of disappointment when all they got was someone saying, "Nice nails, mate." you know, and it's just a positive and wholesome response. And then they felt disappointed, and then they began to look inward and reflect on why did they expect violence and what they got was compliments? And what are these ideals of masculinity and strength? And why did they feel that they've been so weak? And why was it that they were making excuses not to go to football or to excuse themselves from the pub? And why did they feel so judged on the bus or in a meeting? And that introspection took them to a very significant place. And there was a rare thing of beauty. I was in a WhatsApp group with over 100 men discussing our fathers and, and our children and our fears, and maybe all the other things in life that we've missed out on, or why we always all wear blue or black, at the same time as sharing nail care tips for when you go to the gym or go climbing or any of the other manly pursuits that they were involved in. And at the end of the 2-week experiment, we triangulated the research diaries, the psychological assessments, the results from the control group. We had academic oversight from a specialist in gender studies. And it turned out that we had moved every single man who took part in a positive direction on the best-known scale in the world for healthy or toxic masculinity. So as an intervention, it worked. And it was a surreal thing to be part of. It was pretty beautiful, pretty profound, and very, very moving. Totally unexpected. You know, this started from going to see Harry Styles. I did not think this would be where this ends up. It's been a very interesting thing to be part of.

I think this truly speaks for you as an individual, right? And how you really live that notion of being a pirate in the best positive way, right? Trying to do something different, right? Challenging the rules, challenging the norms to change individuals, to change systems, and so forth. So let's start with your call to be more pirate, right? It's not just a title of a book, I think. It's a call to action, right? Pirates in history weren't just rebels. They were also reinventors of systems, I guess. So what does being a pirate mean in our world today? And how can rule-breaking actually become the responsible course of action?

This turned into something again that I wasn't really expecting. I'd worked in social innovation and entrepreneurship for an awfully long time, and I'd begun to— I think, you know, your journey is well known, and a similar, you know, when we spoke, you said you left this role that you had in innovation and futurism, and people thought you were mad. I left Liberty. Where I'd worked for 15 years. We'd won Agency of the Year, Campaign of the Year, we'd won the Queen's Award. It was, and it was the most joyful thing to work on because not only did we do great client work, but the work itself was a platform for young talent. And I couldn't have been more frustrated by the end of it. I couldn't have been more annoyed. We kept being called into rooms to talk about innovation. We were seen as the leaders in innovation. And in these rooms, the same thing would happen again and again. Good ideas would be sent to their death on Post-it notes and PowerPoint slides and email threads, and we'd end up doing the same shit under a different name. And I just got damned if I was going to carry on with this anymore. And the places that I saw real change happening were in the communities of young people that I would work with. Kids on the edges, kids willing to take risks, kids who had to circumnavigate the system. Kids for whom, if they play by the rules, then they play to lose. You know, they're told to put their heads down and do what they're told. But if you do that, you do not advance. And I just began to see the frustration of all of us. You know, we face these very, very big problems. And it's Einstein, isn't it, who says if you continue to face the same problems with the same solutions that made them in the first place, it's a form of insanity. I'm paraphrasing. And so Be More Pirate was a love letter to myself and to everyone else frustrated by the truth of innovation. That perhaps, yeah, rule-breaking isn't the risky thing to do but the responsible thing to do. My main measure of this, you ask the modern-day example. Anyone listening who thinks there's, you know, this is catching something with them, hitting a nerve ending, ask a group of people what the last rule they broke was. And I've asked this many, many times, and there'll always be someone who's speeding, uh, and then there'll be someone who's stolen something, and there'll be someone who's very proud that they, um, overwrote a policy at work, or that somebody wasn't getting their expenses, or that they weren't hiring the right people because they're filtering process was biased, or whatever it was. And they made an assumption, they made an assessment, they made an adult intelligent decision. And as a result, they felt one of three things. And it's usually pride, because they took a risk and it paid off, or they learned something. Agency— they felt some control over their life. And then either accountability or responsibility, because you've now gone off the edge of the map and you've taken matters into your own hand, and now you feel responsible. Even the people who say they're speeding, it's like they've assessed that the motorway or freeway is clear, they're late, or it's important. They made a judgment about what is, what is safe for them, and then they got to their destination. You know, the assumption that we can't make such decisions is part of the paralysis that comes with it. And who would have thought, if you asked anyone immediately what are the feelings that come with rule-breaking, it might be guilt, shame, regret. Who would have thought that the consistent emotions connected when someone genuinely tells you where they've broken the rules of life is agency, accountability, responsibility, and pride. And I think that speaks to the conundrum that we're in. The simple way I'd frame the modern issue is most places, most organizations, and most systems that we're in will tell us that the most important skill is creativity. Now, whether that's innovation or tech fluency or our ability for empathy or future thinking, you know, fundamentally creative thought. However, whilst we'll agree that creativity is one of those words we write on the wall in very, very large letters in most organizations we go to, most of us perceive that the way to progress in life is through conformity. And this dichotomy sits at the core of it all. We're told creativity is how to progress, yet we believe conformity is how we get forward. So they are at odds with each other, and reconciling that paradox requires us to break the rules. 'Cause if we do as we're told, we're not gonna get to where we want to get to.

And you're speaking to something that I think we all experience, right? Like if someone breaks a rule, let's say like, you know, someone is, I think we all experience that in traffic when we are in a car or on a bicycle, right? It sometimes is to that extreme that you feel like, okay, like somebody will actually risk your life because they have the way of right.

Mm-hmm.

Or the right of way. It's sometimes for me when I'm biking with my friends and like there's a car, you can almost guarantee depending on which country you're in, that they will feel that they are right. Right. Because the rules are set in a way. Way back in the time that they will risk your life.

Mm-hmm.

And so what you're arguing for is sometimes we have to look at rules and regulations and things like that in, in our own communities, right? On the streets, but also in our organizations and feel like which of those rules actually still make sense and which of those might actually risk our lives. And then act accordingly, which brings me back to that be more pirate, right? Like, how do you approach organizations, for example, and tell them like, hey, let's be more pirate, break some rules.

So you're absolutely right on that first point. There is a contextual relevance and the etymology of rule. Is to do with the linear notion of things, the straight lines. And that's what we were once trying to do. We were trying to make sense of the world and create straight lines, and then we wanted people to follow those straight lines so that we all knew what we were doing. And as much as Newtonian physics now won't help us explain a complex world, the idea of rules as linear no longer is suitable. And linear rules create a more brittle, fragile, and divided world. And time and time again, we can see the policies that were the ones there to protect us now threaten us. And so continuing to navigate the 21st century with 20th century protocols is a good example of the rules we're trying to break. And how do we get to a place where the rules that we have are as fluid as the world that we're in? In terms of being more pirate and how do I approach companies, I don't. I didn't want to ever run another bloody innovation session in my life again. I would have been happy never to stand in front of a room of executives holding Post-it notes, you know, not engaged and not really believing in it, waiting until they get to the pub and they have their second drink before they actually say a good idea, right? And everything else is a kind of contained competition in saying something clever, smart, and ultimately ending up settling for some terrible compromise. I just didn't want to do that under the banner of innovation. It just didn't feel fair, especially when, like you, you've seen real innovation, you've seen new ideas, and new ideas come with a sense of risk when you are actually off the edge of the map in the territory of something new, lost in the swamp of new ideas. That's not a comfortable place.

Absolutely.

And so I just didn't want to do it anymore. And then I wrote the book. The book came out. It was surprisingly successful. I was going through a real crisis of confidence and of identity. I'd run this agency for 15 years. I didn't have that structure anymore. I was suddenly in a little tiny room in my house. I was going through a serious relationship breakdown. I had kids. Everything felt awful. And so I was being introduced as this award-winning entrepreneur with his bestselling book, and I just felt like a failure. So I couldn't reconcile these two really difficult things. And so I then got approached by Lego and they said, we love your book. Would you come in? And we think it really relates to what we do. Would you come in and talk to us about being pirates? And at first I said no. And then I couldn't really afford to say no for the world that I was in. I thought, ah. And so I said yes. I said a fee that I didn't think they'd pay. And then I said, okay, I'll do it. And then my plan was, I'm going to write the innovation workshop where I'll never get booked again, and it's going to be about mutiny. I am going to go and cause fucking mutiny. We're going to do real innovation, real rebellion. And went in and ran this session where I got everyone into that, like, on the tables pirate, like we're kind of drumming the tables, we're really talking about the rules. And got people who sit next to the problems on their daily basis to say what they honestly think. What do you really think when you're in the pub? Or what do you tell your partner every that you think that the company needs to do, but you'd never say at work, right? Because those are the real rules. The rules that tell us not to speak up, the rules that stop you in a meeting saying, you know, are you fucking mad? Is that really the budget? That can't be the time frame. The rules deny us telling the truth sometimes. And we had so much fun, and I, because I had the freedom from never expecting to be booked again, you know, the consultant's curse of having to say what's going to get you the work. And eventually the plan was you stand up and you say what your new rule is going to be, and then I've tricked you all. This isn't a theoretical exercise. You're not going to write it down. There's no Post-it notes. You're just going I'm just going to do it. You've just said it. If the rest of the room stands up, then you have all the permission you need. There's too many people to get fired. Let's fucking go. The whole room stood up. The brilliant idea had been proposed. Everyone's like, why didn't you say that before? I just didn't think you wanted to hear it. Rebellion, rebellion with everyone stood up with people cheering, the feeling from I don't want to speak up. I hate this idea. I'm going to get shut down to I've spoken my truth, I've complained about the thing, and I've suggested an idea. And lo and behold, I've been doing that for the book's nearly 8 years, and I'm approached by companies. It's all inbound requests, organizations that are feeling stuck, organizations with the same level of frustration that I have had, and that are ready to rewrite some rules. I mean, it's a radical invitation, come and cause a mutiny at my own organization, but it's one that I now don't even do alone. I have a team. There are 2 of us. A wonderful woman came on and she's my co-pirate. She added some intellectual rigor to my original idea, and we deliver these in NGOs and governments and corporations, and we're very strict. We will never compromise. It has to be rule-breaking. Sometimes people say, can you come and just help us bend the rules a bit? No, no, there can't be any limit on the ideas that are said, and the ideas that are said and that are voted for have to be enacted. And it's a glorious thing to put people back into— and you know what most commonly is the feedback people give us after time. They get to do the kind of work that they are most proud of. And that's the bit, right? You put people back into the kind of passion or the reason they did something in the first place, that sense of control and connection. And it's the funny thing, we've all got a little bit of pirate in us. And it's not a full-time role. You can't be a pirate all the time. It's exhausting. I've tried. But every now and then when things get stuck, Who doesn't want to put a cutlass through their boss or through the legal team or through, you know, the bureaucracy? And I mean that obviously metaphorically, no one should stab the legal team. The idea of cutting through all that stuff with a little bit of pirate swagger, that appeals to us all. And giving people just a hint of that flavor to their 9-to-5 is a gift.

It reminds me of being more childlike, if not childish, which I think has a lot of a pirate in it. Recently I was walking through a museum at the MIT and I saw these maps of— they were from the 1400s or 1500s, these maps of the world basically. And those maps showed monsters. And the seamen back then, like, they were looking at those maps and seeing like, okay, you know, there's danger, right? We can't go there because we're going to be eaten. We're going to die, you know, and we're going to fall off the world because back then everybody believed that the world was flat and that at the end of the world, there are these monsters that basically going to eat our ships and destroy us. Right. But then. Some sailors, they took their courage and they were probably like breaking the rules and say like, okay, we're gonna sail to the end of the world to discover something new. And I think that new discovery is what companies are looking for as well. They wanna discover something new, like a new market, a new segment, a new product, a new service, whatever it is. Then you help them doing that by breaking the rules, by being more pirate. And I think that's fascinating. You also describe yourself as an uncertainty expert. For me, that sounds bold in a world where most of us want certainty. We all want that certainty. We all want to know what tomorrow is going to happen. We all want to know what is certain in our life. So let's start with what is certain in our world and our lives. As you are the uncertainty expert, I want to start off with What's actually certain?

How fun. Well, very little is certain, if anything, in fact. And I don't mean to be— I tried very, very hard in Uncertainty Experts as I created it, and we've written now the book, The Uncertainty Toolkit, out in January with Pan Macmillan, big plug. And I tried very hard to add something new because there's a lot of books on uncertainty. In fact, it's a topic that's been around for so long. The Buddhist philosophy speaks very clearly about uncertainty. So you've got 2,500 years of ancient wisdom. It's a very strong topic in neuroscience as we try and understand the human brain and why we're responding in the way that we do to so many things. And it's also a key topic in policy and formation. There are increasingly heads of uncertainty at some of the largest companies in the world. Governments are recruiting heads of uncertainty. Most of the universities are looking at uncertainty. I was invited to a special meeting of government departments and think tanks on uncertainty. It's a hot topic. So the cutting edge of our future, uncertain, and as far back as we've ever recorded writing anything down, uncertain. And so what is the consistent thread across all of that knowledge and wisdom? Annoyingly, the one thing they all agree on is that the only certainty is uncertainty. And there's something really annoying about the Buddhists in that they're always right. But there's something really fundamentally useful. The two things that I have discovered above all else, and these I think are the most valuable and useful things, one is that uncertainty— the curse of the clever is they tend to make things more complicated, and by and large they think that they can think or talk their way out of anything. Uncertainty, however, is not a problem to be solved. It's like trying to solve a garden You know, you can't. Uncertainty is an experience and it has to be felt. And if you're going to get through uncertainty, you have to think and feel your way through it. And the problem with the whole VUCA framework thing is it didn't take into account that uncertainty is an emotion. And most organizations still approach uncertainty as if it were risk with probabilities and variabilities, and that doesn't allow for the benefit. Everybody who's listening now knows that their lived experience tells them that uncertainty is just as consistently a resource. You know, mystery is a resource. It's a source of energy and inspiration. If you think about the greatest moments of your life and your achievements, if we went and had a beer and like, you know, shared war stories, it would not be about things that were predictable. It would not be sitting there going, well, this was guaranteed to happen and it did, and I was really pleased. It would be about the unexpected turn of events that we saw the opportunity, reached into it, defied the odds, and pulled it off. And yet we forget that because it feels so uncomfortable. And so knowing that uncertainty has this dualistic aspect to it, it's what's known as psychobiological. Uncertainty affects the brain. It's either a novel thing that the brain reaches towards in the way that the brain loves puzzles, or it causes dissonance because the brain doesn't like it when its predictions go wrong. But at the same time, the body registers uncertainty as either a threat, there's something going wrong here and I need to fight or flight, Or is excitement, is it surprise and I want to go towards it? So are you going to choose anxiety or creativity or avoidance or attraction? And all of that taking place at once, you know, makes uncertainty a very fascinating space. But the headline is it's psychobiological. And the second big thing is that most of us, particularly this present stage, and your question alludes to it, we're trying to fix for certainty. We don't like uncertainty. So what can we say is certain? And this is a fool's errand on which we will exhaust a lot of energy. You cannot fix uncertainty. There is no such thing as certainty, and you can't— you shouldn't try and fix it anyway. And anyway, that's not the bloody problem. The problem is your relationship with uncertainty. And the good news is you can fix your relationship with uncertainty. It's much easier than you think. Every single one of us has a psychological trait that can be measured, and it's called uncertainty tolerance. And if you increase your uncertainty tolerance, you become a very different person. It has huge effects. It's the number one driver of anxiety. It affects your problem solving, it affects your empathy, it affects your voter intentions, it affects your relationship strength. It's a transdiagnostic. It affects so many things. So the Buddhists agree with the neuroscientists. The past agrees with the future. You can't fix uncertainty. You shouldn't try. What you can fix is your relationship with it. But to do that, it has to be a brain and body thing.

So what I'm hearing you say is that uncertainty is an emotion that we can literally feel, right? And as you say, like, you know, we can't fix emotions. It's just not something that is fixable, but we can change our relationship with our emotions and therefore we can change our relationship with uncertainty. And I would actually take that a step forward and say like, we can then also think about the future as something that is by definition uncertain. And we can't fix the future, but we can change our relationship with our future by seeing the future as something that we create by the choices that we make in every moment. And also seeing what I like to say, we were built by change, but not built for change. So we are an outcome of evolution, but we have such a hard time to see change as something that is beneficial to us, that actually will help us in our future as well. So you've done that extensive research on uncertainty. How do you make that practical for people when they still feel like, you know, this emotion of uncertainty and they want to have it fixed. Like, what are some practical ways you actually help leaders in organizations, but also, to be honest, just everyone to have a different relationship with uncertainty?

I'll pick up on the thread that you just said because it's fundamental to this, and you're absolutely right. The way my wife phrases this is that evolution doesn't make predictions. And it took me a while to get my head around that. Evolution doesn't make predictions, but it's just exactly what you said. We are, we are products of our past, which does not make us necessarily fit for our futures. And uncertainty has an interesting role to play here because uncertainty can be a very good coach for your future. The, the, ultimately it's like the old, um, the pharmakon. Before the pharmacist, you know, the poison is always the cure. What makes you better at uncertainty is more uncertainty. However, what we have to do is recondition ourselves for the uncertainty that we're going to face, and then we can become more adaptive. There's lots of studies around psilocybin and lots of excitement and interest in psychedelics at the moment. One of the reasons is its potential mental health benefits, and that's connected to its ability to allow us to lay down new thoughts and patterns of behavior. If we become very fixed in negative loops, It seems to be pretty well evidenced that a dose of psilocybin can create new neural pathways, neuroplasticity, and a new outlook on life. The second most effective way to achieve neuroplasticity and synaptic growth is uncertainty. So if you haven't got time for a massive dose of mushrooms this afternoon, and you know, few of us do, another way of beginning to achieve a more agile outlook on life is a healthy dose of uncertainty, which many of us face on a daily basis. But if we allow that to shut us down, oh my God, I'm going to go and find some certainty, whether that's in a glass of wine, or starting a fight, or, you know, over-indexing on this spreadsheet, or I know the many other ways that we can kid ourselves that there are certainty, or we learn to tolerate the unknown and begin to recalibrate that doubt is a place of discovery. And universally, doubt is something that we think of as an awful, uncomfortable space. But we also know that that's where we've begun to view the world differently. You don't want to go— it's like the axiomatic truth that, you know, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right? But no one has ever gone towards something that's nearly going to kill them and thought, great, this is going to make me stronger, it's going to be a workout. We only ever say it retrospectively. So that's— I think that's the point I'm trying to say. Evolution doesn't make predictions until we start to think about the future. So in practical terms, the most practical thing I can give you is the framework for it. So we ask people, and we have over 30,000 participants internationally. You're right, it's a very robust data set. You ask them what they think about uncertainty. Universally, everyone says 50/50, good and bad, mixed. It can be a pain in the neck. It can be a place of growth. Ask someone how they feel about uncertainty and you begin to understand why it's a problem because they will express negative adjectives to describe their emotions. We've recorded thousands and thousands of these, and they all fall into 3 categories. The first is uncertainty makes me anxious, scared, fretful, worried, sleepless, etc. We call that fear. The second is uncertainty makes me confused, circular, frustrated, indecisive. We call that fog. Third, uncertainty makes me feel stuck, listless, like I've lost my mojo, a bit meh. We call that stasis. In nearly 4 years, 30,000 participants every major economy. No one has ever said an emotion that sits outside those three. So that is the true underlying, hard to articulate, hard to admit, doesn't show up on the radar, not the models that we know, the reason why uncertainty ends up in sabotage and self-doubt and imposter syndrome and procrastination. So how do you turn around? Let's make it practical. Well, the first is tools of emotional regulation. That fear point— fear is a very healthy emotion. Feel the fear and do it anyway is a very unhealthy strategy. But feel the fear and learn to regulate it so it becomes a driver for action as it was always intended to be is a very healthy way to go about it. And the main tool that we teach there is called interoception. It's one of the hot topics in neuroscience right now, but it's a very old skill. And it's just our ability to turn emotions into data. What is that signal inside? What does it mean? Is it a type of anxiety or fear or existential threat? People with high interoception can shut their eyes and count their heartbeats. People with low interoception don't know whether they're stressed, angry, excited, or whether they need a wee, you know. And the research around it is very, very strong. There's a very big data set coming out published by Sarah Garfinkel who looks at this this year, and it'll be the word on everyone's lips next year, I would predict. The second, that place of fog and confusion, the main thing we teach is meta-awareness, and that is an ability to understand your thoughts and your thought processes as those are going around your head. And the key thing we teach there is negativity bias. Our brains default to negativity, not because we're negative people, but to keep us alive. A survival ratio is about 2 in 10. Of every 10 opportunities or things that come our way, 2 of them might keep us alive and make us stronger. 8 of them probably cause some kind of risk. So we are predisposed to see threats and faces in shadows. And understanding that and understanding those thoughts and thought processes that we have is fundamental to it. And the final one— God, my answers are a bit long sometimes, aren't they, Fred? Sorry. The final one is the stasis, the stuckness, and the way out of that seems to be connection, which isn't what we expected. And the key thing that we teach there is something called embodied cognition. And this is very interesting in regards to the future and everything you just said, because the lab that we worked with primarily is based out of UCL, University College London, and they're called the Decision Making and Uncertainty Centre. They were set up in 2009 after the financial collapse, and after 10 years they published their first major framework, and it was called Conviction Narrative Theory. And it takes this idea of embodied cognition that we have two decision-making centers. Before we had the prefrontal cortex, all of our decisions came from what we'd now call as gut instinct or intuition. And ever since dualism, we separate those two things, and we're increasingly realizing they have to be together. Conviction Narrative Theory suggests that the emotions that we were just talking about are as valid in present states and past states and future states. So the emotions that you will feel today, that you'll make a gut instinct decision on— and as everyone who's listened to this has made gut instinct decisions that have changed the course of their lives— those emotions are as powerful as if you try to remember your daughter's birthday or a wedding or a funeral or whatever emotions happen in the past. If you have a dream those emotions are real. Or if you go to see great theater or culture, equally, if you were to think about a decision, Fred, that you're facing that's going to happen at the beginning of next year, and you don't know what the right thing is to do, and you go and you contemplate and you inhabit and you synthesize and you imagine and you scenario what those two outcomes could be, you will feel a ripple of exactly the same thing. Because this is the body, not the brain, so it doesn't do abstract concepts like time. And if you imagine it well enough and inhabit it well enough, you'll begin to pick up those same feelings of, does that feel right? You know, it's January, it's February, and I've decided to do the A option. And this is what my partner says, and this is what the kids say, and this is what the world says, and this is what I would then do. And you'll start to trigger those same sets of emotions. So weirdly, emotions can be a link into better-made future decisions, because you can take those experiences back into the present and make the decisions before you feel those sensations in the actual future by an imagined future. Isn't that fun?

I don't think it's only fun. I think it's probably the most insightful thing you can learn about uncertainty and the future and how you can change your relationship with it. If you really bring it down to that notion of uncertainty is an emotion. So is the future an emotion. And how do you want to feel in the future? Having that question front and center all the time, I think brings that future thinking into your body as well. And you basically embody it. And I think that's a fascinating thing that we see, as you say, more and more research on it that really proves that. And I think that's That's wonderful.

Can we just stop here? Because if you, as Mr. Future, are going to— Dr. Future is now going to say that's the most insightful thing about the future, I might just stop. You know, this is probably as good as it's going to get. So we'll just wrap things up here and now. Thank you, everyone. It's been a pleasure. The book's out in January. Bye-bye.

Absolutely. And sometimes we should actually do that.

Yeah, we should. I certainly should know when to stop.

Because that gives you also the one and only tool that you need, right? We are looking for those tools, frameworks, methods, you name it. But as soon as we have that understanding that it's an emotion that we cannot fix, and uncertainty is not fixable, it's not something that we can turn into certainty, right? And I think that's the conversation most people are having either with themselves or with others is like, what's the certain thing? When we look at the weather forecast, when we look at those predictions, when we look at people telling us like, this is gonna happen in 5 years from today, we are looking for that certainty. And I think that's the wrong thing to do, to be honest. We should look instead for understanding and having that awareness of our relationship with uncertainty and how we can change that. That is a beautiful thing to do, which brings me to a mindstate moment that I want to do.

Next, let's take a moment to pause and reconnect. This is your mindstate moment, a chance to reset and come back to yourself wherever you are right now. These moments of presence are powerful. They remind us that the future starts from within by shifting how we show up in this very moment.

Kind of like a quick pause for us to really take a deep breath in and, and try to imagine, imagine breaking a rule. That's the mindstate moment I want to take you, Sam, and the listeners on. So let's take a slow, deep breath in and let it go. And I want you to notice the weight of your body, maybe in the chair, the ground beneath your feet, or the rhythm of your breath. And now bring to mind a rule you've always felt bound by or constrained by. It might be something at work, something in your community, or even something you silently agreed to in your own life. A rule that just feels heavy. A rule that limits you. And let that rule come into focus. As you hold it in your mind, imagine it written down in front of you, black ink on a page. And notice the edges of the words. The way they shaped your choices, the times they held you back. And now imagine yourself gently taking a pen and drawing a bold line right through it. Not out of anger, not out of rebellion, But out of responsibility for yourself, for others, for the future you want to shape. So pause, breathe, and just feel what shifts in you the moment that rule no longer has power. And ask yourself 3 things: What happens next? What possibility begins to open? Who else might benefit from this act of rewriting? So see the future that becomes available, not someday, but now, the moment you decide the old rule no longer defines you. And stay with that vision. Let it expand and notice what we explored How it feels in your body. And as you slowly bring yourself back, remember, the rules of the past do not determine the future. You do. And take a final deep breath. And just take that forward in your life. So thanks for joining in that Mindstate moment. And Sam, one thing I like to do with every guest, usually in the beginning, but I felt why not doing it at the end to break some rules.

Excellent.

I want you to imagine your future selves. So I invite every guest to start not with who they are, but with who they're becoming. So imagine yourself 10 years in the future. How would you introduce yourself then? Who are you and what future have you helped create?

Well, that depends. I have a bit of a conundrum with this kind of activity because I am always surprised by what it is that I've achieved, and I'm caught in that thing that people always underestimate what they can do but overestimate the time that they can do it. So And I'm suffering some quite large imposter syndrome because the work that I've been doing with uncertainty experts and now with Hard as Nails is really science. And I didn't finish my studies even in just further education, let alone higher education. So let me try and be really honest about it. I'm beset with fear because I've had a very difficult and uncertain last few years. That's why I did the work, right? I did it selfishly. And I'm trying to get out of a deficit mindset. I've got into quite a lot of debt post-divorce and pandemic, and I didn't realize the corrosive effect that has. And so if I was to allow part of me, which I'm working on, I would be very worried about where I'd be in 10 years. And I'm quite scared of the future at the moment. And I'm scared of not living up to the potential of the ideas that I have and the way that I can see in other people's faces that they have excitement for the things that I'm working on. And that I wish sometimes I had too. And I feel bad that that can feel very hard to access, if I'm really honest. And so where I do not want to be in 10 years, but I'm scared that I might be, is looking back with some regret that I didn't fulfill the potential of the things that I've got at my fingertips. I do not want to be there, but I say it out loud because I enjoyed that exercise, and I realized the future does scare me, or my inability to seize and create the future, as you say. But so as not to leave it on a downer, there is another side of me which is incredibly excited. We've taken this work of uncertainty, came out of my kitchen in a fucking COVID nightmare, and has been adopted by organizations large and small. And I'm pretty convinced that it has the ability to fix, or certainly improve, a lot of the challenges facing the world. Uncertainty tolerance drives community division, political instability, extremism. And we now have a global publisher and a book coming out which makes it accessible, which means that everybody can access these tools and materials. So if I was going to counter my negativity bias with a positivity bias, imagine 10 years back and being able to say, you know, the bloody shitshow of problems that the world faces now is very, very connected to the things that I work on. The negative rules, the challenges of uncertainty, toxic masculinity, and to look back and genuinely think this work made a difference. That would— I feel that in my body. I feel scared. And one of the things I've learned in uncertainty is that if you stick a human brain in an fMRI scan, the exact same blood flow shows up in fear as it does in excitement. And I can't tell you honestly which side of that I am right now. But that would be my paradoxical look at the future. And I very much know which one of those I would like to be on the right side of. So thank you for making me be honest with myself about that. I might go away and do some more reflecting.

Thanks so much for sharing and being honest, Sam. So my last question to you, and selfishly, I ask myself this question a lot too, and hopefully some of our listeners will enjoy the answer you're giving, Sam. What's one rule you think everyone should break right now?

Hmm. Well, I'll tell the truth. I'd like, I'd love to be real, you know, there's lots of fun things we could say. There's lots of contemporary things that we could say. We could make jokes about, you know, all the different problems there are in the world. But the truth is, At first I was surprised, and now it is almost reassuring. No matter who I've met, whether they're prime ministers or presidents or politicians or CEOs or ordinary people or teachers or gangsters or people we're scared of or people we love, I've never met a human being who isn't walking around holding on to some kind of story that holds them back. Never. And it surprises me. We're all so tightly holding on to the exact same story that holds us back. And I wrote Be More Pirate, and I said to help people fix the rules of the world, and I wrote Uncertainty Experts to help us fix everything from the erosion of democracy to climate injustice. You know what, ask someone what worry keeps them awake at night and it'll be their, their work, it'll be their relationships, it'll be their health, it'll be their finances., and what's the main thing that causes those? You know, some, some story we're all holding onto. And so the question I ask that's close to yours is, where do you see your potential? And what do you see, or who do you see, as getting in the way of that? And almost universally, the answer is ourselves. And so that, of course, has to be the rule that we break.

Sam, I want to close with this. If you could give our listeners one experiment to try after this show, what would it be? And you alluded on that a little bit now, like, you know, talk to someone and ask them, like, you know, what is your maybe hidden potential, right? And what is getting in the way of realizing that potential? That might be an experiment. You can talk to anybody, even a stranger. It might feel uncomfortable, but why not breaking that rule that we can't approach strangers with a good question and help them to reflect? But what would be another experiment that you want our listeners to try out after listening to today's show?

I think the 101 of piracy is probably the most useful thing, and it is ask a difficult question. And that sounds easy, right? But it's subjective. You might be like me and Fred, you know, middle-aged white men with some kind of tenure, so we can ask difficult questions. So our questions that we ask should be really difficult. We should ask questions that leave people reeling. Depending on where you are in life and your background and how safe you're feeling, might be different. But we've all been in a meeting and we've all wanted to say something. We've all thought, this is weird. Why don't I ask the obvious question that no one seems to be asking? Because you don't want to feel like a weirdo. But when you do ask it, it turns out that you're a hero and everyone's, thank you so much for asking the question. It was on all of our minds. And it happens in polite society. The skill of asking the necessary but difficult question with grace and elegance and good manners is really a fundamental. You will enjoy your life more. People will respect you. It's a matter of kind of reverse boundaries, and you won't spend 2 weeks trying to work out whether someone meant what they said or not, or trying to elucidate it in text messages and emails. The art of asking a difficult question feels like a rule of polite society, but by God, it will accelerate your life and the things that you're trying to achieve.

Here you have it, your next experiment. Ask that difficult question. Perfect. So thank you for reminding us that the future isn't something out there waiting for us, right? It's here in our choices, in our courage, and in our willingness to break the rules that no longer serve us. So where can listeners find more about you and your work?

I'm pretty easy to find. I'm the only Sam Conniff, but there's a Samantha Conniff in the States who one of these days I'm going to get in touch with and say hello. And I have a very small team. So if you reach out to me anywhere, it's usually just me or my wonderful assistant, Emma. My main focus over the next few months is the Uncertainty Toolkit. It's out in January. So we have a website there, samconniff.com. All my socials will all point to that. And we want to make these tools that we've proven work, and we want to make them as accessible as possible. So if this is relevant or rewarding, if you're working with young people or any community who are facing extreme uncertainty and it's hindering their lives, then we have tools and we have resources and we have research and we have data, and we're keen to share it as openly and as widely as we can.

Sam, thank you for joining me, this was inspiring, energizing, and I would say in the best sense, a little rebellious. Hmm. To all our listeners, remember, the future isn't predicted, it's practiced. And the next practice starts now. Thanks for listening to The Future Is How. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe, share it with someone who needs it, and join my next letter for more future-ready practices. Until next time. Let's go and create a radically better future together. Thank you so much.

That's a wrap for today's episode of The Future Is How. Remember, the future isn't something we wait for. It's something we create with every choice, every breath, and every step we take. If this episode sparked something in you, share it with someone who's ready to shape what's next. And don't forget to subscribe and leave a review. Your next chapter begins now. So what will you create today?

I'll see you in your future.