 Hello everybody, I'm really happy to be here, but my stomach I don't think is very excited about it But I left my son back in Australia with his father, but So I'm excited about it, but I'm also very nervous about being away from my family But he always wants to come with me to everything You know children kind of feel left out all the time when I tell him that I need to go to the chemist He's like fine go. I told him I was going to a chemist in Brighton, England And he didn't believe me so he said he really wanted to come to meaning He couldn't come so I was wondering if I could just film a short video of you saying hello, Leo on Three so that he doesn't feel left out and I can come back as a star parent Oh Thank you. Okay. Oh, yes. I have space. That's a good thing one two three That's great. Thank you Thank you so much so I I'm actually very touched by the topic of this conference, which is a rather you know Special word a very important word meaning and I think particularly During this time when I feel like everybody wakes up And comes face-to-face with meaninglessness itself and it feels good to be part of a group of people who are Trying to bring back that I don't want to say hope but I guess realistic and Non-cynical because I think that's the cynicism that really is breaking everything down at the moment So I'm very excited about that topic and thinking about this talk today. It really struck me that everybody has Different values, you know, what we see is important as meaningful differs from person to person But you know despite these differences The quest for meaning is always there You know throughout of human life. It never disappears running through you know like a thread through the story of every Human experience is that very familiar question, you know, what does this all mean? And it's a fundamental aspect. I think of what makes us human and what makes it so hard but also so interesting to be human kind of this instinct to question our The meaning of our own existence seems to be the catalyst for so many things that make life worth living in the first place So, you know music art literature and so on so the results of our Of our sort of quest for meaning are all around us But I think that meaning itself is actually extraordinarily Elusive throughout our lives. I think it seems to do at least in my experience a little dance, you know, it comes and it goes It's a very frustrating Performance and even when meaning is present in our lives. So when we sit down and we think and we feel its presence It likes to keep an element of mystery, you know, it's hard to see even when it's around and it seems to prefer the dark So for about I've spent about four years exploring the dark side of innovation Trying to convince people that there's actually a lot that we can learn from from Those who work in the unseen corners of the world, you know, so-called misfits pirates hackers gangsters, corn artists pranksters, you know ex ex-prisoners and from this exploration Into the world of outlaws and undesirables. I have found over and over again that they too Look for meaning. So when a Somali pirate is a hijacking a ship off the coast of of Somalia He is often asking himself why he's doing that When a young drug dealer is trying to find a way to secure a few corners He's building a narrative that is attaches some sort of meaning to those actions When a copycat is replicating a Pharmaceutical there is a story there about why she believes that her mission Is a worthy one. So we are not the only people who Seek to draw out meaning from experience, you know, everybody does that We're certainly not the only ones so Um the there's a brief I want to give you just a brief example of that I mentioned Somali pirates and actually a few years ago. I interviewed a group of Somali pirates and Piracy in Somalia started as a very unsophisticated business in the early 90s and it came about as a response To foreign trawlers who were stealing the fishing stock that people on the coast depended on for income so a group of fishermen got together and they they would See the ships that crossed their shores and sort of an opportunistic and sort of a fair and they would hijack them and then they would split the spoils according to how much each Fishermen had invested in the operation or either split the spoils equally as well and The the the government of Somalia collapsed in 1991 after a very brutal civil war So the Navy and coastal police wasn't able to repel the illegal fishing and also wasn't able to repel the response To it as well. So then something happened a civil servant noticed that this that this was going on And he thought that it would be a good idea to scale this small lo-fi cottage industry and he approached investors and I quote with a very good business idea and he Founded an organization called the Somali Marines and he recruited employees many of them the original Pirates on the coast provided them with military style training and Establish what is today known as modern Somali piracy, which is the capture for ransom of large commercial vessels with the use of mother ships as bases across the ocean and They pirates began to command, you know ransom payments. You might have seen this in the news all over the years That were in the millions, you know to the average whole was 2.7 million us dollars and since the first known hijacking in 2005 over a hundred and forty nine hijacked ships For about an estimated three hundred and eighty five million dollars and with links all across the world as well So it turned From a very small cottage industry into quite a large International well organized Organization pirates even employed Lawyers and negotiators And bank note-checkers and even sort of small local economies would spring up on the coast while Negotiations for ransom payments were ongoing at you know providing with the hostages and the pirates with You know water cut which is a narcotic leaf and food and mobile phone services But here's the thing about Somali pirates that I was more interested in beyond the economics of how the movement scaled The initial pirates the original pirates who were fishermen were being very genuine When they said that they became pirates because of the attacks on their fishing stock and that they were only safeguarding What was originally theirs to begin with? But the truth of the story was lost relatively quickly Most of Somalia's pirates lack a history in fishing. It's a marginal activity in Somalia It's not part of Somali diet It's actually looked down upon as a way of making a living But every single pirate I spoke to said the same thing, you know, they said we are the protectors of our coast We do this because of the attacks on our stock They were all on message and what this shows me is an incredible PR machine That is ensuring that the meaning of what they are doing isn't lost Even if it's untrue So the pirate entrepreneurs like many of the entrepreneurs that we come across in the world that we operate within every day Think about how to build culture How to recruit and retain the best employees and how to give them a sense of mission That goes beyond monetary gain even though that's the ultimate goal, you know in our world We talk about how to find purpose, you know Why do we sell iPhones and iPads and MacBooks and because we believe in beautiful products and we want to change the world with them Well, then when you're pirating you also need that why so so misfits what I found provide and answer That why as well There was a story that really stuck out for me when I was thinking about the talk today This this is Dwayne Jackson and he's a guy that I met a few years ago He lives near here at Hove and we met Many times we had very long conversations about his life Dwayne grew up in children's homes all over East London He was kicked out of his house when he was 11 years 11 years old kicked out of school when he was 15 And he was actually on the verge of being institutionalized when a child psychologist Assessed him and in his report concluded that he would either be a master of criminal or an extremely successful businessman and this conclusion became sort of a foreshadowing of a future that he was yet to shape but Not immediately so in his early 20s Dwayne fell in with a drug trafficking ring and he's struggling to pay his rent in his bills and most significantly for him a 400-pound debt to his own mother so he agreed to traffic drugs from the England to the United States and He was arrested in Atlanta in possession of six and a half thousand tablets of ecstasy But let's back up a little bit to Dwayne at age 15 before the drug trafficking and before the Stint in prison. He spent two and a half years in prison in England And while he was sitting in the dining room of a children's home that he had been living in He noticed an old Zedek Spectrum computer He taught himself to code with it. He found the manual and he became Obsessed with it because it provided him it was a challenge, but it also provided him with a certain level of Consistency and uncertainty that had been missing from every aspect of his life And he actually continued coding while he was in prison He used to code with pen and paper and then call a programmer on the outside and then they would decode Debug the code together And so instead of prison being this place that kind of stunted and limited his development. It actually became a Place where he would gain Really hugely important skills and perspective He said for example that in prison you notice everything around you because you have so much time to sit still 90% of your time in prison is bloody boring So everything takes on an additional meaning and every little detail begins to matter So for example, he said you can make hot baked beans on toast by cutting a plastic bottle in half putting water in it and heating it with wires from a stereo and Therefore heating the beans and then using the same heat to toast the bread on the metal wires that you find under prison mattresses, so These things materials aren't useless. They're ways to to to cook a meal now the force stillness of prison Provided Dwayne with kind of the sort of perception that he needed to find meaning in the things that seemed most meaningless Really so perhaps it isn't as elusive as we believe it is as I said I believe it is when I started talking perhaps it's everywhere, but we are moving at a speed that isn't really allowing us To take it in so when Dwayne made it out of prison I have to speak very quickly because I have about a minute and a half Left when he made it out of prison. He used this keen sense of observation that he had sort of honed through imposed Stillness one. He was released. He started a company called cash flow. Has anyone heard of it? It's great, and it's an accounting platform and he Began before that he began working as a freelance web developer and he stumbled onto a problem He didn't have a way to organize his invoices In a in a in a straight way This was the early 2000s and everything that the software that was around was counter-intuitive and confusing I'm sure people here remember the time when you had to buy software on CDs and everything was annoying and impossible to deal with So he kind of thought and he said what's going on around here. Can I create something better? So at the time the business model in the industry was for software to be built for the desktop and the perceived wisdom would have been to follow this path, but Dwayne was a web developer and he didn't have money to hire desktop developers and he didn't have the skill to do it So using kind of the attention to detail He thought I have web hosting space and I also have this ability to program online. So what can I do with it? So instead of building a competing Desktop program who created his own accounting software and this was on the cloud and this was 2005 And it was not the thing the cloud was not the thing that it is today So by paying attention By simply noticing what was available to him like you make hot baked beans on toast He avoided falling falling into the trap of following the herd You know his business was a success and he sold it in 2013 For quite a huge amount of money, but that's not the important bit to me. The beauty of this whole thing is that Dwayne arrived at this way of Accessing software and became a pioneer of this way in which we do everything today By virtue of his life experience life experience that taught him the tremendous benefits of just stopping for one second In closing on conversation and I'm almost done Dwayne told me something that remains etched in my brain. He said at no other point in your life Do you get to press pause? for two years and think about Where you are and how you got there And I was lucky. He said that I had that opportunity I was lucky and he's right. You know, when do we create the space for reflection and for stillness, you know We're analog beings But we run at a relentless digital pace and I think it's important to ask ourselves what the cost of that is Just to close there is a wonderful book Called the art of stillness by Pico Iyer and he describes stillness in such a beautiful way He said to me the point of sitting still is that it helps you to see through the very idea of pushing forward if it does have benefits, sorry indeed it Leads you into a place Where you are defined by something larger and if it does have benefits then they lie within some invisible bank account With a very high interest rate, but very long-term yields To be drawn upon at that moment surely inevitable when the doctor walks into your room shaking his head or A car in other car veers in front of yours and all that you will have to draw upon Are what you have is what you have collected in your deeper moments? That really struck me all that you will have to draw upon is what you have collected in your deeper moments everything else Is just noise really we don't have to be Throne into prison or dragged into desperate circumstances to choose how we derive meaning From experience if we learn how to stop and reflect It's possible hard and we might not always want to but possible to find purpose and meaning and in everything that at first glance Might seem like nothing so I hope this was helpful. Thank you, and I apologize for going over time. Thank you so much