September 26, 2025 • 37 mins
Writer Douglas Adams, best known for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, used science fiction and satire to warn us about potential dangers in our future, from artificial intelligence to social media and animal extinction. In this Cautionary Conversation, Tim is joined by Arvind Ethan David, author of the new audiobook Douglas Adams: Ends of the Earth, to discuss why Adams was in the business of telling Cautionary Tales, his worries (and fixes) for the future, and what we all have in common with a sentient puddle.
For more information go to timharford.com.
Douglas Adams Ends of the Earth on audiobook: https://www.pushkin.fm/audiobooks/douglas-adams-the-ends-of-the-earth
The Hitchhikers Immersive evening in London: https://riversidestudios.co.uk/see-and-do/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-185234/
Become a Cautionary Club member on Patreon for bonus Cautionary Tales episodes, behind-the-scenes chats, newsletters, and more. To join Pushkin+ visit pushkin.fm or the show page on Apple.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
If you don't feel like you're getting enough Cautionary Tales,
I have some very good news. We've just launched the
Cautionary Club over on Patreon. We'll be dropping an extra
Cautionary Tales episode each month, a bonus interview, and a
newsletter chock full of behind the scenes titbits and anything
else we dug up in our research. We would love
(00:38):
to see you there. Head to patreon dot com slash
Cautionary Club to find out more. That's patreon dot com
slash Cautionary Club. I wanted to start this edition of
Cautionary Tales with a little something by one of my
favorite writers, Douglas Adams, the creator of The Hitchhiker's Guide
(00:58):
to the Galaxy. Are you sitting comfortably, Imagine a beautiful
sunny glen on a distant planet, and imagine you see
a puddle before you, recently formed from last night's rain.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Imagine yourself to be that puddle, a fully sentient puddle
who wakes up this very morning and thinks to herself, what.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
A wonderful morning, What an interesting world, What a beautiful
glen full of bird song and sun? How perfect this
world is? What an interesting hole? I find myself in
It fits me rather well.
Speaker 5 (01:46):
In fact, it fits my gosh, it fits me perfectly.
It corresponds exactly with the smooth contours of my body.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
I get it now.
Speaker 5 (01:58):
I understand. This hole in the ground that is my home.
It must have been made to have me in it.
It was made for me, designed precisely with my wants
and my needs in mind.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
It is mine.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
Consider this, reflect on what a powerful idea it is.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
It makes me special and important. If this world was
made from me, that makes it my world, my creation. Ah,
how wonderful? What shall I do with it?
Speaker 3 (02:41):
And you're still breathing and still thinking about it, still
luxuriating happily in your self certain solipsistic superiority. As the
sun rises in the air and the air heats up,
and thermodynamic forces beyond your understanding start to act on you.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
What's happening? It's getting too hot? Why why is it
getting hot?
Speaker 3 (03:06):
As you gradually evaporate, becoming smaller and smaller, you begin
frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to
be all right, because.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
This world was built. This world was built, and it
can't be happening. It's appeared.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
So that moment when you disappear entirely into the ether
catches you somewhat by surprise.
Speaker 6 (03:49):
Are we relaxed yet calm, confident of your centrality to
the universe, convinced that we've really got global warming under control? No, well,
we recommend our correspondence course How to Survive the Great Emotions,
if it comes with a subscription to the Total Perspective
Vortex Path or for a twenty nine ninety nine miltarian
(04:09):
dollars a month.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
That clip was from the new audio book Douglas Adams
The Ends of the Earth by Arvind Ethan. David Arvid
is joining me today to talk about the life, the
universe and the cautionary tales of Douglas Adams. Welcome, Arvind, Hello,
nice to be here. So what do you think Douglas
Adams was trying to say with the parable of the
puddle and why did you want to put it in
(04:33):
your book?
Speaker 7 (04:35):
The point, I think is that the puddle is guilty
of something that almost all of us and humanity as
a whole has been guilty of, which is taking the
leap from the fact that we have a very nice
planet that suits us to the rather unfortunate, possessive and
arrogant position that therefore this planet belongs to us, was
made for us, and is ours to ruin and despoil
(04:58):
as we would. And I think Douglas thought there was
maybe something we should take a look at more closely.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Yes, he was, in his own quiet way, a master
of the cautionary tale. Not the only connection between your project, Arvin,
and Cautionary Tales. I know you have also been working
with our master of sound design, Pascal Wise. So before
we listen to anything more, we'll get to it. Let's
(05:25):
listen to Pascal's theme for Cautionary Tales. I am sitting
(05:50):
with Arvin Ethan David, who created a new audio book
about Douglas Adams titled Douglas Adams The Ends of the Earth. Arvin,
when did you first encounter Douglas Adams. Well, first as
a writer and then as a man.
Speaker 7 (06:07):
They were fairly approximate. Does a writer? I read The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, probably at about thirteen. That
seems to be the sweet spot for a certain type
of teenager. Yeah, checks out to discover it and fell
in love at once. The sort of telepathy that he
employs getting inside your head and making you feel smarter
(06:28):
and more connected and less strange than or perhaps strange
but less alone. That was his skill. And then a
couple of years after that, I read the Dirk Gently
novels and it was my turn to put on the
school play, and for some insane reason, I decided to
make Dirk Gently Solistic Detective Agency, a novel that includes
(06:50):
time travel, ghosts, aliens, and exploding planet. Earth's perfect for
a school play, and even more strangely, Douglas Adams came
to see it. He came to see it, so was
he local or I think very shortly before it went on,
we realized we hadn't asked for permission, and so I
wrote to his agent and I said, you know, we're
(07:12):
doing this thing. We hope that's okay. And I got
back a very charming letter saying that whilst Douglas did
not believe that his book was capable of being adapted
for the stage or any other medium, he wouldn't stop
us from trying. And so we went ahead and on
the second or third night he turned up.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
I mean, that is extraordinary. He's a pretty big star
by then, even if he was behind the scenes because
he was a writer rather than a performer for the
most part. How did it feel? Did he tell you
that he was coming or did he just show up?
Did anybody recognize him?
Speaker 7 (07:43):
Well, he was six foot five and very notable, so
everybody recognized him. And there was nowhere in the audience
we could put him that he wasn't going to be
blindingly obvious to the cast. So there was a lot
of tension that night. And I sat about three rows
behind him waiting for him to laugh, and he didn't
(08:05):
for the first five or six minutes, and very awkward.
And I remember because we had changed a lot of
stuff because you sort of have to when you adapt
Douglas Adams, and I thought, oh my god, he doesn't
like it. And then he took out a pencil and
started making notes. Wow, and then he started to laugh. Okay,
So then we were okay. And afterwards we went out
(08:27):
for dinner and I asked him if it was okay
that we had changed things. I said, you know, we
sort of changed the plot a bit and he said,
changed it, You fixed it. I never worked before, so
that was the start of something.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
I was also a huge fan. Never met him, but
huge fan of his Hitchhiker's Work, which I had as
an audio book. I think one of my first experiences
of experiencing spoken word audio and listening to it over
and over and over again until the cassettes wore out,
and just loved it. And for those who haven't encountered
(09:04):
Douglas Adams, I was trying to think about how to
describe him, and well, to my take is the Hitchcock's
Guide to the Galaxy is is Originally it was a
radio play. It later became a TV series, in a
film and a book, but originally a radio play. And
it's basically, imagine if you had the best bits of
Star Trek and the best bits of Monty Python and
(09:25):
the best bits of a philosophy seminar, and they all
combined perfectly, that would be not quite as good as
The Hitchhacker's Guide to the Galaxy. That's my take. I
don't know, that's pretty good. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah.
I mean it's this kind of this intergalactic adventure, but
it's full of strange scenarios and thought experiments, and it's
and it's very surreal, and it's very very clever. So
(09:47):
that was when you met Douglas and then but the
friendship continued.
Speaker 7 (09:53):
I think friendship would be implying a reciprocity and an
equality which definitely did not exist. I was in the
presence of one of my heroes. I was a nineteen
year old interning at his company. But yes, for the
last decade of his life and the first decade of
my adult life, we saw each other. I would be
invited to things, and would get copied in on emails
(10:15):
and pulled into the odd meeting, and it really supercharged
and started my career. I ended up imagining and seeing
for the first time what it might be to live
the life of a creative intellectual, and that work didn't
have to be serious suits in a bank. It could
be fun and silly and absurd, and it could involve
(10:37):
sitting in dark rooms and making nonsense up with your
friends and seeing if anybody would pay you for it.
And that served me as a model for the decades since.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
And he died very young. It was two thousand and
one and he was only forty nine years old. How
did that feel?
Speaker 7 (10:53):
It was, as you say, early two thousand and one.
It was the first sign that two thousand and one
was going to be a very very bad year. Indeed,
I was out, so I came home to this long
answer phone message telling me that Douglas Adams was dead.
It felt utterly implausible. Was also a very Douglas death.
He was suffering from writer's block, as he did, it
(11:14):
was his whole adult life, and he had, as he
often did, gone to the gym to work through it.
And he died in the gym, so miserable. But the
work got left behind, and there was a lot of it,
more than people realized. Five Hitchhikers books, two duck Gently books,
and then a huge volume of talks and lectures and
(11:37):
articles and the archive. Yeah, tell us about the archive.
So Douglas left all his papers to his old college
at Cambridge, then John's and the team there, dr Adam Crowthers,
have done a wonderful job of catalog again and it's
been available to the public for ten years or more now.
(11:57):
But then during the pandemic, I discovered that there was
a large amount of audio visual material, old VHS's and
cassettes and dat tapes in reel to reel which had
never been digitized. So we decided to take that on
and we you know, I've known the family since I
was a teenager. So I reached out to them and
to the agents and all the official people, and once
(12:21):
again was given blessing to go ahead. Nobody was going
to stop me, So go ahead with what? So we
ran a Kickstarter to raise some money from the fans,
and with the fans, we then went and digitized everything.
We took realms and realms of stuff and took it
to Bristol. Apparently Bristol is the place that you digitized stuff,
(12:42):
and we found a lot of very interesting stuff. Talks
he had given Q and A's, he had given abandoned documentaries,
answer phone cassettes with some very angry people shouting at
each other, all sorts of rundom stuff, some beautiful home
video stuff that I was very happy to be able
to give to his family. And what happened in the
(13:04):
course of going through all this stuff. I remember, I'm
doing this during lockdown, during the pandemic, during Trump one,
the world was increasingly obviously on fire, and a lot
of us were fairly stressed by it. A global pandemic
and any number of political crises will do that for you.
(13:25):
As we've all experienced this last half a decade or
decade of increasing chaos, and somehow, going through all this stuff,
it was as if he was there whispering his famous
mantra into my ear, don't panic. And I sort of
realized that on all the great crises of our time,
Douglas had got there first. Then he had thought about
(13:47):
them and started to make fun of them, to describe them,
and in some cases even to suggest possible solutions.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
And you decided to release this as an audiobook. Why that?
Speaker 7 (14:00):
Well, in the first instance, because there was all this
archived material, and it seemed to me that it was
most interesting for people to hear Douglas in his own words,
in his own voice, But also because they were so
many fascinating people who were either friends of his who
are inspired by him to do great and interesting work.
(14:20):
And so I thought, you know what, I'm going to
go talk to them all. This was a great excuse
to have long conversations with Stephen Frye and David Badil
and Sanjiv Basca and all these wonderful thinkers and doers
of the world. And so that's where the book came out.
It came out of a mixture of a sort of
conversation with Douglas through his archive, and then conversations about
(14:41):
Douglas with those who knew him or his work best.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
Do you think he was in the business of telling
caution detales.
Speaker 7 (14:47):
I think The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy itself is
a sort of cautionary tale. The reason the book is
called The Ends of the Earth is that was the
working title for Hitchhikers. Yes, and in his original conception,
every episode of the radio show The Earth was going
to end a different way.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Which would also have been a cool idea, but a
different idea exactly, And so yes, I think he was
telling coutry retails. I think he was also a warrior.
He was a depressive. He was a man who worried
at issues, and I think he could see all the many,
many ways we were going about it it to being
the business of being alive on this planet wrong, from
(15:30):
bureaucracy to conservation to technology. I think he was very
aware of the likelihood that we would probably blow ourselves
up in more than one way. I mean, I love
his take on artificial intelligence, which of course is something
that we're completely obsessed by. And as I think through
his work, actually several different examples of it. There's as Marvin,
(15:54):
the paranoid android, who's who has a brain the size
of a planet, but it's just miserable the whole time.
There's the ship's computer which crashes because it's trying to
work out how to make Arthur Dent the perfect cup
of tea. And the one that sticks in the mind
is deep Thought. So deep Thought, as of course you
will know, is the supercomputer designed to produce the answer
(16:16):
to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.
And it says I can do this. It'll take seven
and a half million years. But finally, of course, seven
and a half million years later, they come to hear
the answer.
Speaker 7 (16:31):
It's a hugely disappointing forty.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Two which, well, what does that tell us? What is
I mean? That's a good joke. It's a good joke,
but there's something more there, I think.
Speaker 7 (16:40):
Well, Douglas, of course, would constantly insist it was only
a joke.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (16:44):
The person who I think, and this will lead us
to some interesting territory. The person who I think has
said this best, and I say this carefully, is Elon Musk.
And Elon Musk, who is on record saying that Douglas
is not only his favorite author, but his favorite philosopher.
Says that what you learn from that anecdote is that
the point is never the answer. The point is learning
(17:07):
to ask the right question.
Speaker 8 (17:09):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Yes, And in the end, they build a they build
an even bigger computer to run for five billion years
to figure out what the question is. And then once
they know what the question is, they will figure out
what the answer really means exactly.
Speaker 7 (17:23):
And their computer, of course, is the Earth. And that's
incredibly funny. Yeah, but then you stop and think about
it and you go, oh oh, we're a supercomputer designed
to figure out the ultimate the ultimate question. And Arvin,
we are going to get into some of the problems
that Douglas Adams foresaw and how he tried and sometimes
failed to fix them, starting with social media.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
We're going to do that. After the break, we're back.
I'm Tim Harford and this is a cautionary conversation with
Arvin Ethan David, who is the author of the new
(18:04):
audiobook Douglas Adams The Ends of the Earth. So, Arvin,
the third chapter of your book's all about social media,
which I think is going to be a surprise to
some people. Because Douglas Adams died in two thousand and one,
and that feels like, well, it's six or seven years
before Facebook, right, it feels like a pre social media age.
(18:26):
But he thought about this and he tried to create
a social media platform all of his own. So what
did he think social media could be?
Speaker 7 (18:35):
Well, the Guide itself, This is how extraordinarily pressy on
two was.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
This is the Hitchhiker's Guide. That's sort of the digital
book that our heroes carry around with them, and it
gives them advices to everything they're going to encounter in
the galaxy.
Speaker 7 (18:49):
Exactly and what it is when you drill down into it.
It's a crowd sourced platform. Everyone, anyone can be a researcher.
You upload your entries. The guy's Trip Advised were a Wikipedia,
it's trip avisor Wikipedia, long before either of those things existed.
And there's also has a very interesting relationship with fact
(19:11):
and opinion, or reality and opinion. Even in the very
first book, there's a throwaway joke that there's a sign
on the in the offices of the Guide that says,
in the event of a conflict between the Guide and reality,
the Guide is definitive. Reality is often faulty yes, and
(19:32):
again a wonderful present prefiguring of our own tortured relationship
with digital crowdsourced information platforms and reality. And in the
final book, the Guide is taken over by a company
called the Infidium Corporation, which is described as being rapacious,
(19:55):
profit seeking, merciless, and concerned only with profit.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Elon Musk is a big said, okay, keep going.
Speaker 7 (20:04):
And they decide that they have to ass the Guide's
primacy and in any situation where the Guide has said
something that reality contradicts, they're going to go out and
fix the reality. And one little detail is the Guide
is very clear that the Earth has been destroyed, annoyingly
and upsettingly, the Earth continues to exist, and so the
(20:26):
Guide sets in place this elaborate scheme, using incidentally, an
AI avatar that looks like a little friendly bird.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
To destroy it, okay, to.
Speaker 7 (20:37):
Destroy the planet Earth. So yeah, I think you probably
thought about social media and it's dangers a little bit.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
He certainly did. He always said though, that the greatest
selling point of the Guide was that it had the
words don't panic written in large, friendly letters on the cover.
And I often feel that more social media should come
with a rapper that just says, don't panic before you
open it, and the world might be a better place
if it did.
Speaker 7 (21:02):
Or its great success is that it convinced us not
to panic, and we all unlocked it and put it
into our pockets, into our brains, not realizing the danger
it could do. And actually what we should have done
the second the thing reared its head was to panic
a lot and burnt the loss of it one way
or the other.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
So one of the contributors to your audiobook is Stephen Frye,
and let me slightly paraphrase what he says about Douglas
Adams and social media. He says, how do I put it?
I wouldn't say that he was fortunate in dying. I
mean his mind when he died had really been unpolluted
(21:41):
by what happened to the Internet and by the invention
of social media, and then what happened to that, he
would of course have been angry and disappointed and upset,
as we all were. Do you think that's right. I
think it's half right. I think it's certainly true that
Douglas would have found the dark side of social media
extremely upsetting. What he tried to do in his own
(22:03):
lifetime was to build a platform H two G two
dot com, which was a much friendlier version of social media,
one where editorial contribution and fact checking and community rules
of engagement were extremely important, and he put an enormous
amount of energy. He ran a company, turned up at
(22:24):
the office every day for years trying to try to
do that. That ultimately did not survive him, or it does.
It still exists, but in a fairly curtailed way. But
he did try, and today we see attempts like that
Blue Skies an attempt to do that, But I think,
you know, one can't write the whole thing off. Obviously,
(22:45):
social media has done lots of interesting things and connecting
people globally. This is a social media thing we are
doing right now, this podcast and the huge boom age
and audio discussion in drama and long form is because
of the Internet. But we'd be also foolish to deny
that reality has taken some hard hits as a result.
(23:06):
Do you think a better Internet was possible? And is
there anything that Douglas is writing or his or his
practices as an entrepreneur teachers.
Speaker 7 (23:17):
The thing he used to say is that people are
always going to act according to human nature, because it
would be unnatural for them not to do so. Yes,
and so I think it's impossible to believe that. Obviously,
companies are going to be profit seeking and media is
going to seek to dominate as big an audience as possible.
(23:40):
That has always been the way, from campfire storytellers to
digital barons. But I think where we have failed is
this simple idea of, ooh, should we maybe think about regulation,
should we maybe think about some guardrails parameters? And I
think those are things. Weirdly, they're not sexy things, and
(24:02):
they're not the things you expect a comic novelist to
think about, But actually he did, and that's what he
was trying to do with his own digital innovations. And
I think one of the great sadnesses about his death
is Douglas was someone who was influential and deeply loved
by the tech community. He was, you know, friends of
Bill Gates and friends of Larry Allison, and you know
(24:23):
that some people claim he coined the phrase reality distortion
field to describe Steve Jobs. And so if he had
stuck around, you just sort of wonder maybe he would
have nudged these people and nudged these companies in more
interesting directions.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Maybe maybe they don't seem very nudgeable, But he was
a very clever thinker and he influenced a lot of
a lot of people. And I'm curious, what do you
think he would have made of chat, GPT and generative
AI in general.
Speaker 7 (24:54):
I think he would have loved it. I think he
would have been obsessed by it. He tried even in
his own life. They in the computer game he made
Starship Titanic, they built a thing called spooky Talk, which
was a very crude sort of language model. This is
in two thousand, But he was very passionate about trying
to create this chat bot in the game that could
(25:18):
simulate some sort of real conversation. And he scripted a
lot of it himself. And so I think he would
have found it fascinating. And it is fascinating, And the
same things apply. The questions become, all, right, if you
are going to build a Marvin, if you're going to
build a thing with a prototype people personality.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Yeah, GPP, genuine people personalities. They say, then what.
Speaker 7 (25:46):
Do you do once you've done it? What are the
rules around it? How do you treat Marvin Marvin clearly
didn't feel he was treated very well.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
No, well, I I am really struck by the contrast
between chat GPT and Marvin. I mean, Marvin, I think
you ought to know. I'm feeling very depressed and Mark, Yeah, yeah, yeah, Marv, Marvin,
could you just Marvin, could you pick up that piece
of paper? I don't no brain size of a planet.
They asked me to pick up a piece of paper,
(26:12):
and that's Marvin. Chat GPT's the exact opposite. You fire
up chat GPT and you say, could you do this
for me? It's like, yeah, sure, I'd be happy to
do that. That would be amazing. I would just love
to do it. It's so it's so perky. My wife says,
chatchept is definitely male, and I said, why do you
think it's mail, which is well, it's it's completely overconfident.
It just keeps talking at you.
Speaker 7 (26:35):
It marches forward with completely undeserved confidence.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Yeah. So it's very very different to Marvin.
Speaker 7 (26:40):
But I tell you who it is, like, Yeah, it's
like Eddie the shipboard computer.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
It is very like Eddie.
Speaker 7 (26:45):
And Eddie, of course, is the one who actually gets
them in trouble. Eddie is the one who is supposed
to be flying the ship and forgets to do it
to make a cup of tea. That said, so, the
fact that we are where we are with Ai is
so astonishing, and so, for example, as well as the book,
I'm deep into the making of a Hitchhiker's Guide to
(27:07):
the Galaxy live show we're going to open here in
London in November.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
And sorry, so is that going to be like a
performance of the audio play in the book or is
it something totally different, like a nonfiction thing.
Speaker 7 (27:20):
It's a whole new thing. It's we're building a fully
immersive world. And you come in as a hitchhiker. You
come in with your towel if you want, and with
Arthur Dent, hitchhike your way.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
You've got to know where your towel is.
Speaker 7 (27:31):
You have to know where your towel is and if forget,
if you forget one, the gift shop can supply. But
one of the things we're looking at doing is saying,
rather than have an actor playing Marvin, what if we
just built Marvin because you can.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Now yeah, yeah, you just need to MAKEBT considerably more depressive,
considerably more depressed to be possible, not nothing that I
hammer some screwdrivers can't achieve. I can't wait to see that.
So just tell us when and where is this going
to be happening.
Speaker 7 (28:01):
The show opens in November at the Riverside Studios in London,
and we're taking over the whole building because you know,
you need some space to hitchhike around the galaxy.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
And is it going to be a limited run it
runs to Christmas or is it going to be for
the foreseeable future.
Speaker 7 (28:14):
It's an initial four month run through to February and
then we'll see.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
We will see. Indeed, we are going to have to
wait a minute or two because we have a break.
But after the break, I will be asking Arvind about
Douglas Adams's great later life passion, which was conservation. He
predicted what was going to happen to social media? Did he,
in the same way predict what would happen to our planet?
Hold on, we'll be back. We're back. I'm Tim Harford
(28:51):
and I'm talking to Arvind Ethan David, and I want
to start this section with another clip from Arvid's book,
and it's a clip of Douglas Adams himself doing a
stand up routine about venomous snakes.
Speaker 8 (29:04):
We asked apprehensively if any of the folk remedies or
potions we'd heard about were any good. Well, nine times
out of ten they'll work fine for the simple right
reason that nine snake bikes out of ten the victim
doesn't get ill anyway, it's the last ten percent that's
the problem. And there's a lot of myths we've had
to disentangle about snakes. In order to get at the truth,
you need accurate information. People's immediate response to snake bikes
(29:27):
is often to overreact and give the poor snake a
ritual beating, wh doesn't really help in the identification. If
you don't know which exact snake it was, you can't
treat the bike properly. Well in that case, I said,
could we perhaps take a snake bike detective kit with
us to Kimodo? Ah, of course you can. Of course
you can take as many as you like. Why do
(29:50):
you a blind bit of good? Because they're only for
Australian snakes. So what do we do if we get
bitten by something deadly?
Speaker 6 (29:59):
Then?
Speaker 1 (29:59):
I asked?
Speaker 8 (30:00):
He blinked at me as very stupid. Well, why do
you think you do? He said? You die of course
as well. That's what deadly means.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Oh and it's quite something to hear his voice, and
it's a mini cautionary tale.
Speaker 7 (30:20):
I suppose it really is. He was I think, possibly
unique in this way. What we just heard is a
world class bit of stand up. But at the same
time this is in the context. This bit that he's
doing is in the context of what has become a
truly landmark work of conservation writing, Last Chance to.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
See Yeah, tell us about that.
Speaker 7 (30:45):
The story that Douglas would tell is he gets a
phone call one day from the Observer magazine inviting him
to go to Madagascar to meet a lima, and he's
pretty sure that they've called the wrong number, so he
says yes at once before they've discovered their mistake, and
that he goes to Madagascar and meets a lima and
writes a piece about it for The Observer. And this
(31:05):
was not in itself unusual. They sent six or seven
other literally figures on these missions. What is unusual is
Douglas becomes so obsessed, so interested in conservation and rare
animals that he befriends the zoologist Mark Carwardine and says
to him, how about we spend the next year doing this. Yeah,
(31:26):
and that's what he does. They spend a year traveling
around the world looking for I think seven of the
rarest species in existence, and then he writes this extraordinary work,
which is both scholarly funny and has some of the
greatest feats of empathy you'll ever read in his describing
what it might be like to be one of these animals.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
I mean, just the title last chance to See that
that's a lovely bit of black humor, because that's what
you generally put on a theater when a play's about
to end its run, all that sort of thing. And
actually it's not really your last chance to see because
they could always be put on again. You can always
restage the play if there's if they're demand. But he's
(32:09):
talking about living species that are absolutely on the brink
of extinction. It really is the last chance to see
and there is no bringing them.
Speaker 7 (32:20):
Back, though he was always obsessed with extinction. There's a
great bit about the Dodo in Gently where they go
back in time to see the last Dodo and Professor
Kronotus weeps at the sight of it. And it's sort
of stupid beauty since Douglas did that the seven animals
that he saw, two of them have become extinct, so
(32:44):
twenty five percent and that is terrifyingly about the right ratio.
We've lost about twenty five percent of the species of
Earth in the last twenty five years, and that's not
slowing down. And it was that armageddon that became the
grand mission of Douglas's last years.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
Yes, because he didn't just want to describe the problem.
He wanted to find solution. So, for example, with the gorillas.
What was he doing with the gorillas?
Speaker 7 (33:12):
So he was approached by a guy called Greg Cummings
who ran the Diane Foss Gorilla Foundation and asked for money.
He got the sort of begging letter that many of
us get. Sends some money to a charity, and he did,
but then he goes to some event and Greg asks
him again for more money. And the way Greg tells it,
Douglass went, look, enough of the band aids, what will
(33:35):
it take to actually save the gorillas? Which is a
question no one had ever asked before. He meant, what
he means, what do you mean I mean actually saved them?
How can we solve this problem? And so they set
about writing a business plan, a sort of strategic plan
for how they could keep the Mountain gorilla safe forever.
They put a price tag on it, and then Douglas
(33:58):
spent a year of his life flying around the world,
taking the director of the Dian Fossy Goerilla Foundation to
meet the richest people on the planet to persuade them
to fund this ski. Yeah, they didn't succeed Sadly, they
came close, and the gorilla, the Mountain Gorilla, is actually
doing quite well because they raised enough money. But that
(34:18):
was the sort of mind he was. He was very
happy to make fun of a problem. But unlike most people,
certainly I like most writers, he went one step further
and would try and fix things.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
So is there a lesson cautionary tales? We always like
to draw lessons from these stories of disaster. Is there
a lesson that we can learn either from the extinction
of these creatures or from Douglas Adam's approach to saving them.
Speaker 7 (34:44):
What Douglas would say when people asked him why and
why seems an obvious question, right, Why should we save
gorillas because they're cute, because we like animals, and maybe
most of us don't need to go further than that,
but he would say something more profound. He would say, Look,
it's by understanding them that we have any shot at
(35:08):
understanding ourselves. And on the assumption that we think self
knowledge is a good thing, let's not kill the only
things that can reflect us back at ourselves. There's this
great idea. People talk a lot about teaching apes sign
language or teaching apes to speak, and there have been
various experiments, and Douglas asks the question, why why would
(35:29):
we do that? So we would learn what's it like
to live in a jungle, because there are plenty of
our own species that live in jungles, and we don't
listen to anything they have to say, Yes, it's.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
Very Douglas Adams. So you've been working with Douglas's voice
and his image and his writings as you put together
and his friends and admirers as you put together this
audio book. E've immersed yourself in his thinking. What have
you learned?
Speaker 7 (36:01):
That there is a lot to panic about, but that
panic is a wholly inadequate response, and that maybe we
just need to do something.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Arvin, thank you so much for joining us. It's been
an absolute pleasure talking to you. Remind us the title
of the audio.
Speaker 7 (36:23):
Book Douglas Adams The Ends of the.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Earth, and that's available on Audible, Spotify, Pushkin, dot fm,
or wherever audio books are sold. And Tim Harford, I've
been talking to Arvind Ethan David and there will be
a regular episode of Cautionary Tales back in your feed
very soon. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford
with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines and Ryan Dilly. It's produced
(36:49):
by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and
original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound
design is by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio. Bend
A d af Haffrey edited the scripts. The show also
wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,
Greta Cohne, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey,
(37:13):
and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
Do you want to support the stories we tell on
Cautionary Tales. If so, you can join my new Cautionary
Club at patreon dot com slash Cautionary Club for exclusive
bonus episodes, newsletters, ad free listening and other exciting parts. Alternatively,
(37:36):
you can join Pushkin Plus on our Apple Show page
for continued benefits from our show and others across the
pushkin network.
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
If you don't feel like you're getting enough Cautionary Tales,
I have some very good news. We've just launched the
Cautionary Club over on Patreon. We'll be dropping an extra
Cautionary Tales episode each month, a bonus interview, and a
newsletter chock full of behind the scenes titbits and anything
else we dug up in our research. We would love
(00:38):
to see you there. Head to patreon dot com slash
Cautionary Club to find out more. That's patreon dot com
slash Cautionary Club. I wanted to start this edition of
Cautionary Tales with a little something by one of my
favorite writers, Douglas Adams, the creator of The Hitchhiker's Guide
(00:58):
to the Galaxy. Are you sitting comfortably, Imagine a beautiful
sunny glen on a distant planet, and imagine you see
a puddle before you, recently formed from last night's rain.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Imagine yourself to be that puddle, a fully sentient puddle
who wakes up this very morning and thinks to herself, what.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
A wonderful morning, What an interesting world, What a beautiful
glen full of bird song and sun? How perfect this
world is? What an interesting hole? I find myself in
It fits me rather well.
Speaker 5 (01:46):
In fact, it fits my gosh, it fits me perfectly.
It corresponds exactly with the smooth contours of my body.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
I get it now.
Speaker 5 (01:58):
I understand. This hole in the ground that is my home.
It must have been made to have me in it.
It was made for me, designed precisely with my wants
and my needs in mind.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
It is mine.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
Consider this, reflect on what a powerful idea it is.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
It makes me special and important. If this world was
made from me, that makes it my world, my creation. Ah,
how wonderful? What shall I do with it?
Speaker 3 (02:41):
And you're still breathing and still thinking about it, still
luxuriating happily in your self certain solipsistic superiority. As the
sun rises in the air and the air heats up,
and thermodynamic forces beyond your understanding start to act on you.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
What's happening? It's getting too hot? Why why is it
getting hot?
Speaker 3 (03:06):
As you gradually evaporate, becoming smaller and smaller, you begin
frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to
be all right, because.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
This world was built. This world was built, and it
can't be happening. It's appeared.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
So that moment when you disappear entirely into the ether
catches you somewhat by surprise.
Speaker 6 (03:49):
Are we relaxed yet calm, confident of your centrality to
the universe, convinced that we've really got global warming under control? No, well,
we recommend our correspondence course How to Survive the Great Emotions,
if it comes with a subscription to the Total Perspective
Vortex Path or for a twenty nine ninety nine miltarian
(04:09):
dollars a month.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
That clip was from the new audio book Douglas Adams
The Ends of the Earth by Arvind Ethan. David Arvid
is joining me today to talk about the life, the
universe and the cautionary tales of Douglas Adams. Welcome, Arvind, Hello,
nice to be here. So what do you think Douglas
Adams was trying to say with the parable of the
puddle and why did you want to put it in
(04:33):
your book?
Speaker 7 (04:35):
The point, I think is that the puddle is guilty
of something that almost all of us and humanity as
a whole has been guilty of, which is taking the
leap from the fact that we have a very nice
planet that suits us to the rather unfortunate, possessive and
arrogant position that therefore this planet belongs to us, was
made for us, and is ours to ruin and despoil
(04:58):
as we would. And I think Douglas thought there was
maybe something we should take a look at more closely.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Yes, he was, in his own quiet way, a master
of the cautionary tale. Not the only connection between your project, Arvin,
and Cautionary Tales. I know you have also been working
with our master of sound design, Pascal Wise. So before
we listen to anything more, we'll get to it. Let's
(05:25):
listen to Pascal's theme for Cautionary Tales. I am sitting
(05:50):
with Arvin Ethan David, who created a new audio book
about Douglas Adams titled Douglas Adams The Ends of the Earth. Arvin,
when did you first encounter Douglas Adams. Well, first as
a writer and then as a man.
Speaker 7 (06:07):
They were fairly approximate. Does a writer? I read The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, probably at about thirteen. That
seems to be the sweet spot for a certain type
of teenager. Yeah, checks out to discover it and fell
in love at once. The sort of telepathy that he
employs getting inside your head and making you feel smarter
(06:28):
and more connected and less strange than or perhaps strange
but less alone. That was his skill. And then a
couple of years after that, I read the Dirk Gently
novels and it was my turn to put on the
school play, and for some insane reason, I decided to
make Dirk Gently Solistic Detective Agency, a novel that includes
(06:50):
time travel, ghosts, aliens, and exploding planet. Earth's perfect for
a school play, and even more strangely, Douglas Adams came
to see it. He came to see it, so was
he local or I think very shortly before it went on,
we realized we hadn't asked for permission, and so I
wrote to his agent and I said, you know, we're
(07:12):
doing this thing. We hope that's okay. And I got
back a very charming letter saying that whilst Douglas did
not believe that his book was capable of being adapted
for the stage or any other medium, he wouldn't stop
us from trying. And so we went ahead and on
the second or third night he turned up.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
I mean, that is extraordinary. He's a pretty big star
by then, even if he was behind the scenes because
he was a writer rather than a performer for the
most part. How did it feel? Did he tell you
that he was coming or did he just show up?
Did anybody recognize him?
Speaker 7 (07:43):
Well, he was six foot five and very notable, so
everybody recognized him. And there was nowhere in the audience
we could put him that he wasn't going to be
blindingly obvious to the cast. So there was a lot
of tension that night. And I sat about three rows
behind him waiting for him to laugh, and he didn't
(08:05):
for the first five or six minutes, and very awkward.
And I remember because we had changed a lot of
stuff because you sort of have to when you adapt
Douglas Adams, and I thought, oh my god, he doesn't
like it. And then he took out a pencil and
started making notes. Wow, and then he started to laugh. Okay,
So then we were okay. And afterwards we went out
(08:27):
for dinner and I asked him if it was okay
that we had changed things. I said, you know, we
sort of changed the plot a bit and he said,
changed it, You fixed it. I never worked before, so
that was the start of something.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
I was also a huge fan. Never met him, but
huge fan of his Hitchhiker's Work, which I had as
an audio book. I think one of my first experiences
of experiencing spoken word audio and listening to it over
and over and over again until the cassettes wore out,
and just loved it. And for those who haven't encountered
(09:04):
Douglas Adams, I was trying to think about how to
describe him, and well, to my take is the Hitchcock's
Guide to the Galaxy is is Originally it was a
radio play. It later became a TV series, in a
film and a book, but originally a radio play. And
it's basically, imagine if you had the best bits of
Star Trek and the best bits of Monty Python and
(09:25):
the best bits of a philosophy seminar, and they all
combined perfectly, that would be not quite as good as
The Hitchhacker's Guide to the Galaxy. That's my take. I
don't know, that's pretty good. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah.
I mean it's this kind of this intergalactic adventure, but
it's full of strange scenarios and thought experiments, and it's
and it's very surreal, and it's very very clever. So
(09:47):
that was when you met Douglas and then but the
friendship continued.
Speaker 7 (09:53):
I think friendship would be implying a reciprocity and an
equality which definitely did not exist. I was in the
presence of one of my heroes. I was a nineteen
year old interning at his company. But yes, for the
last decade of his life and the first decade of
my adult life, we saw each other. I would be
invited to things, and would get copied in on emails
(10:15):
and pulled into the odd meeting, and it really supercharged
and started my career. I ended up imagining and seeing
for the first time what it might be to live
the life of a creative intellectual, and that work didn't
have to be serious suits in a bank. It could
be fun and silly and absurd, and it could involve
(10:37):
sitting in dark rooms and making nonsense up with your
friends and seeing if anybody would pay you for it.
And that served me as a model for the decades since.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
And he died very young. It was two thousand and
one and he was only forty nine years old. How
did that feel?
Speaker 7 (10:53):
It was, as you say, early two thousand and one.
It was the first sign that two thousand and one
was going to be a very very bad year. Indeed,
I was out, so I came home to this long
answer phone message telling me that Douglas Adams was dead.
It felt utterly implausible. Was also a very Douglas death.
He was suffering from writer's block, as he did, it
(11:14):
was his whole adult life, and he had, as he
often did, gone to the gym to work through it.
And he died in the gym, so miserable. But the
work got left behind, and there was a lot of it,
more than people realized. Five Hitchhikers books, two duck Gently books,
and then a huge volume of talks and lectures and
(11:37):
articles and the archive. Yeah, tell us about the archive.
So Douglas left all his papers to his old college
at Cambridge, then John's and the team there, dr Adam Crowthers,
have done a wonderful job of catalog again and it's
been available to the public for ten years or more now.
(11:57):
But then during the pandemic, I discovered that there was
a large amount of audio visual material, old VHS's and
cassettes and dat tapes in reel to reel which had
never been digitized. So we decided to take that on
and we you know, I've known the family since I
was a teenager. So I reached out to them and
to the agents and all the official people, and once
(12:21):
again was given blessing to go ahead. Nobody was going
to stop me, So go ahead with what? So we
ran a Kickstarter to raise some money from the fans,
and with the fans, we then went and digitized everything.
We took realms and realms of stuff and took it
to Bristol. Apparently Bristol is the place that you digitized stuff,
(12:42):
and we found a lot of very interesting stuff. Talks
he had given Q and A's, he had given abandoned documentaries,
answer phone cassettes with some very angry people shouting at
each other, all sorts of rundom stuff, some beautiful home
video stuff that I was very happy to be able
to give to his family. And what happened in the
(13:04):
course of going through all this stuff. I remember, I'm
doing this during lockdown, during the pandemic, during Trump one,
the world was increasingly obviously on fire, and a lot
of us were fairly stressed by it. A global pandemic
and any number of political crises will do that for you.
(13:25):
As we've all experienced this last half a decade or
decade of increasing chaos, and somehow, going through all this stuff,
it was as if he was there whispering his famous
mantra into my ear, don't panic. And I sort of
realized that on all the great crises of our time,
Douglas had got there first. Then he had thought about
(13:47):
them and started to make fun of them, to describe them,
and in some cases even to suggest possible solutions.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
And you decided to release this as an audiobook. Why that?
Speaker 7 (14:00):
Well, in the first instance, because there was all this
archived material, and it seemed to me that it was
most interesting for people to hear Douglas in his own words,
in his own voice, But also because they were so
many fascinating people who were either friends of his who
are inspired by him to do great and interesting work.
(14:20):
And so I thought, you know what, I'm going to
go talk to them all. This was a great excuse
to have long conversations with Stephen Frye and David Badil
and Sanjiv Basca and all these wonderful thinkers and doers
of the world. And so that's where the book came out.
It came out of a mixture of a sort of
conversation with Douglas through his archive, and then conversations about
(14:41):
Douglas with those who knew him or his work best.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
Do you think he was in the business of telling
caution detales.
Speaker 7 (14:47):
I think The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy itself is
a sort of cautionary tale. The reason the book is
called The Ends of the Earth is that was the
working title for Hitchhikers. Yes, and in his original conception,
every episode of the radio show The Earth was going
to end a different way.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Which would also have been a cool idea, but a
different idea exactly, And so yes, I think he was
telling coutry retails. I think he was also a warrior.
He was a depressive. He was a man who worried
at issues, and I think he could see all the many,
many ways we were going about it it to being
the business of being alive on this planet wrong, from
(15:30):
bureaucracy to conservation to technology. I think he was very
aware of the likelihood that we would probably blow ourselves
up in more than one way. I mean, I love
his take on artificial intelligence, which of course is something
that we're completely obsessed by. And as I think through
his work, actually several different examples of it. There's as Marvin,
(15:54):
the paranoid android, who's who has a brain the size
of a planet, but it's just miserable the whole time.
There's the ship's computer which crashes because it's trying to
work out how to make Arthur Dent the perfect cup
of tea. And the one that sticks in the mind
is deep Thought. So deep Thought, as of course you
will know, is the supercomputer designed to produce the answer
(16:16):
to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.
And it says I can do this. It'll take seven
and a half million years. But finally, of course, seven
and a half million years later, they come to hear
the answer.
Speaker 7 (16:31):
It's a hugely disappointing forty.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Two which, well, what does that tell us? What is
I mean? That's a good joke. It's a good joke,
but there's something more there, I think.
Speaker 7 (16:40):
Well, Douglas, of course, would constantly insist it was only
a joke.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (16:44):
The person who I think, and this will lead us
to some interesting territory. The person who I think has
said this best, and I say this carefully, is Elon Musk.
And Elon Musk, who is on record saying that Douglas
is not only his favorite author, but his favorite philosopher.
Says that what you learn from that anecdote is that
the point is never the answer. The point is learning
(17:07):
to ask the right question.
Speaker 8 (17:09):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Yes, And in the end, they build a they build
an even bigger computer to run for five billion years
to figure out what the question is. And then once
they know what the question is, they will figure out
what the answer really means exactly.
Speaker 7 (17:23):
And their computer, of course, is the Earth. And that's
incredibly funny. Yeah, but then you stop and think about
it and you go, oh oh, we're a supercomputer designed
to figure out the ultimate the ultimate question. And Arvin,
we are going to get into some of the problems
that Douglas Adams foresaw and how he tried and sometimes
failed to fix them, starting with social media.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
We're going to do that. After the break, we're back.
I'm Tim Harford and this is a cautionary conversation with
Arvin Ethan David, who is the author of the new
(18:04):
audiobook Douglas Adams The Ends of the Earth. So, Arvin,
the third chapter of your book's all about social media,
which I think is going to be a surprise to
some people. Because Douglas Adams died in two thousand and one,
and that feels like, well, it's six or seven years
before Facebook, right, it feels like a pre social media age.
(18:26):
But he thought about this and he tried to create
a social media platform all of his own. So what
did he think social media could be?
Speaker 7 (18:35):
Well, the Guide itself, This is how extraordinarily pressy on
two was.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
This is the Hitchhiker's Guide. That's sort of the digital
book that our heroes carry around with them, and it
gives them advices to everything they're going to encounter in
the galaxy.
Speaker 7 (18:49):
Exactly and what it is when you drill down into it.
It's a crowd sourced platform. Everyone, anyone can be a researcher.
You upload your entries. The guy's Trip Advised were a Wikipedia,
it's trip avisor Wikipedia, long before either of those things existed.
And there's also has a very interesting relationship with fact
(19:11):
and opinion, or reality and opinion. Even in the very
first book, there's a throwaway joke that there's a sign
on the in the offices of the Guide that says,
in the event of a conflict between the Guide and reality,
the Guide is definitive. Reality is often faulty yes, and
(19:32):
again a wonderful present prefiguring of our own tortured relationship
with digital crowdsourced information platforms and reality. And in the
final book, the Guide is taken over by a company
called the Infidium Corporation, which is described as being rapacious,
(19:55):
profit seeking, merciless, and concerned only with profit.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Elon Musk is a big said, okay, keep going.
Speaker 7 (20:04):
And they decide that they have to ass the Guide's
primacy and in any situation where the Guide has said
something that reality contradicts, they're going to go out and
fix the reality. And one little detail is the Guide
is very clear that the Earth has been destroyed, annoyingly
and upsettingly, the Earth continues to exist, and so the
(20:26):
Guide sets in place this elaborate scheme, using incidentally, an
AI avatar that looks like a little friendly bird.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
To destroy it, okay, to.
Speaker 7 (20:37):
Destroy the planet Earth. So yeah, I think you probably
thought about social media and it's dangers a little bit.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
He certainly did. He always said though, that the greatest
selling point of the Guide was that it had the
words don't panic written in large, friendly letters on the cover.
And I often feel that more social media should come
with a rapper that just says, don't panic before you
open it, and the world might be a better place
if it did.
Speaker 7 (21:02):
Or its great success is that it convinced us not
to panic, and we all unlocked it and put it
into our pockets, into our brains, not realizing the danger
it could do. And actually what we should have done
the second the thing reared its head was to panic
a lot and burnt the loss of it one way
or the other.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
So one of the contributors to your audiobook is Stephen Frye,
and let me slightly paraphrase what he says about Douglas
Adams and social media. He says, how do I put it?
I wouldn't say that he was fortunate in dying. I
mean his mind when he died had really been unpolluted
(21:41):
by what happened to the Internet and by the invention
of social media, and then what happened to that, he
would of course have been angry and disappointed and upset,
as we all were. Do you think that's right. I
think it's half right. I think it's certainly true that
Douglas would have found the dark side of social media
extremely upsetting. What he tried to do in his own
(22:03):
lifetime was to build a platform H two G two
dot com, which was a much friendlier version of social media,
one where editorial contribution and fact checking and community rules
of engagement were extremely important, and he put an enormous
amount of energy. He ran a company, turned up at
(22:24):
the office every day for years trying to try to
do that. That ultimately did not survive him, or it does.
It still exists, but in a fairly curtailed way. But
he did try, and today we see attempts like that
Blue Skies an attempt to do that, But I think,
you know, one can't write the whole thing off. Obviously,
(22:45):
social media has done lots of interesting things and connecting
people globally. This is a social media thing we are
doing right now, this podcast and the huge boom age
and audio discussion in drama and long form is because
of the Internet. But we'd be also foolish to deny
that reality has taken some hard hits as a result.
(23:06):
Do you think a better Internet was possible? And is
there anything that Douglas is writing or his or his
practices as an entrepreneur teachers.
Speaker 7 (23:17):
The thing he used to say is that people are
always going to act according to human nature, because it
would be unnatural for them not to do so. Yes,
and so I think it's impossible to believe that. Obviously,
companies are going to be profit seeking and media is
going to seek to dominate as big an audience as possible.
(23:40):
That has always been the way, from campfire storytellers to
digital barons. But I think where we have failed is
this simple idea of, ooh, should we maybe think about regulation,
should we maybe think about some guardrails parameters? And I
think those are things. Weirdly, they're not sexy things, and
(24:02):
they're not the things you expect a comic novelist to
think about, But actually he did, and that's what he
was trying to do with his own digital innovations. And
I think one of the great sadnesses about his death
is Douglas was someone who was influential and deeply loved
by the tech community. He was, you know, friends of
Bill Gates and friends of Larry Allison, and you know
(24:23):
that some people claim he coined the phrase reality distortion
field to describe Steve Jobs. And so if he had
stuck around, you just sort of wonder maybe he would
have nudged these people and nudged these companies in more
interesting directions.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Maybe maybe they don't seem very nudgeable, But he was
a very clever thinker and he influenced a lot of
a lot of people. And I'm curious, what do you
think he would have made of chat, GPT and generative
AI in general.
Speaker 7 (24:54):
I think he would have loved it. I think he
would have been obsessed by it. He tried even in
his own life. They in the computer game he made
Starship Titanic, they built a thing called spooky Talk, which
was a very crude sort of language model. This is
in two thousand, But he was very passionate about trying
to create this chat bot in the game that could
(25:18):
simulate some sort of real conversation. And he scripted a
lot of it himself. And so I think he would
have found it fascinating. And it is fascinating, And the
same things apply. The questions become, all, right, if you
are going to build a Marvin, if you're going to
build a thing with a prototype people personality.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Yeah, GPP, genuine people personalities. They say, then what.
Speaker 7 (25:46):
Do you do once you've done it? What are the
rules around it? How do you treat Marvin Marvin clearly
didn't feel he was treated very well.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
No, well, I I am really struck by the contrast
between chat GPT and Marvin. I mean, Marvin, I think
you ought to know. I'm feeling very depressed and Mark, Yeah, yeah, yeah, Marv, Marvin,
could you just Marvin, could you pick up that piece
of paper? I don't no brain size of a planet.
They asked me to pick up a piece of paper,
(26:12):
and that's Marvin. Chat GPT's the exact opposite. You fire
up chat GPT and you say, could you do this
for me? It's like, yeah, sure, I'd be happy to
do that. That would be amazing. I would just love
to do it. It's so it's so perky. My wife says,
chatchept is definitely male, and I said, why do you
think it's mail, which is well, it's it's completely overconfident.
It just keeps talking at you.
Speaker 7 (26:35):
It marches forward with completely undeserved confidence.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Yeah. So it's very very different to Marvin.
Speaker 7 (26:40):
But I tell you who it is, like, Yeah, it's
like Eddie the shipboard computer.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
It is very like Eddie.
Speaker 7 (26:45):
And Eddie, of course, is the one who actually gets
them in trouble. Eddie is the one who is supposed
to be flying the ship and forgets to do it
to make a cup of tea. That said, so, the
fact that we are where we are with Ai is
so astonishing, and so, for example, as well as the book,
I'm deep into the making of a Hitchhiker's Guide to
(27:07):
the Galaxy live show we're going to open here in
London in November.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
And sorry, so is that going to be like a
performance of the audio play in the book or is
it something totally different, like a nonfiction thing.
Speaker 7 (27:20):
It's a whole new thing. It's we're building a fully
immersive world. And you come in as a hitchhiker. You
come in with your towel if you want, and with
Arthur Dent, hitchhike your way.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
You've got to know where your towel is.
Speaker 7 (27:31):
You have to know where your towel is and if forget,
if you forget one, the gift shop can supply. But
one of the things we're looking at doing is saying,
rather than have an actor playing Marvin, what if we
just built Marvin because you can.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Now yeah, yeah, you just need to MAKEBT considerably more depressive,
considerably more depressed to be possible, not nothing that I
hammer some screwdrivers can't achieve. I can't wait to see that.
So just tell us when and where is this going
to be happening.
Speaker 7 (28:01):
The show opens in November at the Riverside Studios in London,
and we're taking over the whole building because you know,
you need some space to hitchhike around the galaxy.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
And is it going to be a limited run it
runs to Christmas or is it going to be for
the foreseeable future.
Speaker 7 (28:14):
It's an initial four month run through to February and
then we'll see.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
We will see. Indeed, we are going to have to
wait a minute or two because we have a break.
But after the break, I will be asking Arvind about
Douglas Adams's great later life passion, which was conservation. He
predicted what was going to happen to social media? Did he,
in the same way predict what would happen to our planet?
Hold on, we'll be back. We're back. I'm Tim Harford
(28:51):
and I'm talking to Arvind Ethan David, and I want
to start this section with another clip from Arvid's book,
and it's a clip of Douglas Adams himself doing a
stand up routine about venomous snakes.
Speaker 8 (29:04):
We asked apprehensively if any of the folk remedies or
potions we'd heard about were any good. Well, nine times
out of ten they'll work fine for the simple right
reason that nine snake bikes out of ten the victim
doesn't get ill anyway, it's the last ten percent that's
the problem. And there's a lot of myths we've had
to disentangle about snakes. In order to get at the truth,
you need accurate information. People's immediate response to snake bikes
(29:27):
is often to overreact and give the poor snake a
ritual beating, wh doesn't really help in the identification. If
you don't know which exact snake it was, you can't
treat the bike properly. Well in that case, I said,
could we perhaps take a snake bike detective kit with
us to Kimodo? Ah, of course you can. Of course
you can take as many as you like. Why do
(29:50):
you a blind bit of good? Because they're only for
Australian snakes. So what do we do if we get
bitten by something deadly?
Speaker 6 (29:59):
Then?
Speaker 1 (29:59):
I asked?
Speaker 8 (30:00):
He blinked at me as very stupid. Well, why do
you think you do? He said? You die of course
as well. That's what deadly means.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Oh and it's quite something to hear his voice, and
it's a mini cautionary tale.
Speaker 7 (30:20):
I suppose it really is. He was I think, possibly
unique in this way. What we just heard is a
world class bit of stand up. But at the same
time this is in the context. This bit that he's
doing is in the context of what has become a
truly landmark work of conservation writing, Last Chance to.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
See Yeah, tell us about that.
Speaker 7 (30:45):
The story that Douglas would tell is he gets a
phone call one day from the Observer magazine inviting him
to go to Madagascar to meet a lima, and he's
pretty sure that they've called the wrong number, so he
says yes at once before they've discovered their mistake, and
that he goes to Madagascar and meets a lima and
writes a piece about it for The Observer. And this
(31:05):
was not in itself unusual. They sent six or seven
other literally figures on these missions. What is unusual is
Douglas becomes so obsessed, so interested in conservation and rare
animals that he befriends the zoologist Mark Carwardine and says
to him, how about we spend the next year doing this. Yeah,
(31:26):
and that's what he does. They spend a year traveling
around the world looking for I think seven of the
rarest species in existence, and then he writes this extraordinary work,
which is both scholarly funny and has some of the
greatest feats of empathy you'll ever read in his describing
what it might be like to be one of these animals.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
I mean, just the title last chance to See that
that's a lovely bit of black humor, because that's what
you generally put on a theater when a play's about
to end its run, all that sort of thing. And
actually it's not really your last chance to see because
they could always be put on again. You can always
restage the play if there's if they're demand. But he's
(32:09):
talking about living species that are absolutely on the brink
of extinction. It really is the last chance to see
and there is no bringing them.
Speaker 7 (32:20):
Back, though he was always obsessed with extinction. There's a
great bit about the Dodo in Gently where they go
back in time to see the last Dodo and Professor
Kronotus weeps at the sight of it. And it's sort
of stupid beauty since Douglas did that the seven animals
that he saw, two of them have become extinct, so
(32:44):
twenty five percent and that is terrifyingly about the right ratio.
We've lost about twenty five percent of the species of
Earth in the last twenty five years, and that's not
slowing down. And it was that armageddon that became the
grand mission of Douglas's last years.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
Yes, because he didn't just want to describe the problem.
He wanted to find solution. So, for example, with the gorillas.
What was he doing with the gorillas?
Speaker 7 (33:12):
So he was approached by a guy called Greg Cummings
who ran the Diane Foss Gorilla Foundation and asked for money.
He got the sort of begging letter that many of
us get. Sends some money to a charity, and he did,
but then he goes to some event and Greg asks
him again for more money. And the way Greg tells it,
Douglass went, look, enough of the band aids, what will
(33:35):
it take to actually save the gorillas? Which is a
question no one had ever asked before. He meant, what
he means, what do you mean I mean actually saved them?
How can we solve this problem? And so they set
about writing a business plan, a sort of strategic plan
for how they could keep the Mountain gorilla safe forever.
They put a price tag on it, and then Douglas
(33:58):
spent a year of his life flying around the world,
taking the director of the Dian Fossy Goerilla Foundation to
meet the richest people on the planet to persuade them
to fund this ski. Yeah, they didn't succeed Sadly, they
came close, and the gorilla, the Mountain Gorilla, is actually
doing quite well because they raised enough money. But that
(34:18):
was the sort of mind he was. He was very
happy to make fun of a problem. But unlike most people,
certainly I like most writers, he went one step further
and would try and fix things.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
So is there a lesson cautionary tales? We always like
to draw lessons from these stories of disaster. Is there
a lesson that we can learn either from the extinction
of these creatures or from Douglas Adam's approach to saving them.
Speaker 7 (34:44):
What Douglas would say when people asked him why and
why seems an obvious question, right, Why should we save
gorillas because they're cute, because we like animals, and maybe
most of us don't need to go further than that,
but he would say something more profound. He would say, Look,
it's by understanding them that we have any shot at
(35:08):
understanding ourselves. And on the assumption that we think self
knowledge is a good thing, let's not kill the only
things that can reflect us back at ourselves. There's this
great idea. People talk a lot about teaching apes sign
language or teaching apes to speak, and there have been
various experiments, and Douglas asks the question, why why would
(35:29):
we do that? So we would learn what's it like
to live in a jungle, because there are plenty of
our own species that live in jungles, and we don't
listen to anything they have to say, Yes, it's.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
Very Douglas Adams. So you've been working with Douglas's voice
and his image and his writings as you put together
and his friends and admirers as you put together this
audio book. E've immersed yourself in his thinking. What have
you learned?
Speaker 7 (36:01):
That there is a lot to panic about, but that
panic is a wholly inadequate response, and that maybe we
just need to do something.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Arvin, thank you so much for joining us. It's been
an absolute pleasure talking to you. Remind us the title
of the audio.
Speaker 7 (36:23):
Book Douglas Adams The Ends of the.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Earth, and that's available on Audible, Spotify, Pushkin, dot fm,
or wherever audio books are sold. And Tim Harford, I've
been talking to Arvind Ethan David and there will be
a regular episode of Cautionary Tales back in your feed
very soon. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford
with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines and Ryan Dilly. It's produced
(36:49):
by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and
original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound
design is by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio. Bend
A d af Haffrey edited the scripts. The show also
wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,
Greta Cohne, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey,
(37:13):
and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
Do you want to support the stories we tell on
Cautionary Tales. If so, you can join my new Cautionary
Club at patreon dot com slash Cautionary Club for exclusive
bonus episodes, newsletters, ad free listening and other exciting parts. Alternatively,
(37:36):
you can join Pushkin Plus on our Apple Show page
for continued benefits from our show and others across the
pushkin network.
Host
Tim Harford
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