Don't Panic! Douglas Adams' Guide to Tomorrow - with Arvind Ethan David

Summary

---

Podcast Summary: Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford

Episode: Don't Panic! Douglas Adams' Guide to Tomorrow – with Arvind Ethan David
Date: September 26, 2025

---

Overview

In this engaging episode, Tim Harford is joined by writer and producer Arvind Ethan David to explore the legacy of Douglas Adams—the celebrated author behind The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. They discuss Adams' uniquely prescient insights into technology, social media, extinction, and human arrogance, all woven through the lens of cautionary tales. Drawing from David’s new audiobook, Douglas Adams: The Ends of the Earth, and archival clips, the conversation celebrates Adams’ humor, philosophical depth, and environmental activism, while examining the relevance of his cautionary tales for today’s world.

---

Key Discussion Points

1. The Parable of the Sentient Puddle — Human Arrogance and Environmentalism

• Douglas Adams’ Puddle Parable opens the episode, illustrating humanity’s egocentric belief that the world was made for us—until the environment changes beyond our control (03:42–06:05).
  • Adams’ warning: “If this world was made for me, that makes it my world, my creation. How wonderful. What shall I do with it?”
    (Douglas Adams, as read by iHeart Announcer, 04:38)
  • The “Great Demotions” – Harford jokes about a correspondence course on learning one’s true place in the universe (06:14).
• Arvind’s Analysis: The story is about the leap from appreciating a planet that fits us to arrogantly believing it was made for us—an attitude Adams thought dangerous for humans and the planet (06:51).

2. Adams as a Master of Cautionary Tales

• Adams’ work isn’t just entertainment—it’s packed with cautionary tales about bureaucracy, technology, and ecology.
  • Harford likens Hitchhiker’s Guide to “the best bits of Star Trek and Monty Python and a philosophy seminar... and it’s not quite as good as Hitchhiker’s Guide,” (11:44).
• Personal Anecdotes:
  • David shares how adapting Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency as a school play led to meeting Adams, who praised the adaptation: “You fixed it. It never worked before,” (10:54).
  • Adams was generous and supportive, helping David’s early career, and modeling the creative life.

3. The Archive and Legacy Projects

• Douglas Adams’ Archive: Stored at St John’s College, Cambridge, now digitized with the help of a fan-led Kickstarter (13:56–14:58).
  • Surprising finds: Unheard talks, abandoned documentaries, angry voicemail tapes, and family home videos.
• The process of archiving in lockdown was, for David, like Adams whispering “Don’t panic” in his ear—a comforting mantra during chaotic times (15:00–16:00).

4. Social Media—Adams’ Prescient Warnings

• Adams imagined social media before it existed:
  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide is “a crowdsourced platform” like Wikipedia or TripAdvisor, with a blurry line between fact and opinion (22:51–24:03).
  • Harford notes the Guide’s sign: “In the event of a conflict between the Guide and reality, the Guide is definitive. Reality is often faulty,” (23:04).
• In Adams' books, corporate interests take over the Guide, prioritizing profit and even “fixing reality” to match the Guide—eerily reminiscent of today’s information wars (24:07–24:45).
  • Adams’ real-life attempt to create a friendly, community-moderated site (h2g2.com) was a noble predecessor to social media—and a warning about what happens when profit dominates (25:56).

Notable Quotes

• “He always said 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 wrapper that just says Don’t Panic before you open it.”
  (Tim Harford, 24:45)
• “Maybe what we should have done the second the thing reared its head was to panic a lot and burn the lot of it.”
  (Arvind Ethan David, 25:05)

Philosophical Take

• Adams believed technology and media would always reflect human nature, both for good and ill (27:20–27:32).
• Regulation and thoughtful guardrails—though not glamorous—were in Adams’ mind a necessary counter to unrestrained digital platforms.

5. Artificial Intelligence—Comedy, Philosophy, and Foresight

• Adams' AI Characters: From Marvin the Paranoid Android (“a brain the size of a planet, but miserable”), to Deep Thought (who gives the infamous answer ‘42’), Adams lampooned our obsession with technological answers (17:58–19:26).
  • Elon Musk has called Adams his favorite philosopher, believing the real lesson is in “learning to ask the right questions” rather than seeking definitive answers (19:01).
• Modern AI: David asserts Adams would have been fascinated by ChatGPT and today’s language models. Adams prototyped a chatbot for the game Starship Titanic—two decades ahead of his time (28:57–29:43).
  • Harford draws a contrast: “ChatGPT is perky and overconfident; Marvin is depressive and reluctant,” (30:36).
• Exciting News: David reveals they're creating a live, immersive Hitchhiker’s Guide show in London, possibly featuring a Marvin AI chatbot (31:15–31:50).

6. Conservation—Last Chance to See

• Adams’ later life passion was biodiversity and conservation, showcased in the book Last Chance to See (36:10–36:34).
  • “He was unique... [writing work that was] scholarly, funny, and with feats of empathy—you’ll ever read in describing what it’s like to be one of these animals,” (37:15).
  • Dark humor: “Last Chance to See” signals extinction—there are no encores for species unlike stage plays (37:37).
  • Two of seven species he profiled have since gone extinct—mirroring the real-world catastrophic rate of loss.
• Adams was more than a commentator—he tried to fix problems, notably leading efforts to create a business plan to actually save mountain gorillas (39:01).
  • “What will it take to actually save the gorillas?... They wrote a plan, put a price on it, and Douglas spent a year trying to get the world’s richest people to fund it...” (39:01).

Notable Quote

• “It’s by understanding [animals] that we have any shot at understanding ourselves... let’s not kill the only things that can reflect us back at ourselves.”
  (Arvind Ethan David, 41:28)

7. Final Reflections: Don’t Panic, But Act

• David summarizes Adams’ message: “There is a lot to panic about. But panic is a wholly inadequate response. And maybe we just need to do something.” (41:50).
• Harford closes with appreciation for Adams’ wit, warning, and enduring wisdom.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• On Human Arrogance:
  “This hole in the ground that is my home, it must have been made to have me in. Was made for me.”
  (Douglas Adams, 03:42)
• On Adaptation:
  “Changed it? You fixed it. It never worked before.”
  (Douglas Adams to Arvind Ethan David, 10:54)
• On Technology and Questions:
  “The point is never the answer. The point is learning to ask the right questions.”
  (Elon Musk, quoted by Arvind Ethan David, 19:01)
• On Social Media:
  “In the event of a conflict between the Guide and reality, the Guide is definitive. Reality is often faulty.”
  (Hitchhiker’s Guide sign, 23:04)
• On Conservation:
  “It’s by understanding them that we have any shot at understanding ourselves... let’s not kill the only things that can reflect us back at ourselves.”
  (Arvind Ethan David, 41:28)
• On Panic:
  “There is a lot to panic about. But panic is a wholly inadequate response. And maybe we just need to do something.”
  (Arvind Ethan David, 41:50)

---

Important Segments & Timestamps

• Adams’ “Parable of the Puddle” and its message: 03:42–06:05
• Meeting Douglas Adams; school play adaptation: 08:23–10:54
• Deep Thought, Marvin, and AI: 17:58–19:47, 28:57–31:50
• Social Media, Wikipedia, and h2g2.com: 22:37–27:02
• Conservation and “Last Chance to See”: 34:39–41:28
• Final reflections on action and legacy: 41:28–42:15

---

Tone and Style

The episode is witty, affectionate, philosophical, and deeply relevant—with Adams’ humor and caution woven alongside Harford and David’s thoughtful commentary.

---

For New Listeners

If you enjoy stories about human error, technological wonder, and environmental stakes—served with a side of British irony and heartfelt urgency—this tribute to Douglas Adams’ work and worldview is essential listening. Don't Panic—but also, don’t just stand by.

---

Transcript

[iHeart Radio Announcer]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster and level up every tool in their arsenal. T Mobile knows all about that. They're now the best network, according to the Experts@ookla Speedtest. And they're using that network to launch Super Mobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built in security and seamless satellite coverage. That's your business supercharged. Learn [e-mail] seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky. Best network based on analysis by Ookla of Speedtest Intelligence data 1H2025 in business.

[Oracle Cloud Advertiser]

They say you can have better, cheaper or faster, but you only get to pick two. What if you could have all three at the same time? That's exactly what Cohere, Thomson Reuters and Specialized Bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development and AI needs where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment. Spend less than you would with other clouds. How is it faster? OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second cheaper. OCI costs up to 50% less for computing, 70% less for storage and 80% less for networking better. In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds. This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads right now with zero commitment. Try OCI for free. Head to oracle.com strategic that's oracle.com strategic.

[LG XBoom Advertiser]

Stop settling for weak sound. It's time to level up your game and bring the boom. Hit the town with the ultra durable LG XBoom portable speaker and enjoy vibrant sound wherever you go. Elevate your listening experience to new heights because let's be real, your music deserves it. The future of sound is now with LG x boom and for a limited time save 25% at LG.com with code fall25 bring the boom xboom.

[Tim Harford]

Pushkin.

[Arvind Ethan David]

If.

[Tim Harford]

You don't feel like you're getting enough Cautionary Tales, I have some very good news. We 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 tidbits and anything else we've dug up in our research. We would love to see you there. Head to patreon.com cautionaryclub to find out more. That's patreon.com cautionaryclub I wanted to start this edition of Cautionary Tales with a little something by one of my favourite writers, Douglas Adams, the creator of the Hitchhiker's Guide 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. Imagine yourself to be that puddle, a fully sentient puddle who wakes up this very morning and thinks to herself, ah.

[iHeart Radio Announcer]

What a wonderful morning. What an interesting world. What a beautiful glen, full of birdsong and sun. How perfect this world ends. What an interesting hole I find myself in. It fits me rather well, in fact. It fits. Oh, gosh, it fits me perfectly. It corresponds exactly with the smooth contours of my body. I get it now. I understand. This hole in the ground that is my home, it must have been made to have me in. Was made for me. Designed precisely with my wants and my needs in mind. It is mine.

[Tim Harford]

Consider this. Reflect on what a powerful idea it is.

[iHeart Radio Announcer]

It makes me special and important. If this world was made for me, that makes it my world, my creation. How wonderful. What shall I do with it?

[Tim Harford]

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.

[iHeart Radio Announcer]

What's happening? It's getting too hot. Why? Why is it getting hot?

[Tim Harford]

As you gradually evaporate, becoming smaller and smaller, you begin frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right.

[Arvind Ethan David]

Because.

[iHeart Radio Announcer]

This world was built to have me in it. This world was built to have me in it. This can't be happening. It's can't be happening.

[Tim Harford]

So that moment when you come disappear entirely into the ether, catches you somewhat by surprise.

[iHeart Radio Announcer]

What's happening? Stop it. What's happening?

[Tim Harford]

Are we relaxed, yet calm? Confident of your centrality to the universe? Convinced that we've really got global warming under control?

[iHeart Radio Announcer]

No.

[Tim Harford]

Well, we recommend our correspondence course, how to Survive the Great Demotions. It comes with a subscription to the Total Perspective Vortex app. All for only 29.99 Altairian dollars a month. That clip was from the new audiobook Douglas Adams, the Ends of the Earth by Arvind Ethan. David Arvind is joining me today to talk about the life, things, the universe and the cautionary tales of Douglas Adams. Welcome, Arvind.

[Arvind Ethan David]

Hello. Nice to Be here.

[Tim Harford]

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 your book?

[Arvind Ethan David]

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 as we would. And I think Douglas thought that was maybe something we should take a look at more closely.

[Tim Harford]

Yes, he was, in his own quiet way, a master of the cautionary tale. But that is 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 listen to Pascal's theme for Cautionary Tales. I am sitting with Arvind Ethan David, who created a new audiobook about Douglas Adams titled Douglas the Ends of the Earth. Arvind, when did you first encounter Douglas Adams? Well, first as a writer and then as a man.

[Arvind Ethan David]

They were fairly proximate. As a writer, I read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, probably at about 13. 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 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's Holistic Detective Agency a novel that includes time travel, ghosts, aliens and exploding planet Earths.

[Tim Harford]

Perfect for a school play.

[Arvind Ethan David]

And even more strangely, Douglas Adams came to see it.

[Tim Harford]

He came to see it. So was he local or.

[Arvind Ethan David]

I think very shortly before it went on, we realized we hadn't asked for permission. Ah. And so I wrote to his agent and I said, you know, we're 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.

[Tim Harford]

I mean, that is extraordinary. He was a pretty big star by then. Even if he was behind the scenes. Cause 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 really?

[Arvind Ethan David]

Well, he was 6 foot 5 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. Yeah. And he didn't for the first five or six minutes. Awkward and very awkward. And I remember cause we had changed a lot of stuff. Cause 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.

[Tim Harford]

Wow.

[Arvind Ethan David]

And then he started to laugh.

[Tim Harford]

Okay.

[Arvind Ethan David]

So then we were. Okay. And afterwards we went out for dinner and I asked him if it was okay that we had changed things. And I said, you know, we sort of changed the plot a bit. And he said changed it? You fixed it. It never worked before. So that was the start of something.

[Tim Harford]

I was also a huge fan. Never met him, but huge fan of. Of his hitchhiker's work, which I had as an audiobook. 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 Douglas Adams, I was trying to think about how to describe him. Well, so my take is the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is. Is originally it was a radio play. It later became a TV series and 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 the best bits of a philosophy seminar. And they all combined perfectly. That would be not quite as good as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That's my take. I don't know.

[Arvind Ethan David]

That's pretty good.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah.

[Arvind Ethan David]

That's pretty good.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah. I mean it's this kind of this intergalactic adventure, but it's full of strange scenarios and thought experiments and it's very surreal and it's very, very clever. So that was when you met Douglas and then. But the friendship continued.

[Arvind Ethan David]

I think friendship would be implying a reciprocity and inequality which definitely did not exist. I was in the presence of one of my heroes. I was a 19 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 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 sitting in dark room 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.

[Tim Harford]

And he died very young. It was 2001, and he was only 49 years old. How did that feel?

[Arvind Ethan David]

It was, as you say, early 2001. It was the first sign that 2001 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. It was also a very Douglas death. He was suffering from writer's block, as he did almost 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?

[Tim Harford]

Yeah.

[Arvind Ethan David]

So miserable. But the work got left behind and there was a lot of it. There was more than people realized. Five Hitchhikers books, two Dirk Gently books, and then a huge volume of talks and lectures and articles. And the archive.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah, tell us about the archive.

[Arvind Ethan David]

So Douglas left all his papers to his old College at Cambridge, St John's and the team there, Dr. Adam Crowthers, have done a wonderful job of cataloging it. And it's been available to the public for 10 years or more now. But then during the pandemic, I discovered that there was a large amount of audiovisual material, old VHS and cassettes and DAT tapes and 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 again was given blessing to go ahead. Nobody was going to stop me.

[Tim Harford]

So go ahead with what?

[Arvind Ethan David]

So we ran a Kickstarter to raise some money from the fans. And with the fans, we then went and digitized everything. We took reams and reels of stuff and took it to Bristol. Apparently. Bristol is the place that you digitize stuff.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah.

[Arvind Ethan David]

And we found a lot of very interesting stuff, talks. He had given Q&As. He had given abandoned documentaries, answer phone cassettes with some very angry people shouting at each other, all sorts of random stuff, some beautiful home video stuff that I. I was very happy to be able to give to his family. And what happened in the course of going through all this stuff? And remember, I'm doing this during lockdown. During the pandemic during Trump 1, 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. As we've all experienced this last half 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, and he had thought about them and started to make fun of them, to describe them, and in some cases, even to suggest possible solutions.

[Tim Harford]

And you decided to release this as an audiobook. Why that?

[Arvind Ethan David]

Well, in the first instance, because there was all this archive 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. And so I thought, you know what? I'm gonna go talk to them all. This was a great excuse to have long conversations with Stephen Fry and David Badil and Sanjeev Bhaskar 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 Douglass through his archive, and then conversations about Douglass with those who knew him or his work best.

[Tim Harford]

Do you think he was in the business of telling cautionary tales?

[Arvind Ethan David]

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.

[Tim Harford]

Yes.

[Arvind Ethan David]

And in his original conception, every episode of the radio show, the Earth was going to end a different way, which.

[Tim Harford]

Would also have been a cool idea, but a different idea.

[Arvind Ethan David]

Exactly. And so, yes, I think he was telling cautionary tales. I think he was also a warrior. He was a depressive. He was a man who worried at issues and. And I think he could see all the many, many ways we were going about it. It being the business of being alive on this planet. Wrong. From 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.

[Tim Harford]

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 Marvin the Paranoid Android, 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 all know, is the supercomputer designed to produce the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. And he says, oh, yeah, 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.

[Arvind Ethan David]

Hear the answer and it's a hugely disappointing 42, which.

[Tim Harford]

Well, what does that tell us? I mean, that's a good joke. It's a good joke, but there's something more there, I think.

[Arvind Ethan David]

Well, Douglas, of course, would constantly insist it was only a joke.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah.

[Arvind Ethan David]

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 Douglass 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 to ask the right questions.

[Tim Harford]

Yes. And in the end, they build an even bigger computer to run for 5 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.

[Arvind Ethan David]

Exactly. And that computer, of course, is the Earth. And that's incredibly funny. But then you stop and think about it and you go, oh, we're a.

[Tim Harford]

Supercomputer designed to figure out the ultimate question. And Arvind, 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. We're going to do that after the break.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal. T Mobile knows all about that. They're now the best network, according to the experts at Ookla Speedtest. And they're using that network to launch Super Mobile. The first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built in security and seamless satellite coverage with super mobile. Your performance, security and coverage are supercharged. With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand. With built in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients. And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite to mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid. That's your business. Supercharged. Learn [e-mail] Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky. Best network based on analysis by Ookla of Speedtest Intelligence data 1h 2025 run.

[iHeart Radio Announcer]

A business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart streaming radio and podcasting. Call 844-844 iHeart to get started. That's 844-844, iHeart.

[Tim Harford]

We're back. I'm Tim Harford and this is a cautionary conversation with Arvind Ethan David, who is the author of the new audiobook Douglas Adams, the Ends of the Earth. So Arvind, the third chapter of your book's all about social media, which I think is gonna be a surprise to some people because Douglas Adams died in 2001 and that feels like, well, it's six or seven years before Facebook. Right. It feels like a pre social media age. 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?

[Arvind Ethan David]

Well, the guide itself. This is how extraordinarily prescient he was.

[Tim Harford]

This is the Hitchhiker's Guide, sort of the digital book that our heroes carry around with them. And it gives them advice as to everything they're going to encounter in the galaxy.

[Arvind Ethan David]

Exactly. And what it is when you drill down into it, it's a crowd sourced platform. Anyone can be a researcher. You upload your entries.

[Tim Harford]

The guy It's TripAdvisor or Wikipedia.

[Arvind Ethan David]

It's TripAdvisor Wikipedia, long before either of those things existed. And there's also a very, it has a very interesting relationship with fact and opinion or reality and opinion. Even in the very first book, there's a throwaway joke that there's a sign 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 again, a wonderful prescient 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, profit seeking, merciless, and concerned only with profit.

[Tim Harford]

Elon Musk is a big Douglas Adams fan. You said, okay, fine, keep going.

[Arvind Ethan David]

And they decide that they have to assert 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 Guide sets in place this elaborate scheme using, incidentally, an AI avatar that looks like a little friendly bird to destroy. To destroy the planet Earth. So, yeah, I think he probably thought about social media and its dangers a little bit.

[Tim Harford]

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. And I often feel that more social media should come with a wrapper that just says Don't Panic before you open it. And the world might be a better pace if it did.

[Arvind Ethan David]

Or its great success is that it convinced us not to panic and we all unlocked it and put it into our pockets and 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 lot of it one way or the other.

[Tim Harford]

So one of the contributors to your audiobook is Stephen Fry. 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 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?

[Arvind Ethan David]

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 lifetime was to build a platform, h2g2.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 the office every day for years trying 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 and attempts to do that. But I think, you know, one can't write the whole thing off. Obviously, social media has done lots of interesting things in connecting people globally. This is a social media thing we are doing right now, this podcast and the huge boom age in audio discussion and drama and long form is because of the Internet.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah.

[Arvind Ethan David]

But we'd be also foolish to deny that reality has taken some hard hits as a result.

[Tim Harford]

Do you think a better Internet was. And is there anything that Douglas writing or his practice as an entrepreneur teach us?

[Arvind Ethan David]

I think he used to say is that people are always gonna act according to human nature because it would be unnatural for them not to do so.

[Tim Harford]

Yes.

[Arvind Ethan David]

And so I think it's impossible to believe that obviously companies are gonna be profit seeking and media is going to seek to dominate as big an audience as possible. 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 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 Douglass was someone who was influential and deeply loved by the tech community. He was friends with Bill Gates and friends of Larry Ellison. And 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.

[Tim Harford]

Maybe, maybe they don't seem very nudgeable. But he was a very clever thinker and he influenced a lot of people. I'm curious, what do you think he would have made of ChatGPT and generative AI in general?

[Arvind Ethan David]

I think he would have loved it. I think he would have been obsessed by it. He tried even in his own life, in the computer game. He made Starship Titanic. They built a thing called Spooky Talk, which was a very crude sort of small language model. This is in 2000. But he was very passionate about trying to create this chatbot in the game that could 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 gonna build a Marvin, if you're going to build a thing with a prototype. People personality.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah. Gpp. Genuine people personality, as they say, then.

[Arvind Ethan David]

What 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.

[Tim Harford]

No, Well, I. I am really struck by the contrast between ChatGPT and Marvin. I mean, so, Marvin, I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed. And you're like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Marvin, could you just. Marvin, could you pick up that piece of paper? I don't know. Brain the size of a planet. They asked me to pick up a piece of paper, and that's Marvin. ChatGPT's the exact opposite. You fire up ChatGPT and you say, well, 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. It's so perky. My wife says, ChatGPT is definitely male. And I said, why do you think it's male? Which says, well, it's completely overconfident. It just keeps talking at you.

[Arvind Ethan David]

Yes. It marches forward with completely undeserved confidence.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah. So it's very, very different to Marvin.

[Arvind Ethan David]

But I tell you who it is. Like, it's like Eddie, the shipboard computer.

[Tim Harford]

It is very like Eddie.

[Arvind Ethan David]

And Eddie, of course, is the one who actually gets them in trouble. Eddie's the one who is supposed to be flying the ship and forgets to do it to make a cup of te. 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 the Galaxy Live show, which we're gonna open here in London in November.

[Tim Harford]

Sorry, I should say. So is that going to be like a performance of the audio play in the book or something totally different, like a nonfiction thing?

[Arvind Ethan David]

It's a whole new thing. We're building a fully emotional, 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.

[Tim Harford]

You gotta know where your towel is.

[Arvind Ethan David]

You have to know where your towel is. And if you forget one, the gift shop can supply. But one of the things we are looking at doing is saying rather than have an actor play Marvin, what if we just built Marvin? Cause you can now.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah, yeah. You just need to make ChatGPT considerably.

[Arvind Ethan David]

More depressive, considerably more depressing not to be possible. Nothing that a hammer and some screwdrivers can't achieve.

[Tim Harford]

I can't wait to see that. So just tell us when and where is this going to be happening?

[Arvind Ethan David]

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.

[Tim Harford]

And is it gonna be a limited runs to Christmas or is it going to be for the foreseeable future?

[Arvind Ethan David]

It's an initial four month run through to February and then we'll see.

[Tim Harford]

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 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.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster and level up every tool in their arsenal. T Mobile knows all about that. They're now the best network according to the experts at Ookla Speed test. And they're using that network to launch Super Mobile. The first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built in security and seamless satellite coverage. With Super Mobile, your performance, security and coverage are supercharged. With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand. With built in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients. And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite to mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid. That's your business. Supercharged. Learn [e-mail] seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky. Best network based on analysis by Ookla of Speedtest Intelligence data 1h 2025 run.

[iHeart Radio Announcer]

A business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad supported streaming Music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart streaming radio and podcasting. Call 848-44844 iHeart to get started. That's 844-844, iHeart.

[Tim Harford]

We're back. I'm Tim Harford and I'm talking to Arvind, Ethan David and I want to start this section with another clip from Arvind's book. And it's a clip of Douglas Adams himself doing a stand up routine about venomous snakes.

[Douglas Adams (archival audio)]

We asked apprehensively if any of the folk remedies or potions we'd heard about were any kind. Well, nine times out of ten they'll work fine. For the simple reason that nine snake bites out of ten, the victim doesn't get ill. Anyway, it's the last 10% that's the problem. 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 bites is often to overreact and give the poor snake a ritual beating, which doesn't really help in the identification. You don't know which exact snake it was. You can't treat the bite properly. Well, in that case, I said, could we perhaps take a snake bite detector kit with us to Komodo? Ah, of course you can, of course you can. Take as many as you like. Won't do 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 then? I asked. He blinked at me as if I was stupid. Well, what do you think you do? He said. You die, of course. That's what deadly means.

[Tim Harford]

Arvin. It's quite something to hear his voice. And it's a mini cautionary tale, I suppose.

[Arvind Ethan David]

It really is. He was, I think, possibly unique in this way. What we just heard is a world class bit of standup, 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 see.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah, tell us about that.

[Arvind Ethan David]

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 Aleema, 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 then he goes to Madagascar and meets the lemur and writes a piece about it for the Observer. And this was not in itself unusual. They sent six or seven other literary figures on these missions. What is unusual is Douglass becomes so obsessed, so interested in conservation and rare animals, that he befriends the zoologist Mark Kjwardin, and says to him, how about we spend the next year doing this?

[Tim Harford]

Yeah.

[Arvind Ethan David]

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.

[Tim Harford]

I mean, just the title, Last Chance to See. That's a lovely bit of black humor, because that's what you would generally put on a theater when a play's about to end its run, or 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 demand. But he's 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 back.

[Arvind Ethan David]

No. He was always obsessed with extinction. There's a great bit about the dodo in Dirk Gently where they go back in time to see the last dodo and Professor Chronotis weeps at the sight of it in its sort of stupid beauty. Yeah. Since Douglass did that, the seven animals that he saw, two of them have become extinct. So 25%, and that is terrifyingly about the right ratio. We've lost about 25% of the species of Earth in the last 25 years. And that's not slowing down.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah.

[Arvind Ethan David]

And it was that Armageddon that became the grand mission of Douglas's last years.

[Tim Harford]

Yes. Because he didn't just want to describe the problem, he wanted to find solutions. So, for example, with the gorillas. What was he doing with the gorillas?

[Arvind Ethan David]

So he was approached by a guy called Greg Cummings, who ran the Dian Fossey Gorilla foundation and asked for money. He got the sort of begging letter that many of us get, send 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, Douglas just went, look, enough of the band aids. What will it take to actually save the guerrillas? Which is a question no one had ever asked before. Yeah, he went, what he means, what do you mean? I mean actually save 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 gorillas safe forever. They put a price tag on it. And then Douglas spent a year of his life flying around the world, taking the director of the Dian Fossey Guerrilla foundation to meet the richest people on the planet to persuade them to fund this scheme. They didn't succeed. Sadly. They came close and the mountain gorilla's actually doing quite well. Cause they raised enough money. But that was the sort of mind he was. He was very happy to make fun of her problem. But unlike most people, certainly unlike most writers, he went one step further and would try and fix things.

[Tim Harford]

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 Adams approach to saving them?

[Arvind Ethan David]

What Douglas would say when people asked him why and why seems 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 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've been various experiments and Douglas asked the question why? Why would we do that? Is it 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.

[Tim Harford]

Yes, it's very Douglas Adams. So you've been working with Douglas voice and his image and his writings as you put together, and his friends and admirers as you put together this audiobook. You've immersed yourself in his thinking. What have you learned?

[Arvind Ethan David]

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.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah. Arvind, thank you so much for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Remind us the title of the audiobook.

[Arvind Ethan David]

Douglas Adams the Ends of the Earth.

[Tim Harford]

And that's available on Audible, Spotify, Pushkin fm, or wherever audiobooks are sold. I'm Tim Harford. I've been talking to Arvind, Ethan and 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 Fiennes and Ryan Billy. It's produced 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. Ben Nadaff Haffrey edited the scripts. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Christina Sullivan, Keira Posey, 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 [e-mail] cautionaryclub for exclusive bonus episodes, newsletters, ad free listening and other exciting perks. Alternatively, you can join Pushkin plus on our Apple show page for continued benefits from our show and others across the Pushkin Network.

[iHeart Radio Announcer]

Foreign.

[LG XBoom Advertiser]

Stop settling for weak sound. It's time to level up your game and bring the boom. Hit the town with the ultra durable LG X Boom portable speaker and enjoy vibrant sound wherever you go. Elevate your listening experience to new heights because, let's be real, your music deserves it. The future of sound is now with LG XBoom and for a limited time save [e-mail] with code fall25 Bring the.

[iHeart Radio Announcer]

Boom XBoom this is an iHeart podcast.