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

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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

what a wonderful morning what an interesting world

what a beautiful glen full of birdsong and sun how perfect this world is

what an interesting hole i 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 it.

It was made for me.

Designed precisely with my wants and my needs in mind.

It is mine.

Consider this.

Reflect on what a powerful idea it is.

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?

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.

What's happening?

It's getting too hot.

Why?

Why is it getting hot?

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

this world was built to have me in it.

This world was built to have me, and it just can't be after me.

It just can't be after me.

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

What's happening?

Stop it!

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 Demotions.

It comes with a subscription to the Total Perspective Vortex app, all for only $29.99 Altarian 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, 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 your book?

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.

Yes, he was in his own quiet way a master of the cautionary tale, but that is not the only connection between your project, Arvind, 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 Adams, The Ends of the Earth.

Arvind, when did you first encounter Douglas Adams, first as a writer and then as a man?

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

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 on the school play.

And for some insane reason, I decided to make Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency, a novel that includes time travel, ghosts, aliens, and exploding planets, Earths.

Perfect for a school play.

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

He came to see it.

So was he local?

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 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.

I mean, that is extraordinary.

He, I mean, he's a pretty big star by then, even if, oh, 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?

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.

Yeah.

And he didn't for the first five or six minutes.

Awkward.

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 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.

I was also a huge fan, never met him, but huge fan 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.

just loved it.

And for those who haven't encountered Douglas Adams, I was trying to think about how to describe him.

And well,

so my take is the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is

originally it was 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.

That's pretty good.

Yeah.

That's pretty good.

Yeah.

I mean, it's this kind of intergalactic adventure, but it's full of strange scenarios and thought experiments and and it's and it's very surreal and it's very very clever so that was when you met douglas and then

but but the friendship continued

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 yeah but yes for the last decade of his life and the first decade of my adult life we saw each other i would be 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 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.

And he died very young.

It was 2001 and he was only 49 years old.

How did that feel?

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.

Yeah.

So miserable.

But the work got left behind.

And

there was a lot of it.

There was more than people realize.

Five Hitchhiker's books, two Dirk Gently books, and then a huge volume of talks and lectures and articles and the archive.

Yeah, tell us about the archive.

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 cataloguing 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 VHSs 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 ever 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.

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 reels and reels of stuff and took it to Bristol.

Apparently, Bristol is the place that you digitize stuff.

And

we found a lot of very interesting stuff.

Talks he had given, Q ⁇ A's 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 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.

You know, 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.

And you decided to release this as an audio book.

Why that?

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

there 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 going to go talk to them all.

This was a great excuse to have long conversations with Stephen Fry and David Bedil 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 Douglas through his archive and then conversations about Douglas with those who knew him or his work best.

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

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.

Which would also have been a cool idea, but a different idea.

Exactly.

And so, yes, I think he was telling cautionary tales.

I think think he was also a worrier.

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 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.

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'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 all know, is the supercomputer designed to produce the answer 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.

And it's a hugely disappointing 42.

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.

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

Yeah.

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 favourite 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.

Yes.

And in the end,

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.

And their 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 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.

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T-Mobile knows all about that.

They're now the best network, according to the experts at OOCLA Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

With Supermobile, 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 more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.

where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by UCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

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Whether you're analyzing historical trends, exploring policy implications, or working through a business challenge, Claude helps you dig deeper into the complexity, rather than settling for the first explanation that seems reasonable.

It's built for people who enjoy the process of figuring things out.

The best insights come from thorough exploration.

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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 is all about social media, which I think is going to 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 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?

Aaron Powell, well, the guide itself,

this is how extraordinarily prescient he was.

This is the Hitchhiker's Guide, the 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.

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.

It's It's TripAdvisor or Wikipedia.

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, crowd-sourced 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.

Elon Musk is a big Douglas Adams fan, you said.

Okay, fine, keep going.

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 the planet Earth.

So yeah, I think you probably thought about social media and its dangers a little bit.

I 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 wrapper that just says, don't panic before you open it.

And the world might be a better pace if it did.

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 right, 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.

So, one of the contributors to your audio book 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, but 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?

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 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, 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.

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

Aaron Powell, do you think a better internet was possible?

And is there anything that Douglas's writing or

his practice

as an entrepreneur teach us?

I think 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.

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 Douglas 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 sort of wonder, maybe he would have nudged these people and nudged these companies in more interesting directions.

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

chat GPT and generative AI in general?

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 chat bot 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 going to build a Marvin, if you're going to build a thing with a prototype people personality.

Yeah.

GPP.

Genuine people personality, as they say.

Then 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.

No, well,

I am really struck by the contrast between

ChatGPT and Marvin.

I mean, Marvin, I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed.

And you're like, oh, Marvin, yeah, yeah, yeah, Marvin, could you just, you know, 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.

Chat GPT is the exact opposite.

You fire up Chat GPT 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 do it.

It's so

perky.

My wife says, Chat GPT is definitely male.

And I said, why do you think it's male?

She says, well, it's completely overconfident.

It just keeps talking at you.

Yes, it marches forward

with completely undeserved confidence.

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

But I tell you who it is like.

It's like Eddie, the shipboard computer.

It is very like Eddie.

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 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 the Galaxy live show, which we're going to open here in London in November.

And is it?

Sorry, so is that going to be like a performance of the audio play in the book or something totally different, like a non-fiction thing?

It's a whole new thing.

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.

You've got to know where your towel is.

You have to know where your towel is and if you get 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 play Marvin,

what if we just built Marvin?

Because you can now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You just need to make ChatGPT considerably more depressive.

Considerably more depressing.

It's got to be possible.

Nothing that a hammer and 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?

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.

And is it going to be a limited run?

It runs to Christmas, or is it going to be for the foreseeable future?

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

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.

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 an OOCLA Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

With Supermobile, 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 more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by OCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

The stories I explore often feature smart people making decisions with incomplete information, something we all face daily.

The difference is having tools that help you think more thoroughly about what you might be missing.

Claude excels at this kind of collaborative exploration.

Its new learning mode lets you see exactly how it works through problems so you can see how it found the answer you may have been stuck on, the considerations, the alternative perspectives and the potential blind spots.

Whether you're analysing historical trends, exploring policy implications, or working through a business challenge, Claude helps you dig deeper into the complexity, rather than settling for the first explanation that seems reasonable.

It's built for people who enjoy the process of figuring things out.

The best insights come from thorough exploration.

See why the world's best problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner and try Claude for free at Claude.ai/slash slash cautionary tales.

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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.

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 reason that nine snake bites 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 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.

If 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?

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 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

Arvin, it's quite something to hear his voice and it's a mini cautionary tale, 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 See.

Yeah.

Tell us about that.

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 then he goes to Madagascar and meets a Lima 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 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.

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.

I mean, just the title, Last Chance to See, that's a lovely bit of black humour because that's what you would generally put on a theatre when a play is about to end its run or 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 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.

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 Cronotis weeps at the sight of it and

its sort of stupid beauty.

Since Douglas 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.

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

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?

So he was approached by a guy called Greg Cummings, who ran the Diane Fossey Guerrilla 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, Douglas just went, look, enough of the band-aids.

What will it take to actually save the gorillas?

Which is a question no one had ever asked before.

He went, what he means, but 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 gorilla 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 Diane Fossey Gorilla 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 is actually doing quite well, because they raised enough money.

But that was the sort of mind he was.

He was very happy to make fun of a problem.

But unlike most people, certainly unlike most writers, he went one step further and would try and fix things.

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?

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 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 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.

Yes, it's 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 audiobook.

You've immersed yourself in his thinking.

What have you learned?

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.

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.

Douglas Adams, The Ends of the Earth.

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, 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 Fynes, and Ryan Dilly.

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 Nadaf Hafrey 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, Kiera 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 Club at patreon.com/slash cautionary club 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.

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