Dan Snow's History Hit - Brexit History Showdown with Robert Tombs

Episode Date: February 20, 2021

Five years after the announcement of the Brexit referendum I am joined on the podcast by Robert Tombs, author of The Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe, for a Brexit history showdown. In this thought-provoking conversation Robert, a fantastic historian absolutely steeped in European history sets out why he believes it was in the best interests of the UK to leave the European project.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hits, everybody. It's the episode we've all been waiting for. It's the big showdown. It's the Brexit history showdown. Now that Brexit's over, I thought we could plunge in with both feet,

try and change some minds. This is the episode in which I talk to Robert Toombs. He's just published This Sovereign Isle. He was a big supporter of the Leave side during the Brexit debate here in the UK. He wanted to leave the EU, the European Union. I wanted to stay. This is not like the Lincoln-Douglas debates between two evenly matched orators, both brimming with passion for their cause, because we're not evenly matched. He is a professor. He's an author of wonderful books, particularly on French history. I'm just a Muppet with a podcast. But this was a chance to have a little discussion, now that it's all over, in a friendly way about why someone so steeped in European history as Robert Toombs became convinced that it was in the best interests of Britain to leave the EU. And this was a really enjoyable, thought-provoking conversation.

It's one that I wish I'd had a few years ago. And whilst we didn't change each other's minds, because that's not how it usually works, it was definitely good to hear some of the Brexit arguments made in such an articulate and thoughtful way by such an interesting man. If you wish to watch documentaries about that long Anglo-French rivalry, let me tell you, we've got quite a few of them. You take your pick. We've got early medieval, we've got Norman conquest on History Hit TV, got a little high medieval, got a little Hundred Years War action going on there. You can see Jonathan Sumption talking about the Hundred Years War on History Hit TV. But we also

come, of course, to the long 18th century and the giant clashes for global domination between Britain and France, culminating in the Battle of Waterloo and the Battle of Trafalgar, both of which we have documentaries about. Trust me, if you're interested in Anglo-French rivalry, we got it covered at History Hit TV. The Netflix for history. Head over to historyhit.tv, sign up, enter the whole new world of historical viewing. You're going to absolutely love it. Only the other day, a listener to the podcast got in touch with me on the internet, on the interweb, and told me that his, a listener to the podcast got in touch with me on the internet, on the interweb, and told me that his parents were so into the podcast, they decided to upgrade their broadband just so they could get History Hit TV. So if you're listening to this, that

particular family, I hope you're enjoying HistoryHit.tv. Thank you very much for signing up. In the meantime, everybody, enjoy this episode of me having a discussion with Robert Toombs. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure. Thank you for asking me. We sit on different sides of the old Brexit debate, but what we share is a great passion for history. You as a leading academic, me as a jokey broadcaster, but we share a passion for history. And I am sure you do as well. I see history everywhere in this debate. In fact, with so much modern politics, whether it's Trump

appealing directly to history to make America great again, whether it's Putin's case for himself, Scottish independence, Brexit, history is just central to all these debates, but it sort of gets overlooked by the mainstream. Well, if I can be slightly heretical, I'd say I absolutely agree with you. History is everywhere. And I think in some ways, we'd be better off if we had a little bit less of it sometimes. I think the debate about Europe and the other things you mentioned are all fundamentally, when you really dig down a bit, are all about the way people understand the past, or the ideas they have about history. And they're often deeply felt ideas, but they're often not really very critically defensible ideas. And I sometimes wish if we

had a bit less historical rhetoric and perhaps a tiny bit more historical analysis, or sometimes if we just agreed that we'd leave history out of it, we'd find some of these debates rather less passionate and rather less heated. Yeah, I agree. Funnily enough, it often comes up on this podcast as other ever occasions in which perhaps there's a bit too much history. And that is, as you say, heretical. And you point out in your book and in interviews you've done recently that almost the problem with the Brexit debate is that history was capacious enough to arm both sides with arguments

that were really quite compelling. And I agree. Should we rehearse some of those arguments? Let's both make the argument for Brexit from the point of view of history. Is it a Linda Colley? Is it a British exceptionalism idea? Is it a, dare I say, a slightly Whiggish idea of history? What is the most compelling argument for Brexit, do you think? Let me give you the pro-Brexit one first. It would be, as you say, that Britain, and perhaps particularly England, have a unique relationship with Europe and the rest of the world. And this would be things like ancient devotion to parliamentary government, a long existing tradition of independence and self-government, the common law system very

different from the EU's Roman law assumptions. You might even say a greater suspicion of the state. Therefore, a dislike of a system that can be seen as constantly interfering and unnecessarily interfering. So all those things you could say were pushing us towards Brexit. Let's just stay on that for a second. It's so fascinating. And as a Canadian, I'm not unaware of the very profound links across the Atlantic and the fact that those imperial vestiges slash new dynamic countries, Canada, Australia, South Africa, USA, they are very different to the remnants of the French and Portuguese empires. I absolutely see that. And I also think that Britain's kind of imperial journey over the last 200 years makes it less obvious to people why you should want to

surrender sovereignty in order to seek advantage. It's more obvious when you've had German armies marching across Belgium in 1914 and 1940. We've had a different journey. Okay, I'm going to say I'm sceptical about this argument, but I agree it's a very cogent one. And it appeals to people on both sides, on one side positively and on the other side negatively. Therefore, we have these links with other parts of the world and Europe. And this makes us less European. And that may well be true. And of course, as you say, our experience of the 20th century was much less traumatic. And hence,

I think it's demonstrable that we don't feel that the EU is saving us from a return to the 1930s in the way that people in some European countries do, or indeed, if you're an Eastern European to Russian domination, or if you're a Southern European from some countries, a return to dictatorship. You know, we haven't got those fears that are always, I think, in the back of the minds of many of my European friends who say, well, you know, if the EU broke down or if there wasn't an EU, wouldn't we be in danger of returning to Franco or Salazar or whatever? And I just think that those are not fears that most people in this country deep down feel. And so, yes, I mean, you did it very eloquently. You can produce arguments for saying why we should not be in the EU. And you can also produce arguments for saying

why we don't need to be or why we don't feel the need to be in the EU. But as I said, I'm a bit sceptical about the extent to which these are the real explanation for Brexit. And hence, although a historian, as you said, I'm kind of letting down the corporation by saying that I think that history is not the crucial explanation of this. Well, in that case, at the end of the conversation, I'm going to ask you whether it was Robert Toombs, the historian that was campaigning for Brexit, or just Robert Toombs, citizen and... I'm too old for them to be separated. You know this too, as you were saying earlier, once you get really deeply into history, it does affect your thinking about practically everything, just automatically. And you can't help thinking in

historical terms. But I'm a European historian, I'm really a historian of France. Therefore, I think of it from a European perspective and not just from a British perspective. You certainly are a wonderful historian of France. Your book, That Sweet Enemy, I think is one of the most brilliant books. I enjoyed it enormously. For anyone who's not familiar with the book, at the end of each chapter of the history, you talk in a more openly subjective way about what you think that history means, where the blame lay at various junctures of Anglo-French history, but it's wonderful.

But anyway, I'm going to ask, so if you're sceptical about that historical argument, what are the other historical influence on you as you made this decision to come out to Brexit? Well, it was partly my French historian hat, if you like, because this is a slightly roundabout answer. But, you know, when people say, oh, yeah, but Britain or England has a very different historical tradition, you know, we're so attached to our independence, to democracy. I think, well, what about the French? They've had umpteen revolutions. You could hardly say the French are not attached to liberty, to freedom, to the idea of democracy, in some ways, even more so than we are. And what about Italy? What about Poland? What about Hungary?

All these countries in the 19th century, which is my period, had these struggles for independence in a way that we really haven't had to do. So you might say, well, why are they still willing to remain in the EU when we left it? A thought experiment. If Hungary next week decided to leave the EU, then of course, we'd be looking for historical explanations and say, well, of course, all this was predictable because of their history. But they're not going to do that. The question I ask myself is, given all these historical traditions, which in many ways make it very difficult for European nations to accept a confederal system or power in Brussels and all that. Why do they accept it and we reject it? And therefore, I don't think it's because our history is wholly different or our attachment to democracy or liberty are so much greater. I think that's demonstrably not true. One of the things

you have to look at, it seems to me, is the rather more boring circumstances in which we made the decision. And therefore, look not so much at, you know, the long historical story as the rather more boring circumstances in which we made the decision. And therefore, not so much the long historical story as the rather short-term historical circumstances of our deciding to leave. The 2008 crash, rather than the Danish conquest of England a thousand years ago. Shall we talk about some of the reasons that you think that made Remainers so certain that history was on their side? Where's the best place to start? I mean, this very difficult idea of the archipelago in which we live, Englishness, Britishness, and the assumption of uniformity across the isles. Recently, lots of historians have pointed to that. The complexity of

identity, even within the isles, means that perhaps we're not so different to Europeans as we once thought. Yeah, I think that's true. There are differences between all countries and also similarities. Or the fact that, as you point out in your book, for many periods of our history, we were in transnational polities of sorts anyway. Yes, that's true. Of course, going back to the point you made earlier, the great transnational polity that we were in, which was the empire, was a very different one from the continent of Europe. So I think, you know, there is something in the argument that Brexit has some connection with our imperial history, inevitably. That's not to say it's an attempt to recreate the

empire, which seems to me to be silly. But your question was really about how one explains remain views. And okay, it's partly because I'm on the other side, I have to admit I find these somewhat more difficult to explain. If opinion polls are helpful, with a pinch of salt and all that, quite a small number of people in Britain have said that they are deeply attached to the idea of European integration. It comes out at about 5% of the electorate. So of course, they're often very articulate people. And so they can create a narrative, which is one of the electorate. So of course, they're often very articulate people. And so they can create a narrative, which is one of the nation state being outdated, internationalism being the wave of the future. And also the other things that we kind of touched on, the EU keeps the peace in Europe, leaving the EU is a backward looking and isolationist step and that kind of thing.

There are people who believe all those things, which I don't, but I can see how they can be believed. But for many people in Britain and all over the continent, the EU is essentially a practical arrangement, hopefully for making them better off. And most people who voted to remain said that they had voted because they feared the economic consequences of leaving. So I think one has to look in a sense at, you were saying, the very recent history and not the long-term history. Because you can go back to the Battle of Hastings and you can think of Henry VIII

and you can think of the Spanish Armada, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you will say we couldn't be members of the EU. It's clearly not the case. Lots of people did think we should be members of the EU. Therefore, I think it comes down really to a much closer look at how people understood their present circumstances and not only looking for some historically deterministic story that caused us to behave the way we did. But if I think of my own colleagues, of course, it's notorious that 90% of academics were opposed to Brexit. For many people, it would be the thought that many of their students come from the EU, they have links with the EU academically, they get funding from the EU and so on. Therefore, if you were to say,

ah, yes, but what about the Battle of Waterloo? These sorts of things simply wouldn't count in their consciousness, they would think of them as irrelevant. And the sort of history that I guess does count for them is this rather broad and general sense that the tide of history is moving towards supranational organisations. Though, of course, that doesn't seem to be happening anywhere else apart from in the EU. Yes, I feel a bit seen because despite not being super articulate, I feel I'm in that little weird 5% who have that kind of millenarian view about global government, which I often get derided for. But we can perhaps come fact that for the last 250 years, Britain was a global hegemon has possibly blinded us to the fact that previous to that, as you point out in your book, invasions across the channel were very frequent. Britain had huge entanglements with Europe. But a more fundamental point, which is what happens in Europe affects Britain, whether we like it or not.

It strikes me that policymakers in the southeast of England have got two conundrums. One is the Isles, and it's the heterodox makeup of the Isles and the difficulty of establishing a satisfactory status quo, if that's the right way to put it. The second is what on earth to do in the invasion ports of Europe? What the hell do you do about the Belgians, the Dutch, the Normans, the Gallic tribes? And it strikes me that when Julius Caesar approached the Channel Coast, that's what our Celtic forebears had to decide, is do you intervene in France before he arrives in Kent? And whether you see an Athelstan trying to marry his sisters off to European princes, it's Elizabeth I intervening in the French Civil War, which you know much more about than I

do, or in the Low Countries. We have scrambled over the years to have influence beyond the White Cliffs of Dover. And I think that's the bit of history that I did find quite pertinent. If you are presented with this gigantic reality on the continent, is it not best to engage with it? I'm sure we should engage with it as we shall with its various member states. The question is, do we want to be part of it? Now, as I said, I don't think history tells us what we have to do, but it does tell us what we have done in the past. And as you say, exercising influence and being very aware of dangers from the continent, and after all, there have been an awful lot of dangers, as well as the benefits, you know, the attractions for trade, for culture,

meant that we were constantly engaged, and no doubt we always will be engaged. But one thing that I point out in the book, and I don't know whether you think this is a good point, is that since the end of the Hundred Years' War, since the reign of Mary Tudor, there has been no attempt by any British ruler, monarch, prime minister, whatever, until we joined the European Economic Community to have a permanent organic link with any part of Europe. We've always wanted to be a free agent, engaging, as you say, reacting against threats, taking advantage of opportunities, but not as Mary Tudor wanted to marry Philip of Spain and inherit Burgundy, or her son, you know, if she'd had one to inherit Burgundy. Elizabeth I was very keen to keep out

of that kind of entanglement, wouldn't marry a French or a Spanish prince and so on. And we had the Hanoverian connection, of course, for quite a long time, but it was extremely unpopular. connection, of course, for quite a long time, but it was extremely unpopular. And most people didn't want us to be too involved in European politics. Now, does that tell us anything? Well, it may tell us that we've always had other axes to grind or other fish to fry. And we're often much more interested in what was happening outside Europe than inside. Okay, the threat or potential threats have often been there, as you say. And I think it's certainly the case that when Macmillan applied to join the EEC, the idea that a united Europe could be a threat to us, and therefore we should be in it to prevent it from being a danger was very real. It was certainly one of the motives. But I would say now, and you may say this is terribly

complacent and reckless, it seems to me that the EU, as it has developed as a rather weak collection of states, is not a threat to us. And that therefore, we no longer really have to engage with it to the extent that we thought for 50 years, from 1970 onwards, roughly, we had to do. from 1970 onwards roughly, we had to do. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. I'm talking to Robert Toombs about Brexit, on which we disagree. It's exciting. More after this.

Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week

douglas adams the genius behind theitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Here are the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. I was just thinking of the rot setting when Charles II gave back Dunkirk,

captured with the grit of the new model army on the dunes of Dunkirk. As I referred to earlier, the other great question, and this is where our relations with Europe have always been also about relations within the isles. And sure enough, Brexit seems to have dealt an arguably mortal blow to the Union. We'll see. Who knows? Were we complacent in thinking of the United Kingdom as a settled constitutional arrangement?

Were we complacent in our history? Do you think you guys priced in the potential upheaval within the aisles that Brexit might cause? Possibly not. I take a rather different view, and perhaps a more realpolitik view. Your view, I think, which is a very respectable one, and you may be absolutely right, that in a sense that countries eventually do the things that their peoples feel deep down are good for them. So Scotland will become independent because now arguably a majority of Scots feel that that's what they want, therefore that's what they'll do. I sort of feel that people often don't do what they would like to do because

they realise that the costs of doing it are so high. And here my analogy would be with Catalonia. Here, my analogy would be with Catalonia. Being a member of the EU makes it very tempting for parts of multi-ethnic states to break away. Because what's the risk? You risk becoming like Luxembourg or Slovenia. Well, what's the problem with that? That's great. And I think that the membership of the EU, by making this all seem very safe and cost-free, tended to encourage separatism, or at least a strong sense of regional autonomy in many parts of Europe. Now, that may be a good thing, or it may be a bad thing. But it seems to me that Brexit makes that much, much, much less feasible for Scotland to become independent of the United Kingdom when the United Kingdom has left the EU,

and where there's no guarantee that Scotland will become a member of the EU. when the United Kingdom has left the EU, and where there's no guarantee that Scotland will become a member of the EU. And if it did, it would be a very small and marginalised member of the EU. It seems to me that although Brexit might make many Scots very annoyed, it makes the possibility of Scotland becoming an independent country more and more remote. You may well be right. You've talked in the book and you talked in this interview about there are no great currents of history. You know, Barack Obama probably wasn't right when he talked about the arc of history and bending towards various things. But there's two very contradictory things going on at the moment. I grew up in the 90s when we were told the nation state was an anachronism and we were all going to be subsumed into these transnational blocks.

And in a way, of course, globalization technology is pushing towards that, the growth of a kind of transnational, liberal, highly mobile, middle class citizens of the world. But that seems to also be producing pushback and the nation state and indeed nationalist strongmen seem to be coming back into fashion from Brazil to Poland and various other places. Do you think it's in any way useful to try and think about the historical life cycle of the nation state? Or do you think we are just whistling in the wind? I think you put it very well. I think it looked as though globalization was making the nation state anachronistic, and that governments would simply not be able to control things, that they would become, in a sense, irrelevant. They would themselves give away much of their power to

international bodies or to other sorts of institutions, and we would all become much more footloose and less attached to a place. And that clearly is true for some people. David Goodhart famously called them anywhere people. I think many of those are the ones who are keenest on the EU. Though, interestingly, more British people live in the Anglosphere than live in the EU. So there must also be quite a large body of this international middle class, if you like, which is not particularly attached to the EU, which is much more attached to relationships with America or with Australia and so on. But there is certainly, or there was at least, a sense that globalisation was the wave of

the future. But since China has been behaving in the way it has, since, of course, the pandemic, and also the political kickback, which you rightly identify, which, of course, many people dismiss as populism, but it seems to me it's a wish by many people who feel that their interests are being ignored to hang on to the things that they have most confidence in, which is their country and their government. This certainly has made for a very powerful reaction. Of course, it's tempting for people on the anti-Brexit wing, as it were, to say, oh, yes, it's all the same thing. You know, Boris Johnson, Trump, all these people are the same. They represent the same thing. In some senses, they come from similar grievances.

They represent the same kind of desires among a large part of the population. But the kind of thing that this is manifested in is very much influenced by the political culture of the country in which it takes place. In some countries, you have populist politicians who are wrecking the whole political system, or who are creating new political parties. What have we got? We've got an old Italian prime minister who has, in a sense, rejuvenated the governing party that's been in power most of the time since the 1880s. It's hardly a very revolutionary populist movement. since the 1880s. It's hardly a very revolutionary populist movement. These things have similarities, but they're not the same thing and they don't produce the same results. So I guess come back to that final question I asked you a bit earlier, really, but

you made your decision as, of course, a historian, of course, armed with lots of context, but you made your decision as someone looking at the present, trying to weigh up the short-term practical benefits and drawbacks of being in the EU, did you? That's fascinating to hear. Well, I think I would say you can't stop being a historian. I'm sure you'd agree with that. And in some ways, my historical analysis was first of all to say, is the EU going in a direction that seems to me historically viable? And I feared that it wasn't, that it was moving away from the kind of democracy that Europe has been trying for a long time to build. And it was probably trampling on the deepest loyalties of Europeans, which are

to their countries. So I felt worried about the way the EU was going. And I think that was probably the main thing. The other thing And I think that was probably the main thing. The other thing was the feeling that, thanks to David Cameron, we were being forced to vote. And therefore, one could say, well, what will be the effect of this vote on the next six months or the next five years? But I kind of, as a historian, felt what will be the effect of this vote in the very long term? And if we vote to stay in the EU, is this something that we'll be able to live with for a generation or more? And I thought probably it wasn't. What's the measure of success? So if you talk about it in a generation's time,

what would a bad situation have looked like? And what will a good post Brexit situation look like? My worst scenario would have been for us, essentially through fear of change, to tie ourselves to an EU that was becoming more and more unpopular with its citizens, more and more economically unsuccessful, which was giving rise to extremist political movements in many parts of Europe as a reaction against the kind of high-minded bureaucratic system that the EU really is. And that also we might well be heading to another Eurozone crisis, which would cause another economic disaster. So I was afraid of our being stuck in that system. What would success be like? Well, it would be for me, of course, for Britain to be able to maintain itself as a prosperous and secure, independent democracy, to level up, that's certainly an essential aspect of Brexit. If we don't do that, then you could well say, well, the whole thing's been a waste of time and effort.

creative kind than we have done in the last 50 or 60 years. And of course, to raise the very important point that you raised earlier, that Brexit will consolidate the union. On that final point, I do think that Britain's, well, certainly politicians and lots of sort of intellectuals' obsession with its role in the world is deeply confusing. Is the EU a method for somehow prolonging Britain's global relevance, or is the opposite true? Well, I find all that deeply confusing and odd. Do French intellectuals talk about France charting an independent way in the world? Well, they talk about France running Europe, in the sense that's the great project that France has been following since the 1950s. This is the great gamble, that France will build a European system to which it will hand over much of its independence, but that that won't matter because essentially France will

be providing the brains and will be running it. Our idea has never been that. I think we've never really tried very hard to be running the EU. We've tried to be good members of the club and so on, but not really running it. I don't think we've had a very clear international policy. It's tended to be either being the American's best friend or being a good member of the European club or both simultaneously. And it seems to me that's not really a national policy.

Maybe we can never have one again. But, and here I'm a bit of a heretic, you earlier on were talking about how Britain had been the hegemon for 250 years, and now we're not. I'm not really convinced that we ever really were. The way I think we should look at our history internationally is that we have for a long time been one of the half dozen or so most powerful states in the world, certainly since the beginning of the 18th century, along with Russia, Germany, France, and of course, more recently, the United States and now China. But we've never run the world. In the 19th century, we had often very little influence on what was happening in Europe.

We were terrified of being invaded by the French. We had endless imperial disasters by trying to do too much. And so I think now we're really in the sort of position that we've been in for a very long time. We haven't got an empire anymore. And if you think that's what really defines the greatness of a nation, then we're a nation in decline. But then everybody's lost their empire. And I don't believe that the empire was what gave Britain its influence or its wealth, rather the other way around. And in any case, the empire was to a large extent a drain. So I think that we should actually be a bit less worried about what we do in the world. And if you wanted a somewhat cynical summary of our possible strategy, it would come from Lord Palmerston when he famously said, England has no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests. And we need to work out what our interests are and the countries with which we will cooperate in trying to bring them about. And those interests include peace and

democracy and so on. But I don't think we should feel we've got to attach ourselves, whether to the Americans or to the EU, in order to have our proper say in what happens in a world which affects us all. Yep, I don't deny that. I find that endless debate very peculiar, and it's tied up with the key question of the Winston Churchill bust in the bloody Oval Office. If I hear one more thing about that, I'm going to jump off the building. I agree. It's terribly humiliating and demeaning to be obsessed with this. I was glad when I heard the Prime Minister on television the other day, he didn't use the phrase special relationship. If all politicians would stop using that phrase, it would be an awful lot better off.

It should be absolutely banned, Robert Toombs. We agree at last. We have reached the ultimate synthesis. I really enjoyed that. Thank you so much. Thank you very much for inviting me onto your podcast. Tell everyone what the book's called. It's called This Sovereign Isle, Britain in and out of Europe. Lovely. Thank you very much indeed. Well, thank you. Hi everyone. Thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you are probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms, but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour, head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars,

and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us, and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs, and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.