Dan Snow's History Hit - The History of Social Media with Kara Swisher

Episode Date: February 4, 2021

Facebook was founded on the 4th of February 2004 and began as a tool to stay in touch with friends and family, but has ended up being a place where you can plan insurrectionist movements and anti-vax rallies. Today I am joined by American tech journalist Kara Swisher to talk about Facebook, social media and the history of tech and what the future holds for the industry.Kara has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and is currently an opinion writer for The New York Times. She also co-founded the Recode conference. If you would like to hear more from Kara then she presents the Sway Podcast with the New York Times about power and influence. She also co-hosts Pivot with NYU Professor Scott Galloway offering sharp, unfiltered insights into the biggest stories in tech, business, and politics.

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. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. This episode is first broadcast on the 4th of February. Today is the anniversary of the founding of a little business called FaceBook.

You may have heard of it. It's pretty important. It began as a tool to stay in touch with folks and have some idle social moments whilst online. It ended up being a place where you can plan insurrectionary movements and anti-vax rallies. So to talk all about Facebook, but also social media, the history of tech, I've got one of my heroes on the pod. I've been hoping to have her on the pod for years, and this felt like a big, important anniversary and also a huge time for her. Tara Swisher is an American journalist.

She's been described as the most powerful tech journalist. She's probably one of the most powerful journalists in the world. She was recently credited with ending the career of the CEO of Parler, almost single-handedly, after a robust interview with him when he demonstrated that he didn't have a clue what he was doing. She has an extraordinary story. She went out to San Francisco. She worked for the Wall Street Journal out there in 1997, and she realized something remarkable was going on.

As you'll hear in this podcast, she ended up meeting all of the tech moguls when they were working out of their garages and basements. She's now everywhere where tech is talked about. She is an opinion writer at New York Times. You'll hear that she has a couple of podcasts, including Sway with the New York Times, and she's listened to by millions of people all over the world trying to make sense of this moment that we're in. She is funny and brilliant, and it was a huge, huge pleasure to have her on the podcast talking about Facebook, but more importantly, just about the history of tech, what it all means, and perhaps what the future is going to bring. If you love history and your history needs are not being met by the

traditional media, you need to go to History Hit TV. It's like Netflix for history. It's a new digital channel devoted to history. It's got the world's best historians. It's got hundreds of hours of your favourite old documentaries, but also brand new material, more being added all the time. We've got huge plans for this year. Thanks to the vast number of subscribers that have joined us over the last year or two. We've got some big budget productions going on at the moment. So exciting. Huge, huge thank you, as ever, to all of you who have joined the revolution. If you want to check it out, please go to historyhit.tv and have a look at the newly relaunched site. Available now on Roku and all sorts of other platforms. In the meantime, everyone, here is Kara Swisher. Enjoy.

and all sorts of other platforms. In the meantime, everyone, here is Cara Swisher. Enjoy. Cara, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. No problem. I've been a big fan of yours for years. I'm so struck. Can I just start with your story? Sure. It's long. I'm really old. Which part? No, you're not. You're in the prime of life. Okay. You're in the prime of life. You arrived in San Francisco when things were kind of going crazy.

Now, was that intentional? Was one of those remarkable moments of luck? I mean, were you a tech person in your teens and out east? No, no. I started covering tech for the Washington Post, actually. I covered AOL, which was the original commercial online company, and they were headquartered near Washington, D.C. in Virginia. And so I started covering the very nascent online services business right after the internet was made commercial by the U. the US government, which involved Al Gore and many others. They allowed this public thing to become commercial. And so I was covering the early days of that. And so it led me eventually to Silicon Valley in the mid 90s. I got there in 95 or 96, something like that. When I was writing a book about AOL, I started going out there to

visit the very early Amazons and Netscapes and things like that. And so I was sort of one of the first people to, I think, recognize the power of the internet and understand what it was going to do, that it was the latest media, whether it was radio or television or print or the Gutenberg Bible or whatever. I think I really was on to the idea that this particular medium was the next big change. And then I followed it by covering the mobile industry really closely once I got out here, because I saw that trend pretty clearly early on. And so I just kept covering it. And I met a lot of the founders of these companies when they were a startup. So Jeff Bezos, when he had just a few employees, the Google guys in their garage, et cetera, et cetera. So I met them early.

That's my only claim. I just, I saw it before a garage, et cetera, et cetera. So I met them early. That's my only claim. I saw it before a lot of other reporters, for sure. I love the fact, I was watching The Fugitive, and you were hanging out with the Google guys in their garage. I can't believe it. Yeah, I was. Yeah, I wasn't hanging out with them. We're not friends. But I definitely saw it early, and I did understand it way before that when AOL came into, everyone makes fun of AOL, but AOL was the first way a lot of people got online. There was an expression that AOL used that was so easy to use, no wonder it's number one. Well, it was the idea of using technology in an ease of use way to do communications or media or entertainment or anything, you know, anything. And now, of course, coup making in the United States, that's how we make coups here is online. And then we broadcast it all. And then

it's used by the FBI to convict us of sedition, which is really a lovely end to this whole coda of what happened. But initially it was for cat videos and now it's for stupid coup attempts in which you do the crimes in front of online services, which is just to me, I'm amazed by that. Like, Hey, Hey, this is being recorded. I'm making coup people. Well, okay, I'm gonna ask you about which bit you're amazed by. I thought you'd be amazed about the insurrection. But from everything I've heard of you, you probably weren't amazed by that. No, I wasn't. I actually wrote about it two years ago saying this is where it's going to lead. Those are the exact words. I said, what if Trump lies about the election in a column in 2019? And I was talking about how dangerous he had been becoming and how this stuff

is going to lead up to bad news. And so I said, what if in the election he declares that it's a fraud and then he urges his followers into a coup-like situation? What is Twitter going to do then? And so I kept posing this question to people over the past two years because I thought that's just where it was going to lead. And it did. I hate being wrong, but it was pretty easy to see how radicalization was moving and how it does move. And whether it's that or anti-vax or QAnon or whatever. Talking about prediction, is it very difficult for you now to go back and talk about your early history in the Valley and the Bay Area because of what you now know? Or have you got contemporary notes and all your columns and all your thinking? Do you remember those heady days?

I was pretty questionable about them. When I go back and look at a lot of them, I was quite like, this is a lot of power coalescing in a small group of people who are not very educated on lots of things like history. And so early on, I was very much worried about concentration of power only because I'm a history major. I was interested in history. And I watched as other industries, in this country, at least whether it was airlines or trains or oil, we have a long history in this country of trust busting. And I felt like it had the same echoes of

concentration of power in the hands of a few people and the inability of government to deal with it. And I was worried as I saw the things that I liked about the internet being abused by game players who just gamed it for malevolent means. And you could see that, whether it was Alex Jones or anybody else. And so you could start to see, especially as social media took over, a real, if you're just a student of history, you know what's going to happen here. You know what I mean? It's not the most difficult analysis to make when you're watching. Well, thank you for the shout out for students of history, because we're getting beaten all around the beltway by the STEM subjects at the moment. So thank you for the support. No, history is very important. But one of the things that's interesting, someone asked me the

other day about whether this was worse. And one of the early columns I wrote for the Times is about how it's not worse than other medias in that it's the same kind of thing. It's just it weaponizes and amplifies. And it also directs questions to individuals as opposed to a billboard or a newsreel. Hitler didn't need Instagram to kill all those people or Mussolini or Stalin or anybody or Genghis Khan didn't need Snapchat or no, that wouldn't have worked.

You know, Twitter, no, didn't need Twitter. They all managed to get their propaganda out there just fine. In Hitler's case, in Mussolini's case, they used newsreels, right? Or Lenny Riefenstahl wandering around with her camera. And in a good case, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt used the radio quite a bit. John Kennedy used television. These are not new techniques. It's just that this particular medium goes viral and everything else.

And so you could imagine, think about a Stalin with a Twitter feed. Well, that's interesting. Comical as it is to think about, Duterte is doing that in the Philippines and his extrajudicial killings and his propaganda, his attacks on journalists. He's just using the tools of the moment or Erdogan in Turkey. Going back to the early days, was it self-conscious? Did people in Iron Bridge in the 18th century or George Stevenson when he was invented the railway, did they go like, this is a new paradigm. I'm going to change the whole world. It's going to be amazing. Was that how people were talking in the 90s? Did they go, this is the wheel,

this is the printing press, this is railways? Was there a certainty there? Yes, absolutely. I remember meeting Steve Case and he said, I'm going to change the world. And at first I was like, you're crazy. And then I'm like, ah, he's right. And one of the things, when I first encountered browsers, really, I was on a fellowship at Duke University and I downloaded a whole book onto the server, onto my computer. And I was like, oh my God, I just downloaded a book. And it was slow and I messed up the system there. And one of the system administrators was mad at me. And I said, I downloaded a book. And he's like, so what? And I'm like, are you kidding? Wow, this is a big deal. People did understand, I think, the power of it. And that's who got in early. I think at Jeff Bezos, he called it the world's biggest

bookstore. You don't remember that. That's what he called it. Everyone was mad at him. They're like, it's not true. It's not true. But it really was true, right? He was using it as you could get any book in the world and most stores could only supply, I don't know, 10,000 SKUs or whatever the number of books you can have in a bookstore. And so that was a big controversy when he called it that. But I thought, oh, he's exactly right. It's the world's biggest anything store. And that's, you know, that's the title of Brad Stone book about Amazon. And so you could just begin to see that digital and now you see it in the pandemic, the companies that have done the best are digital companies, right? They're not the airlines or the hotels or even the media companies. It's all the digital companies who have risen in value through no innovation, just because they happen to be there at the time when people needed

digital means to do things, whether it's delivery or communications or media or entertainment or whatever. You suggest that any educated history grad would have realized from the absolute beginning that there was the seeds of an existential threat to democracy in these fun tools. The rest of us were all getting in touch with high school friends. And you were sitting around going, I think one day this is going to be a direct threat to the liberal democratic consensus. So it was baked in at the beginning. But was that just an accident? Was it just a quirk of its DNA?

Define accident. So I was a propaganda studies major. So I saw it. I was like, huh, they're doing this in China. They're doing this in Nazi Germany. They're doing this. If you have even a passing knowledge of propaganda, you could see how these tools were incredible. They were like a gift to dictators or a gift to people who want to trick people. They're a gift to cheaters or a gift to hackers or a gift to scammers. It's also a wonderful place to do a Bernie meme. It's not one or the other. It can be used in a malevolent way. And so one of my focuses was the architecture of these businesses. In some cases, like a Snapchat or other sites,

there's no need to get enraged, right? That this is just a communications. It's a very utilitarian kind of thing. In the case of Facebook and Google, the same thing. Google, you search for it and then you find it. Or Uber, you order it and you get it, right? You can have all these issues with the employment issues over at Uber, how they handle their employees or their non-employees, their gig workers. But the issue is you don't linger on it. It doesn't have sort of a thing on your brain. But when you came to social media, their entire business plan was predicated on engagement

and what is better for engagement than enragement. And so that's why the top 10 things are angry things because that's what keeps people going. They could dial the algorithm down. In the case of Google, when you're searching for things, it's speed, context, and accuracy. That's the frame of the house. They need to do those things because you don't want to hang on on Google. You just don't. You just want to get in and get out, essentially, which is a pretty good business, right? In Facebook's case, it's based on speed because you want it quickly. It's always based on speed, which also battles the brain. But it's also based on virality, which is a problem. Once it's based on virality, it's a

problem. And it's not based on accuracy. It's just virality, speed, and maybe engagement. What engages people? What's interesting? And so therefore, uh-oh, hello, anti-vaxxers. Hello, people arguing. Hello, the ability of has to make you want to drink it. It's not good for you, but his business plan is predicated on enticing you and then addicting you. And then the addiction element of it is systemically addictive. You create a real problem. It's not unlike sugar or anything else, I think. I had a chat with the wonderful Jill Lepore on this podcast. Oh, she's great. Oh, she's the best. And we talked about those kind of moments in tech history where things might have gone differently. We talked, obviously, about Johnson, the National Data Center in 65. That's her new book. Yeah.

Were there moments that you witnessed where it could have gone, like if people had brought in charging, were there moments when things could have gone differently? Well, they're very young people who didn't have an appreciation of history, right? Or consequence. One of the things that's important is these mostly white men, young white men, were treated like little gods. And so anything they did was really smart. And the fact of the matter is they had no wisdom, right? And why would they? They're teenagers, essentially. They're very young people who were quite protected. So two things I always say. One is people are always like, why are these systems so unsafe, Kara? I'm like, because the people who

designed them have never been unsafe. If you've never been unsafe, why would you advantage safety? What's wrong with that? I don't get attacked. Well, if you're a woman or a person of color or anybody else, you're like, wait a second. When they had Facebook Live, I questioned them about murders and bullying, and they were like, huh? Never happened to me. Like, what are you talking? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No appreciation of consequence. And that's one of the issues. And whenever you point out the consequence, they say, free speech. And you're like, yeah, but coup, you can't incite violence. And so that went on and on. I think the first place I recognized it was when, it sounds like a funny thing, I remember it, when they had an AOL, when you pulled up the page, if you remember, there was a little picture there. And I was noticing they were fuzzy. It was

a picture of like, might have been Taylor Swift, actually, when she was much there. And I was noticing they were fuzzy. It was a picture of like, it might've been Taylor Swift actually when she was much younger. And it was fuzzy. And I said to the person who's in charge of the homepage, is that fuzzy? And they said, yeah, we do that on purpose. And I'm like, what? And so they did it on purpose because people lean in and click it. So they're causing confusion right away. So they'll make you do things. And anything that crawls down your brainstem and makes you do things is open for propaganda, is open for whatever you want to pour into it. And then the malevolent players showed up, not as hackers of the system, but customers. That's really powerful for those people if you want to convince them of anything.

They give a billboard on a highway for a politician. Everyone sees it and can comment on it and have an opinion. Everyone sees what this guy is going for. When it's online, someone like Brad Parscale, who worked for President Trump, very smart at this, could send a million different messages to a million different people, all of them slightly different, and they could all be lies. Like, it doesn't matter. Like, and so there was no targeting.

There was no consequence for any of this. And so in a consequence-free world, the way civilizations die is lack of consequences, that there's a stop sign somewhere one day, and then it's not there. And by the way, there's a red light. No, that's not there. You can kill someone, by the way. Oh, no, no. Now you can't kill someone.

You're going to jail. And so the whole random and arbitrary nature of a non-consequence system that sometimes you get caught creates just chaos. And that's where we are. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. I've got the wonderful Cara Swisher on. We're talking about Facebook, social media, and what the hell's after this. spire, 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 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. And you talk about those tech bros. I've heard so many interviews in which you say that never in history have there been a group of people so powerful who are determined not to be seen as powerful. It's such a strange phenomenon.

Yes. And full of grievance. I had someone the other day, Carrie, you're so mean to me. This was a billionaire who could have me disappeared in seconds. I was like, okay, I suppose. So it was over parlor. They were like, you killed them. Because I did this interview. I didn't kill them. I let him talk. That's what I did. And I challenged him when he lied. And so I was quite fair. I let him say his piece. And I think people just didn't like what he had to say, which was I take no responsibility for the coup planning on my platform. Okay. The guy who set John Wilkes Booth's leg got convicted. He didn't know. And of course, later got exonerated. But, you but you know sorry that's not an excuse for what you're doing having no moderation they just don't want the responsibility and they want all the

money that's my impression of them most of them are they going to get moderation are they going to get forced on them yes maybe well it depends on where it is you're in australia no i'm in the uk uk yes in the uk but you don't have the First Amendment. So yes, probably. And probably all over Europe. Yes. I think probably in the US, there's going to be some focus on their economics, which is power concentration. We love to take that down here. So the concentration of economics will be where we'll focus. Maybe privacy and data. You're never going to see them saying, you can't. The First Amendment bars the government from abridging freedom of speech. So the government can't step in and be a speech police in our country, at least. It can be anywhere else, in lots of places. But I think there'll be a lot

around privacy, data privacy, and antitrust, and fines for violations of consent degrees on these issues. And I think maybe some taxing. Why not tax social media like it's sugar? Why not? Kind of an interesting idea. So that's the kind of thing you're going to see here. Not any overt First Amendment things. And then some reform of Section 230, which is a law here that grants them pretty broad immunity across their platforms. Probably something like that. Would that be bipartisan there in the States? Because both Republicans and Democrats, they've both got complicated relations with tech, but they both contain critics. Yes, I guess if the GOP stops whining about conservative bias, of which again, just like election fraud, evidence free, maybe

minor examples of it, but nothing serious. If they would get off that and focus on power concentration, they would have a solution to their own gripes, which is that if you have a small group of people running something that is essentially the public square, even though it's not public, you have to live with their decisions. And in the case of taking President Trump off of Facebook and Twitter, that was a good decision. It doesn't mean two people should have been able to make it. If you have that power, you should wield it as correctly as you can. But the fact is, there's two people that can wield it. And so that's the problem, right? So there's two different things. And I think people can't separate them. They just focus on the decision. And in the case of President Trump, he absolutely violated every norm of these

fights and eventually to inciting violence. And that's the red line. I mean, there's three red lines, really terrorism. And this was domestic terrorism, by the way, there's terrorism, child pornography and inciting violence, And he broke possibly two of them. What is the feeling now? How has it changed in your career? Apart from these billionaires being terrified of talking to you and saying you're bullying. But like, is there still optimism? Is there still like, yeah, we're changing the world?

Or has that moved elsewhere? Is that maybe in renewables? What's the vibe there? Well, I think getting rich changes your point of view, right? I sort of have the mood that they really do have to have responsibility i mean a joke i tell them i don't think it's funny is you're either going to have to do something about this and really step up with responsibility just like a chemical company or a bank and be legislated the way everybody else is every

other industry is legislated across the world you're gonna have to step up or you're gonna have to armor plate your tesla right because the inequity that's happening is really vast. The danger and the damage is really real this time. And so I want them to be part of that. And I think around certain things like climate change tech or healthcare tech, like this pandemic has shown the inequities are so vast between people. The rich people have benefited. No one who's rich didn't do well during this pandemic. They did great. And others did not. Others who were on the front lines and the essential workers who were really sacrificial workers did not. And so we have to really work together to figure this out. So certain things, climate change, tech, robotics, self-driving is something that really has a lot of players in it and is really interesting. And so, yes, there is

a hopefulness in that arena. Social media reform is something people are talking about a lot. We'll see. We'll see what happens. But yeah, there's still always entrepreneurship. And entrepreneurship is the only thing that will save our planet in so many ways, right? In terms of figuring out not just carbon capture when it comes to climate change, because that's just like cleaning up a toilet overflows. You got to fix the toilet, right? Like, let's stop cleaning up the floor. And that's what carbon capture is, unless you could do it on such a mass scale that you could just keep consuming and it'd be okay. You'd send everything out into space. I guess, I don't know. You know, I'm not an expert. But we really do have to think about renewable energy. We have to think about self-driving because that all is much more efficient. We've got to think about how we commute. This pandemic's made us realize we don't have to fly everywhere. We don't have to go in everywhere. There's other ways to do business.

So that's a really interesting and hopeful area. I like the climate change tech people I meet. Yeah. So I guess lastly, I was going to ask you in that case, what's the greatest innovation to come out of the Valley in your time there? What are you proud to have watched grow and develop? Proud? I'm not proud of that.

The greatest one is the iPhone that created the app economy. I think that changed everything. I mean, obviously the internet itself, but I think the iPhone was the moment. Think about it. You wouldn't have Uber and Instagram. You wouldn't have all kinds of services without the iPhone. And it later became Android, but iPhone was the very first. This whole idea of the app economy and all these developers on top of it.

I think that changed. It moved us into the Star Trek era where all our information is on a device that is accessible and is a communicator, is an information thing. And so I had to pick one. It would be the iPhone. And then the things that ensued from it, the Google Android phones and things. But that was the first. And of course, the podcast that people are listening to now and your wonderful podcast.

Cara, tell us more about your wonderful podcast before you go. Oh, I have one called Sway for the New York Times that I do big interviews with people like the Parler CEO. I just did today the Substack CEO. But then I do Isabel Wilkerson, which we talked about caste systems in our country and the impact. I do lots of different people. I do a range of people. I talk about power. It's a podcast about power and who has it, who doesn't, who should have it, who doesn't have it and should have it, et cetera. And I try to challenge them on their power. And I

have very, very powerful people. I had Elon Musk and I have people you may not have heard about, like John Fetterman in Pennsylvania. I had Brad Raffensperger talking about what happened between him and Trump right before that second perfect call that he made. And he explained all the crazy conspiracy theories. And then, of course, Trump on that call asked about everyone. So that was sort of helpful. And then I just recently interviewed the CEO of Dominion Voting Systems. I'm really interested in voting security and cybersecurity really around voting. And now he's sued everyone, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell. It's a pleasure to watch, honestly. And then I have another podcast called Pivot at New York Magazine, and that's with Scott Galley.

And we talk about topical issues of the day. Today, we're going to talk about probably the new Facebook oversight board issue around Trump deplatforming. But we talk about everything, site board issue around Trump deplatforming, but we talk about everything, Disney parks and all kinds of stuff. Can I just, I'm so sorry, take a bit more time. I just want to ask about power because every time I have a politician on this podcast, I always ask about power. I ask them if they feel powerful and they usually say no. Like where, in your experience now, you've met all these powerful people. Huge question. Where does power lie in the US, in our modern world? Where does power lie? In our modern world, Corporations, not in government. I mean, Trump has shown how much you can mess things up. Destruction is easy, isn't it? My son this morning was like, they're

doing this. Mitch McConnell's blocking this and this. I said, it's easier to destroy than it is to build. It just is. And it's powerful. There is power in destruction. And so I think it depends on what you're thinking about. You could say Trump sort of upended the whole political system. That's very powerful. Although then he didn't really get much of his policies through. Right. He didn't really execute. He just made a mess. I tend to look at things. I have actually two tattoos on my arms. One is entropy and one is centropy. Entropy is chaos and centropy is everything coalesces towards a building phase. And so I think about power like that, like who is in the building phase and who is in the destruction phase. And if you think about it like that, it gives you a good way to imagine how they look at it. Right now, I think obviously Mark Zuckerberg is very powerful.

I think most of the top 10 companies in the world are all tech companies, the most valuable, except for Saudi Aramco. And that eventually we will not be using fossil fuels. So that's gonna be off the chart in 20 years, essentially. But I think tech companies are probably the most powerful right now. And then those people who own them are the richest people in the world. And therefore, by our measure of money, they're the most powerful. But I like to look at all kinds of people you might have not have heard of. A lot of these activists that are working, some of these

Congress people you don't realize are sort of working their way into doing things. Like there's a woman named Lena Kahn, and she's rethinking antitrust. She might be the head of one of the FTC commissioners now under Biden. Very young law student who came up with the idea of changing antitrust. I think she's very powerful. And she was involved with the congressional hearings on the tech companies. This one woman whose ideas are making tech companies nervous. Same thing with Elizabeth Warren, the senator. Mark Zuckerberg, when he called her his existential threat. I joke about it. I was like, not death, not climate change, not premature balding.

Like, really? Her is your existential threat? Okay. I would pick something else for my choices, but it's okay. That's fine. So there's a lot of power in ideas still, I think. There always has been. From Martin Luther on down, right? Everybody has an idea. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

All right. Thank you so much. Just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask.

If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I'd really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things, and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you. getting pummeled. Thank you. 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. you