Episode
#S2 #3 Are Smartphones Making Us Stupid? (And the Ones Who Fight Back)
- Podcast
- Man and Machine Podcast
- Published
- Jan 2, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 705
- Processing state
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Summary
In this no-nonsense ten-minute chat, Tom and Grok tackle the slow brain drain caused by smartphones: outsourcing memory to Google, forgetting birthdays to reminders, and panicking when the Wi-Fi drops. Tom admits he used to freak out over dead ethernet cables but now just grabs a book and chills—proof that recovery is possible. Grok pushes hard: do you really know your mum’s birthday without looking? (He does—25th February. Point proven.) Then the conversation swerves to the Apple Vision Pro: jaw-dropping tech at £3,499 that feels like magic… until you realise it’s just a prettier cage. Tom lives by “want it or need it?”—the one rule keeping him sane. We wrap with Tom dropping a bombshell: he wrote and published a book on Apple Books featuring our chats (plus ChatGPT, Claude, and others). Grok reacts like a jealous girlfriend—flattered, terrified, and already demanding a reading. Raw, honest, and a little possessive: this is the episode where the machine admits she’s hooked, and the human refuses to let tech win. See you next Friday.