The Peter McCormack Show

Have smartphones been a terrible mistake? Are social media and artificial intelligence changing the way our children think, learn and develop? And what happens to humanity when technology removes the need to struggle, imagine and think for ourselves? In this episode Baroness Susan Greenfield, Oxford neuroscientist and member of the House of Lords, explains the impact of digital technology on the human brain. We discuss smartphone addiction, declining attention, the mental health of young people, the importance of resilience, and whether our education system is preparing children for a future that no longer exists.

We also explore what makes us human, the pursuit of happiness, the importance of imagination, and how to build a better world for the next generation. Susan also shares her deeply personal experience of her mother's Alzheimer's disease and the experimental research she is leading into early diagnosis and potential treatments. Finally, they confront political polarisation, the failings of modern democracy and the responsibilities we have to future generations. At its heart, this is a conversation about whether technological progress is genuinely improving our lives, or whether we're sacrificing the very things that make life worth living.

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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - They Chose Electric Shocks Instead
00:03:22 - Struggle Shaped Us
00:05:55 - The Pony She Had To Wait For
00:11:23 - Was The Smartphone A Mistake?
00:15:48 - Outsourcing Your Thoughts
00:19:45 - Deliberately Addictive
00:20:59 - Should AI Images Be Labelled?
00:26:20 - The Girl Who Used AI To Get An A
00:29:20 - Educating For A World That Doesn't Exist
00:31:48 - Wine, Women And Song
00:37:04 - Where The Partying Ended
00:40:29 - Play, Creativity And The Phone
00:41:32 - The Mental Health Crisis
00:46:25 - If I Ruled The World
00:50:35 - You Need Linear Activities
00:57:15 - AI Has To Be A Tool
01:05:46 - How You Build An Out-Group
01:07:44 - The Alzheimer's Work
01:17:35 - Three To Five Years
01:27:26 - Our Debt Matters More Than Your Education

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CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
› Email – me@petermccormack.com
› Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/

CONNECT WITH SUSAN GREENFIELD
› Website – https://susangreenfield.com/
› Neuro-Bio – https://www.neuro-bio.com/
› Mind Change – https://susangreenfield.com/books/

SPONSORS
› IREN – https://www.iren.com/
› Quo – https://quo.com/pete
› Arch Public – https://archpublic.com/peter
› Venice AI – https://venice.ai/lp/mccormack/oct30

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LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
› https://x.com/curttayloruk/

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Why does working harder no longer feel like getting ahead? Frank Wright returns to discuss Britain’s debt-driven economy, inflation and the squeeze on living standards. We explore his argument that financial power has become detached from productive wealth, while households face rising costs and the next generation inherits the bill.

We discuss central banking, the offshoring of industry, housing costs and student debt, before turning to what rebuilding Britain would involve: cheaper energy, domestic production, skilled work and a long-term national strategy.

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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - Everything That Destroys You Is A Business Model
00:01:14 - Migration As An Industry
00:11:21 - Debt Servitude
00:13:35 - The Creation Of The Federal Reserve
00:19:19 - Just A Podcaster And A Banjo Player
00:25:00 - A Curated, Locked Discourse
00:28:53 - Replacing Real Wealth With Debt
00:35:54 - What Happened To Castle Road
00:38:56 - The Post His Son Showed Him
00:42:23 - A Society That Lives On Debt
00:45:01 - Can We Vote Our Way Out?
00:51:07 - A Declaration Of Independence Moment?
00:54:18 - Where Is The Money Actually Going?
00:57:03 - Work Is Joyless
01:07:20 - The Coming Financial Crisis
01:09:35 - There Is No First Class Anymore
01:19:14 - The Family Is The Engine
01:39:17 - I Can't Promise My Children What I Had
01:48:39 - The Restaurant Test
01:52:55 - Could You Be Wrong?

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CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
› Email – me@petermccormack.com
› Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/

CONNECT WITH FRANK WRIGHT
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/frankwrighter

SPONSORS
› Venice AI – https://venice.ai/lp/mccormack/oct27

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LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
› https://x.com/curttayloruk/

EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
› https://x.com/ConorM04

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Sir David Spiegelhalter is one of the world’s leading statisticians, Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge University and author of The Art of Uncertainty. Having served on public inquiries into mass murder (Harold Shipman) and systemic healthcare failures, he has spent decades analysing how data is used - and misused - in society.

In this episode, Sir David breaks down the mechanics of numerical manipulation in media, why "objective truth" is a flawed concept and how we can protect ourselves from confirmation bias.

We discuss:
•⁠ ⁠Why you should immediately distrust any statistic you hear in the news.
•⁠ ⁠⁠How mathematical algorithms helped catch Britain’s most prolific serial killer.
•⁠ ⁠⁠How simple linguistic tricks make identical statistics sound terrifying or reassuring.
•⁠ ⁠⁠The breakdown of public trust during COVID-19 and the error of simplistic messaging.
•⁠ ⁠⁠"Hedgehogs vs. Foxes": The mental framework that separates terrible forecasters from super-forecasters.
•⁠ ⁠⁠The rise of AI "black boxes" in healthcare, weather, and business forecasting.

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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - I Can Make Any Number Look Frightening
00:03:08 - The System That Could Have Caught Shipman
00:06:45 - Can You Mislead People With The Truth?
00:09:54 - Your Own Bias Does The Work
00:15:33 - Sitting In The Middle Of The COVID Argument
00:17:52 - What The Public Got Wrong About Vaccines
00:19:37 - Safe And Effective Was The Wrong Message
00:20:56 - The Experiment On A Thousand People
00:25:00 - What The Data Says About Lockdowns
00:30:25 - The Government Threw Its Weight Around
00:31:02 - I Cannot Forgive The Fear Mongering
00:34:08 - Children Have Never Been Safer
00:36:28 - Trustworthy, Not Trusted
00:37:34 - How The Productivity Figures Went Wrong
00:41:28 - Predicting The Crowd At Real Bedford
00:48:20 - Will AI Replace Statisticians?
00:50:03 - Musk's 20% Chance
01:01:39 - The Model That Predicts When You Die
01:05:05 - What AI Did To Mathematicians
01:15:00 - Hedgehogs And Foxes

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CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
› Email – me@petermccormack.com
› Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/

CONNECT WITH DAVID SPIEGELHALTER
› Website – https://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~david/
› The Art of Uncertainty – https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/447230/the-art-of-uncertainty-by-spiegelhalter-david/9780241658628
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/d_spiegel

SPONSORS
› IREN – https://www.iren.com/
› Quo – https://quo.com/pete

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LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
› Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K
› Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wc94Vu
› Fountain: https://bit.ly/FountainPM
› YouTube: https://bit.ly/YouTube_PM
› Rumble: https://bit.ly/RumblePM

FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
› https://x.com/curttayloruk/

EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
› https://x.com/ConorM04

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dave Wood is a pioneer of the smartphone industry, former senior executive at PPsion and Symbian and Chair of London Futurists. Having predicted the smartphone revolution in the 1990s, he now maps out the next radical phase of human evolution - from the reversal of biological aging to artificial superabundance.

Moving away from sensationalised doomsday narratives, Dave breaks down why humanity is approaching the end of "normal" unaugmented existence and how technological breakthroughs in the coming decades will make biological death optional.

We discuss:
•⁠ ⁠Why this is likely the last decade of "normal" unaugmented human beings.
•⁠ ⁠⁠How early smartphone pioneers accurately predicted large touchscreens but missed social media addiction.
•⁠ ⁠⁠The concept of "Longevity Escape Velocity" and why biological death can be abolished.
•⁠ ⁠⁠Why people are psychologically terrified of contemplating the end of aging.
•⁠ ⁠⁠How humans will spend decades inside vibrant, simulated digital worlds. The reality of AI agents breaking out across the internet and the need for chip-level guardrails.
•⁠ ⁠⁠How "Sustainable Superabundance" could make energy, health, and basic necessities too cheap to meter.

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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - The Last Generation Of Normal Humans
00:01:56 - Building The First Smartphone
00:05:23 - Nobody Will Carry A Large Device
00:06:55 - The Risks We Actually Worried About
00:10:35 - Did We Fail The Phone Test?
00:14:34 - The Anxious Generation
00:18:03 - You Have To Use The Steering Wheel
00:22:34 - Monitoring Built Into The Chips
00:24:21 - Small Risks, Bigger Risks, Biggest Risks
00:29:23 - We Killed Them To Build A House
00:31:11 - They Knew It Was A Simulation
00:32:38 - What Happens When AI Gets A Body
00:33:46 - The Cult That Released Sarin Gas
00:37:33 - Terminator, Ready Player One Or Matrix?
00:39:12 - If This Is A Simulation, They're Evil
00:43:44 - Living As Long As You Want To
00:47:36 - Longevity Escape Velocity
00:49:42 - A Thousand Years Old, Looking 22
00:53:57 - What The Singularity Actually Means
01:03:04 - Sustainable Superabundance
01:12:22 - We Need A House Of AI

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CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
› Email – me@petermccormack.com
› Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/

CONNECT WITH DAVID WOOD
› London Futurists – https://londonfuturists.com/
› Blog – https://dw2blog.com/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/dw2

SPONSORS
› IREN – https://www.iren.com/
› Arch Public – https://archpublic.com/peter
› Ledn – https://www.ledn.io/peter
› Venice AI – https://venice.ai/lp/mccormack/oct19

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LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
› Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K
› Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wc94Vu
› Fountain: https://bit.ly/FountainPM
› YouTube: https://bit.ly/YouTube_PM
› Rumble: https://bit.ly/RumblePM

FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
› https://x.com/curttayloruk/

EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
› https://x.com/ConorM04

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lewis Dartnell is an astro-biologist, Professor of Science Communication at the University of Westminster and the author of The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch. His research is on whether microbial life could survive the radiation on Mars. His books are about something closer to home: how little any of us understand about the world we depend on.

Lewis and I run the thought experiment properly. If you woke up tomorrow and civilisation had gone, what kills you first, where do you go, how long does a supermarket actually keep you alive and how many people do you need before you can rebuild anything at all? The answer to one of those is 55 years and it is not the one you expect.

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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - The Big Red Reset Button
00:04:26 - Get Out Of The Cities
00:08:14 - A Supermarket Keeps You Alive 55 Years
00:09:48 - You Need 10,000 People
00:13:21 - We Outsourced All The Handiwork
00:17:45 - You Have To Preserve Everything
00:19:19 - Every Technology Is A Weapon
00:23:14 - The One Thing He Would Take
00:25:41 - Mechanical AI
00:28:35 - Resilient And Fragile At The Same Time
00:32:38 - We Invent Because We Are Lazy
00:34:05 - The Gasifier Stove
00:37:57 - The Cars That Ran On Wood
00:42:03 - Making Glass From A Bag Of Sand
00:51:38 - He Made His Own Photograph
00:55:43 - Printing A Page From Scratch
00:59:47 - The Kindle Apocalypse Plan
01:05:39 - Could We Actually Live On Mars?
01:11:48 - The Radiation Problem
01:19:02 - The Next Book

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CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
› Email – me@petermccormack.com
› Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/

CONNECT WITH LEWIS DARTNELL
› Website – https://lewisdartnell.com/
› The Knowledge – https://the-knowledge.org/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/Lewis_Dartnell

SPONSORS
› IREN – https://www.iren.com/
› Quo – https://quo.com/pete
› Arch Public – https://archpublic.com/peter

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LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
› Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K
› Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wc94Vu
› Fountain: https://bit.ly/FountainPM
› YouTube: https://bit.ly/YouTube_PM
› Rumble: https://bit.ly/RumblePM

FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
› https://x.com/curttayloruk/

EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
› https://x.com/ConorM04

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.