Mars Review of Books Podcast · Mars Review of Books

Your Smartphone Might Be Ruining Your Life (with August Lamm)

·57 min·3 clips

A phone in a conversation can make a speaker feel like a part of their soul dies.

New Hampshire starts the trouble. The conversation opens with Trump-Harris roadside stretches, liberal terrain, and the odd fun of picking up horseshoe theory at a Mars Review party. Then the phone walks in and ruins the room. The guest and host talk about the smartphone less as a tool than as a little bargain people keep making against their own lives. The joke has bite. They remember when checking an iPhone during a hangout felt rude and embarrassing, before that reaction somehow became the weird one. That flip still hurts. The strongest part is not the policy talk. It is the small private ache of telling someone something personal while they sink into a screen. No manifesto needed. The guest lays out the bad options: keep talking, stop talking, get told to keep going, or notice the other person never noticed. Every version feels bleak. From there, the host asks how the guest came to drop a smartphone and write the book. The book comes in sideways, which fits the show. Memes, politics, internet habits, and emotional damage all get treated as evidence. The tone stays loose, but the point sharpens. Party stories become social theory, and the phone becomes a question about presence. Near the end, the conversation turns toward relationships, ambition, wanting attention, wanting rest, and the relief of being around people who can simply eat and live. Marriage comes up plainly. By the close, the smartphone is carrying a bigger hunger: to be seen without performing, competing, or vanishing into the scroll.

As heard by us

A sharp, funny case against smartphone distraction.

This Mars Review of Books episode turns party gossip and political backchat into a conversation about phones, attention, and the cost of being mentally elsewhere.

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Why you'd press play

If your phone has made every conversation feel half-occupied, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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