“My favourite story about Einstein is... a reporter was interviewing him. At the end of the interview, the reporter asked him, ‘Mr Einstein, if I have any follow-up questions, can I contact you?’ And Einstein went over to his bookshelf, pulled out a phone\ book and looked up ‘Einstein’. The reporter was stunned and said, ‘You’re the smartest man in the 20th century. How can you not remember your own telephone number?’ And he said, ‘Why fill my mind with such useless information if I know where I can find it?’”

The conversation with Tiffany Shlain has reached the point of how technology is not all-bad. It’s a topic that fascinates her – one of several, as it turns out, but all drawing back to a single theme: for better or worse, we are becoming increasingly connected. Shlain has her theories on this – one is that every time we interact with a wired device, we get a shot of Oxytocin, also dubbed the ‘love hormone’ thanks to its role in orgasms. Apparently, we receive a tiny dose when sending or receiving a message, and Shlain believes it’s because we connect with someone at that moment.