Gavin Francis

speaker

523 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 13 Jun

Gavin Francis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

London Review Bookshop Podcast · Gavin Francis & Philippe Sands: The Unfragile Mind · 13 Jun 2026 podcast

And other ones say, well, it's far more complicated than that.

If I had to put my money on it, I'd probably say it's more complicated than that.

But it's definitely a factor because we know that, for example, that, and you've all come to talk about mental health.

So I suppose you're aware that we're going to discuss difficult issues.

But we know that self-harming behavior is contagious, for example.

So if you have a small community of teenagers who are self-harming, the more they talk about that, the more that spreads.

So people learn how to do it from others who are doing it.

So social media exponentially increases your possibility of sharing that kind of thing.

And there are very dark corners of the internet where people are comparing their self-harming in a competitive way, very dark corners.

I like the way that a lot of thinkers on this subject and governments increasingly are starting to think about smartphones, which is not in terms of technologies, but as addictions.

So we're thinking we need to regulate this the same way as we regulate alcohol or morphine or oxycodone.

You know, that it can be dangerous.

It's an amazing tool.

And it's wonderful and it can help human flourishing, but it's also quite risky and dangerous if it's completely unsupervised.

You know, if you let kids go on it however much they want to without any kind of supervision, just like you wouldn't let five-year-olds drink whiskey or take oxycodone, we need to be a bit more careful.

So I kind of, I like the way that the conversation is going actually about, which is more thinking about our addictive nature as humans, rather than thinking about the devils of technology.

Anyway, so that is part of it too.

Because we were only getting part of the way through the complexities of it, Philippe, but maybe we should move on.

felt they had had.

Yeah.

Showing 261–280 of 523 · page 14 of 27