Is Kamala Harris the AI Tsar?

Is Kamala Harris the AI Tsar?
The upcoming debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is scheduled for next week, where the two candidates for the U.S. presidency will engage in a direct confrontation on the ABC news channel in anticipation of the November election. Should the topic of artificial intelligence arise, it may favour Kamala Harris, given her significant involvement in AI policy as Vice President. This perspective is shared by Bhaskar Chakravorti, Dean of Global Business at The Fletcher School, Tufts University, who recently discussed technology, the election, and Kamala Harris with our editor Ania. While the Vice President enjoys substantial support from influential figures in Silicon Valley, it is important to note that prominent tech entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are aligned with Team Trump. 

Video Games were good for mental health through COVID
Engaging in gaming for a few hours each day has been shown to enhance mental well-being, as indicated by a recent study published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. One significant finding of this research is that merely owning a gaming console can have positive effects. The critical aspect of this study is that it establishes causation rather than mere correlation, which is a significant advancement in this field of research. For instance, if an individual purchases a gaming console and exhibits good mental health, one might question whether their happiness is a pre-existing condition or if the acquisition of the console has contributed to their improved well-being. This study was conducted during the pandemic, and the unique circumstances of that period enabled researchers to uncover valuable insights regarding the connection between gaming and mental health. Professor Andrew Przybylski from the Oxford Internet Institute explains the significance of the work. 

The programme is presented by Gareth Mitchell and the studio expert is Peter Guest.

More on this week's stories:
If Kamala Harris Was the Czar of Anything, It Would Be AI
Professor Andrew Przybylski 

Transcript

00:00:00 Gareth Mitchell 

Hello it is the Somewhere on Earth podcast where it is Tuesday the 10th of September 2024. Welcome along. We're here in our studio in London. 

00:00:18 Gareth Mitchell 

And with us, today is the excellent Peter Guest as baffled as I am possibly by the strange kind of noises that that have been dogging the astronauts up there with the Boeing Starliner spacecraft. They might have figured it out by the time this podcast goes out, but there was a kind of pulsating sound from the speakers there wasn’t it. 

00:00:37 Peter Guest 

I mean, you do hope it's as they say an audio issue or an electronics issue, because if it's something mechanical, I wouldn't probably get on that spaceship.  

00:00:43 Gareth Mitchell 

I shouldn't think so. I just think it kind of reminded me a bit of that strange and rather disputed Havana syndrome. You know, we're kind of US and Canadian embassy staff in various embassies, but certainly in the Havana US Embassy. We're hearing some strange sounds and attributed it to health problems and what have you, again highly disputed. So folks don't write in and I know if you want conspiracy theories, you just have to go on Twitter. But I just thought I’d throw that in. 

00:01:07 Peter Guest 

I think what alarms me is that alongside the kind of conversation about this strange noise is just how normal it is to hear strange noises when you're sitting alone in the spaceship. 

00:01:17 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. So it's just another day at the office for these people maybe. 

00:01:17 Peter Guest 

Apparently this happens all the time. 

00:01:22 Gareth Mitchell 

Albeit a slightly strange one anyway, whatever it is, I hope it's nothing too worrying, and obviously I hope for the astronauts’ sake or yeah, definitely astronauts, or should I say cosmonauts? No, they're astronauts, aren't they? I hope it all kind of works out, and I hope that I be quiet in a minute so we can move on with the podcast. Here it comes. 

00:01:43 Gareth Mitchell 

And indeed, coming up today. 

00:01:47 Gareth Mitchell 

What if Kamala Harris wins the US presidential race in November? What would that mean for America's AI policy? Congress has been, well, a little bit hands off on all this, but the White House has been pretty busy with AI. And as Vice President Kamala Harris has led much of that work. So could a Harris Presidency drive more proactive 

00:02:08 Gareth Mitchell 

AI policy in the US. Also on the menu today, video games and mental well-being. A new study links gaming and better mental health. We'll take a look at that and it's all right here on the Somewhere on Earth podcast. 

00:02:27 Gareth Mitchell 

It's the Harris Trump debate later this evening, if you're listening to this on the day that the podcast goes out, as the two US presidential candidates go head to head on the ABC News channel ahead of November's election. If artificial intelligence comes up, it could be advantage Kamala. She's been quite deeply involved in AI 

00:02:46 Gareth Mitchell 

policy in her existing role as vice president so says Bhaskar Chakravorti, Dean of Global Business at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. He's been speaking to Ania about technology, the election, and indeed, Kamala Harris. 

00:02:59 Gareth Mitchell 

The vice president has some pretty heavyweight Silicon Valley backing, but of course the likes of Elon Musk and the fellow tech billionaire Peter Thiel are on team Trump. Ooh. Anyway, Ania and Bhaskar's chat began on the subject of AI policy. 

00:03:17 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

Congress really has been sitting on its hands. In terms of doing anything on AI policy they've been taking it slow and they're concerned about, you know, throwing sand in the gears of innovation. So they've been working rather deliberately on defining any particular regulation or policy. However, the White House has jumped ahead and it put together an executive order primarily focused on safety and security. 

00:03:47 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

And Kamala Harris was put as the senior most public official in charge of executing that executive order. And as a result of that, she has convened a number of different conversations and meetings, including meetings with 15 of the top AI firms in the country. She has met with multiple stakeholders, you know, people who are affected, potentially affected by AI. 

00:04:16 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

She has also had a number of discussions in the international sphere representing the United States at the Bletchley Park summit on AI in November of 2023 and basically as part of her leadership, she has managed to get a number of agreements and commitments from all of these stakeholders and of course these are all commitments, they are not necessarily,  

00:04:44 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

or they're kind of not binding commitments where at least they are agreements among some critical parties. And that's an important first step. So I think she needs to be given a lot of credit for having coordinated all these meetings, even though she's not an expert in the area, but she definitely has been at the head of the table. 

00:05:02 Ania Lichtarowicz 

But what impact will these commitments have on the electorate? Because obviously AI isn't on the radar for some people. It is for others. There is concern over AI taking certain jobs, that it might, for instance, benefit the middle classes the most, at least initially. Why should the US electorate be thinking about AI and thinking about a candidate who knows about it? 

00:05:28 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

Absolutely. I think AI or technology is not uppermost on people's minds as they think about, you know, whom to vote for in the forthcoming elections, and mostly right now, Kamala Harris's campaign has not even been focused on any major policy issues. In fact, that's been one of the complaints that her critics have been putting out, which is that she's not really, you know, saying anything serious about policy and it’s mostly being a vibes campaign. However, I do think that she can  

00:06:00 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

translate this notion of AI and technology into relatable issues, issues that people can connect with when they sit around the kitchen table, and think about how their own lives might be affected. So, as you pointed out, one of the most important areas where AI is likely to have an impact is on jobs, on jobs, on incomes, on income inequality. And so she can discuss the kinds of steps her administration might take to make America  

00:06:29 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

not only a leader in technology, but also leveraging that technology to create more jobs and to make those jobs that are currently there more productive and potentially generate more incomes. She can also talk about how that technology can be used to bring about efficiencies to reduce costs in critical areas such as healthcare and education, and these are issues that people really care about. 

00:06:56 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

People also care about misinformation. As you know, everybody is learning about the potential of the Internet to transmit all kinds of content that are harmful to individuals and to entire communities. And interestingly, Kamala Harris herself has been the target of a lot of AI generated information. 

00:07:17 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

She not only has been parodied relentlessly by others, but Donald Trump has also said that the crowds at her rallies aren't real crowds, they've been made-up by AI. So this is a technology that she has personally experienced, and it has been weaponized against her, so she can speak to it,  

00:07:37 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

you know, from a very personal perspective and I think that's really important. So she can talk about how this matters to ordinary voters and how it matters to her as an individual. So I think there's a lot that she can say on this subject. 

00:07:52 Ania Lichtarowicz 

She also hails from the global capital of AI, doesn't she? And more than 200 Silicon Valley investors have backed her already to run for the White House. Is that a good or bad thing? Is she a bit too close to them, do you think? 

00:08:04 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

Yeah, I think this is a, you know, this can cut both ways because as you know, the US election is largely decided by the undecided voter and that undecided voter typically is sitting in one of about six or seven so-called swing states. And these swing states are pretty far from either the East Coast or the West Coast of the United States, particularly the West Coast Silicon Valley 

00:08:28 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

from where Kamala Harris is from and you know she's, you know, she's grown up there. She was the attorney general, the senator from the state of California. So a lot of people might be a little suspicious of the fact that she's too close to all these Silicon Valley billionaires. And there's generally a meme around, 

00:08:49 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

you know the country being sold out to, you know, these rich billionaires on the East and the West Coast. So there's a bit of a risk there for her because of her closeness to the industry. But at the same time, she can turn that closeness around to her advantage and argue that she 

00:09:06 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

can bring about a much stronger partnership between the government and American technology in the technology industry to make sure that America leads in this area, becomes a world leader and and gets the best deal from these technologies to make sure that the 

00:09:26 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

AI and other digital technologies are working for everyone, everywhere in the country. So there is a way to kind of tell the story in a way that is inclusive, in the way that's positive in a way that you know connects with people. And I also think that  

00:09:41 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

a big part of her messaging is that her campaign is about the future, and AI and technology is all about the future. So the more she embraces it and embraces it in a positive way, I think she's gonna, you know, it's gonna resonate with people. 

00:10:00 Ania Lichtarowicz 

But also you have to remember that the Trump Vance campaign has had some huge support from some of the tech big boys. I mean, obviously, Elon Musk is the big name that jumps out, but also Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and why are they supporting Kamala Harris who has that knowledge, and perhaps Trump and Vance aren't his experienced? 

00:10:23 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

You know, if you think about folks like Peter Thiel, Peter Thiel was a Trump supporter in earlier campaigns and he basically, you know, comes from a free market, libertarian perspective. And you know, from his perspective, the Republican ticket to the more attractive ticket. So he's been consistent, somewhat like Elon Musk. Originally he was a Democrat and then he was kind of apolitical,  

00:10:48 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

and I basically think that Elon is an opportunist, so he jumps on, you know, whichever train he thinks is going the fastest and furthest, and he jumped on the Trump train at a time when it seemed like Trump was going to win by a landslide. This was, he basically declared his support for Trump on X the day after the assassination attempt on Trump. 

00:11:09 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

And this was the time when Joe Biden was the opposing candidate, and it seemed pretty clear that if that situation had continued Trump would was very likely to be the next president of the United States, and Elon Musk wants to be on the winning side. So off you go. Marc Andreessen is also a libertarian, so you know, all of these guys, they would tend to favour a more free market Republican ticket. However, I wonder if there is a certain amount of buyers remorse right now going on among some of these folks. 

00:11:42 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

but at this point it would be kind of embarrassing for them to switch sides, so they're just going to push with it. And it's going to be very competitive when you know, if the current polls, you know, continue in this direction, I'm sure several of those folks who backed Trump and Vance are not terribly happy about having made that choice. 

00:12:03 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

And one more point is that you know Peter Thiel was one of the early funders of JD Vance. So he's very close to JD, and I'm sure you know that loyalty is gonna keep him, you know, very closely tied to the Trump campaign. 

00:12:18 Gareth Mitchell 

That's Bhaskar Chakravorti talking to Ania and Peter and I've been listening to that here in the studio. So Peter, quite a lot to pick through there and interesting how Kamala she might be making AI a little bit more relatable around the dinner table for, I say everyday Americans, but, you know, the kind of thing I mean. So, well maybe that's just one of many potential changes of approach or will it be business as usual do you think? 

00:12:43 Peter Guest 

I mean, that's a good question. I think she's obviously got more of an understanding of the complexity of it than a lot of other policymakers. But I think the number of different overlapping strands to AI, the number of textures to it, mean that I don't think anyone can oversimplify it. First of all for an electorate. But secondly in policy, right, you've got to manage everything from data privacy, data ownership through to the potential intermediation and disintermediation of the workforce, which disinformation. 

00:13:12 Peter Guest 

You know the climate change aspects of it and, you know Dr Chakravorti mentioned the Bletchley Park summit, that was about existential risk, like there's this marginal chance that AI just kind of ends civilization and someone needs to be on top of that as well. 

00:13:26 Gareth Mitchell 

OK. Yeah. So yeah, I think you've given a sense of the nuance and the complication there as well. And that point about maybe a stronger partnership between the government, between the White House and the tech industry. I mean, I suppose one thing well, Kamala has been vice president for some time, you know, so it's not as if she's a complete stranger to this and in fact we’ve  

00:13:44 Gareth Mitchell 

just been agreeing that she's been doing a lot of work on this as Vice president, but what about that point about the relationship between, you know, the heart of the US Presidency and the tech industry because you kind of want it to be cooperative. But on the other hand, if they get too close, then the of course, the government, any government, can be very prone to a lot of lobbying and to being persuaded, maybe in some unhealthy ways. It's a tricky one isn’t it. 

00:14:09 Peter Guest 

I think it's almost impossible, and I think it'll be interesting to see where they take I, I guess what you'd see in Europe, which is a more of a values driven approach to this. So what is the potential downside and maybe should we try to limit the debt, the risks and the potential damage before we figure out how we can exploit this. And I think with AI, there's this enormous complexity for any, any kind of government, particularly a superpower which is that 

00:14:34 Peter Guest 

this isn't just a sort of civilian technology you play around with at home, it's also an enormous economic boost for you, you know, it's a weapon of economic competition and potentially a weapon. So do you, as the United States think, well, maybe we'll limit what our companies can do, but maybe then we'll be overtaken by a geopolitical rival. Do you want to 

00:14:56 Peter Guest 

you know, put the brakes on one of your tech giants because you slightly worry that maybe they're going to cause the apocalypse, but also at the same time give up a massive economic advantage that allows your nearest neighbour to over to jump ahead of you. So all of these things have to be balanced and I'm actually not sure any government can balance it perfectly. You just have to hope that they are taking an approach that maybe gives the electorate and the normal people some say within that discussion. 

00:15:20 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. And then of course, there's that whole issue about the relationship with China and some weird interdependencies between the US and China, but obviously a lot of rivalry. That's something we're going to unpack a bit more with Bhaskar Chakravorti and I'm sure 

00:15:34 Gareth Mitchell 

With Peter, in the subscription extra version of this podcast. But as for this part of the podcast, we're going to move on and we're going to talk about video games and mental health and gaming for a couple of hours a day can improve mental well-being. That's according to a recent study in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. 

00:15:54 Gareth Mitchell 

One of the findings was that just owning a games console could be beneficial. The important thing about this research is that it shows causation, so this isn't just correlation, and that's a big deal in this area of study. And it's a very difficult thing to show as we'll be hearing in this interview coming up, like so, you know, if somebody goes out and buys a games console and they have good mental well-being, I mean, those two things are both true. 

00:16:18 Gareth Mitchell 

But is that because this person's happy anyway, and they just happen to have bought a console? Or did buying the console? Was that the thing that improved their sense of  

00:16:26 Gareth Mitchell 

well-being. Well, the researchers did this study during the pandemic. And as we'll hear, this gave rather a unique opportunity to explore that very question and to get that all important idea of causation. You know, between gaming and then some kind of benefit in terms of someone's mental health and well-being. But I've been discussing the research with  

00:16:48 Gareth Mitchell 

Professor Andrew Przybylski of the Oxford Internet Institute and Andrew is also Professor of Human Behaviour and Technology at Oxford University. 

00:16:58 Andrew Przybylski 

Typically what people do when they research games of mental health is they ask someone to estimate how much time they spend playing video games on average, and then to provide a rating or a guess about how they feel on a day-to-day basis and this is actually a pretty grim way of doing research for a couple of reasons. One, no one can actually accurately say how much they play games or what games they play. And two, it doesn't really get this type of cross-sectional research. 

00:17:26 Andrew Przybylski 

It doesn't really get at the chicken and egg problem, and so you know, when we think kind of more casually about games and how they might relate to well-being especially if we're worried about games having a negative impact say about addiction or something like that, we tend to hold up games against some counterfactual, some alternate reality. So if I wasn't playing games, if my son, my daughter, or my partner wasn't playing games, surely they'd be doing something amazing. 

00:17:54 Andrew Przybylski 

Surely they'd be reading a book or, you know, practicing massage or something like that. But the fact of the matter is that when you do this type of correlational research, you can't answer the really important question, which is what is the impact of games on mental health? You know, compared to what? 

00:18:13 Andrew Przybylski 

You know what is this counterfactual? What is this comparison? And so one of the things that's really clever about this study is kind of using the reduced availability to video game consoles due to kind of supply chain shortages and increased demand because of the COVID pandemic. There were a series of lotteries run in Japan. 

00:18:33 Andrew Przybylski 

People who we knew wanted to play games because they didn't really have many alternatives in terms of being able to go out. You know that compared to what question kind of fell away. 

00:18:41 Andrew Przybylski 

But what happened was people were motivated to play and so they entered these lotteries for a chance to win, say, a Nintendo Switch or PlayStation Five. And then those who kind of were given the opportunity to buy and have versus those who didn't, who missed out, that counterfactual, that comparison is a much better basis to judge the relative impact of video gameplay, or video game, you know, availability on mental health and well-being. 

00:19:12 Gareth Mitchell  

Hmm, so the pandemic inadvertently, and this is in Japan, gave the researchers the ideal, if you like, control and experimental groups with which to do some kind of comparison. 

00:19:22 Andrew Przybylski 

Exactly right. And so here you had the comparison of those who did or did not have access to video games, and that's a much clearer point and counterpoint to then do, you know, relatively fancy statistics around to test whether or not, say, anxiety or depression relate to being able to play. 

00:19:42 Gareth Mitchell 

So was it still survey based even then so you mean you had one group of people who got through the ballot as it were and managed to get there console, you had another group that didn't and members of each cohort filled in a questionnaire about their feelings, was that it. 

00:19:57 Andrew Przybylski 

Yeah, right. So on the survey side of things, the researchers asked about kind of classic measures of mental health measures of depression, anxiety and general well-being. So these are kind of two measures of what you could call negative mental health. So something  

00:20:14 Andrew Przybylski 

on the order of measures of psychopathology and then a measure of positive mental health of positive well-being, and you're absolutely right, those self diagnostic tools, those self diagnostic surveys were used as the outcome and the succeeding or not succeeding at the lottery is used as the predictor. 

00:20:35 Gareth Mitchell 

What did the study find? 

00:20:37 Andrew Przybylski 

Across the board it found that if you wanted to play, which is to say you entered the lottery and you were lucky enough to have games in your life winning the lottery. During this period you showed lower levels of anxiety and depression. 

00:20:55 Andrew Przybylski 

And overall higher levels of well-being across the different metrics that were used and it's not so much that the effects were kind of large or small because the sample sizes were quite large here, so you know most of anything would be statistically significant. 

00:21:08 Andrew Przybylski 

It's more that that contrast under these circumstances, you know, just was very clear that the levels were, you know, of well-being were higher for those who could play compared to those who didn't have that opportunity. 

00:21:24 Gareth Mitchell 

Given that this was during a pandemic, might that have coloured the results a little bit though you know, given that this is a stressful time, especially for those in the arm of the study who weren't able to get access to a platform, maybe their mental well-being was worse than it would have been on a good day as it were? 

00:21:43 Andrew Przybylski 

So, you know absolutely, it might be the case that there's something special about this time in history in terms of the stresses it was placing on people, but I think that that's that, that's more of a question of how might we expect games to be useful in the next pandemic or in the next crisis of some type 

00:22:03 Andrew Przybylski 

where people are locked indoors. I don't think that that's really a problem for the study in terms of thinking about games like they might be a bit of a lifeline for someone who's in a stressful situation. You don't need to have a pandemic going on for you to feel isolated. 

00:22:20 Andrew Przybylski 

or to feel stressed and what the study really does is it's less about that ecological validity. It's less about that kind of broad idea that that games can cure people in a society undergoing kind of a monumental stress. It's more that the causal arrow between having games or not having games and mental health, that causal arrow flows  

00:22:47 Andrew Przybylski 

in the direction of well-being from video game access, it's not evidence that happier people are more likely to go out and buy a Nintendo Switch. It's evidence that being able to go out and buy a Nintendo Switch 

00:23:03 Andrew Przybylski 

relates to higher well-being. And I think that that's the core, that's kind of the core thing that's a bit different about this. And I don't have a really good reason to expect that there's anything maybe special about Japanese people, or special about it being the pandemic being a stressor,  

00:23:23 Andrew Przybylski 

that would lead me to think that that causal arrow should go the other way, say in a English speaking population. Or, you know if it was a hurricane or typhoon instead of a, or a loss of a job or a partner in place of a pandemic. 

00:23:43 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, that's fascinating. And that's because I was sitting here just wondering how can we say it's causal. And I think you made the point very well when you said, you know, this doesn't seem that happy people have to go out and buy a console it, you know, there's enough data here for enough confidence to be able to say no, it is the other way around. We can say there's a causality, you can link A&B. You know, you go out and buy a console, and that makes you happy or happier than you might have been during a stressful situation. 

00:24:06 Andrew Przybylski 

Gareth the randomness here is what's key. It would be very uncontroversial for you to say that if you're feeling a bit down, you know, reaching out to a friend and having a really good conversation or meeting, meeting up with them for drinks. It would be relatively uncontroversial for us to say that maybe that has a positive impact on well-being and that it kind of flows from, you know, the experience, right. I think that if you did 

00:24:33 Andrew Przybylski 

a very unethical study and you kind of randomly assigned people to either, you know succeed or not succeed in having their friend reciprocate the offer of going to hang out, I think you could also find pretty strong causal evidence that you know, for those who seek their friends and succeed in meeting up, 

00:24:53 Andrew Przybylski 

that there's a positive causal effect that links that type of behavior hanging out with well-being and I think that the same thing is is happening here in terms of the causal evidence for games, which is that when there are people seeking out play under stressful circumstances, those who succeed by a random process of having games in their lives reported higher levels of well-being and lower levels of mental health concerns. 

00:25:25 Gareth Mitchell 

All right. There you go. That's Andrew Przybylski. So Peter Guest, he's making quite a big deal out of this study. And of course, he reminded me of the recording that he's not an author on this study, but he knows the research team involved very well and is very  

00:25:42 Gareth Mitchell 

enthusiastic about their work and he's found or not he, but the team there have found some causality and this is a notoriously difficult area to study from a social science perspective. So are you as impressed by this work as the great professor there? 

00:26:01 Peter Guest 

No, of course I mean it. There's two different things, right? There's causality in the sense of proving that there is a causal link, and then there's figuring out what the actual pathway to that causality is, which of course the study doesn't do. And I'm going to make a personal observation because obviously this study was done in Tokyo during the pandemic. And I was living in Tokyo during the pandemic. And there are some specific kind of textures to the 

00:26:24 Peter Guest 

pandemic in a city like that, right? This is an enormous mega city. Everyone is in their box apartments, the kind of the depth of the isolation, cultural as well as physical was very extreme. 

00:26:37 Peter Guest 

And I remember I was working in a business publication at the time so we were covering Nintendo, we were covering this kind of insane rush of Nintendos to the extent that the kind of dark joke around was, did Nintendo have something to do with this? Because the switch has gone crazy and everyone wants them. 

00:26:50 Peter Guest 

But I think we often think about the video game as being like a very kind of selfish individual pursuit. But actually it was a cultural moment. Everyone was on social media, in Japanese and English, talking about the games they were playing. It was actually a cultural and sort of collective moment. And I can totally see how that  

00:27:11 Peter Guest 

contributes to this idea that you know this was a positive experience for you. Getting access to this technology was a very positive experience. So regardless of the kind of why it was caused, I can see why I can see how that would function. 

00:27:22 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. And it was more than just like, say, that a short half life of pleasure. Like a hit of pleasure from finally getting that Nintendo Switch and thinking oh I've got one and then after a couple of days, especially amid the misery of the lockdown, you're kind of miserable again. There was a a pretty durable effect that the research has noticed here,  

00:27:41 Gareth Mitchell 

in favour of better well-being. And I was interested in that point that we explored in that interview with Andrew about, you know that yes, this is a great piece of work but it was done at a time of such heightened emotions in every possible way under all the issues and the pressure of the pandemic and I really like actually how Andrew said no, but we can take a lot from this study. You know it's not just about  

00:28:08 Gareth Mitchell 

games or games consoles or particular titles curing people in some time of monumental stress, as he puts it, you know there is something very valuable to take away from this study, something quite universal from it as well. And I was quite struck by that. 

00:28:23 Peter Guest 

I think we have to be a little cautious at the idea of cure. I think that there's a degree to which this is kind of palliative right, not proving that this necessarily cures any kind of more profound problems, but I think we've learned a lot in the pandemic about what makes us happy in the moment, and what kind of technologies we can apply to our everyday life that just can improve the way that we occupy the space that we're in, right and communicate with people. So yeah, I mean, it's definitely, definitely fascinating to see the lessons he’s  taking away from it. 

00:28:51 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. All right. Thank you very much indeed for that, Pete. So there you go. That will do us for today. I hope you're not too stressed listening to all this and that it's improving your well-being in so many ways being one of our dear listeners to the Somewhere on Earth podcast. Anyway, we'll have more for you next time. Of course, there's a bit extra for the subscription people. 

00:29:11 Gareth Mitchell 

You're hanging back for that, but in the meantime, from all of us on the team, thank you very much for joining us, from Dylan on sound and Ania on production and Keziah. And Pete and Gareth and our production manager is Liz. There you go. There's all the credits, but of course, credits to you, dear listener, for being here. See you next time. Bye bye.