Peter Gabriel Full Interview

that, whether through peaceful means or war, music has always played an important role and I believe it is a tool to awaken Rabel. Good or bad it is and you know I think you're getting it because you know you say yes with context and text and everything else, but sometimes a song can encapsulate a whole feeling and um and in the case of Boo it's kind of whole movement, no, you have an interesting case in Uganda right now because there's a guy, Bobby Wine, who's trying to present a kind of alternative political point of view, uh, and they have to do it. change the laws of that country to prohibit him from performing so music can still be powerful, yes, yes, now I feel like you are unique among artists, a restless soul, you are always looking for the next thing, the next project, you know you are a big fan of technology and digital media. of the audiovisual language, um, it's something that you know that you see in the future as your projects for the future, yes, yes, well, there is one thing, um, well, a couple, one, uh, unfortunately, my wife got cancer ago couple of years, lymphoma and had access to this amazing immunotherapy treatment car, uh, but it occurred to me that it was very obvious that many people will never have the opportunity to have access to this, so what is clear in the communication musical on television is as soon as you can turn it on. in digits, you can bring it to the world at low cost and therefore with the evolution of a kind of cellular medicine, it is possible to use magnetic fields like Nova Cure in Israel or infrared light like open water with holography to turn cells on and off . and sound, and there's a whole range of potential digital treatments that could be miniaturized and provide access to high-tech healthcare to millions of people, so it's kind of a passion project right now and another one is that I had this uh extraordinary experience playing music with Apes and um sorry with Apes Apes, yeah, no, I've had furry drummers before, but this was next level, next level and I think we have some footage of this, well we have, yeah and If we could get through the video, I would love to show you so this is the language research lab in Atlanta.

Could we mention the sound? This isn't a drummer, right? I think so, no, this is Panisha, who? Unfortunately he died, but here he has a little board

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of symbols and he can communicate with words and we asked him to start playing maybe a little louder the music that I'm playing in the house next door, so he's improvising with me and that's it like She started, but then we asked her what she wanted it to be about and she said fix it, but she got very careful and considered the way she chose her notes in an extraordinary way and you will see that she likes this note, so it comes .

Back to the ninja then it made me want to cry seeing this and me and now she finds the octave below incredible incredible and now you see her go to the symbol board good, you did good, very good, she pressed the button forever because she thought who had just done a good performance, so it's amazing anyway, as a result of that we have one of the founders of the Internet, a guy named Vince Surf and an incredible scientist named Neil Gershenfeld and Diana Reee, who is Dolphin Research. and um Sue Savage Rambo, who was the inspiration and um, you can hear her voice in that, and we're hosting a meeting at MIT this July to try to create an interspecies Internet with sort of specially designed interfaces to allow non-humans to have access to the online world, and you know, a lot of people laugh at this, but I think maybe it's just one example, but there's a lot of really considerable intelligence that exists on our own planet now.

We don't necessarily have to go looking for intelligent life in the universe, we might have it on our planet, uh, and hope

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y we'll recognize it before destroying it completely. Yes, it is extraordinary, a kind of surprising innovation also just with technological music. and the way music can know AB jumping species extraordinarily well, one of the things too and this would only be done if the apes or the participants volunteered and decided to do it. There are these new brain scans that you can wear like a hat, right? an MRI machine that will have a resolution a million times better than MRI and, well, yesterday there was a paper that showed that at Columbia University they can now recognize speech from the brain pattern and they can convert the readings of the brain in words, uh, they can also do it in Berkeley in pictures, so we'll be able to know that the days of having private thoughts will soon be over, which comes with a danger warning, yeah, so technically you could do it.

We're saying that potentially at one point maybe you can transfer that into music. Mary Lou Jebson is one of the examples that she gives, yes, that, um, she thinks that yes, in maybe two or three years we will be able to think again. about music to listen to it and you know when that starts to happen with movies and with text, um, there's a whole new world and I mean, actually one of the first conversations we had was about potential human rights abuses of this technology, but it's common and it's something we all need to think about, yes, the idea of ​​your thoughts being monitored seems like it, well, in a way, yes, and Facebook Google is already doing it to some extent, which is another area of ​​conversation now.

I just want to um, mention, uh, we'll go back from uh to humans and uh, we'll talk about the fact that you were recognized with the prestigious Man of Peace award, um, I think we have a picture of that too and this, um, was in , I think, 2006. was this is uh oh yeah this is this is the um Lake the uh how was that so how did that come about what does that really mean to you it really meant a huge amount because these are given from the piece um Bri laureates and So, they are an extraordinary group of people, yes, who have given their lives in the service of others, so, um, I think they also want a celebrity to get news coverage for their events, but they don't. let's do.

Stop at that, well, and in that case, shortly after, you, Nelson Mandela, released The Elders, which was a project that he had been planning for many years. Well, we were, yeah, Richard Branson, yeah, we were kind of tearing down where the lack of leadership that I think we're seeing in the world today was and maybe you could form a group of such extraordinary individuals that could influence situations and be able to apply pressure and connect the kind of young idealism with some wisdom, experience and networking and we tried to sell it to Mandela because we both thought that if Mandela doesn't do this he won't fly, so we had lunch at Richard's house with Mandela and his first reaction was: I'm sure those in power don't want a group of veterans to interfere and then he started thinking and thinking about a time when he had worked or when he was asked to help with Hutus and Tosis fighting each other. yes and the young generals said: he or I had told you that actually we prefer to talk to you because we don't feel that you have any other agenda than to serve everyone. uh, everyone else here has a separate agenda and anyway, it took a couple more years, but finally in 2007, he got Enthusiastic and, well, in 2006, really, and then we invited people that he and Grassa Michelle, his wife, um, they thought, and we had the first senior meetings, which you see there and that was incredible, uh, feeling, um, and I think you know.

There is still a lot of work to do, but I think they have had an impact in many areas. I mean, one area was child marriage, where they've now created a separate organization called Girls Not Brides, but the number of girls forced. in marriage went down from about 11 million to 8 million, so, but conflict resolution in Kenya, I mean, there are a number of examples and unfortunately we lost Kofi Andan, who was the president after the tutu and, um, but now we still we have Banky Moon and it's still a wonderful group, um, that can go and get their phone calls answered and, uh, and make a difference, we hope.

Yes, I think you know that more and more problems we are looking at, like refugees or climate change, are global in nature and so national governments are not always able to act and the UN is sometimes blocked by veto votes in the Security Council, etc., does an incredible job, but it also has problems, so I think we need several entities that are global in nature. and it could have an impact, yes, you mentioned that Kofi and sadly passed away last year and I have a quote here from Desmond Tutu, yes, who actually spoke, I think, at his funeral and said that one of the most powerful things that Kofi and An had been told they were and it's a very simple quote, but it means that he said a lot, there's no such thing as them and us, there's just us, yeah, you know, and that seems to be kind of the defining characteristic of de. of you guys, actually, your work and the way that yeah, no, that quote inspired an album that I called us on because I just think that we all do this, you know, we define.

I think we are born with a tendency to shy away from people who are different from us in everything and you have to work, I think to find the quality, but I mean one of the surprising things that happens with music is that there is an easy way That Kofi wasn't a bad interpreter of Conger, he was. It's, uh, but it's a way in and it opens people up and, um, uh, so, um, I was going to say something that's faded away now, but maybe it'll come back well, um, that made-up music that just brings it back. back to that. because I know I just got it again, that's how an older person's brain works, although it's supposedly interesting this frequency that we were talking about, yeah, they did some experiments with mice and if you have this frequency for an hour or a day o With two hours a day you can stop Alzheimer's in its tracks and prevent plaque from forming.

Most of us probably have elderly relatives if we're not already candidates, but that's the way it is. Anyway, by the way, but what I was doing with the Us and Them thing is that there was a continuation of that quote where you can measure how civilized a person is or how civilized they have made their life based on where they put that dividing line: does it begin outside of me? Does it start outside my family? city, my country or my planet, and uh, anything we can do to push that line a little bit, uh, we should get into that, I'm sure, well, um, uh, just to get back to the music because I know that in a few minutes you will be. you're going to perform for us a little bit oh you're looking at the clock well I was looking for the clock I know that's it you know I'm aware of the time when we, um, you, uh, we were inducted into the Hall of Fame two Sometimes, kind of a select few that have only been included twice, it's the advantage of being in a group and going solo, that's true, yes, and you mentioned in one of your acceptance speeches that the music is extraordinary and correct me if this is wrong, but you said it was like an ax to a frozen sea, which I think NS originally is like an ice pick to the I always misunderstand quotes, but yeah, the feeling is there, yeah, yeah, yeah, and it's that you're Saying that you know that music can unlock some kind of doomed feeling and emotion and some of us have been on dates like that or at least we hope that music works like that and uh no, I think that's one way that I've You certainly know that a good advertisement will make me cry, but a good piece of music will make me cry and I think it's a way, you know, it's a basic way to reach the soul, yeah, yeah, I mean, there's a great quote that I love again from where you say that without music life would be a mistake, yeah, which kind of sums it up, really, yeah, it works for me, yeah, and what is it, are you optimistic about the future of the planet in general? specifically about the music and the way the music goes.

I am an optimist by nature and believe that we are an intelligent species, but we generally don't concentrate unless our survival truly believes that our survival depends on it. I always think about Talent. It's overrated and you know, if I tell someone you know this gun is going to go off in 12 months unless you produce a great piece of art or a great piece of music, people are going to be surprised at how talented they are, you know? The same goes for our planetary survival, if we really address climate change seriously, I'm sure we are capable of generating some solutions, but there are forces that don't address the problem seriously, so I think there are a lot of opportunities. but yes, I tend to think that we will find a way out at least for a few million years, yes, ladies and gentlemen, Peter Gabriel, thank you very much.

I just wanted to say that Bill is an extraordinary man and for anyone he is. I'm not familiar in my country it's a national institution, but anyone who's not familiar, check out Bill Bailey on YouTube because you'll laugh a lot, thanks Peter, no.