Tech Unheard Episode 8: Peter Gabriel

© Peter Gabriel Limited in respect of the audio contribution from Peter Gabriel in the podcast and any associated use of his image.Rene Haas (00:07): 

Welcome to Tech Unheard, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the most exciting developments in technology. I’m Rene Haas, your host, and CEO of Arm. Today I’m joined by the legendary musician Peter Gabriel. Listeners will know him for hits like Solsbury Hill and Sledgehammer, as well as his commitment to activism and innovation. Peter has long been an early adopter of new technologies in his music, having been on the front edge of digital recording, download, and distribution tech. He’s also used innovative technology and other spheres, including the use of cameras and the internet to mitigate human rights abuses with a charity witness, always pushing the boundaries of technology and creative work. Peter ran a competition with Stability AI a couple of years ago, asking artists to submit AI animated music videos inspired by and set to his music. Peter Gabriel, welcome to Tech Unheard. 

Peter Gabriel (00:59): 

Thank you very much. 

Rene Haas (01:00): 

It is a pleasure to have you here. We’re actually in the English countryside at the Founders’ Forum, which is my first time here, but we were chatting earlier. This is your 15th or 16th time to this event. 

Peter Gabriel (01:12): 

I think I was invited to the second one, and I have no idea why, but I had a good time and I’ve been enjoying coming ever since. 

Rene Haas (01:20): 

For you personally, what do you get out of coming to something like this? 

Peter Gabriel (01:24): 

Well, my dad was an electrical engineer inventor, so I think that’s the starting point from my interest, but it just feels like there’s a lot of smart people who are going to influence what happens in the world, and a lot of the stuff they’re generating is optimistic and positive. So I come away usually excited by some of the stuff I’ve learned. So for a curious mind, it’s a wonderful place. 

Rene Haas (01:51): 

Yeah. We’ll touch on a few things that we saw because there are actually some very, very fascinating demos here. But you mentioned your dad was an electrical engineer, and that’s my background, and my dad was a scientist more into physics and chemistry, an inventor. But I’m curious, your dad being an electrical engineer, what were the kind of problems he worked on? 

Peter Gabriel (02:11): 

Well, I think in the war, he was part of a team that before radar, Germans used to have a beam the planes would travel along, and so they found a way to bend the beam so that the planes ended up dropping the bombs into the ocean rather than on land. 

Rene Haas (02:30): 

Oh my goodness. 

Peter Gabriel (02:30): 

So that was a useful thing. And then he got involved with cables, and I think he ran the, well, I know he ran the first experiment running tv, fiber optic cable. 

Rene Haas (02:43): 

Oh my goodness. 

Peter Gabriel (02:45): 

Which is actually credited to an American, but his was two years prior to that. 

Rene Haas (02:49): 

You mentioned the beam sort of diversion for German airplanes. Was he working for a defense contractor for the UK government? 

Peter Gabriel (02:58): 

I think it was for the government. 

Rene Haas (02:59): 

Oh, for the government directly. 

Peter Gabriel (03:00): 

But his main company was a company called Rediffusion who mainly designed televisions, and then they created a television studio, but he also was involved in aircraft simulators that Disney bought eventually, I think for theme parks. 

Rene Haas (03:17): 

Yeah. So that was end-quote, real electrical engineering in terms of developing. 

Peter Gabriel (03:23): 

Yeah. And he had his workshop where he used to run away from the craziness of the family and make things and fix things. I inherited his skill to sort of disassemble almost anything, fixing and reassembling, I didn’t get. 

Rene Haas (03:37): 

Well, the road less traveled/forward. My father was a scientist as I said, I had an interest in getting into media and broadcasting and TV and also in engineering, and my dad said, well, if you want to pursue the latter, we’ll fund it. If you want to pursue the former, you’re on your own, which made the economic decision very simple for me. 

Peter Gabriel (03:57): 

Funny how that works. 

Rene Haas (03:58): 

You didn’t follow up your dad relative to the engineering background. You got into music. Why into the creative area of music versus the engineering side? 

Peter Gabriel (04:05): 

I never had his skills. I think I may have been a bit ADHD. I was dismal at exams, so I didn’t have the smart enough exam results to get into university, and I was passionate about music, and it felt like all the pent-up emotion and frustration that I had, I could pour into the music and it felt I started off as a drummer so I could hit things. 

Rene Haas (04:31): 

Well, it’s interesting because – well, a few things. First off, probably if you grew up in this era, being not very good at exams would not have actually been an inhibitor to getting into this field, because clearly there’s been a lot of people who have been very successful who weren’t great academic and test takers. But on the second hand, and I’ve noticed this in my engineering career, there are many, many engineers that I’ve worked with who are musicians and very good ones. And there’s something about how music is created that is very analogous in some ways to the way engineering problems are solved. Do you have a view on that? 

Peter Gabriel (05:04): 

I do. I think it’s probably something to do with the way the brain is structured because it also, for maths and medicine – I mean, the first band I was a drummer in was not a very good jazz band, but it was all doctors. But I think somehow maybe it’s patterns and organization, that some sort of skillset, and – I mean, I hate this division. You know, I think arts and science should be open to everybody, and we should use AI in part to allow us all to become artists and scientists and self-generate these creative worlds around us. So I hate people limiting themselves. I think fear determines many, many human decisions and shouldn’t, but we need to pump ourselves up in various ways in order to break through the fear. 

Rene Haas (06:01): 

And there’s a lot. I want to ask you about that in terms of AI and the brain and how we make decisions. But when you got into music, in terms of your creativity, was it something that you would write down what it is exactly you were going to try to compose? Or did the ideas come to you somewhat in an analog or random fashion relative to how you constructed your ultimate output? I’m curious you know, engineers start with a bit of the ‘what problem am I solving’ and work backwards relative to the logic required. In music, when you’re creating something for you personally, how does that come about? 

Peter Gabriel (06:36): 

Well, I have a theory that there are two types of creative energy, Energy A, which is more analytical, which may be mostly computer-assisted, and then Energy Z, which is more intuitive and zen energy. And so for me, an ultimate creative structure would be different layers. So perhaps you map a rhythm in layer one and you improvise something, and then you use whatever brain power can assist you to improve it and focus on details. And then the next level might be timbre, next level melody. That’s the theory. I mean, often it just happens in a messy random way. And I remember an interesting conversation with George Martin, because he would say, what I do, I have a clear picture and I know how to get there. For me, it’s much messier. You know, I throw a lot of shit against the world until something sticks, and I love introducing the random, and I think that’s a key part of design is to get a randomizer in there that’s really opening things up. 

Rene Haas (07:52): 

Yeah. And I think when I think about AI and I think about AI relative to our industry, it’s much more the George Martin aspect. In other words, it’s logical, it’s a work back. If you look at the way large language models work today, they work off of a known set of answers and then test and test and test and test until the right input comes back. The zen part that you just created, the throwing shit against the wall, then I wonder whether AI can ever accurately capture, and that gets into really the bioscience of the neurons inside the brain that my brain is 20 watts, your brain is 20 watts. The way your neurons fire to create something is completely unique to you. I could never do it. And I wonder whether you think AI could ever achieve that? 

Peter Gabriel (08:41): 

I’m certain it will. Yeah. No, I really think that, you know when- 

Rene Haas (08:45): 

Why are you so certain? 

Peter Gabriel (08:46): 

Well, I mean, maybe it’s just smarter algorithms that are better generating, but I mean, there’s a lot of random elements in the world, which could be inspiration if you like, for the algorithms. You know, I can’t see any job that in the future can’t be better done either with the help of AI- obviously person-to-person skin-to-skin, nursing or whatever else, these are harder things to crack. 

Rene Haas (09:15): 

So you believe that AI will ultimately get pretty good at creativity and invention? 

Peter Gabriel (09:19): 

Yeah, I think it’s absurd that it wouldn’t. 

Rene Haas (09:23): 

Yeah, there’s a lot of healthy debate on that topic, just relative to can AI solve problems? The answer is not known. And I agree with you, I think, and we’re already seeing this, right? There’s the aspects of artificial intelligence that are either augmenting jobs or accelerating jobs, and with every technological innovation replace some jobs. But the creativity and invention and innovation, which is uniquely human and uniquely patterned to how our brains operate, that to me will be quite a fascinating bridge to cross when we cross it. 

Peter Gabriel (09:56): 

Yeah, no, it may take a little while, but I know Bill Joy a little bit, and he’s working with his son on a systems-based approach to AI using fractals and patterns and trying to, I guess reverse-engineer, I’ll get it wrong if I try and describe it, but it just senses that maybe rather than going from leaf to leaf, it might understand the branches and the trunk and the roots a bit. And if that materializes, maybe that would help in this process. But it then brings up all sorts of societal questions. We tend to go towards the most effective and cheapest solutions to all problems. So where does humanity fit in that? And the universal basic income is one possible solution, but we don’t have the resources to jump to that. So I think this is a very interesting and potentially awkward transition that we’re making. 

Rene Haas (10:54): 

We’re in the midst of some things that – and you and I are roughly the same age – but I did not think that we would see in our lifetime. This is one of these things, I always thought that a few generations would have to worry about this problem, but not ourselves. But now it feels like we’re front and center of it, which really raises a lot of fascinating questions, as you said, in terms of moral, social, societal, in terms of where things are going to go with this. 

Peter Gabriel (11:20): 

One project we were worked hard on was to create a thing called theelders.org. Richard Branson and I went to Mandela and tried to get former world leaders working together so that they would have a currency that wasn’t based on economic, political, or military power, but just on moral authority. 

Rene Haas (11:43): 

Oh my gosh. 

Peter Gabriel (11:44): 

So that’s just one thing, but there’s many people working on different projects around the world, and I’m passionate that we need to find a way right now of connecting all the people that have optimism and hope, because, you know, I still believe you can go anywhere in the world and you’ll find kindness, compassion, generosity. But we don’t have a means of harvesting those. Whereas right now, hatred and division, we can harvest and we can make particular people very powerful through that process. So there needs to be a counter-movement and I think there’s a growing group of people looking at ways whether you can create global passports, global citizenry, global commons, all sorts of ideas that I think could bring people in. And then whatever amount of military that gets thrown at this, ideas can’t be killed off while there’s one person left standing, 

Rene Haas (12:42): 

I was not familiar with theelders.org. Is it still – you said Mandela. 

Peter Gabriel (12:46): 

Yeah, still going. And again, I think we are looking and hoping that there’ll be ways that, I mean, they have successfully influenced quite a few difficult situations, but it was an example. 

 

Rene Haas(13:00): 

 Interesting. What are some? I’m just kind of curious. 

Peter Gabriel (13:02): 

Well, I think where there’s been war about to break out, I mean a couple of places in Africa and so on, I think they’ve gone in. Tutu was the chair for a while and Kofi Annan afterwards, and then they’ve been able to go to Myanmar and Cyprus, places that have tensions still. I mean, Israel Palestine is still – I don’t know how effective they were there, but they certainly let their voices get heard. And the idea was, you know, Mandela was quite clear at the opening, he said, if you can’t see and feel this in the village, you’re not doing the right thing. They had one program against child marriage, which has changed laws in a number of countries. So there’s small incremental things. But if there was a movement which could unite various people working on climate or indigenous rights, land rights, all sorts of things that could get connected. 

Rene Haas (14:00): 

Are governments involved in it, or? 

Peter Gabriel (14:02): 

No, and anyone who’s still active in politics is not allowed to be an actor. But the Elders select themselves. 

Rene Haas (14:09): 

Gotcha. I get there’s not a bad thing to kind of have a self-selecting body in terms of that sense. 

Peter Gabriel (14:15): 

Yeah, but I mean, but a dream might’ve been that may still happen eventually, the people of the world try to elect people who they think have made remarkable difference with their lives. And obviously we’ve had a fair number of Nobel Peace Prize winners in amongst the Elders. So but it’s an example of an initiative, which, you know, I’d love to see connected with people at the bottom, so that it’s- 

Rene Haas (14:41): 

That’s fantastic. 

Peter Gabriel (14:42): 

Well, yeah, but I think there’s a lot of people doing things, but we just need to sew it all together. 

Rene Haas (14:49): 

You’ve been involved in so many interesting, fascinating things. We could spend so much time. I want to go back to the founder’s forum we’re at, you and I just walked through the demo tent and we saw something interesting in terms of a regenerative electronic process. We drank some algae together. Good for the gut. I’m not sure, I’m not sure, might be last algae drink for quite a while. You said your dad was actually involved in something kind of interesting, similar in terms of – 

Peter Gabriel (15:15): 

Well, he wasn’t involved at all. He was a consumer, and I think mainly he bought sort of plasma-creating electronic device that would, I think he was hoping cure baldness. But it was, I mean, I’ve looked at, I think it’s from the 1950s or ‘40s, but it’s got a whole list of therapies, which I’m not sure how many have the evidence behind them, but I’m passionate about energy therapy in the sense that the way pharma is structured at the moment, we are going to serve the wealthy once again, but we’re not – maybe certain exceptions – going to reach billions of people around the world. However, and this is where your world comes in, I think if you can get consumer electronics generating infrared healing, ultrasound, better understanding of what’s happening with the electricity in the body and magnetic fields response that we can maybe get directly to individual cells and get something that you then connect to your phone and could provide high-tech healthcare to billions of people at an affordable price. 

Rene Haas (16:21): 

Yeah, you and I were chatting a little bit about this, and I’ve become familiar recently with energy therapy, and I’m a little bit of an old school guy, just from the standpoint of if it’s not covered on their insurance and covered in your med plan, is it a legitimate type of procedure? But people who I know have used it- 

Peter Gabriel (16:40): 

Yeah, some very close to you. 

Rene Haas (16:41): 

Some very close to me, and they swear by it. And it makes a gigantic difference in their lives. 

Peter Gabriel (16:48): 

And there’s now the evidence there. There is the good science. 

Rene Haas (16:51): 

So what’s the blocker behind this? 

Peter Gabriel (16:54): 

Well, I think you need a cultural shift towards healthcare that the old days where you got sick and who do we go to? We go to our parents and say, an expert. We hand over responsibility to someone else, fix us, please. But it doesn’t work like that, particularly now, we’ve got to be collaborators. Both sides asking questions. Not one side who knows and the other who receives. 

Rene Haas (17:19): 

It’s an area where Arm technology is such a natural fit. Arm is in a lot of medical devices today, simple devices, home blood pressure monitors and things of that nature. All of that work that’s being done is all happening on an Arm-based solution. And we’ve had a lot of people inside the company for years have been passionate about addressing this field, we’ve run, we tend to run into a lot of regulatory issues. Just simply for the people who are the device manufacturers commercially, they just look at the amount of time it takes to develop such device and the cost, and they run out of the gumption to continue with it. But it’s low hanging fruit, quite frankly. 

Peter Gabriel (17:56): 

And it’s less regulated than drugs. So that there is a way maybe through consumer electronics of getting some stuff tested that can just be made available. And then the science and clinical trials can take place afterwards as long as people aren’t dying in the meantime. 

Rene Haas(18:14): 

Yeah, and I think back to the drug industry, they’ve got their own motivations in terms of how pharma is set up. It’s a highly regulated industry. It’s a very expensive industry. And alternatives are absolutely needed. 

Peter Gabriel (18:26): 

And I just think there’s so many opportunities and you’re beginning to see startups in this area, and there is growing evidence. 

Rene Haas (18:33): 

Yeah. No, we just ran into a couple interesting ones just in the demo area. Switching gears for a minute, I’m going to talk about Stability AI. Yeah and I read about your interesting work in terms of creativity there around and music and such, or maybe video. Can you tell us a little bit about what that is and how you got involved with it? 

Peter Gabriel (18:49): 

Well, I just think I love any creative tools that suddenly allow ordinary people to do exceptional things. And so AI has definitely given that opportunity both in video imagery and music. Now, I was very happy to just open up my music for people to experiment on. I mean, there are still some ethical issues about training models and all the rest and who it takes from, but – you know – 

Rene Haas (19:17): 

What does it do exactly? 

Peter Gabriel (19:19): 

Well, no, this was just using prompts to generate, I mean, still it’s mainly a technical nerd community doing these things. But we also set up a thing, because at the moment, if a video goes onto YouTube, the musician or the songwriter gets most of the income outside of the tech company, and we felt it should be – if it’s a good visual thing. But so we have a site we call 50 50, which we’re just experimenting with, which will divide the income, which we feel should be larger to the creative side. 

Rene Haas (19:59): 

A bit of a democratization then, if you will. 

Peter Gabriel (20:00): 

Yeah, we’re trying a little bit, but I just think enthusiasm is what I’ve always been drawn to. And if people want to try things, and I think music is going that way too with its sort of evolutionary approach to music. So we had a slogan, it’s the process, not the product. And that if you can invite people in on the process so that they become co-creators with you and some will bother, and I don’t want to bother on a lot of occasions, but when I do, I want to have the chance of getting in there and sort of growing this garden that I can help design. 

Rene Haas (20:37): 

Not talking about the music industry too deeply from an economic standpoint, but if you look at where it is today in terms of how people consume music, are we in a good place? Are we in a healthy place relative to both thinking about it as an artist and then also just as how the population consumes music? 

Peter Gabriel (20:56): 

Well, I love the idea that anyone can get anything, and that’s brilliant. But it’s pushed artists’ rights back about 50 years. But we had a competitor to Spotify in the early days, we were quite often early in the field. 

Rene Haas (21:12): 

You were very early. 

Peter Gabriel (21:13): 

Yeah, we had a music distribution thing two years before Apple, and we had this somewhat similar thing called WE 7, but they actually did it better. But with this one, we worked out we were paying artists 10 times as much as they were getting from Spotify for per stream. So they’re very successful and we sold ours on and not so successful. 

Rene Haas (21:37): 

So OD two, pre iTunes, pre iTunes, post Napster. 

Peter Gabriel (21:42): 

I guess it was – I can’t remember. It was around that time. Yeah. 

Rene Haas (21:45): 

Yeah. That is quite a bit ahead of its time. 

Peter Gabriel (21:49): 

Yeah, I think we were but – which was often my dad’s problem. 

Rene Haas (21:53): 

Yeah, I mean, I think the statute of limitations for illegal downloads on Napster has probably passed. Yeah, but I remember when Napster kicked off, it was a little bit like Spotify now in the sense of, ‘oh my gosh, everything’s available and how fast can you download everything?’ And then obviously iTunes put it in a different place. But the industry changed forever in terms of distribution of music. 

Peter Gabriel (22:16): 

Which is brilliant, and Spotify was very well designed in a way that we weren’t, but I think they could afford to be more generous now they’ve taken dominance. 

Rene Haas (22:27): 

Yeah, no, I think, like you said, as a consumer of music, and I love music, it is wonderful that you can get everything at any time, anytime that you want. But it feels like all that consumption can’t be good for the artists. 

Peter Gabriel (22:39): 

Well, this is a question for you then is: should prompts be transparent? 

Rene Haas (22:46): 

Yeah. 

Peter Gabriel (22:46): 

Yeah. I think if you’ve got a history that goes with any piece of software of origination and influence, then maybe micropayments. I mean, there’s no real excuse why we shouldn’t be able to generate micropayments. 

Rene Haas (23:01): 

Easily. Right. I mean, selfishly, I must’ve done a bunch of Spotify hits on games without Frontiers and Sledgehammer and Lamb Lies on Broadway. And I’m thinking somebody should be benefiting from this other than me just sort of slipping it. I hope Peter’s getting a little piece of what’s going on here. 

Peter Gabriel (23:17): 

Yeah, a small piece I’m sure. It’s better now, but it’s still, I would say it has a long way to go. Old, well-established artists, we’ve done very well. We were there in the financial heyday of the music business. But for young artists and minority interest artists, this is really critical because live work is very hard to get. 

Rene Haas (23:38): 

So one of the things that we talk about in my industry is what jobs will AI replace? We’re already seeing with things like agents and chatbots and things of that nature where white collar jobs can be replaced. And on one level you look at it and say, what’s to worry about here? We’ve seen that with every technological evolution. There are jobs that go away and things get more productive. Back to the discussion we had about invention and creativity, we maybe get to a world where music can be generated artificially, and we’re kind of there now. 

Peter Gabriel (24:12): 

 We’re there. 

Rene Haas (24:12): 

But how do you feel about that both ethically, technologically, morally, in terms of is this a bridge too far? 

Peter Gabriel (24:21): 

No. You can’t. You know, it’s like King Canutes in the waves. You can’t stop it. You’ve just got to work with it and find your corner. So I think that’s the only way to compete with AI is to work with it. 

Rene Haas (24:33): 

Do you have a viewpoint though? I mean, will you get to a point where there will be music created by AI with unique vocals and unique backgrounds that will say, this sounds pretty darn good. I don’t really care whether it was created by a man or machine? 

Peter Gabriel (24:44): 

Well, as a producer always used to say, ‘give me a music business without any bloody musicians’, because that’s where all the problems come. And we’re going that way. There’s this wonderful designer called Gaetano Pesce, and he used to say that beauty in the future will lie in the imperfection, and humanity is loaded with imperfection. 

Rene Haas (25:07): 

I wonder. It’s folks who say, we ended up having a chat with somebody. We had a very, very nice restaurant in New York a couple of days ago, and we were talking about could robots replace the chef? And my patron lunch was saying, there’s just no way people will want to know their food has been created by a person. And I said, well, but we don’t know who’s behind the kitchen. No, the front of the house will always be people, but behind the curtain, the food tastes great. I don’t know any difference. And he said, ‘No, no, no. People will come to know it’s made by humans.’ I wonder if the same is through with music. People will say- 

Peter Gabriel (25:42): 

No, well I think – there is already a robot chef, and I think that it’s only going to get increasingly better. And same with music. So I think the fringe is safer than the mainstream because where the mainstream is where the money is, and therefore, that’s where AI will first focus. 

Rene Haas (26:03): 

And I think the other thing it can’t replace is obviously live performances. 

Peter Gabriel (26:09): 

That’s a lot harder. But I mean, I went to the ABBA show and you know – 

Rene Haas (26:16): 

Humanoids were up there? 

Peter Gabriel (26:17): 

Yeah, well, Abba Voyage, it’s all sort of virtual characters. 

Rene Haas (26:21): 

Oh, really? Yeah. I’ve heard about that. Is that a good show? 

Peter Gabriel (26:24): 

They do it really well. I mean, I think there’s things for all of us to learn, but it’s – as the starting point – they’ve done it really well. And there is already, you know, Elvis things and Michael Jackson shows coming along so, 

Rene Haas (26:37): 

Done – like a virtual? 

Peter Gabriel (26:39): 

Yeah, virtually, and that’s only going to get better. So, you know I don’t think anything is safe from AI. And I think that it amplifies and accelerates everything, and humans are not amplifying and accelerating their reaction and anticipation. 

Rene Haas (26:57): 

So now you’ve got me very curious. So this ABBA show, it’s- 

Peter Gabriel (27:02): 

Yeah, you can see it in London. 

Rene Haas (27:03): 

Yeah. No, I’ve heard of it, but it’s a virtual- 

Peter Gabriel (27:05): 

Yeah, it’s all virtual. And no, I used to make a joke about it because you know I think they’ve taken a younger version of themselves. And so I’d said in opposition, I’ve made my avatar a little fatter, a little balder than the real thing. 

Rene Haas (27:25): 

When do I see Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins in the mid 1970s? When does that come out. I want to see that. 

Peter Gabriel (27:30): 

Yeah. Well, so do I. Because I think all artists want horizontal income, which is where you lie in your bed and the money comes in. 

Rene Haas (27:38): 

Gotcha. I will look forward to seeing Genesis perform again in some virtual tour. Peter, it was a pleasure. No, it was a real pleasure. Thank you.  

Thanks for listening to this month’s episode of Tech Unheard. We’ll be back next month for another look behind the boardroom door to be sure you don’t miss new episodes. Follow Tech Unheard wherever you get your podcasts. Until then, Tech Unheard is a custom podcast series from Arm and National Public Media. And I’m Arm CEO Rene Haas. Thanks for listening to Tech Unheard. 

Credits (28:20): 

Arm Tech Unheard is a custom podcast series from Arm and National Public Media executive producers Erica Osher and Shannon Boerner, project manager, Colin Harden, creative lead producer Isabel Robertson, editors Andrew Merriweather, and Kelly Drake composer, Aaron Levison. Arm production contributors include Ami Badani, Claudia Brandon, Simon Jared, Jonathan Armstrong, Ben Webdell, Sofia McKenzie, Kristen Ray, and Saumil Shah. Tech Unheard is hosted by Arm Chief Executive Officer Rene Haas.