Living Under the Law of Unintended consequences
Bob is a legendary music producer. He’s worked with the likes of Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd, Andrea Bocelli, who actually helped produce his very first album, Lou Reed, and Kiss. In addition to all of his great work in the music industry, Bob is also a passionate environmental activist and has been fighting against climate change for many years.
So Bob, thank you so much for joining us today.
My pleasure. So let’s just start out with what does… Let me just correct one thing. I didn’t produce Andrea’s first album, but I did give him his first number one record. First number one record, that’s awesome.
So let’s just sort of start out broadly about activism. You’ve been an activist for a number of years, and obviously a lot of people in entertainment, music are activists. What does activism mean to you?
Well, what it means to me is my human responsibility, and I think all of us are activists on a certain level all the time, and we just don’t know it. If we’re parents, we’re activists because we’re active, we’re on behalf of our children, on behalf of our families, we’re aggressive, we fight for the right. And as kids, we tend to be activists because as we grow, as our brains grow, we take on subjects or we take on passions and they sort of inhabit us like our loves for rock stars, but also like our passion about a particular subject, whether it’s the environment or whether it’s something political. Young people tend to embrace these things. They fall in love and they are consumed with them and they become very active in their relationship with them.
So we’ve all got it. It’s baked in. The question later on in life is whether we make the time and whether we put in the effort to follow those things that we care about. And I have. That’s just sort of my nature. I make stuff, you know, and I do stuff. It’s what I do for a living and all day long. So the things that I care about, I’m very active about.
You know, and you’re coming from the music and entertainment world. And of course, there is a lot of activism, environmental and otherwise, in entertainment. But of course, the flip side, what we hear from the Fox News and the right-wing media is that, you know, these are elites that are trying to tell you what to do. And of course, nothing could be further from the truth. But how do you counter that dialogue in terms of being in the entertainment field and being an activist at the same time?
Well, you know, elites, I mean, some people in the entertainment business have been fortunate enough to be really successful, so they made a lot of money. And in that sense, they are considered to be elite because they have money, they have power and they are, you know, public personalities. People know them. But as human beings, you know, most of us were raised just like everybody else. Our parents went to work just like everybody else. And we went to school just like everybody else. We learned our values long before we ever became successful at anything, whether it’s people in the entertainment world or multi-billionaires who have found their fortunes in technology. Before they became multi-billionaires, they were just regular folks like the rest of us. And they went to school and well, actually, they weren’t regular folks. They were obsessed with technology. But, you know, we all just grew up like everybody else you went to school with. And we all saw the same movies and listened to the same music, read the same books, watched the same television stations. And we encountered the world in the same way.
Now, how we react to the world is a different story. And in my home, we were taught we were taught that everyone was welcome at our table. In fact, my mother bought a boardroom table because there were five kids. My parents, my grandma lived with us, and any guests that any one of us wanted to bring home. So there was just no table big enough. She bought a boardroom table and that gave us the space to we could expand it with leaves to accommodate however many guests wanted to come home with us for dinner that night. And no one was ever turned away.
And just that stop right there. That act of opening your home to strangers and to anybody and to people who needed a meal or to people that you wanted to have a meal with. That was an act of open-heartedness that sort of imbued everything I did in my life. So I just… My mom, you said, would pick up strays, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense, what she meant was I would just befriend anybody, you know, so like I’d meet somebody and, you know, within 15 to 20 minutes, we’d be best buds and then I’d bring them home. And there was no fear and there was no exclusion. It didn’t matter if they were tall, short, green, white, blue, you know, whether they were our religion or some other religion, whether they believed in politics that, you know, the politics that we believed in at the time, the home was open.
So that sets the stage and my feeling about life is that the best way we can go through it is with an open heart, open eyes, open ears and an open mind. And if we can be open, we can hear, we can see other people, we can understand other people and may find out that our preconceptions about those other people are not right. And we may learn something. But the thing that we will most certainly do is we will allow the opportunity to connect.
And that’s such a great thought, and when we think about activism, sometimes we think about marching before Capitol Hill or the White House. But, of course, activism can also be local in our show producer who’s been friends with you for a long time, Stephen Jay, he put you in touch with some people like Thomas Lindzey, who’s been on this show, as well as some others that have their activism is focused more at the local or community level.
And then you hope that that can grow and become a national or even international phenomenon. But what you were talking about right now, reaching out to your neighbor, reaching out to people in your local community, local activism is also very important as well. If you could talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, well, I think local. Listen, I think personal activism is the key. This is where it all starts. You have to care about stuff. You have to care about your health. You have to care about what you do. You have to care about your quality as a human being. And then if you do care, hopefully you do healthy things. And I don’t mean just in terms of what you eat and the exercise you get, but also in terms of the way in which you interact with people and the world.
And then if you then you spread out from there, then you must care about your family and you must care about your friends, the people closest to you. And then you must care about your neighbors and then your neighbors’ neighbors. And as it grows, you suddenly realize, oh, hell, I’m caring about my whole community. And once you get to there, then you start to have to answer questions about how things are working on a social level. Is my community healthy? You know, is my community getting what it needs? Is my community suffering from anything? And in many communities, there’s a lot of suffering. There’s poverty, there’s discrimination, there is violence.
And if you’ve gone through the steps of caring about yourself, your family and your friends, and you look up and you realize that everyone around you is at risk because there’s a huge amount of violence surrounding you, then you must realize that it’s your responsibility to do something healthy for your community too. And that means you have to take it on, take on that violence, figure a way to help to reduce it or or eliminate it altogether. And then instantly you’re a community activist.
You know, you’ve either put together or participated in a lot of media conferences, especially in your home country of Canada. What do you think is the state of the media and the relationship between media and activism, particularly young activists? Because, you know, the media obviously plays a huge role in shaping the public conversation. To what extent does the media, in your mind, influence activism?
Well, I think that the media promotes and foments activism, but it’s not always the right kind of activism. And I mean, let’s face it. The media’s job is to is to grow and make money just like everything else in our system of capitalism. And we believe that everyone has the right to create and profit from what they create. And the media has found that the way to grow, the way to get people to get people to stick with them and to grow their numbers is to inflame people. That’s what they’ve learned. And social media has made it much easier to do so, because now you’ve got algorithms. You have these little, you know, artificial intelligence bots that run around the world at light speed and find out what everyone reacts to the most. And we’re human. What we react to the most is our fears, our loves, our desires. So when it sees us like looking up something that we’re afraid of or something that we really believe in, it notes that and says, well, that person likes that stuff. I’m going to give them more. And it amplifies it.
So what can begin is an innocent curiosity about people different from me. I could begin to start looking up Martians. And if I look up Martians two or three times, suddenly I’m just going to start to get a whole bunch of articles about Martians and including ones that are not necessarily positive. And if I click on the one that’s not positive about Martians and I stay there long enough, the little bot knows and says, wow, that guy is really interested in crap about Martians. So I’m going to feed him as much crap about Martians as I can. And before you know it, my entire social media feed is stacked with stuff that is that is against Martians, that accuses them of things. It’s conspiracy theories about Martians.
And so this is how the media is now working in a way against our social interest because they are promoting a kind of activism that is not healthy. They’re pushing people towards people’s basest inclinations. And sometimes they’re helping to create prejudice. You don’t even have to be prejudiced to start with. You just have to make a few steps in that direction out of curiosity. And the little AI bots will figure out a way to give you more and more stuff to make you watch longer, stick with it longer and see more ads. And that’s the bottom line. So where we are now in our society is we’ve found out what are people most passionate about? Well, they’re most passionate about the things that frighten them. And the media has been feeding our fears in a way that’s unprecedented.
I mean, when I was growing up, yeah, there used to be the old adage, you know, if it bleeds, it leads like on national news. The first thing you’d see would be the big train wreck. And then you’d start talking about other, you know, less sensational stuff that was perhaps even more important to your life. Now, it’s all sensational. It’s all about the things that you need to be afraid of. It’s all about natural disaster. It’s about violence in the street. It’s about those people who are coming to get you, whoever they might be. And if that’s all you hear all day long, then you tend to either fold your tent and go hide in a corner or you act. And if you’re acting on the basis of this kind of information, chances are you’re not going to act very well.
Do you think a lot of that is a structural problem with the media itself, because we’ve heard the phrase that if you’re not paying for something, if you’re not paying for a product, then you are the product. And that is for the most case with the media. But in the old days, we only had Nielsen or they had opinion polls or things like that. But now, like you said, they have algorithms that can really literally get inside people’s heads and know what makes them tick. And they’re able to create the media, can craft propaganda to respond to those unique interests. Like you were saying, if somebody is Googling Martians, they’re going to know that and they can shape their propaganda accordingly. So where do you feel that we are in the state of the media? Do we think that the media really has turned into some form of mind control, more or?
Yeah, I think it’s inadvertent mind control. I think that we’re living under the law, under the rule of unintended consequences. Like so much of what has been created started with a great idea or something that’s really cool.
A lot of nerdy guys created something that they thought was really cool, like Facebook, which is not a really good idea. You know, the idea of rating women according to how they look, that’s disgusting as far as I’m concerned.
And but, you know, to the sort of hormonal, you know, college students who created the thing that was really cool. So they created this thing that was really cool. And then it just kind of grew and grew and blew up and became bigger than they ever, ever imagined. And and started to become an echo chamber of its own sort. And then in order to deal with the growth, they had to have more employees. In order to have more employees, they had to make more money. In order to make more money, they had to keep people stuck to the service.
Then they had to start marketing their data to advertisers so that they could help advertisers reach their preferred customers. And so it all started with the best of intentions. But my father used to say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And what we live in right now is a kind of media and informational hell that is an unintended consequence of systems that were put into place quite innocently.
I think to start, I don’t think there was a big brother who figured this out and decided that they were going to propagandize us and take control of society. But I think that over time, like the lobster that gets slowly boiled, the famous lobster, you know, it’s boiled in its own bath sort of thing or whatever. I can’t remember the adage, but over time, this has happened with these structures that were created with the best of intentions that people thought were really cool to start with. It’s not cool now. It does shape our thinking. It does propagandize us and it does manipulate us all the time.
As you say, it used to be on television. If you’d watch a TV show, there’d be an ad for Winston. Of course, they lied to us then, you know, they lied and propagandized us and sort of influenced our thinking by putting up good looking models. And, you know, the Marlboro man, everybody wanted to be a real man because that’s what they sold us on. And if you wanted to be a real man, you had to smoke Marlboro. So lots of kids started smoking, lots of them developed cancer. That was a bad consequence of something that somebody probably thought was a cool idea. I got an idea. Here’s how to sell cigarettes.
So, look, we’re at a state now where we need a reckoning and I almost feel like we need some kind of giant flush. Unfortunately, those come historically in the form of catastrophe. And I pray that that’s not the way we’re going to have to experience our change. I hope that we’re smart enough now and that we are communicating well enough now to affect the change in a positive way to actually do it because we want it, not because it’s forced on us by some cataclysm. You know, and you think about how, you know, the Gen Z is we think of as being defined by social media. They’ve had it for basically their entire lives. And it is the primary way in which they consume and get information. And that’s both good and bad.
So if you think back to the Marlboro case when the tobacco companies were giving out misinformation about the link between tobacco and cancer and you think to yourself, well, if all of these social media platforms had existed back in the 50s and 60s and 70s when this was going on, maybe people would have understood the link between smoking and cancer earlier than we eventually did. At the same time, that same social media can also give us misinformation very quickly. And, you know, we’ve had people on this show, for example, medical experts that we talked about how there was a rumor that was started out of absolutely nowhere that the COVID vaccine causes birth defects and it’s caused millions of people to not get the vaccine, even though there’s not a shred of evidence behind it.
But it was just some rumor that was started on social media. So it’s both good and bad. When you get instant information, it can be instantly good or instantly bad, but it certainly changes the dynamics. So as someone that’s been involved in media and has followed media very closely for a number of decades, where do you see the sort of evolution of the younger generation just being sort of used to or accustomed to getting instant information, which was not previously the case?
Oh, boy, I mean, you know, we don’t have enough time to deal with all the implications of current social media and what it’s meant to this generation. And by the way, I mean, if we’re talking about kids who are currently in their teens or early 20s, the events of the last three years have just been devastating to them on a social level and have really impacted their mental health. And unfortunately, so let me see if I can do this in a short period of time, but. Social media has it has encouraged one kind of behavior that I think it ends up being very unhealthy for kids who’ve just gone through this period.
And that is that they’ve learned that the only connection you can have with anyone is through a device that you can’t just sit there and talk to somebody. You can’t just sit there and play or do anything else. There’s always got to be a device. And if you see, you know, many, many adults as well, but but a lot of kids in that age group, they’ll actually sit together in a group looking at their devices. Communicating sometimes with the people in the group and sometimes people outside of the group. But there is a it’s become habitual that their connection with others is through a device.
And then they had three years of learning that they can’t even get into the room with other people. And that just underscored how important the devices were. And what they’ve lost is the direct human connection between themselves and their friends, themselves and their parents, for sure, themselves and their extended families. And and that alone is so I’m not really answering a question about instant information, but the fact that instant connection is only possible through a device now. And that is as a result of the media that are on these devices, the devices themselves are just pieces of plastic and and metal and and have no brains at all.
But it’s what we put through them that is influencing these kids. So the software has conditioned kids now to be in a place where they cannot connect. And that’s really dangerous and unhappy place to be. And I fear that we’re going to see a lot of, you know, kids engaging in in self-destructive, let me just put it like that, self-destructive behavior because they’re lonely. And and they’re they feel cut off from their tribe. That’s not an answer to your question, but it’s how I feel very strongly about what’s happening to this generation and through their social media.
And follow up on that, you know, we think of one of the challenges that we’ve had in the environmental movement is, of course, connecting the younger activists to the middle aged and older activists, because, you know, and this is not unique to Gen Z or this generation. Every generation has always blamed the generations before it. But of course, you know, you are an environmental activist in the 70s and 80s. And for whatever reason, sometimes when I talk to younger people, they’ll say, you know, the problem is the older generation. We don’t we don’t want them involved. We don’t even want people over the age of 60 running for office.
I mean, I’ve even heard that from from some young people. So what do we do to bridge the gap to say that actually the activists that were fighting for the environment in the 70s and 80s are doing the same thing that you’re doing now, and they might actually have some wisdom to impart? Well, you know, when, according to the Bible, when the children of Israel broke out of Egypt and and attained their freedom after having been slaves for generations and generations, they had to wander around in the desert for 40 years before they found their homeland.
And the reason for that was so that everyone who had a slave mentality would have died off by the time they got to the new to the promised land. So they would enter the promised land as free people, free in their minds, free in their souls. And, you know, in a way. In all honesty, as passionate as I am and as much as I want to see change and as much as I use my station, which comes with age and in a certain way for to move needles as best I’m able, I think in a general sense, my generation has done a really crappy job of, you know, of caring for the world, of caring for, you know, caring for society at large, of caring for humanity. We’ve done a crappy job.
It looks like we’ve done a good job because we speak loudly, but we but the effects of our speaking have been minimal. And if I were the kids, I’d get rid of all of us. I, you know, I have sometimes I attend a meeting or I speak to a group of students or something and I just go, well, I don’t know why you don’t all just hate us. You should. We’ve done a really shitty job. And and maybe it takes a generation of people who have who are free of some of the preconceptions and programming that we we have as a result of our upbringing, you know, that that everything is about profit. Everything’s about growth. Everything is about personal actualization and everything.
You know, who invented the selfie? We did. Not not the techies, because we started the whole self movement. Movement.
We started with self-realization, self-improvement, self-health, self this, self that. And and we cannot be surprised or upset about the natural evolution of that thinking to where the only thing that matters in life is the selfie. And so it’s our fault. It is our fault. And the way the world is right now, it’s our fault. We consumed and consumed without thought for for the repercussions. You know, these are the unintended consequences of our. Self-indulgence.
And and so, you know, what I say to kids, if they say, you know, they look at us and go, you know, it’s you guys did this. I say, you’re right. You’re right. Wow. Well, they might be and they’ll probably probably probably be saying something similar a few decades from now when the younger generation is looking back. Well, they might. But but I don’t think that we’ve been at this juncture. Quite like not quite at this juncture before. Historically, maybe it at, you know, massive turning points like the fall of Rome and stuff like that.
But this is a this is a massive turning point that we have. We’ve created a world that is no longer self-sustaining. We’ve created a world that is actually on track to to destroy itself, not the globe. The globe will be fine. It’s our world, us, the world of humans. We have created a world of humans that has a shelf life now, you know, where it seemed like it was going to be perpetual. It is clearly not.
Yeah, that’s so true. We can only hope that the what we call our new age, which is the Anthropocene, that is that the we live in a world that is largely our climate is largely influenced by human activity. We hope that we’ll survive it. And to do so, we’re going to need more activists like yourself, as well as activists from from this generation as well.
