Samantha: In this day and age, celebrities are scrutinized way more than, five, ten years ago. So, in 2018, what does celebrity mean to you? And how do you think celebrity differs from the perception of a celebrity in the past?

Mike Shinoda: Just a little— by way of a little bit of a background on me, I guess first I should say I grew up drawing and painting and playing piano and those were all very, especially at the time, they were just nerdy things to do. I wasn’t playing music where a lot of friends or a lot of people at school would be like, “Yo, have you heard that guy?” It was more like I would play piano. They’d humor me, but it wasn’t cool. The art thing was more utilitarian. It’s like, “Will you draw a poster for our football game? Will you draw this so we can put it on a t-shirt or on the yearbook?” I went to school for design and art and the music just kind of took off. So, I ended up doing it because I loved it and it was like a winning lottery ticket. It was like, wow, I can’t believe I get the opportunity to do this, I’m so lucky.

So, I remember distinctly the first time when the band was really blowing up and we had a single that was on the radio, and I remember going to one of our shows and seeing people in the crowd that I wouldn’t be friends with. I would never… at one point actually, the most extreme example of it was I was outside one of our early, early shows and there was a skinhead kid who was like, “I love your band” and I was like “You’re a fucking skinhead, like what?!” I didn’t say anything, I just kind of moved on, but if it was me now, I would actually probably engage them and been like, “What is the deal, why?”

Samantha: Like, what is it about our music that’s resonating?!

Mike: Right, and what am I doing wrong? But I think where I was kind of going with this is a few years later I did a show, this is a long time ago now but I did a couple of art shows, a two-part theme that was about celebrity. It was about basically a faceless, nameless skeleton character who became famous for no other reason than being famous. It was around the time of the beginning of, like, Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie’s thing, and then Britney Spears shaved her head and eventually it went all the way to the point where as I was—the art was on the walls and the premiere for the second show was happening—just a few weeks before, I think it was like a week or two weeks before that Michael Jackson died and in the show already was stuff about Princess Diana and all this stuff about celebrity because it was really exploring the fact that I’ve gotten myself into this situation being known by all these people.

I’m in it for the art of it, for the fun of doing it. I mean, of course I appreciate being able to make an incredible, better than make a living doing it. But it was never for me. It’s never been about like, hey look at me, I’m famous. I could actually really do without that. For it to culminate in that way where Michael Jackson passes away and one of the greatest, one of the biggest celebrity death moments happens like right on top of the show.

Samantha: Did you feel like at that time, it was super gimmicky, what we were sort of considering popular culture?

Mike: What was crazy in that moment was, when he died he’d had a long career. He started as a child pop-star, so to have two, three decades of being the biggest R&B, pop singer in the world—that’s a lot of time for people to say that they’re either your friend or your co-collaborator.

So as soon as he passed away, every single radio station in the world, every single news publication, every single outlet you can think of had somebody on who is a friend of his, or worked with him and it took no time at all for C-list celebrities and garbage people to be on CNN. And that for me, that was like a big turning point that got us where we are today. Because you can see very quickly how the threshold at which they would say, “Oh, this person is worth putting on the air, and this person is not”, the threshold started to just kind of evaporate.

And these days now with being able to quantify a celebrity’s value in terms of followers on any individual social media platform, whether that’s because they are—they’re just funny and they make little Vine-style videos or they just wear bikinis and that’s all they do and they get free product, and that’s basically the routine—they have no problem putting those people on the news. It’s just gotten really… it’s an inch deep and a mile wide.

Samantha: And what do you think that says about us as we’re consuming and popularizing this sort of cultural behavior, and what we’re considering to be consumption worthy? As an artist and someone who truly values the craft and the time spent and involved, does that infuriate you, or do you almost see that as an opportunity to continue to uphold…?

Mike: Well, that’s a good point. I definitely think that when I hear music that’s created by somebody that I know has the attention to craft and the skills, when it’s not just kids screwing around in their bedroom, like whatever the opposite of that is—by the way I’m not dissing that, I think that everybody’s got to start somewhere—but who’s going to get my respect, who do I listen to and go, “Wow, how did they do that?” To me, that is kind of one of the ways, one of the lenses through which I view something and maybe judge it.

Here’s a couple of things though. Number one, our brains are wired in such a way, that when we see somebody’s face enough times, our brain doesn’t just say, “Oh, I recognize that famous person.” Your brain on a primal level actually says “that is my friend”, and it’s built in from caveman times when you would be running around with other people, and with rocks and spears trying to kill tigers and whatever. You’re just trying to survive. And if you see other neanderthals who you recognize, the chances are, if you’ve seen them before and they didn’t kill you or attack you, then they were your friend, and your brain is hardwired in. In fact my second show which was called Glorious Excess Dies, I sold a book with it and I went into detail inside the book about that particular subject.

So fast forward to modern times, you see a celebrity’s face enough times whether you follow them and that’s—you’re seeing them in your feed all the time—or they just show up in the news that you read or the shows that you watch. they become part of your friend group, your family, etcetera.

Samantha: It’s like a kinship.

Mike: Yeah, exactly. And so you have this greater effect. I mean, how else would you describe somebody who, when Mac Miller passes away and you’ve never met Mac Miller, you don’t know him at all, and people are crying, right? Then some people even say that like, “I don’t even know why I’m crying, why does this bother me so much?” Part of it is that, because your brain is saying, “That’s your friend.”

I guess one other thing I would say, we do have a responsibility in the sense that on the whole, so many of us, we have more people listening than ever before.

Samantha: Yup.

Mike: We’ve made more connections and followers. I’ve got—I don’t know how many—like a million something followers on Instagram so it’s pretty obvious that I have a responsibility to those people if I’m going to talk about something that could potentially affect them or I just have to be responsible about the way I talk about things. But let’s say you’re a kid in high school, and you may not think of yourself as an influencer but you actually have a couple hundred followers. Maybe you have two hundred followers, maybe you have five hundred followers—can you imagine being on a stage in front of five hundred people, how differently you’d speak to them versus the kid who’s on their phone in the car behind their friend?

And they’re just like, you know, mental vomit, whatever pops into their head, “Oh, this is funny, this is whatever, I’m going to retweet this, I’m just going to troll this person.” They’re doing those things but they’re not really realizing the actual power they have, and the power is split into many facets of it; but one thing would be that they have the power to accidentally harm somebody or accidentally lift somebody up.

I think Twitter is a really particularly interesting platform, because their whole thing is built on retweets, right? It’s all built on, somebody else has said something and everybody else says, “Yea, me too” and they don’t… They don’t realize that your ability to push the button, and what you share, is actually generating money.

Samantha: Our current president knows all about—

Mike: Knows all about that.

Samantha: —about monetizing.

Mike: Ugh, I don’t even want to get into that.

Samantha: I opened the box.

Mike: If you’re an average sixteen year old, you are the one that every company wants. They want to get your attention. They want you to be retweeting and reposting, etcetera. They want your favorites. They want your likes. They want your money. And if you’re just haphazardly doing that, you’re literally spending virtual currency. Your attention is your currency. You’re just giving it away. Knock it off! Like you can’t just retweet everything, you’ve got to be more sensible. Like, you’re so powerful, stop being so careless with it!

Samantha: It’s like spontaneous behavior. Immediate. There’s no filter. To your point earlier, when you know you have a speech that you’re going to speak to an audience publicly, you’re prepared, you mentally prepare. You have your monologue, you know exactly what strategically, the message is going to be. When you have a little device in your hand, it’s just too immediate.

Mike: Oh, so I actually kind of glanced over it and I didn’t quite get to the point on this thing. If you’ve got two hundred followers and you, like I said, you imagine yourself in front of a crowd of two hundred people, how would you talk? You would talk much differently than people do online.

The other thing is, we’ve been talking about mental health, I just did, wasn’t really a collaboration in a traditional sense, but my friend is a TV writer named DJ, DJ Nash, and DJ did a new show called, A Million Little Things. It’s all about a cast of characters. The main hub of the friends, the guy who brought everybody together is the most successful, he’s the happiest, he’s the best guy, they all love him more than everybody. And in the very first episode, he basically locks in a business deal which secretly benefits one of his friends, and then he jumps off a building. And everybody’s like, “Wait, what, John was the happiest guy, he’s the best guy, of all of us, how could it possibly have been John?!”

So this is his show and DJ was like, “It’s based on some experiences with a real friend, it was inspired by something like that.” And he talked to me often about, “Am I getting the tone right on this?” like, “You understand this. Is it reading right, is it sounding right?”

So, I was really proud to be part of that and when I was doing it I was realizing man, you know, people are being more and more aware of using appropriate language and appropriate approaches when you’re talking about suicide. So, for example, a lot of mental health professionals would prefer that you say, “Died by suicide”, instead of saying “Committed suicide.” Because committed is always like, “committed a crime”, “committed adultery”, “committed bad things.”

Samantha: There’s a negative connotation, yeah.

Mike: Yeah and they suggest it’s more sensitive to say “Died by.” It’s a very small difference, but just choose the other one. And then there are other things like, if you do have a piece of news, a story where somebody died by suicide, then some guidelines are: don’t get into gory details, definitely don’t put pictures up and so on and so forth because, there could be somebody reading who actually is in the highest level of danger. And if they see that stuff, it can trigger them and they can just spiral and that could be the end of everything. So obviously the stakes are as high as they get.

If you’re a kid or a person with two hundred, three hundred, four, five hundred followers—if you’re just like a high school student or college student—you probably don’t know those guidelines. You probably never heard that stuff before, because they’re aiming that stuff at the press. But aren’t these young people powerful? If I’m following you, and you’re not thinking and you just say something really graphic or post something crazy, I didn’t get a warning! I didn’t get a chance to avoid it, and all of a sudden I opened up that social media app and I saw it, and who knows what could happen.

That was a thing that I realized this year, like, oh man. The same way you’d be conscious about how you speak about mental health, you wouldn’t want to offend your friends. People put filters in place so they don’t curse in front of their parents. Your brain just tells you, “Hey, FYI remember, there are consequences, you know, you say certain words in front of certain people, you get in big trouble. Just don’t do it.” And it’s easy to write it in. That was one of the things I realized this year.