Today, we're diving into the wild world of storytelling and its cosmic connection to our human evolution—seriously, it’s like the ultimate plot twist! We’re chatting with Jim Conrad, a voiceover artist and all-around storyteller extraordinaire, who’s been pondering some pretty heavy questions: What happens to our beloved narratives when AI starts churning out tales and even mimicking emotions?

Buckle up, because we’re not just talking about the art of telling stories; we’re getting into the nitty-gritty of story listening, and how that skill might just be our secret weapon against the impending AI takeover. Spoiler alert: it turns out that the real magic lies not in shouting louder, but in tuning in better! We’re about to explore the delicate balance between the human experience and the cold, calculated world of machines.

Takeaways:

1. Storytelling and story listening are integral to human evolution, shaping our culture and meaning.
2. In a world flooded with AI-generated narratives, the art of listening is more crucial than ever.
3. The journey to living authentically requires us to confront whose story we are actually living.
4. As we navigate the AI revolution, we must embrace our emotional depth and intuition over mere logic.
5. Living with awareness and less fear is the key to a fulfilling life, so let's harness that superpower!

Companies mentioned in this episode:

1. Ignite Voice, Inc.
2. Yuval Noah Harari
3. Nexus Information Systems
4. Spotify
5. James Earl Jones

Your voice is your superpower. Use it. Welcome to Ignite My Voice Becoming unstoppable, powered by Ignite Voice, Inc. The podcast where voice meets purpose and stories ignite change.

Deep conversations with amazing guests, storytellers, speakers and change makers.

Now, storytelling and story listening is one of the biggest things in human evolution, and it's what will eventually, hopefully, save us from the AI onslaught that is coming.

Hi, I'm Kat. Human evolution is connected to story before technology, before institutions, before media.

We pass knowledge through voice, through symbols, through myth.

Hi, I'm Kevin. And not just through telling stories, through listening to them. That's how culture survives. That's how meaning travels.

Exactly. And today we're surrounded by stories, headlines, feeds, algorithms, but our capacity to with a story, to really listen, feels like it's shrinking.

And now we have AI generating language, generating voices, even simulating emotion. So the question becomes, what happens to storytelling when machines can replicate it?

Our guest today, Jim Conrad, voice over artist, podcaster, entrepreneur, has been thinking about that deeply about propaganda, about critical thinking, about Young's question, whose story are you living?

And whether in this AI revolution, the thing that might save us isn't louder storytelling, but better listening.

Here's our conversation with Jim Conrad.

I've become aware of how much story is a part of everything we do.

I just read a great book by Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote Sapiens and a number of other books, and he's a human anthropologist studying the history of evolution of humans. And in his latest book, Nexus Information Systems, what is it? Information systems from the Stone Age to AI.

And so human evolution is connected to story because that's how we passed on information verbally through storytelling or writing on cave walls or music. And so what he has determined is that stories, in order for us to understand anything, anything, it has to be in the form of a story.

And whether it's mathematics or physics or anything, if you tell us a story about it and then how impactful is that story? That's what makes an impression upon us. Yeah, we've known that. I mean, look at media, right?

You know, I mean, a news story, you know, a movie, a book, literature professors. Yeah, everything is a story.

So now storytelling and story listening is the biggest, one of the biggest things in human evolution, and it's what will eventually, hopefully save us from the AI onslaught that is that is coming. And it will be. The AI revolution will be bigger than the Internet, at least according to some people that I've talked to in the.

Business before we get to AI because we're gonna get there. I just wanted to you mentioned story listening. What do you mean about story listening?

Well, it's a two way street. Right. It's one thing to tell a story, but we must also be able to listen to stories.

Unfortunately, that skill or that art has kind of been lost in the modern era because we're inundated with information through media and so our attention spans have been shrinking as you probably understand and see every day with your students.

And so the art of actually being able to sit and take the time and have the patience to listen to a story the way it should be told as opposed to the headlines or little bits and bytes.

So yeah, I think story listening is something that we have to cultivate and craft and then just be conscious of the fact that it is important to our evolution and our well being.

Yeah, we believe in story so much and see it on so many levels. You know, in our current times too, story can be a weapon. Story, well, like you said that, you know, it's built into our DNA to.

Understand story can be a lie.

Which the problem is we're susceptible to story as humans and somebody that's crafting a story well can use that to bypass truth, facts, everything. And it's.

Yeah, storytelling isn't necessarily the truth. And that's one of the other things that Harari talks about is the art of coercion. The idea of propaganda ideologies. It's a shared story.

The whole idea of monetary value, money. We buy into the fact that this piece of paper is worth $20 and if everybody buys in, then it's worth $20.

What can happen is if a certain segment doesn't buy in, like in crypto, then it starts to upset the balance. And I think that's what we're seeing today now, where it's going, what will happen? I mean obviously we'll have to wait and see.

We just have to be conscious of where it's taking us.

And I think in this fast paced world, sometimes we don't take enough time to actually sit and think about, okay, where is this going and what is the ultimate impact?

Oh for sure.

And where we come from is we're also trying to give that some reflection but also supply some tools for people, critical thought tools that allow them to see through some of the dangers of story. Right. And we see that in our students that often they're just not equipped to analyze a story well and they're more susceptible.

But you can change that, you can skill up.

Yeah. And I think it's Part of maturity. We are susceptible at an early age to the information that we're given and then as we mature.

I've been reading a lot of Jungian psychotherapy through James Hollis, PhD.

You're going deep.

And James Hollis is able to interpret Jungian theory quite well and sort of, you know, not necessarily dumb it down, but at least make it more relatable. Digestible. Yes, digestible.

And particularly, you know, he's an 85 year old psychologist or psychiatrist who's had a number of case histories, so he can relate it back to people that he's worked with and yeah, the received stories that we get. And then at a certain point in time in one's life, you finally stop and look around and go, okay, whose story am I living?

Am I living someone else's story like the one that my parents wanted me to have? Or am I living my own authentic story? And at a certain point in time, I think we all have to be conscious of that and then look around.

Strombo was on his little podcast or whatever, talking with Gabor Mate.

Oh, love Gabor.

I don't know how the conversation got to it, but he talked to Gabor Mate about being with people in the last days of their life in palliative care and in hospice. And he said, what do people say? What do they think towards the end?

And Gabor Mante said, the overwhelming thing was people regretted that they didn't live their real life. They regretted that they didn't become the person they wanted to be.

So what's scarier to get to that point in your life and realize that, or right here, right now, face the fear. Because if you're going to change your life and become the person that you really want to be, it's going to be painful. It's going to be very painful.

And you may piss a lot of people off. Would you rather face the fear now or be lying on your deathbed going, geez, I wish I would have done that.

You want to be able to play a video of that to people earlier in their life so they feel the effect and then they take action. Because it's scary, Jim. I mean, let's face it, capitalism is a story.

We just did a fascinating podcast a little while ago about Israel and the Gaza Strip and the house of cards stories that are built in there. And when you start to take apart those stories, what's left? You really start to question and doubt many of the things we're told.

Well, that house of Cards that a lot of us build our lives on you pull out a card and it all starts to fall apart.

And that is terrifying. That is terrifying. Most people don't have the motivation to look inward and try to discover those things. We're just too busy trying to survive. Right.

Well, living Haven stories.

And another angle that was brought up in that podcast was that we are very fortunate. It's a privilege to be able to pretend the house of cards is okay.

I was talking about that the other day.

It's true. In a lot of places, you don't have that privilege, right?

No, no. Prime Minister Mark Carney's speech@davos 3 days ago, I believe will go down in history.

I agree.

I believe we'll go down in history. I read the actual text of it. Powerful. It was extremely powerful.

And it was finally refreshing to hear the courage of an elected leader, and he happens to be ours.

Not that I'm thumping for the liberals, but there's no doubt that that speech, that message hit home, especially with Europe, and should hit home with the rest of the world.

I don't know that it hit home in the US All.

Well, I mean, as my friend Russ Hamilton, who lived in the United States for 25, 30 years, he said, this whole thing, what's happening down there, it's been decades in the making.

Oh, yeah.

And from the Supreme Court and then political shifting, it's been sort of working its way towards this point where they will go from here. As Carney says, the world order has been ruptured. And for those.

And that was the first question in the panel afterwards, the guy asked him, well, you know, is this going to continue, or do we just have to ride this out? And he goes, it's changed forever.

It's never going back.

It's not going back to the old way. And as he said, nostalgia. Nostalgia isn't a strategy.

It's not a plan.

Which was a great line, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, there's some great, very good lines. The T shirt, you know, you're either at the table or on the menu.

Yeah, that's a great one. You know, like you, I watched Trump and then. And then our leader, and I thought about the speeches back to back.

It made me realize I don't even think Trump understood three quarters of what Carney said. Like, literally, that the words made no sense to him.

I worry, though, that a lot there's a certain portion of the U.S. citizenship that that's the same thing they do not have the skills to process.

Well, we go back to, once again, decades in the making. The decline of critical thinking and education. Societies that value education will prosper and have success.

Those that do not will fall by the wayside. And what's happening in our good, you know, with our good neighbors and friends we all have. And family, you know, I have American family.

Your daughter is.

My daughter is married to an American. My other daughter is engaged to an American. I have American cousins, as I think a lot of us do.

And I always hearken back to Margaret Atwood's great quote about the Canadian American relationship. She said, the 49th parallel is like the world's longest one way mirror. And we sit behind and we can look down and we can observe and comment.

And so I mean, Canadians are the world's experts on America, right? Every Canadian is. But when they look back up at us, all they see, who do they see? All they see are themselves. All they see are themselves.

Yeah.

And so they don't, you know, so the, the idea of a 51st state, well, you know, why wouldn't you want to be a part of us? You're already us, aren't you? They have no idea. Have no idea.

So, yeah, yeah, the, the critical lack of, of education, the decline of the public education system. They did away with the education department.

And the other one I toss in.

There is not only a low value of education, but a low value of expertise that somehow anybody can slip into a role and just perfectly execute everything that's needed. Right.

Well, I mean, Silicon Valley relies on almost entirely on H1 visas, you know, importing talent from other countries. There isn't, there is a definite lack of homegrown talent.

My uncle's down there, he's a patent lawyer, so my cousins are down there.

Yeah. So which is, you know, I mean, that's what we all do. I mean, companies look for the best and brightest wherever they are.

But I still think we have to continue to, at least as Canadians value education above all else. I think that's what's going to get us out of any situation that we find ourselves in. It's going to solve the problems with the help of AI.

AI is, you know, it reflects back us. Right. It searches everything that we have input historically.

Historically, and then summarizes it or finds, you know, finds what specifically we're looking for and then tells us a story about it.

And it's building on the stories that it knows. So this fascinates me because there's stories about men, there's stories about females, so there's that male, female perspective.

So it's only giving us that perspective, there's historical perspective. It's not coming up with anything new.

Well, and it's also biased based in those stories.

And it doesn't. And AI does not have a soul.

Harari talks about AI and he says, you know, the differences, you know, human beings in our decision making processes, in the way we live. We are driven by emotion. And AI does not have emotion.

It can assimilate hundreds of billions of pieces of data and then create for us a story that we can then comprehend about whatever subject that we want to find out about. But there is no soul behind it. There's no spiritual.

But is there that story about logic where logic is the only thing you need to make a decision? Is it. Where does emotion fall into?

In episode nine of the Kona Vision Podcast, I talk about that. A gentleman by the name of. And I'm trying to come up with this name anyways, I will. He wrote an essay called the Crisis of the Western Mind.

And in it he describes the four sort of main crises that are happening in Western thinking. And one of which is the crisis of just what you mentioned.

The idea that through the scientific method and through logic and positivism and the way we have been taught to analyze our reality is limiting because it leaves out all those things that cannot be proven. And then Carl Jung, one of his first essays was the Psychology of why Human Beings Believe in Invisible Things.

And then through his research, he began to understand that there was something else outside of the physical realm, the provable realm, the ghost in the machine.

And so now those two thought processes are kind of combining and people are beginning to look around and see other alternatives and integrate spirit and spirituality, not necessarily religion. I think religion has distorted our sense of trying to connect with the ethereal right. We seek to connect. We have always sought to connect.

It's just finding new ways to do it.

Well, I think too, coming into play with emotions would be morals and ethics.

And then I go back to Carney's speech, trying to drive at the fact that we can return to creating an ethical approach to the world order or whatever with grounded morals as opposed to transactional and logical and finance, or doing.

Whatever we have to do to survive or making whatever compromise we have to make in order to gain more power, having core values. His book is called Values, and I think he keeps coming back to those core values. And I think that's what we. I think that's the new revolution is.

I think AI is beginning to show us more and more how important being human is.

And it gives Us, it is really giving us a real clear distinction between, you know, what is truly human and what we bring to the table and then what the tool of AI or technology can bring.

And there's something that AI can't do either. And it's called intuition. Intuition is that ghost in the machine that I don't think we've given ourselves enough credit for.

Well, I mean, because we've discounted it because it's not provable. We kind of, we give it short shrift. Right. It's kind of like, you know, yeah, it kind of exists, but not really.

And so, but here's the hard evidence, here's the provable stuff, here's whatever.

And so I think bringing those ephemeral, ethereal things back into the conversation and then giving them much more importance and understanding how important they are to being human is the distinction between us and technology and emotionless technology.

You know, I hate to rain on your guys parade.

Oh, stop, you're gonna do it anyway.

She prepped for this interview with AI.

However, the academic critic in me would chase the money and I would go, well, who's funding the billions, trillions of dollars to advance AI right now? And there are very few tech companies that are really pushing this. And then there's the corporate world that is investing in a panic.

And they want a return, they want a return on the dollar. And that return perhaps lies in trying to minimize costs in laying off. So that's driving a lot of this. Right?

People are valued.

They're describing the AI bubble which exists and it's happening. These companies are not creating any revenue. They're getting lots of investment, but in order to get the revenue back.

Yeah, you're talking about a 75% increase in layoffs. Silicon Valley is all about finding the unicorns. The billion dollar company that has just one person who has a better mousetrap or a better idea.

And all of the ancillary stuff around it that used to employ people are now AI. So you have AI, marketing, AI, this R& D. And it's only one person with that idea now. I mean, of course it's going to happen like that.

We're creating, we create this stuff because we want it. It's not because we're, you know, that somebody is forcing us to create this technology.

Well, I would interject there. Somebody wants it. Yeah, well, somebody all don't want it, but it's happening.

Or we think we want it, but maybe we, we don't want goes back to building Oppenheimer, building the atomic bomb. Can we or should we? And Einstein said, no, we shouldn't, and I'm out.

And that was the basic sort of philosophical difference between Oppenheimer and Einstein. It'll be interesting. You know, AI generated voices. I mean, it's happening today right now. My voice could be replicated and used, and I could.

I could then license it to be used for whatever purpose that the licensee wants. I won't, and I will. Well, not my kids, actually, were the ones who said no. I said, well, wait a minute.

If I, you know, get my voice, you know, AI versioned and then licensed, and long after I'm gone, the, you know, if the. If my voice is used and they pay, you know, that goes into the estate, and that'll be your money. And they say, we don't care. We don't care.

We don't want to hear your voice.

Not you.

It's not you. If you're not doing it, then we don't want to hear it.

And as a voiceover actor and performer.

Yes.

Doesn't that hit you kind of funny?

Yes.

I. I mean, once again, follow the money. Right now, they are using AI voices. Spotify. Yeah, Spotify is in the. In the voice. In the AI voice business. And it's some ridiculous.

You know, they'll pay you 10 bucks for every time it's used. Now, on a global scale, maybe that could be worth it. I don't know. And then, of course, images, actors getting scanned.

I've heard an anecdote, I'm sure it's true, of a guy who was working on a production here in Vancouver, and then they wanted to scan him so they could put him into backgrounds and whatnot. So he agreed to do it for this particular production. And then six months later, somebody called and said, hey, I just saw you in a video game. What?

And he went, yeah. So we investigated, and yep, there was his image in a video game.

Read the small print.

Yeah. So. Or, you know, once it's in the digital realm. Yeah. Then you don't have control over that.

So, I mean, if there's guardrails around it, you know, James Earl Jones.

I just heard James Earl Jones, who has passed away, but he had his voice AI replicated and then sold it to Disney so that they can always have a new voice for Darth Vader. So, I mean, in that instance. And then the estate of James Earl Jones will get paid Disney bucks. So maybe it's worth it. And.

And who's to say yay or nay?

I don't know. I wonder Though, in terms of. I mean, if we look at voiceover as an example, AI has no emotion. Can it can mimic emotion?

Yeah, yeah.

But can it create a combination of emotions? Can it do what a good artist can do? No, I'm not condensed.

Yeah, it may not right now. And this is getting better.

This is the first generation or the second generation of it. Wait a bit, you know, four or five years.

That sounds like technological determinism to me. That sounds a bit like, oh, the technology will always improve and it will get there. But part of me goes, no, it will never be human.

It will never get there.

Yeah, show me.

You know, one of the threads that stayed with me is that story can be powerful, but it can also be persuasive. We buy into narratives every day, sometimes without even realizing it.

About money, about identity, about success, about who we're supposed to be. And if we're not conscious, we can end up living someone else's story instead of our own.

And as AI continues to evolve, replicating voices, replicating emotions, we're forced to ask what actually makes us human.

AI can generate a story. It can simulate feeling. It doesn't wrestle with regret. It doesn't sit at the end of life wishing it had been more authentic.

That's still human territory, which makes this.

Moment and our lives feel much more meaningful. Live with less regret, less fear, and with more awareness.

Be conscious. Live with awareness. That is your superpower. Thanks for listening to those of you in France, Germany, and Russia.

And we'd love to have you join us in Mexico this December for our upcoming retreat. More info coming soon on ignitemyvoice.com.

Ignite my voice. Becoming unstoppable. Your voice is your superpower. Use it.