I once sat down with a man who can tell the entire Odyssey from imagination alone. No text. No notes. Just the story, living in him.
Dr. Martin Shaw spent four years living in a tent as a rite of passage. He has written 18 books. He is one of the very few people alive who makes a living from #storytelling in the oldest sense of the word: a bard, working audiences the way bards have for three thousand years.
His definition of #myth has stayed with me ever since we recorded this: a beautiful lie that tells a deeper truth, a truth that works without the use of facts.
Which is a strange thing to sit with now, a couple of years into machines that can generate infinite stories and mean none of them.
Because Martin’s real warning was never about #AI. It was about worship. About tools quietly becoming deities. About what he saw arriving after Humanism, and why he thinks the world needs healing that no tool can deliver.
He told me every culture, before it could write, collected what truly mattered and coded it into stories so it would survive.
We have never had more storage and fewer stories worth keeping.
One line I keep returning to: revery leads to participation.
Martin explains what that costs. Most people will not want to pay it.
Oral storyteller Martin Shaw on being a raconteur, telling stories, the power of myth, technology, AI and having a ‘service code.’