In the first half, Ed Weigle, one of America’s most prolific voice actors, joined Connie Willis (info) to discuss his career of over 40 years. Since age 13, he’s lent his voice to thousands of radio and TV commercials, promos and movie trailers—including voiceovers for WWE and Aerosmith’s 2012 music video for "Legendary Child." (View a behind-the-scenes video.) Even as a boy in Western Pennsylvania, Weigle recalled, he got attention for his deep voice, and thanks to his "radio-addicted" babysitters, he was drawn to the medium.
To a caller in Texas who wondered how he could break into voice acting, Weigle advised getting a professionally-made demo tape and making contacts with local studios. One of the changes from years past in his line of work, he explained, is that today there's more work for "everyman" voices than for announcer-type voices like his own. He agreed with a Connecticut listener who observed that in addition to a distinctive voice, a persona is important to success as a voice actor. He also encouraged a man calling from Texas, who said his ambition to become a talk show host was hampered by his eye disease, to adopt technology like in-ear teleprompting and to consider a medium like YouTube, where he could exercise greater control over the format of his programming.
Weigle entertained listeners in the first hour with improvised renditions of phrases supplied to him by Connie.
*********************
Jim Matlock, a research fellow with the Parapsychology Foundation in New York, talked about his work studying reincarnation in the latter half of the show. He described his method as being data-driven and focused on spontaneous cases, meaning instances of remembering past lives organically and not as a result of hypnosis or other means of extracting memories. Although Matlock's research does support the existence of animal reincarnation as well as human, only intraspecies animal cases have been analyzed.
One fundamental concept in studying reincarnation is that consciousness is separate from the mind, Matlock related. Once the body fails and dies, consciousness remains, ready to manifest itself, now more highly evolved, into another body. Nearer to the rebirth experience than adults, he continued, children report relatively high levels of reincarnation; as for the prevalence of the phenomenon, Matlock shared his opinion that almost all people have been reincarnated.