Human Meme

David Boles
  • 3.7 (7)
  • SOCIETY & CULTURE
  • UPDATED DAILY

The Human Meme podcast examines what separates human consciousness from mere biological existence. Each episode investigates the inherited behaviors, cultural transmissions, and cognitive patterns that replicate across generations, shaping how we think, grieve, speak, and remember. David Boles, a New York City writer, publisher, and teacher, hosts these conversations as mindfulness with teeth: no production music, no easy comfort, only the direct inquiry into what makes us recognizably human. Since 2016, the podcast has asked why we weep emotional tears, how language emerged from gesture, and whether memory constructs or reveals the self. The irrevocable aesthetic is the commitment to answers that, once understood, cannot be unknown. Be a Human Meme.

  1. 7H AGO

    The Somnambulist's Prophecy

    Have you ever dreamed something true? Not metaphorically true. Not symbolically true. Actually true. You dreamed your phone would ring, and it rang. You dreamed someone was sick before anyone told you. You dreamed a door opening that hadn't opened yet. Most of us have had this experience at least once. We wake up unsettled, the dream still clinging, and then something happens that makes us pause. Makes us wonder. We shake it off. We tell ourselves it was coincidence, pattern-matching, the brain's talent for finding connections where none exist. We go on with our day. But what if you couldn't shake it off?

    14 min
  2. You Might Also Like: The Oprah Podcast

    7H AGO · BONUS

    You Might Also Like: The Oprah Podcast

    Introducing How Mattering to Yourself & Others Can Change Your Life with Oprah, Jennifer Wallace & Ina Garten from The Oprah Podcast. Follow the show: The Oprah Podcast Oprah is joined by award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Wallace to talk about her transformative new book "Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose." Drawing on six years of research, Wallace shares how mattering - the feeling that we are valued and have an opportunity to add value - is a fundamental human need essential to our well-being. She believes there's been "an erosion of mattering" and provides actionable steps to deepen your connections, reconnect to your sense of purpose and navigate challenges with greater resilience. Joining the conversation is Jennifer's close friend and lifestyle icon Ina Garten. Oprah and Jennifer also speak with a military wife who learned how to bring mattering back to her marriage and an extraordinary young man who went from being a sanitation worker to a Harvard Law School graduate. BUY THE BOOK! 'Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose' by Jennifer Wallace: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/756179/mattering-by-jennifer-breheny-wallace/ Chapters: 00:00:00 - Welcome Jennifer Wallace, author of “Mattering” 00:05:50 - Ina Garten joins 00:07:05 - The importance of mattering to yourself 00:08:40 - How Ina shows people they matter 00:09:30 - The importance of showing up 00:10:50 - One easy way to show people they matter 00:12:20 - The thread that ties us together 00:13:40 - Extrinsic and intrinsic values 00:15:50 - Professor Gordon Flett on why mattering is life or death 00:18:12 - How mattering affects our longevity 00:21:00 - How to get through hard moments 00:23:00 - How Army partners struggle with mattering 00:28:00 - Our resilience is tied to our relationships 00:34:00 - Mattering to ourselves raises the bar for all relationships 00:35:20 - A former sanitation worker's observations on mattering 00:42:00 - Supporting support staff 00:44:50 - Mattering at work 00:46:00 - The 4 important feelings to mattering 00:48:10 - What to do if you feel like you don’t matter Additional Resources: ‘Be Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir’ by Ina Garten: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/770511/be-ready-when-the-luck-happens-by-ina-garten/ Gordon L. Flett, Ph.D. https://www.yorku.ca/lamarsh/gord-flett/ ‘The Wives: A Memoir’ by Simone Gorrindo: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Wives/Simone-Gorrindo/9781982178505#:~:text=The%20Wives%20%7C%20Book%20by%20Simone,Official%20Publisher%20Page%20%7C%20Simon%20%26%20Schuster The Reciprocity Effect: https://www.thereciprocityeffect.org/Follow Oprah Winfrey on Social:https://www.instagram.com/oprahpodcast/https://www.facebook.com/oprahwinfrey/Listen to the full podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/0tEVrfNp92a7lbjDe6GMLIhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-oprah-podcast/id1782960381 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices DISCLAIMER: Please note, this is an independent podcast episode not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced in conjunction with the host podcast feed or any of its media entities. The views and opinions expressed in this episode are solely those of the creators and guests. For any concerns, please reach out to team@podroll.fm.

  3. 1D AGO

    The Corollary of Every Prayer

    What does it mean to say amen? We say it reflexively. The minister concludes the prayer, and the congregation responds. Amen. So be it. Let it be done. The word carries the weight of assent, of agreement, of complicity in whatever petition has just been offered to the divine. But what happens when someone refuses to say it? I want to explore the larger project of what I've been calling Fractional Fiction. Because the two are inseparable. The methodology creates the meaning, and the meaning demands the methodology. Let me start with a scene.

    13 min

  4. 4D AGO

    The Held Land: A Fractional Fiction

    The Held Land tells three stories across 159 years, all rooted in a single quarter-section of Nebraska prairie. In March 1867, Ezekiel Washington, a Black veteran of the 5th United States Colored Troops, files a homestead claim on 160 acres. He builds a soddie with his own hands, breaks the sod, plants corn, and waits for the land to become his. Five years later, a rigged hearing strips him of everything. He walks off the land he made productive with nothing but his discharge papers and disappears from the historical record.

    8 min

  5. 6D AGO

    The Last Living American White Male: A Novel

    What makes you countable? Not valuable. Not worthy. Not loved. Countable. What is it about you that allows a system to place you in a box, assign you a number, and track your existence across time? We live inside classification systems we did not choose and cannot see. Every form you have ever filled out asked you to sort yourself into categories invented by strangers. Race. Gender. Age. Income. Education. Marital status. Employment. Each checkbox a small act of self-definition performed for an audience that will never know your name. The systems do not care about you. They care about the categories. You are the instance; the category is the thing. And when the last instance of a category dies, the category closes, and the system moves on without mourning.

    11 min

  6. JAN 16

    Passage Land: The High Plains, the Long Roads, the People Who Remain

    You inherited a debt you never agreed to pay. I want you to consider that statement before you dismiss it. Not a financial debt, not a mortgage or a student loan with your signature on the paperwork. Something older. Something that attached itself to your bloodline before you were born, before your parents were born, before anyone now living had any say in the matter. This is not metaphor. This is how land works in America. The house you grew up in, the town where you learned to read, the state whose history you memorized in school, all of it sits on ground that belonged to someone else first. The transfer was not clean. The transfer was never clean. And the people who were displaced did not disappear. Their descendants are still here, still remembering, still holding ledgers that no one on the other side wants to examine.

    8 min

  7. JAN 15

    The EleMenTs Trilogy

    When we encounter disability, most of us have been trained to see deficiency. Something missing. Something wrong. A departure from the norm that requires correction, accommodation, or at minimum, sympathy. This is the meme of the broken body, and it has replicated through Western culture for centuries. The meme manifests in our language. We speak of people "suffering from" conditions rather than "living with" them. We describe someone as "wheelchair-bound" rather than "wheelchair-using," as though the chair were a prison rather than a tool. We praise disabled people for "overcoming" their disabilities, as if the goal of every disabled life should be to approximate able-bodied existence as closely as possible. The meme manifests in our narratives. Stories about disabled characters tend to follow predictable patterns. The disabled person exists to inspire the able-bodied protagonist. The disabled person must be cured by the story's end, their disability a problem to be solved. The disabled person is saintly and patient, bearing their burden with grace, teaching others valuable lessons about gratitude and perseverance. Or the disabled person is bitter and villainous, their disability the source or symbol of their moral corruption. Visit BolesBooks.com for trilogy details.

    14 min

  8. JAN 13

    Arm Angles in American Sign Language: A Study of Proximal Articulation in Signed Discourse

    Here is something I did not expect to discover while writing a textbook about American Sign Language. The shoulder knows things the hand cannot say. That sentence sounds like metaphor. It is not. It is linguistics, documented and measurable, and it has been sitting in plain sight for as long as deaf people have been signing to each other. The position of the arm, the engagement of the shoulder, the extension or contraction of the elbow: these carry meaning. Not incidental meaning. Not decorative meaning. Semantic meaning that changes what a sign communicates even when the handshape stays exactly the same. Consider what this implies about how consciousness expresses itself through the body. We tend to think of language as something that happens in the head. Words form in the mind and then exit through the mouth, or through the fingers if we are typing, but the origin point is cognitive, neural, somewhere behind the eyes where the self is supposed to live. The body is just the delivery system. The meaning is elsewhere.

    11 min
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3.7
out of 5
7 Ratings

About

The Human Meme podcast examines what separates human consciousness from mere biological existence. Each episode investigates the inherited behaviors, cultural transmissions, and cognitive patterns that replicate across generations, shaping how we think, grieve, speak, and remember. David Boles, a New York City writer, publisher, and teacher, hosts these conversations as mindfulness with teeth: no production music, no easy comfort, only the direct inquiry into what makes us recognizably human. Since 2016, the podcast has asked why we weep emotional tears, how language emerged from gesture, and whether memory constructs or reveals the self. The irrevocable aesthetic is the commitment to answers that, once understood, cannot be unknown. Be a Human Meme.

Information

  • Creator
    David Boles
  • Years Active
    2016 - 2026
  • Episodes
    827
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © All Rights Reserved
  • Show Website
    Human Meme