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. 23h ago

    Tidal Volume

    Did you know you have taken one breath since since you started reading this? Possibly two. None of them was a decision. Today will take roughly twenty thousand out of you, and eighty years will take something close to six hundred million, and that is the whole allocation. There is no mechanism anywhere in your body for adding to it. A brain deprived of oxygen begins taking damage within minutes of an interruption. What does it mean to say that something breathes? Because a cave does it. Wind Cave in South Dakota moves air in and out of a hole in the ground hard enough to take a hat off a man's head, in and out, on a rhythm you can stand beside and feel. A fire does it. Anyone who has watched a hearth has seen a flame draw and settle. A bellows does it, a bagpipe does it, and a machine at a bedside in an intensive care unit does it about fourteen times a minute for somebody who cannot. So which of those is breathing, and which is only a good impression of it? I wrote a book to find out. It is called Tidal Volume, and it is out now.

  2. 23h ago ·  Bonus

    You Might Also Like: On Purpose with Jay Shetty

    Introducing CAMILA MENDES: "Perfectionism Was Ruining My Life" from On Purpose with Jay Shetty. Follow the show: On Purpose with Jay Shetty Actress and producer Camila Mendes joins Jay for an honest conversation about the hidden cost of perfectionism, the pressure behind success, and what it took to finally choose herself. Camila opens up about the breaking point that forced her to confront old wounds, heal her relationship with food, reconnect with her Brazilian identity, and redefine what spirituality, self-worth, and love really mean. Together, they explore why chasing perfection often leaves us feeling empty, how slowing down can become the greatest act of self-respect, and why true confidence isn't about having everything figured out, but about accepting yourself exactly as you are. With Love and Gratitude, Jay Shetty A State Farm agent can help you choose the coverage you need. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Visit: https://www.statefarm.com/  Head to https://wayfair.com right now to shop all things home and get your space ready for less. On Purpose is now Netflix and Spotify exclusive  http://www.netflix.com/onpurposewithjayshetty  https://open.spotify.com/show/5EqqB52m2bsr4k1Ii7sStc?si=33f7898fb334437c JAY’S DAILY WISDOM DELIVERED STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX Join 900,000+ readers discovering how small daily shifts create big life change with my free newsletter. Subscribe https://news.jayshetty.me/subscribe   Check out our Apple subscription to unlock bonus content of On Purpose! https://lnk.to/JayShettyPodcast  What We Discuss: 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:17 What Excites You Most Right Now? 00:01:57 Designing a Home That Feels Like You 00:03:32 The Challenge of Balance 00:05:26 Living One Day at a Time 00:07:24 The Importance of Learning Your Limits 00:10:09 Why Saying "No" Feels So Hard 00:15:08 Revisiting an Old Wound 00:19:56 Holding Two Truths at Once 00:21:10 Growing Up Between Cultures 00:23:12 Returning to Your Roots 00:24:41 Finding Spirituality Later in Life 00:29:44 The Power of Questioning Your Beliefs 00:31:11 Growing Up Without Stability 00:34:37 The Freedom of Imperfection 00:36:27 The Anxiety No One Could See 00:40:03 When You Have to Numb Out 00:41:45 Living With Your Own Worst Critic 00:44:35 Healing Your Relationship with Food 00:46:14 Recovering from an Eating Disorder 00:48:07 Getting Honest About Body Image 00:50:26 The Moment Self-Worth Starts to Crack 00:51:04 Meeting Rudy: The Turning Point 00:54:27 The Work of Becoming Your Best Self 00:57:30 Why You Have to Heal Before You Love Again 01:00:18 Choosing Love in the Hardest Moments 01:04:53 The Problem With One-Sided Love 01:08:20 The Proposal 01:13:08 When You're Aligned, Doors Open 01:14:54 Protecting Your Peace at Work 01:17:09 Camila on Final Five Episode Resources: Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/camimendes  TikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/@camimendes  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/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.

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  3. Jul 25

    The Occupied Space

    Let me set the scene the way the century set it. The year is 1968. A thin book appears, written by the most celebrated stage director alive, Peter Brook, and it opens with a sentence the theatre memorized like scripture: take any empty space and call it a bare stage; a man walks across that space while someone watches him, and that is all the theatre needs to be. Four essays follow, four names the field still teaches to every student: the Deadly Theatre, the Holy Theatre, the Rough Theatre, the Immediate Theatre. I read that book young. I taught it. And for fifty years I kept walking into the rooms it described and noticing the same stubborn fact. The floor was never bare. Somebody owns it, somebody polices it, and somebody pays for it. And the figure who crosses that floor can die while crossing it, and the room knows. That knowledge is the whole book.

  4. Jul 23

    The Disposition

    Fractional Fiction, for those of you new to the series, is a discipline as much as a name. Every novel in it grows from a small fraction of documented reality, real texts, real law, real science, real ground, and the fiction rises around that fraction without ever falsifying it. Each book carries exactly one invention, one thing that does not exist, and the notes in the back declare it openly so you always know where the ground ends. Everything else holds. The permits in this book are real permits. A treaty really was signed on the sand at Point No Point in 1855. The six words are the real six words. And the three sources this novel is built on are named in the back matter like load-bearing walls. The first is a real book from 1922 called The Wild Heart, eleven animal sketches of Puget Sound country by a writer named Emma-Lindsay Squier, with an introduction by Gene Stratton-Porter that carries an idea this novel takes as law: a wild thing that stops being afraid of us cannot go home. The second is the oldest family record in Greek literature, Hesiod's Theogony, a list of who was born to whom, in which every generation of gods, warned about its children, devours them, and is replaced anyway. And the third is Dante, read in the English Longfellow made in the years after his wife died, when translating the Inferno was the only room of his grief he could stand in. From Dante the book takes its shape, a teller walking a silent listener down through the rings, and it takes a plea. In the sixth canto, a shade stops the pilgrim and asks for the only afterlife that is real: when you are back in the sweet world, carry me into the minds of other people.

  5. Jul 20

    The Word That Lets You Look

    In 2002 a public health director in Newark asked me whether I knew the word nosocomial. I did not. Nor did any of the graduate students in the room I taught the following week. Nosocomial means hospital acquired. It names the illness a patient walks in without and walks out carrying, and medicine has owned the word for more than a century and worn it smooth. This episode is about what a word like that is built to do. Say hospital-acquired infection often enough and it becomes a line item. Call a death a mortality outcome and you have moved it into a spreadsheet, where it can be totaled and compared and discussed on a Tuesday afternoon without anybody's voice breaking. That is cultural code. It replicates, it gets taught, and every time it is spoken it lets decent people look straight at a horror and feel almost nothing. From there the episode goes to Vienna in 1847, to a basin of chlorinated lime, and to a doctor whose colleagues destroyed him for proving that they were the weapon. Then it follows the shape out of the hospital and into the prison, the asylum, the classroom, the parish, and the faith that promised to carry its people out of the world and kept that promise the only way it could. One note on the failed test in this episode. Failing my own rule made the finding harder on hospitals than my original claim was. If that portion of the infection rate is not an irreducible floor, then more of it can be prevented than I had credited, and the institutions have less cover than I gave them. The longer account is in the blog piece is available on BolesBlogs.com DO HARM: Nosocomial Disease and the Institutions That Manufacture the Harm They Promise to Cure is available now from David Boles Books in Kindle and paperback, with a free PDF edition to download. Facts matter.

  6. Jul 19

    The Six Words

    Every rehearsal room I have ever loved kept two smells on staff: scorched coffee and radiator dust. In one of those rooms, years ago, an actor I call Curtis in the book crossed the floor toward me at the end of a long afternoon. He stepped over the spike tape, past the folding table with its script piles, and he stopped inside the working distance that theater people keep the way sailors keep respect for water. Then he said six words, "I want to be your friend." A grown man, saying a sincere and costly thing to another grown man. And I laughed. Two seconds of laugh. Then I answered him with five words of my own: "Haven't we always been friends?"

  7. Jul 14

    The Only Luggage

    Twelve thirty-three in the afternoon. Monday, April 28, 2025. The electrical grid of the Iberian Peninsula loses fifteen gigawatts of generation in about five seconds. Spain and Portugal go dark together. Trains stop between stations, on viaducts, in tunnels. Airports fall back on diesel. The Madrid fire service alone logs a hundred and seventy-four elevator rescues. The national tax portal goes down and stays down until Wednesday. Police officers stand in dead intersections and run the traffic with their hands. The shopkeepers who stayed open made change the way their grandmothers had, out loud, coin by coin. Clerks did the arithmetic in their heads while the registers sat blank. Officers directed two capitals' worth of cars with a grammar of gesture older than the signal light. Everything rented from the wire stopped that afternoon. Everything carried kept working.

  8. Jul 12

    Back to Willowbrook

    The book is history, and the book is news, and the seam between those two things is the subject. Here is the oldest voice in it. In May of 1881, the city of Chicago passed an ordinance declaring that any person "diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed" could be fined for being seen on the public way. Being visible was the offense. The law rode the railroads west after that, and in 1889 it arrived in Lincoln, Nebraska, which adopted the Chicago wording nearly letter for letter, down to the dollar fine and the commitment to the county poor farm. Omaha followed a year later. I grew up in Lincoln. I performed on television there as a teenager. Nobody told me my city had once made it a finable offense for certain bodies to stand where I stood. That silence is one of the reasons this book exists.

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3.7
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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
    883
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © All Rights Reserved
  • Show Website
    Human Meme