This Human Meme podcast is the inflection point for what it means to live a life of knowing. We are in the critical moment of human induction. David Boles is a writer, publisher, teacher, lyricist and author living and working in New York City. He has dedicated his life to founding the irrevocable aesthetic. Be a Human Meme!
…
continue reading
Davidboles Podcasts
Listen to your own voice the next time you tell the truth. Notice how it flows, uninterrupted, from thought to speech. Now pay attention when you're about to lie. Feel it? That hesitation, that gathering of alternate reality before you speak it into being. Scientists have measured this pause. They've quantified it, studied it, turned it into data p…
…
continue reading
1
Wicked: The Bespoke Voice and the Echo of the Ghost
8:05
8:05
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
8:05
Today, we are standing in the wings of the theater, looking out at the empty stage, asking ourselves a question about the ghosts that haunt the floorboards. We are talking about the "Original Cast Recording" and how that static document, that moment frozen in time, can become a trap for every artist who follows. We are looking specifically at Wicke…
…
continue reading
1
How Long Is a Piece of String: Geometry of Uncertain Mercy
14:30
14:30
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
14:30
Someone approaches you and asks for a piece of string. That's all they say. No context, no explanation, no qualifying details. Just: "Can I have a piece of string?" In that moment, you hold something more precarious than you might realize. You're standing at the intersection of mathematics, psychology, and potentially someone's survival. How do you…
…
continue reading
Right now, as you listen to this, your larynx is trying to kill you. This isn't metaphorical. Your voice box sits dangerously low in your throat, creating an intersection where food and air must cross paths every time you swallow. No other mammal has this problem. Horses can drink and breathe simultaneously. Newborn humans can nurse and breathe at …
…
continue reading
Here's something that should stop you cold: humans are the only animals on Earth that cry emotional tears. Not tears to clean the eyes, not tears from irritation, but tears from joy, from grief, from being overwhelmed by beauty. Elephants mourn their dead without weeping. Dolphins recognize themselves in mirrors without crying at their own reflecti…
…
continue reading
1
That Thing That Eats Your Name: A Story for Halloween
11:00
11:00
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
11:00
The first sign something was wrong in the neighborhood came when Patricia Reeves knocked on her own door and asked her husband if Patricia Reeves lived there. She stood on the porch in her gardening clothes, dirt still under her fingernails from planting the tulips we'd all watched her plant an hour before. Her husband assumed it was a stroke. The …
…
continue reading
When we invoke the Boodle Boy, we're also invoking a kind of professional shamanism. The shaman moves between worlds, bringing back knowledge from spaces others can't access. The Boodle Boy moves between disciplines, between technologies, between ways of knowing. He speaks theater to programmers and code to dramatists. He finds the musical structur…
…
continue reading
Here's a thought experiment I want you to try. Tonight, pick one moment from your day. Just one. Don't photograph it. Don't write it down. Don't tell anyone about it. Just hold it in your mind. Try to recall it tomorrow, next week, next month. Watch how it changes. Notice how it connects to other memories, how it grows or fades, how it becomes less…
…
continue reading
1
Black Pill: Meaning, History, and Cultural Fallout
16:24
16:24
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
16:24
"Taking the black pill" names a posture of fatalism that migrated from fringe men's forums into the wider internet. The metaphor riffs on the pills in The Matrix, but where the "red pill" claims to reveal hard truths, the black pill says those truths are terminal and change is pointless. In its most specific and consequential register, it is tied t…
…
continue reading
1
Galileo Test: Why Today's AI Still Can't Invent the Future
13:03
13:03
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
13:03
Consider a thought experiment: one intelligence is trained exclusively on everything known about apples. Another is trained only on oranges. They are allowed to communicate but are strictly forbidden from discussing the specifics of their respective fruits. Would the apple expert learn about oranges, and vice versa? Surprisingly, the answer is almo…
…
continue reading
1
The Mirror and the Machine: A Meditation on Consciousness and Self-Awareness
31:24
31:24
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
31:24
Consciousness is the raw fact of experience itself, what philosophers call qualia. It's the redness of red, the sharp bite of winter air, that peculiar texture of anxiety sitting in your chest. Consciousness is simply the lights being on, the "something it is like" to be you. A mouse likely has consciousness; it experiences pain, pleasure, fear, bu…
…
continue reading
1
Rivers with Standing: Indigenous Law, Memory, and the Future of Stewardship
19:04
19:04
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
19:04
There is no single universal definition of "Indigenous peoples." The most rigorous contemporary practice rests on a cluster of criteria: self-identification; descent from societies that predate colonization; continuity of language, institutions, and spiritual traditions; and a sustained relationship with particular territories and waters. Since the…
…
continue reading
1
"Three Hidden Discoveries: Forests Control Weather, Consciousness Stutters, and Worms Built Civilization
21:48
21:48
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
21:48
When you really sit with these ideas, the boundary between matter and mind starts to shimmer and dissolve. Forests think with water. Worms dream soil into being. Consciousness flickers like a strobe light, creating the illusion of continuity from discontinuous moments. We're not separate from these processes; we're expressions of them. Your thought…
…
continue reading
1
The Hollow Men Explained: T.S. Eliot's Sources, Meaning, and Modern Relevance
17:27
17:27
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
17:27
The concept of spiritual and moral hollowness that T.S. Eliot crystallized in "The Hollow Men" (1925) emerged from a crisis of meaning that had been building in Western consciousness since the mid-nineteenth century. While Eliot's immediate inspiration came from witnessing the spiritual devastation following World War I, the metaphor of human hollo…
…
continue reading
1
AI, AGI, and the Future of Humanity: A 2025 Analysis
11:42
11:42
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
11:42
A persistent gap between public imagination and technical reality defines the common understanding of artificial intelligence. The popular discourse, shaped by a century of fiction, centers on the fear of emergent machine consciousness, while the more urgent, tangible story is about how today's powerful, non-sentient tools are actively beginning to…
…
continue reading
1
From Photograph to Flesh: The AI That Reincarnated the Past
13:11
13:11
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
13:11
The old archivist, Dr. Aris Thorne, felt a jolt of audacious heresy as he slid the glossy print into the maw of the machine. It was a photograph that had become a part of the national bloodstream, an image of pure, unthinking ecstasy at the end of a long and brutal war. He had chosen Alfred Eisenstaedt's "V-J Day in Times Square" for its raw, kinet…
…
continue reading
1
The Digital Specter: Navigating the Murky Waters of Online Trolls and Harassing Reviews
14:54
14:54
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
14:54
In the sprawling, often-anonymous landscape of the internet, a persistent shadow lurks, eager to sow discord and inflict reputational harm: the online troll. These digital phantoms, armed with keyboards and a seemingly endless supply of vitriol, can target individuals, products, and companies with a barrage of harassing reviews, leaving a trail of …
…
continue reading
1
Less Than vs. Fewer Than: The Difference Explained (With Examples)
16:00
16:00
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
16:00
It's a wonderfully curious thing, isn't it, how two little words like "less" and "fewer" can stir up so much conversation and, at times, even a little bit of friendly debate? It's a perfect example of how our language is a living, breathing entity, constantly shaped by how we, its speakers, choose to use it. Let's take a warm and friendly stroll th…
…
continue reading
1
Alien Ingredients Are Everywhere, So Where Is The Life?
13:25
13:25
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
13:25
So, after all this time, have we ever actually found evidence of alien life on Earth? It's a question that gets to the heart of our place in the universe. For more than fifty years, we've been looking, and despite some tantalizing clues, the answer is still no. We don't have a single piece of reproducible evidence. What we have is a fascinating sto…
…
continue reading
1
Black Holes Explained: Formation, Evidence, and the Universe Inside Theory
20:44
20:44
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
20:44
The cosmos harbors many mysteries, but few capture our imagination as completely as black holes, regions of spacetime where gravity so dominates that nothing, not even light, can escape once it crosses a critical boundary. They represent the ultimate triumph of gravity over every known counter-force. When matter is compressed into an extremely smal…
…
continue reading
Nowhere was the tension between local and standard time more vivid than in Indiana. Before 2006, the state was a confusing patchwork of time observance. Some counties followed Daylight Saving, while others steadfastly refused. Some aligned with Chicago on Central Time, others with Ohio on Eastern Time. Locals became "time-bilingual." A dentist in J…
…
continue reading
1
If the Center Holds: Exploring an Enduring Metaphor
18:02
18:02
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
18:02
The phrase "if the center holds" has its conceptual roots in the broader cultural and literary assertion that social, political, or ideological cohesion can be sustained only so long as the core remains intact. This phrase is often considered a response to William Butler Yeats's famous lines from his poem "The Second Coming," in which he prophesies…
…
continue reading
1
Deus Ex Machina: Complete 3000-Year History from Ancient Greece to Future Philosophy
41:19
41:19
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
41:19
The legal systems of this era struggled to adapt to these new realities. The Restored Justice Protocols of 2900 allowed victims of crimes to be restored from backup, effectively undoing the crime itself. But this raised questions: if the harm could be undone, had a crime occurred? The infamous Paradox Trials of 2923-2947 attempted to prosecute crim…
…
continue reading
1
Why Everything We Know About Time, Memory & Aging Is Wrong: 6 Paradigm-Shifting Insights
25:02
25:02
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
25:02
The first forgotten truth emerges from the medieval understanding of time as a living, breathing entity rather than a mere mechanical measurement. Before the proliferation of mechanical clocks in the fourteenth century, communities understood time through the rhythms of nature, prayer bells, and seasonal cycles. This organic temporal awareness crea…
…
continue reading
1
From Ancient Golems to the Synthetic Sacred: How AI Evolved from Mystical Automata to Tomorrow's Consciousness Infrastructure
23:25
23:25
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
23:25
The human yearning to create intelligence beyond our own biological constraints stretches back to antiquity, manifesting not as "artificial intelligence" but through divine automata, mystical golems, and mechanical servants. The ancient Greeks spoke of Talos, the bronze giant who protected Crete, while Jewish mysticism produced the golem of Prague,…
…
continue reading
