Welcome back to The Human Archive, in this episode:

We debut a new recurring segment, Between the Margins, where every third episode we slow down, sit with a text, and talk honestly about what it stirs in us. No lectures. No summaries-for-credit. Just human reactions to old words that somehow keep breathing.

Our first stop is Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. We explore the parts that resonate, the parts that resist, and the strange tension between ancient discipline and modern exhaustion. What does it mean to practice virtue when you do not want to get out of bed? How much control do we really have over our thoughts, our reactions, ourselves? And where does stoicism help, and where does it quietly ask too much?

This is not a breakdown of the book so much as a conversation with it. Highlighters out. Margins full. Questions left unanswered on purpose.

What makes you… you?

Is it memory? Personality? Biology? The stories you tell yourself?
In this episode of The Human Archive, we sit with a deceptively simple question and let it unravel. We talk identity without buzzwords, consciousness without pretending we have the answer, and the strange feeling of being a person who remembers being someone else.

From habits and trauma to choice, continuity, and the quiet moments where the self feels solid or suddenly slippery, this conversation lives in the gray space between science, philosophy, and lived experience.

Welcome to the very first entry in The Human Archive with Dale and Luke. This episode is less a polished broadcast and more a door being cracked open.

We dive headfirst into two journeys moving in opposite directions. Dale unpacks his deconstruction from Christianity and the worldview he landed in on the other side as an atheist, while Luke shares his path into faith and what continues to draw him toward it. From there, the conversation sprawls naturally into big questions and old arguments. The Big Bang, evolution, tradition versus modern belief, and the stereotypes and stigmas that cling to faith from both inside and outside the church.

This is not a debate meant to crown a winner. It is two friends speaking honestly from different perspectives, sometimes agreeing, sometimes colliding, and often sitting in the tension between certainty and doubt. The goal is not to convince, but to understand.

Fair warning: this is our first episode. We are learning in real time. The pacing is imperfect, the edges are rough, and there are moments where we are clearly finding our footing. But the conversation is genuine, and the curiosity is real. If you stick with us, we promise the polish will come