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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:01.506)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Chip Colwell, who is an anthropologist and the founding editor-in-chief of Sapiens, an editorially independent anthropology magazine. And he was also the director of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science from 2007 to 2020. And we're here to talk about his book today on the origin of things. Wait, no, sorry, I had it up, apologies.
So much stuff, how humans discovered tools, invented meeting, and made more of everything. Then we have the introduction on the origin of things. Dr. Colwell, so happy to have you today.
chip colwell (00:41.769)
Thanks so much for having me.
PJ (00:44.55)
So you do a great job of introducing, I love the ease. I read a lot of academic books, so it's really nice to have something that is like, not that it's not enjoyable to read academic books, but something that is written in a more enjoyable style. And you start off with this kind of light bulb moment you had that led to this book from your sister, casually asking you a question.
Talk a little bit about that light bulb moment and how it led you to write this book and why this book is important.
chip colwell (01:17.393)
Absolutely. So a number of years ago now, my sister who lives in Seattle asked me a really simple question. And it was a question that I felt I should have had an easy answer to. At the time, I was a museum curator. I was a curator, not a museum director, just to clarify that small little different job. But I love being a curator. And I was in charge of hundreds of thousands of items.
PJ (01:36.247)
Apologies.
chip colwell (01:46.837)
from cultures all around the world, some going back hundreds of thousands of years. And I'd been an archeologist for a couple decades. And the question my sister asked me was, why do we have so much stuff? And I looked around her place and it looked like probably a lot of our homes. It had things on the wall and couches and tables and chairs. And you know, in the kitchen, there's Tupperware and spoons and...
in the garage is all the stuff that you don't know what to do with. And then you think about the house itself that requires thousands of nails and plastic tubing and electrical wire and everything else. And so in some sense, it's an easy answer, right? We have so much stuff today because we're American consumers and this is what we do. This is how we live. But what she really meant was a far deeper question of how did we get to this moment?
And as I thought about it, it really was a profoundly important and provocative question, because I knew as an archaeologist and someone who studied human evolution for a long time, that if you go far enough back, our most ancient ancestors didn't need anything at all to survive, right? They just needed their bodies and a natural world with resources. So how did we go from that, probably we think about four million years ago, to our world today with
airplanes and computers and podcasts that require all the technology. I'm looking at a microphone and your baseball hat. And so how did we go from nothing to everything across those 4 million years? And so I went back after that holiday visit to my sister and I said, well, someone's surely tackled this. You know, you do what you do as a researcher and you start to look around and read and there were, you know, a few.
books that kind of worked around the edges of that question, but didn't take it on solidly. And I didn't find anything that had a really good answer that really satisfied me. And I'd realize, as an archeologist, I mostly worked on Native American culture and history. And I kind of looked at just the kind of narrow material culture that was left behind. But as a curator, I had at my disposal
chip colwell (04:14.265)
objects across humanity's story. And so I asked myself, what would it look like to try to tell the story to provide that answer? Not just looking at these kind of narrow artifacts, but looking at the whole span of our story as a species. And so that really set me on a big research project. It took a number of years. I traveled all over the world. I interviewed all kinds of people. It ended up
being a deeply interdisciplinary project. So I dipped into philosophy and psychology and physiology, even business and marketing. It really was this amazing exploration on this very simple question.
PJ (05:06.034)
Um, one, thank you. And, uh, sorry, I'm still trying to wrap my head around how I read senior curator multiple times and then said director, but that's like, it happens. All right. Yeah. Um, I was like, yeah, I know. Uh, yeah, I was just trying to hand that out for free. Um, so, uh, well, yes, I, um, as you're talking about this movement from nothing to everything, you know, there's multiple things to talk about there. Um,
chip colwell (05:17.338)
Okay. No worries. I appreciate the promotion.
PJ (05:34.406)
Even you talk about styling yourself kind of after, or this particular book after like these broad histories like Sapiens. But one of the ones, one things I wanted to, I caught from the introduction is you find yourself being more of a minimalist. And so there's that personal aspect of like, you like to get rid of things. But also you have this kind of, you've made this career move as the senior curator.
where you were giving back exhibits and you talk about that. And how did, one, if you can tell our audience a little bit about how that's been in your career, what it's like to be a curator who gives away exhibits and if they're not familiar with the culture, what that's like, but also how did that shape your view of the story of tools and things that you are the kind of person who likes to get rid of things?
chip colwell (06:03.105)
Mm-hmm.
chip colwell (06:31.265)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, in the book, I try to talk about my own relationship to stuff and a bit of my own story. Hopefully it provides a way for readers to relate to me as an author, but also I think they'll probably see some resonances in their own life, right? Because as an American consumer in 2024, and I'm just as...
vulnerable to consumerism. I'm just as susceptible to advertising. Despite myself, I think Ferraris are like super cool cars. I think I want something, I go out and can buy it often, whether it's clothing or whatever it is in your life. It's just so easy right now. On the one hand, I'm
like most every American consumer. On the other hand, I do have this personal tendency towards minimalism. Like most things don't really bring me pleasure. I'm not a shopper. You know, I detest going to malls, right? So there's a big part of me that is just confused by why people love stuff so much for the most part. And so I kind of relate myself as...
you know, an atheist who studies religion, right? Because you're just so confused by it. Like, how does this happen? You want to understand it, right? So I'm that, I feel like sometimes I'm kind of that alien anthropologist, like just trying to make sense of these fascinating human-like creatures, you know, and why they do what they do. So there's a big part of that. And a part of that came out in my work as a curator for more than a dozen years at a major natural history museum.
where museums historically are about getting things, keeping things, and then getting more things and keeping those things and on and on. You're building a collection. This is what museum curators do in our contemporary world. And a big part of my job was addressing claims by Native American contemporary Native peoples for sacred objects and ancestral human remains that had been.
chip colwell (08:51.089)
inappropriately taken, sometimes stolen. And so the work was evaluating those claims under a federal law that allows claims, a process for those claims to be evaluated and then potentially for items to be returned to those communities where they were stolen from. And so not only was I not doing a very good job of collecting stuff generally, because I'm just not interested in getting stuff. You know, I'm not a shopper in life or as a curator.
But then I was actually giving stuff back, you know, and so there was this kind of deep paradox but out of that too came a real fascination with Why an item can be seen so differently by different communities, you know, so right so say there's a sculpture that Museum curator collected because they think it's beautiful or they think it's historical they think it's symbolic of the human mind
PJ (09:35.182)
Hmm.
chip colwell (09:48.693)
Whereas maybe the tribe where it was taken from, they see that exact same item as a spirit. It's not even maybe an inanimate object. Maybe it's totally animate to them and it's a being, a God or some other spirit that they can actually interact with. And so how is it that one culture can see this item as beautiful and purely a piece of art and another culture can see this as a living being?
So what explains such radically different views on objects and the material world that we create as humans? So that was a big motivation too for this book was to understand those really deep evolutionary inclinations that we have that can see things differently. And then how is it that we come to see some things as for example, art and others as living gods?
PJ (10:47.654)
And there's something interesting you've mentioned there that it's come up a couple times actually, as you're talking about the different ways of viewing things that you yourself find yourself going across disciplines. And even as we're talking there, it's not the exact same kind of movement, but it's very similar. This idea of like, there's a whole different lens that happens with objects and give objects their significance or their meaning.
Can you give us any insight into what that movement is like? One, what does it mean to be an anthropologist? And how is that different from things like theology, psychology, those sorts of things? And what was it like to kind of dig into these other disciplines as you were researching this?
chip colwell (11:36.349)
Yeah, and I tussle with the history of those stolen items and what it meant to evaluate those claims and see ancestors go back home and sacred objects. And that whole story is in a previous book called Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits. So the folks are interested in really digging into that history. That's another popular kind of science book that shares that. And-
I think the question of how I experience it as an anthropologist points to a fundamental assumption that no culture is truly right or wrong. There is this kind of agnostic approach to culture, at least as a starting point. You know, often I do believe we ultimately have to make moral judgments and, you know, under the law you have to make certain decisions, but at least your starting point.
is being really agnostic about, you know, is that piece of wood art or is it a god? And not assuming that you have the answer as you begin that investigation. And then having a very deep appreciation for each of those communities' viewpoints and how they got to where they are, you know, why those differences exist. And then celebrating those differences rather than...
often denigrating a particular perspective. Instead, I think most anthropologists want to embrace the diversity of human culture and think that's a good thing. So I think those are some of the built-in assumptions to the work. I think one thing that was different for me in this project and maybe we can get into it, because it's so fascinating, is the synthesis of biology and culture. And anthropology has
different sub-disciplines, and one of them is biological anthropology and one's cultural anthropology, but those folks typically kind of stay in their corners and don't play together, you know. But in trying to unravel the story of how we got from nothing to everything across four million years, you really see the synthesis of biology and culture. And for me, that was an amazing thing to be able to learn about and to...
chip colwell (14:01.813)
draw those connections. And then beyond that, going into these other disciplines, I really enjoyed it. I think learning about art history and psychology and marketing, I had no idea really just how much marketing shapes are, and very strategically shapes our modern consumerism.
So for me, I felt like I was learning. Sometimes you write books and you're like, I know this and I'm sharing it. And other times you write books because you are really learning along the way too. So this was a project for me that really was about the process of learning as much as sharing.
PJ (14:43.154)
My day job is digital marketing. So, this is very familiar. And it's definitely, it is one of those underbelly things that you just like, you live in it and you don't realize until, you know, you might experience it with your kids a little bit because you're like, oh yeah, well, of course it works that way. But then, yeah, our culture is so shaped by it. We have no idea.
chip colwell (14:49.393)
OK, well, I want to hear your viewpoints on that, then, when we get to that.
PJ (15:13.718)
But I did want to go back to, I'm reminded of, I got it from Noel Carroll, but I think it's a very old idea. This idea of critique, he uses it for art, but that you can critique everything in two ways that are complimentary. One is you can critique its purpose, whether its purpose is good or not. And the other is that you can critique its execution of that purpose. So like you can have something that is really horrible, but it's really good at being, doing this horrible thing, right?
chip colwell (15:35.297)
Hmm.
chip colwell (15:43.949)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (15:44.542)
Or you can have something that is very noble but very poorly done. And I'm just trying to walk through it seems, I want to make sure that I'm tracking with you here. As you talk about from an anthropological standpoint, you're focusing more on the structure rather than the purpose, the teleology. And so eventually you can get to a point where you're like, well, that part of the culture is, you know, you can make moral judgments when it comes down to like making
chip colwell (15:49.303)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (16:13.514)
certain decisions, legal decisions, that sort of thing. But really what you're focusing on is that structural and that kind of execution, like how does this fit? What is the meaning of this? Before we judge the whole purpose, because judging the whole purpose of a culture is, I don't know that one person can do that, right? But by working together, we can fit these pieces together and start to understand more the purposes of a culture. Is that a good way of thinking about it?
chip colwell (16:30.429)
Right.
chip colwell (16:41.941)
Yeah, I like your thoughts and that's an interesting way to distinguish how we get to moral judgments, I think as well. And that is where the book ends up, you know, so in the book, I propose that there's three major leaps across those four million years that have gotten us to where we are. The first was our ancestors recognition that the materials of the world can be turned into tools. So the first step is discovering tools.
That happened, we think, probably about 3.4 million years ago in East Africa. Then the next step is the discovery that those tools can have meanings, different kinds of meanings, whether it's economic value, whether it's aesthetic value, whether it's religious value, right? We assign meanings to these tools. And that probably starts to happen maybe a million years ago, but...
probably about 500,000 years ago, and that's well in place by 50,000 years ago. And then the third leap is abundance and the construction of not only the technical ability to create abundance, but also the ideology of abundance. And this is where your colleagues come into play is constructing a world in which abundance isn't just possible, but that this becomes a key purpose of what it means to be human, to consume.
PJ (17:56.962)
Hehehehe
chip colwell (18:07.785)
So that ideology is a really fundamental part. But to get to your question here, so after looking at those three leaps, I then ask, okay, where does that leave us? What does our world then look like? And I recommend the possibility that we need a fourth leap, and maybe this is the moment to do it. Because if you look at environmental crises, if you look at the impacts of overconsumption on people's psychology and social wellbeing,
Maybe there's a need for force. So as an anthropologist, I'm trying to understand. I spend most of the book just trying to understand who we are, how we got here, and what does all this mean. But then, yes, we can, from that history, as we gain an understanding of it, we can ask ourselves, is this who we want to be? Is this where we want to be? And if it's not, can we change it? And that's really where some more
PJ (19:02.648)
Excuse me.
chip colwell (19:07.881)
kind of normative questions, some more moral questions.
PJ (19:13.214)
Absolutely the And I did want to touch on this briefly too as you're talking about this movement back and forth between culture and biology That sounds like similar like that very much that The law the What's the word I'm looking for here? like there's a long history of nature versus nurture and It seems like in a lot of ways that you're working on that dialogue all the way throughout even as you talk about I mean, we're obviously talking about prehistory
3.4 million years ago, right? And so we're talking about that kind of evolutionary biology standpoint and it seems many ways to predate the real cultural movements, right? That kind of springs out of that. But would that be another way as we talk about culture and biology, we're talking kind of that nature and nurture?
chip colwell (19:44.544)
Mm-hmm.
chip colwell (19:52.423)
Mm-hmm.
chip colwell (20:10.365)
Yeah, yeah, that's one way to gloss it for sure, you know, is with the idea that there's nature, that there's some things that just are instinctual or kind of spring from us based on our evolutionary and biological history. And then the nurture part is our culture, our environment that shapes us. I mean, we do have enough research, for example, on chimpanzees and gorillas, you know, our nearest
evolutionary kin to understand that, for example, they use tools, right? We know chimpanzees in Africa create straw tools that they use to fish out termites. There's other kinds of some of our primate kin actually use stone tools. So there's some tool use, right? And that we know that there's culture.
that there is very, you know, as we think of this culture as norms and ways of being, values, expectations of behavior, we see that in our kin. So probably if you go back about 4 million years ago to our very first ancestors that are using stone tools, like in clear ways as chopping and cutting tools, those would have been our Osterlipithecine ancestors. So if you know of that famous fossil, Lucy.
That's who we're talking about. So these were the folks that probably realized that if you pick up a stone tool, sorry, if you pick up like a nodule of stone and break it, it can create a sharp edge. And then that sharp edge you're able to cut things with. So what's the consequence of that? Well, if you're able to use a sharp tool for cutting, you can begin to shear off meat.
from animals, for example, and consume those more efficiently. You can break apart bones and get to marrow, which is really high energy food. And so what begins to happen? And there's a few steps about how it's even possible that a nostril of piscien realizes that you have a stone that can be broken apart and made into tulle.
chip colwell (22:30.685)
And then you have to be able to remember that you did that the next time you see a carcass and you want to get to it. So there's a few steps in there that I talk about in terms of working memory, physical capacity to manipulate stones. So there was this kind of special moment that led to that discovery that, I mean, you can't overstate the importance of that moment. I mean, it's as important as the discovery of the printing press and the first wheel, the first computer. I mean, this...
without this moment, we probably would not be who we are today and where we are today. But in that special moment, that began what some anthropologists call techno-organic evolution, which basically means we, our ancestors, uniquely began to evolve biologically in response to these emerging cultural practices, such as making tools. And let's...
Continue that on, for example, with the cutting tool. So if you do not have a knife and you're trying to eat a big slab of meat, you need incredibly strong jaws and you need very, very sharp teeth. But what happens if you actually do have a knife and you're able to cut up the meat into tartar before you eat it?
Well, you actually don't need very sharp teeth and you don't need very strong jaws. So as our most ancient ancestors developed cutting tools, you actually see the biology, the physiology shift in response. So teeth become less sharp and the jaws become less robust because you don't need to masticate really tough meat.
and it was probably tubers and other kinds of foods that suddenly become available to you simply because you can cut it in advance. And so at the exact same time, you see the emergence of tools, stone tools in particular, you're seeing a response physiologically, biologically as our ancestors begin to shift in response to this. And as, for example, the teeth and jaw begin to evolve in new ways,
chip colwell (24:48.149)
that then has downstream consequences. So if you, for example, don't need as much space for a big jaw, you would now have the capacity for a bigger brain. And just at the same moment that you have a capacity for a bigger brain, you're actually consuming more calories because now you have access to new kinds of food stuff. So the interplay between the tools that are being made and the evolution of our ancestors' bodies
go hand in hand. And so from the very start, there was no nature or nurture. It really was this combination of factors that led us to begin to co-evolve with things.
PJ (25:32.682)
Yeah, there's this cycle or synergy that happens. And in a lot of ways, it seems like that synergy is what motivates and drives these leaps, if I understand your book correctly, right? And so that's this, yeah, and I should, like the old terms are nature versus nurture, right? You have the old behaviorism models, those sorts of things. Really nature and nurture together kind of create this ongoing process. And that...
chip colwell (25:45.894)
Exactly.
PJ (26:01.526)
That's what kind of motivates each of the leaps that you use in your book. And so.
PJ (26:12.499)
As we're looking at that, I am so... Go ahead.
chip colwell (26:17.693)
I think I could jump in too, because yeah, no, just to build on that. Another like really interesting example of that to me was looking really closely at the emergence of art. And this is another area where there is a biological impulse that probably laid the foundation for what we now call art. And so if you look most basically, that's an aesthetic instinct. And...
many, many animals have an aesthetic instinct. And we see this in mating rituals, for example, and choices of birds with beautiful feathers and so on. It's also been demonstrated in the lab. There's a researcher in Japan that trained birds to distinguish different classical musicians from each other and different forms of visual art as well, and showed that the animals seem to have a kind of preference.
for certain forms of music and visual art. And there's other kinds of research that point to biologists in particular have animal behaviorists have shown that the aesthetic instinct is fundamental in much of the animal kingdom. But just having this aesthetic instinct isn't creating starry night, van Gogh's starry night, right? So what more is there? Well,
There's also an element that probably emerged about 500,000 years ago of self-expression, right? So this idea that you have an emotion, you have an experience, there's something in you that wants to express what it is that's a part of your world externally by creating images. And we see this most, where we get that date from is that there's a shell
that was found in Indonesia that was carved by a Homo erectus ancestor about 500,000 years ago that has etchings across it. And there's no, you know, there's no hypothesis that really points to, in terms of having evidence that would support it, that this having any kind of function at all. So a lot of anthropologists think that this is maybe the very first indications
chip colwell (28:42.197)
kind of a non, if you will, a non-functional behavior that might be a form of self-expression. So, but if you add together the aesthetic instinct and self-expression, that also isn't quite art as well, because you need something that we call symbolic thinking, the ability to recognize that if you draw a tree on a cave, that it's not a literal tree, right? But that is a symbol that indexes a real tree.
out in the world. So what we think of as, for example, visual arts is really the combination of the aesthetic instinct, self-expression, and symbolic thinking. And it's really the synergy of those three that are part biological, you know, if you go all the way back to aesthetic instinct, but then become more and more cultural and become more and more, you know, you can draw a tree, you can write the word tree in English, you could write
the word tree as a Chinese character, or you could draw a tree, right? All of those then become fundamentally cultural. And then that's how you get art, in my view. So, you know, it's fascinating. Yes, even if you look at the very emergence of like stone tools, like, and how that began to shape our biology, very clear. But then when you look deeper in time, it also is a question of the mind, and how our minds work around concepts of
you know, art and similar things are happening with religion and so on. So you really do see this continual interplay between biology and culture for much of this formula in your history.
PJ (30:23.102)
And that's built in, like, I mean, that goes, this is why, you know, this is a story. This is something that goes from through history. You have like, it starts with like this cutting tool and obviously many more things. Right. Like I realize we're simplifying very complex processes, but it's like, you have tools that lead to calories that lead to brains that lead to symbols that lead in a lot of ways to culture. And obviously you can talk about culture even in a chimpanzee way, but
chip colwell (30:37.961)
Right, yes, yeah, definitely.
PJ (30:52.866)
What I'm talking about here is what we would recognize as culture, which is several magnitudes larger, this kind of collective consciousness that we pass down from generation to generation. It grows. It also goes away. It's an entirely different landscape of tools. And there has to be an enormous excess of things like calories and brain power before you can even begin to approach this, because you have to have lots of room for experimentation. And if you're...
chip colwell (31:08.469)
Okay.
PJ (31:22.558)
living on subsistence, then that's not going to happen. You don't make beautiful things when you're fighting for food. That's not.
chip colwell (31:26.505)
Yeah.
chip colwell (31:33.194)
Yeah, yeah, no, there's that's a big part of the story. And, you know, as I say in the book, you know, elephants, for example, they make fly swatters. So they take branches and they kind of pull off leaves in order to swat themselves to get flies off themselves. So elephants make fly swatters, but they don't make nuclear missiles and Italian villas and whoopee cushions. And they don't make Van Gogh's Starry Night, right. So
There is, at least in the wild. So, you know, there is something fundamentally different in our story, in our human story. And as you're pointing to, culture becomes a really key part of that, you know, especially at scale and complexity, I think is what you're pointing to, is, you know, yes, many animals have been documented to have forms of culture, but there is something.
really different. And to me, this isn't a form of exceptionalism. I'm not trying to say we're so special because I think we are just a variation on a theme. If you look across the animal kingdom, but in our planet's 4.5 billion year history, no other animal has come up with what we've come up with, both in its beauty and wonder and its terror. We're doing also horrible things with this profound ability to make tools. Weapons of war,
the over consumption of plastics and so on are leading to our demise potentially. So, you know, I think we need to both stand in wonder at how we got here and also look really hard at that story because I think it explains who we are and our predicaments at the same time.
PJ (33:20.966)
How does, you know, we talked a little bit about art, how does religion play into kind of creating that collective consciousness, that several orders, magnitude more culture?
chip colwell (33:32.253)
Yeah, I spent a chapter in the book looking at the origins of religious objects. And, you know, it's part of the story is me going to a, well, sorry, part of the story is me going to Hong Kong to research a statue, form of a bodhisattva, which is a kind of being between a Buddha and us.
called Guan Yin. And Guan Yin is the goddess of compassion, and she's widely takes this statuary form all across Asia and you know across Buddhist communities. And the kind of key question to me around religious objects is why do we need them? Because so much of religion is not based on
chip colwell (34:30.785)
that can't necessarily be seen. It's about a spiritual experience. It is about questions of right and wrong, morality, which also are not fundamentally material. So why do religions need things? And so I travel across Hong Kong, and this kind of prompts a series of questions around these practices. And ultimately, I argue that religions need
material things precisely because they deal in the non-material. And so, you know, if you are trying to envision, for example, the Bodhisattva of compassion, and this spiritual being exists out in the universe, what does she look like? Can I call on her? You know, can I interact with her? Can I ask her questions? Without the material representation of the Bodhisattva,
it's much harder to conceive of that. And it's really interesting to me that the actual emergence of Buddhism in Asia arrived first in material form. So before different communities accepted Buddhism and became Buddhists, statues, which was this revelatory form of representation at the time, some thousands of years ago, that-
people began to trade in those statues and present those statues before they even understood what Buddhism was. So the statues actually had more power in a sense than the religious beliefs that followed. So I see the materials of religion as a kind of weather vane that, in the same way, a weather vane, if you imagine a rooster on a housetop, it's pointing.
to the wind of, you know, the direction of the wind, but the wind itself is kind of unseen, right? But you see the direction of the wind because of the object. So in the same way you can imagine a cross or a Torah or a statue of the Bodhisattva of compassion, all of these are like a weather vane that point to the existence of this thing that can't be seen, but in the minds of believers definitively exists.
PJ (36:30.946)
Hmm.
PJ (36:57.442)
I think it might be adjacent to your point or maybe it's the same point, but Pascal in his wagers, it's often misunderstood, but what he makes, he's talking specifically about how rituals, not only does faith perform rituals and faith form rituals, rituals form faith.
chip colwell (37:01.065)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (37:23.458)
to how there's a techno-organic cycle going on. By these statues creating religion, religion creating different statues, like there's this ongoing process that happens again. And so that's where we get these different magnitudes of culture. Is that another way of?
chip colwell (37:26.366)
Yeah. OK.
chip colwell (37:41.865)
That's really fascinating. Yeah, I hadn't thought about it in that way, but that resonates with some of the work that I've been doing in the ways I've been thinking about it. And I think you also can't undervalue the degree to which religion creates community and creates meaning even more broadly in people's lives. A really fascinating recent discovery archaeologists have made is there's a site in Turkey.
PJ (37:45.036)
Okay.
chip colwell (38:11.073)
called Gobleki Tekki. And this site demonstrated that religion actually got people, at least in Eastern Turkey, to settle down and connect with each other prior to agriculture. So the story for a very long time, archeologists had assumed that why did people first settle in one place? Well, it's because you become a farmer. You give up being
PJ (38:31.109)
Hmm.
chip colwell (38:40.981)
nomadic gatherer. And if you're a farmer, you know, you need to plant crops and tend them and watch them and then harvest them and protect your land. And it was farming that got us to settle down. But this site exists, existed about 2000 years prior to farming, the invention of farming. And this is a series of massive temples that seem to be focused exclusively on religious beliefs. So
what pulled people to settle down in this area and congregate was not farming, but it was actually religion. So, you know, whether or not this happened around the world in different settings, you know, archeologists are now feverishly working to understand, but at least in this one case, it really, I think prompts us to appreciate just how important religious practices and religious beliefs were in creating community.
and then shifting this really important trajectory of getting us to settle down. Because once you actually get to settle down, you get to get more stuff, right? And so you get more stuff because if you're a farmer, for example, you need farming equipment, you need weapons, better weapons, be able to protect your land, you need new kinds of homes because they need to last for a long time. If you have more permanent homes, you might need things like plumbing.
So you see the emergence of all this material culture. And then most fundamentally, you are able to have a surplus. And once you have a surplus, you can then create economies that allow for the exchange of goods and labor, that allow for some people especially to accumulate more and more stuff. So this is where you get the emergence of specialized labor, but also class. And while even...
you know, hunters and gatherers have forms of class, it isn't as exaggerated once you get people settling down. So I've transitioned a little bit from your initial question, but it's to talk, you know, connect the story that, you know, whether it's religion and art and these notions of meaning, all of those actually are tied into this longer history of how we began to shift our culture and our practices, our ways of living as humans.
PJ (40:42.89)
Yes. Yeah.
chip colwell (41:03.045)
And all of this does have material implications down the line as well.
PJ (41:07.082)
I mean, we keep talking about kind of these motivating cycles. You know, you can even think of them as like these engines. And so these engines always cause movement, right? So that's like, you're constantly drawing out like, that's why you moved there. Cause that's the, it's always, it's always a story that kind of keeps going. I've never heard of the. Yeah.
chip colwell (41:26.045)
It's almost like the, it makes me think of like a video game where you're like in the car driving and then you suddenly get a boost, you know, and you go suddenly really fast, but then it slows down a little bit, right? So you know, it is this kind of, we're humming along in different directions and then suddenly something will change and it pushes us in a totally new direction. So yeah, I think that start and it's not even start and stop. It's really you're rolling along and then big shift.
PJ (41:33.935)
You're right.
PJ (41:43.497)
Yeah.
Yeah.
chip colwell (41:54.397)
rolling along big shift like that. If you look across those four million years, that is what you're kind of looking at.
PJ (42:00.414)
There's something really interesting here about the way that history and science kind of interact in anthropology. I had never heard of religion used that way before. It was always the agricultural story, or you have, I don't know if you're familiar with Richard Pogue Harrison's Dominion of the Dead. But so for him, he tells, instead of agriculture, it's that we first started burying.
chip colwell (42:11.626)
No.
chip colwell (42:20.094)
No, I'm not actually.
PJ (42:26.922)
And then there was a religious significance, but also just like a communal significance, right? That we stayed because this is our land, because this is where we bury our dead. That's where homes start, right? And I don't know, unless we have a time machine, it's hard to prove these things definitively, but they do give us like, these stories have explanatory power, right? And there are like obvious...
chip colwell (42:29.543)
Okay.
PJ (42:50.818)
definitive things you can do with like carbon dating and like you're like, well, this showed up 500 years before. So you have to like, you need to show me like something agricultural before that if yeah. But and what's interesting about this is, you know, even as I've studied like the kind of the history of art and philosophy of art, that's kind of been my focus. For a long time, religion and art were very much intertwined, right?
chip colwell (42:53.201)
Mm-hmm. All right.
PJ (43:18.626)
basically the same thing. And as we've differentiated, we've gotten used to those being distinct things. But if we see them as meaning-making engines or cycles or whatever, you can see where they were first unified. And so we're used to thinking of these as separate things. But what do you think about that idea of this like,
chip colwell (43:26.849)
Mmm.
PJ (43:46.35)
that it's easier to think of them as meaning making things. I mean, I see you kind of lump history and religion together that way. What has it done for us that it's differentiated over time like this?
chip colwell (43:53.055)
Yeah.
chip colwell (44:00.065)
It's a really great point because I think, you know, archeologically, it is hard to tell, you know, for example, Neanderthals and our really early humans, you know, say on this side of a hundred thousand years ago, for example, made beads. So were those beads considered something beautiful? Were they for clothing, like a personal adornment and was really about identity?
Right, shaping, if you wear this kind of beads, you're this kind of Neanderthal. And if you wear that kind of beads, you're that kind of Neanderthal. Were they economic? Were they exchanged maybe for food or other kinds of things, labor, other kinds of things? Were they symbolic of maybe the shape of them symbolized some other worldly being? So getting at the actual experience and meaning
things at our species origins is really difficult. And as you say, you can have different hypotheses and then test those against the evidence. And I think we can, based on that scientific process, get closer to an understanding, but it's gonna be really hard to definitively prove it. So I think we're also, I think your question gets to this, we're kind of.
biased a bit about our contemporary categories, right? So in the post-enlightenment world, art is art. Art belongs in a museum. Religious objects belong in a church and so on and so forth. And so we don't always appreciate that those are modern constructions based on modern cultural norms. And if we go far enough back in time, quote unquote art, quote unquote religion,
simply don't exist as categories. So I think you're really right to point to sort of the broader, and this is sort of the broader point of that second leap is that we invented meaning and the meaning of those meanings are construction as well. And so, you know, we can look back and try to tell the story with our modern categories and how we see the world.
chip colwell (46:22.037)
But most basically, what was so transformative about that second leap was just meaning itself. This idea, because you don't see this in our primate kins, for example, macaques that use stone tools. There's no indication at all that they use those stone tools for anything other than cracking open nuts. There's no indication at all that elephant uses the fly swatter for anything other than swatting flies.
So it is that second shift towards seeing those things as meaningful that is the most important part of the story.
PJ (46:58.674)
And in some ways I feel like we've come full circle because this tells us why when you're moving from cultures to cultures, you have to start with the structure and the meaning first before you start making moral judgments. Like when you're talking about like, because you have different categories that are built into the culture. So we're like, you know, you have your museum exhibit and you're going over to like, oh no, over here it's.
chip colwell (47:11.153)
I don't know.
PJ (47:24.842)
Well, that's like a theological thing. It's like, do they say theology over in this culture? Like, you know, it's like, that sounds like a European thing, right? And so it's always, we've returned there even where it's like, you have to, you have to see these categories as, as kind of as they go. Um, but I, I want to make sure that we do get to talk about like the marketing side of things. Um, one, you know, it's, I was. Well.
chip colwell (47:29.95)
Right, right.
PJ (47:52.498)
I'm curious, as you see the advent, like that last leap, I know from a marketing perspective, when you look at the history of modern marketing, which most marketers don't, right? Most marketers are actually more craftsmen, right? Than they are like students of the discipline, right? That's one part of all this. I am a bit of an odd duck at that, but you see like this starts with in the industrial revolution, right? With like true surplus, like surplus that's like, literally like...
chip colwell (48:05.693)
You historians.
PJ (48:20.798)
It's literally costing us more not to make things than it is. And so this is where we get to that leap of abundance. How does that leap, how has that helped us? And I think most people will instinctively understand that because they like their things. But how has that hurt us?
chip colwell (48:28.768)
Mm-hmm.
chip colwell (48:40.417)
Well, this last leap started somewhere about 500 years ago with the beginning of global capitalism, European expansionism, colonialism and imperialism where large amounts of goods are being extracted from colonies around the world. So you begin global trade networks, as well as the rise of a merchant class, modern banking, currencies, you know, all of this.
begins to shape the Industrial Revolutions that begin to arise in the late 1700s with modern factories. And I was able to visit some of the historical sites where the Industrial Revolution was born. It's really fascinating history in and of itself. But to get ahead a little bit, so you have the Industrial Revolutions with modern factories, mass production, where, as you say, you're able to just churn out.
massive amounts of goods, cheaply, quickly, easily. And so that feeds into, you know, the ability, just the raw ability of humans to create more and more. One thing that I myself didn't fully understand was that for most of the industrial revolution beginning in the late 1700s, up until World War II,
there was still always more of a demand than surplus. So, if you look at global economies, historians who studied the revolutions, what they show is that throughout, I mean, of course you have some ups and downs around the economies and so on, but for the most part, factories were never able to quite keep up with demand. And this is why prices could maintain a certain height. And this is why people keep
buying new things because soon as there's a new thing, people want it, there's not enough of it, and so on and so forth. But what happened was with World War II, you had the introduction of very large numbers of factories, as well as new materials, most notably plastics, that the invention had begun earlier, but you see the ability to create massive amounts of plastics after World War II.
chip colwell (51:05.817)
And because of World War II and the global conflagrations it caused, the economies around the world were really suffering. And so suddenly you had for the first time really massive amounts of supply. You were able to produce huge amounts of things, but you didn't have the demand for it. And marketers had already learned some important techniques such as planned.
obsolescence, which is purposefully ensuring that items either go out of style or fall apart earlier than they would otherwise, just to get people to buy more. So strategies like that were already pretty well in place. And so marketers in the late 40s and 50s suddenly needed to use these tools to convince
large numbers of people to buy more and more and more. So that is a pivotal moment where our species went from not just the ability to make stuff, but also consumerism itself as being a fundamental driver to all of the stuff that we have in our lives today. It's that ideology piece of the puzzle.
PJ (52:29.79)
You know, I mean, you can look at things like fashion, but you look at something like Louis XIV's court, which yes, one, they're going to be at the very top of the class food chain. So they are going to have abundance just by virtue of who they are. But the reason he did fashion was in many ways a political tool if you kind of study his reasoning behind it. And yeah, my apologies. Your leap is like 500 years. The story that I have been told, again, like there's different stories.
but is that the, like for instance, like the showroom or things with very little, like really started with like the Victorian knickknacks. And so literally they, as ceramics finally, that was the first time, most of the time, like you didn't have to convince people to buy clothing, but they were literally so good at making things that they were trying to convince people for the first time.
Like a lot of the early techniques, not on a global scale, but in England, were showing up and like, hey, we have a showroom so that you can see how these things look. And all these sorts of things kind of happened right around there.
chip colwell (53:40.617)
Yeah, I mean, just to jump in there, the showrooms of Fast and the Example, essentially the modern mall actually goes back to the mid 1800s. If you look at these shops initially in England, but also then later in France and elsewhere, where you're selling all of these different goods, but in one space by one company. So a lot of the things that I think probably many of us might assume
PJ (53:42.071)
Yeah.
chip colwell (54:09.957)
are within a last generation or two actually go back to the emergence of the Industrial Revolution and you suddenly have all these new goods that you can manufacture in abundance. And so the techniques to sell them, advertising, actually promoting goods in the way that we see with printed ads and so on, very kind of jingles and language, all that goes back many centuries. So there is this really long history that's
really important to recognize. I think we're less modern than we might think. But yeah, but there was something that I think that the important part is you point out, let me go all the way back to the pharaohs of Egypt. You definitely have class for thousands of different classes for thousands of years in many parts of the world and Asia and the Americas and Africa. You have a small number of people that are able to consume
PJ (54:42.968)
Yeah. Go ahead.
chip colwell (55:07.857)
a lot more and acquire a lot more than anyone else in the society. But what happens with the industrial revolutions is essentially what we now think of as the middle class, where you can actually create enough in enough abundance that you can now have massive numbers of people that can consume just as much. And there's this quiz that I mentioned in the book that was really fun where it's like
OK, it basically lists a bunch of items, and it says, is this an Egyptian pharaoh or a modern-day hoarder? And it's things like a mummified cat and scrolls and rugs and gold vases. And it turns out it's the modern hoarder. But it sounds like it's the list of what you probably would find in an ancient Egyptian tomb. And so that's what's different. That's what changed.
PJ (55:43.49)
Ha ha ha!
PJ (55:55.012)
Yeah, right. Right.
chip colwell (56:06.685)
you know, 5,000 years ago, you know, one person could acquire that much in ancient Egypt. Whereas today you can have millions of people that can have just as much as a pharaoh had 5,000 years ago.
PJ (56:19.994)
I think this is my point with Louis XIV, but what you're talking about even with the pharaoh, is that you talk about the people at the top of the class. Yes, they enjoyed those things, but in a lot of ways that was part of the meaningful structure, because they showed that it was religious, it was political power that was like, let me demonstrate this. In some ways, would you say that we have escaped?
We've escaped like the meaningful structure with a lot of our stuff, or is it transferring? How would you describe the explosion of stuff into the middle class or even lower?
chip colwell (57:03.045)
I would like to say it goes both ways, if I could hedge a little bit. I mean, I think on the one hand, it's precisely because we tie our identities, our politics, our memories, and so on, to the things we have that we keep getting more and more. You know, so the car you drive is not just merely a means of transportation. If it was, we would all have the identical, most basic car, right?
PJ (57:06.942)
Yeah, yeah, sure.
PJ (57:22.125)
Hmm.
chip colwell (57:31.861)
but instead driving a pickup truck, a beat up pickup truck or a brand new one means very different things. Driving a beat up pickup truck versus a Tesla means very different things. Driving a Tesla compared to a Maserati mean very different things, right? These are actually what we drive, for example, is probably just as much a political statement as Louis XIV's clothes that he would have worn or his carriage, whatever it might have been. So...
PJ (57:57.807)
Right, right, right.
chip colwell (57:59.945)
It's precisely because we are animals of meaning that we get more in our lives because these things represent who we are and how we wanna live and our values. And at the same time, in this moment of hyperabundance, I do see how things mean less and less because you can simply replace it. When the book came out a few months ago, my wife,
through a little party for me invited friends over and we went around and shared the answer to a question of what's the most meaningful thing in your life and People you know, they're about 15 people and Probably 12 of them couldn't come up with a single thing and I think my hypothesis is that it's because everything so much in our lives is truly replaceable
PJ (58:48.174)
Mmm.
chip colwell (58:56.585)
You know, I may love my car, it gets an accident, why just buy a new one? You know, or I love my hat. You know, it's like my favorite hat. Will you lose it? You can just go down the store, right? So much of our lives is, and it was purposefully made this way by people who want us to buy more and more, is everything is replaceable. And, you know, a lot of people said, well, I would have, you know, 10 years ago, I would have said my family photographs, you know, physical.
things, but now with digital photos, everything's in the cloud. So you don't even have photos that have meaning anymore. So I think also some of our technologies have replaced some of those kind of tangible physical things of meaning. So in short, we're probably not that different from a French king in terms of using things to represent who we are, to play politics, all those things. And because of our
PJ (59:43.747)
Hehehe
chip colwell (59:53.241)
overabundance and easy access to so much. Individual objects probably mean less and less to us than our predecessors.
PJ (01:00:05.286)
I want to be respectful of your time, but I do feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you What directions would you point us towards for the fourth leap? so as we look at climate change as we look at just The meaning of our life as we over accumulate, right? What what should we be as a species looking for that next techno organic leap?
chip colwell (01:00:19.338)
Yeah.
chip colwell (01:00:23.926)
Mm-hmm.
chip colwell (01:00:34.169)
One important point of the book is that a leap is not necessarily a forward movement, right? A leap can be to the side and we can even leap backwards. So this is not a true teleological argument, you know, that we have all progressed, if you will, forward. But I think we need to ask ourselves what directions have these leaps been and what would our next leap look like? And I end the book by
PJ (01:00:39.959)
Hmm.
chip colwell (01:01:03.793)
suggesting we need a two-pronged approach. One is looking at our individual lives. My family and I try what we call a slow buy year where we try to buy less and less in one year. And that I think helps us just on a personal level evaluate what truly is meaningful to us. What do we really need to sustain us? And how our things can truly represent who we aspire to be and how we wanna live. So I think a lot of it's at a personal level,
while necessary, not really sufficient, to shift anything at a global scale. So the second part of it is we need bigger solutions at scale. And so what that might look like is changes in policies. For example, there's been a proposed Right to Repair Act where so many of our electronics and other kinds of big appliances have been made so that you can't repair them.
even if they are in theory repairable. They'll put screws, for example, that hide batteries when all you have to do is replace a battery. So instead of replacing a battery, you have to buy a whole new electronic. So the Right to Repair Act would, at scale, begin to shift how we think about how easily replaceable things are. There's also been a lot of talk around what are called circular economies, around trying to...
close the loop as much as possible from manufacturing to use to reuse. So it's really at scale that we need to think about some of the shifts if we're gonna take seriously the environmental and personal consequences to our over consumption today.
PJ (01:02:49.701)
Dr. Caldwell, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on. Thank you. I definitely will think about this throughout the week. It's been a joy talking to you.
chip colwell (01:03:00.469)
Thank you for the opportunity. I've enjoyed it as well.