Dr. Colwell is an anthropologist, editor, and author of over a dozen books. He received his doctorate from Indiana University and was the Senior Curator of Anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science for over a decade. He is currently the editor-in-chief of SAPIENS, a digital magazine that makes anthropology accessible to everyone. Chip’s latest book is entitled So Much Stuff: How Humans Discovered Tools, Invented Meaning, and Made More of Everything. Chip joins the podcast to explain how we came to live in a society where no matter how much money we spend, it’s never enough and why the average human has accumulated so many personal possessions.

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

Tom: Chip, welcome to the show.

Chip: Thanks so much for having me.

Tom: Let’s start. I want to ask you about where you grew up and what ignited your curiosity as a kid?

Chip: I grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and, I’d say from a early age, fell in love with the desert. of course, you know, you fall in love with your home probably no matter where it is, but the desert held a real spell over me from a young age. I love to go out hiking and exploring. Cacti are some of the most amazing living things. On the planet, my view. And so, I loved the history of the borderlands. And so, when I was in high school and had the chance to take an anthropology class, it was like, this was the, the discipline that was calling to me all along because it allowed me to understand this place where I was from, how I got here and maybe even where we were headed.

Tom: Was that class specific to your school? I think it’s probably not common to have anthropology classes in high school. And it’s particularly not strangely learning anything about where you actually live.

Chip: Right. Yeah, it’s super uncommon. And the story is I had a chemistry teacher who was a failed archaeologist. He failed out of his PhD program, unfortunately, and ended up teaching high school chemistry. And he convinced the administration to let him teach an anthropology class because that was a true passion of his. passion for him. And to show you how amazing he was out of the six students who took his first anthropology class, three of us went on to get anthropology degrees. The story of anthropology often is, it’s both a mirror to look at yourself and a window to look at others. And he did that so beautifully by taking us to the zoo and studying primate behavior and going up to Chaco Canyon in New Mexico and exploring those ancient places and going to Zuni Pueblo and meeting real native elders. And it was just this incredible exploration of place and being human. And he truly set a fire under a lot of us to continue on in the journey of anthropology.

Tom: That’s fantastic. Did you kind of over the years, keep up with those classmates and teacher and share the journey that you were on?

Chip: Yeah, yeah, you know, he continued to be a cheerleader and advocate and fan, for many years and he, also introduced me to an archaeologist who owned a company that dig sites in the path of development projects, highways and things like that.

And so that’s how I got my first job in archaeology. I mean, he was an incredible human being, incredible teacher. Very tragically and sadly, he passed away at a young age, from cancer. So, he’s been gone for some years now, but he’s never been far from my heart because, he was truly someone who made me who I am. And I’m so grateful for it.

Tom: Okay. I want to pivot to your new book, So much stuff. I was telling my seven year old son, Felix, about this book and he said, “Dad, yeah, why do we have so much stuff?” And I said, “Well, let me finish the book and call the author and let me, I’ll get back to you on that.” So, he is actually, on tiptoes waiting for the answer. And I bet this will be the first episode that he listens to of the Templeton Ideas Podcast.

Chip: Oh, that’s amazing.

Tom: You’ll have a seven-year-old listener.

Chip: All right. Well, this is for him.

Tom: All right. So I want to begin with the question, just ballpark, how many things are in the average American home?

Chip: There’s a lot of wild estimates with no absolute answers. The most widely cited number is about 300,000 items. And that was estimated by one scholar a number of years ago. I mean, that includes every single nail, every little joint in your plumbing and so on. But all of those are things and all of those fill our world and all of those make our world possible. so, you know, it’s certainly thousands of things, probably in the average household, probably tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands. our world simply could not exist as we know it. We could not live our lives, as we live them, without all of our stuff.

Tom: Yeah. Yeah. It’s mind boggling to consider, even if it’s, 3,000 or 30,000, you just, hard to imagine the amount of effort and the amount of other things and resources that went into making them. I think the other number that I found fascinating from your book was when they found the Iceman, Otzi, and it’s down in Austria/Italy. he had something like, 400 items on him, and he was from six or eight thousand years ago hiking through the Alps. I mean, that number itself is pretty staggering. So, we’ve had a lot of things with us and we’ve made a lot of things for a long time, I gather.

Chip: Absolutely. I mean, the book tells the big story, the, journey that our species and our ancestors have been on that got us to this moment. And that story begins about three and a half million years ago. There’s a lot of, twists and turns about how our biology responded to the things we’re making, the emergence of settled communities where, with farming and agriculture that leads to, more and more stuff.

But what’s so cool and fascinating about Utsi, the Iceman, that was found, in the Alps. He was actually, we think, a murder victim, running for his life, based on his wounds and what, where he was able to reconstruct from those final moments. All of the things with him were preserved.

And normally as archaeologists, we’re finding only durable artifacts like stone or shell or iron or metal, those sorts of things, whereas because he was preserved immediately under this glacier, you see the clothing he had on, you see the backpack and all the stuff he had in it. Every single thing that he had on him was basically right there for the finding.

And what you see is this incredible wealth of items. He was probably carrying, about half his body weight in stuff, and so you see the wealth of all these things, but also how recognizable it is. So he died probably about 5, 000 years ago, and you see he has a hat. He has a coat. He has pants. He has underwear. You know, the backpack that he was using looks pretty similar to my army surplus backpack that I first used to camp with. So, when you think about the story that led to, art and religious objects and clothing and tools you know, that’s thousands of years that led to that moment and all the stuff Utsi had with him, and we can still connect ourselves to him 5,000 years later.

Tom: Yeah. I don’t know, kind of walk through some of the, what you call the, like the big leaps in human history that led to so much stuff. And I think you just mentioned before that maybe the first leap was about three and a half million years ago. What happened then?

Chip: There was a moment where one of our most ancient ancestors looked around and saw the objects of the world and saw probably a rock, and for the first time realized that rock could be a tool. And that ancient ancestor picked it up, might have broken apart a piece of it, created a sharp edge, and sliced off some meat. And we know this from an archaeological find in 2010 from a site in Ethiopia, and that’s the very first indication of a stone tool being used by one of our ancestors. There’s additional finds in Kenya and elsewhere that support this work.

What led to that true moment of discovery? It’s a bit of a mystery. We don’t know that individual or, that creative spark that led to that exact moment, but we do know certain elements of it had to be in place. We know that, for example, this ancestor of ours had to have a pretty good working memory.

It needed to first create a series of steps and then remember those series of steps. So it could be repeatable for that individual, but then it could also be taught and then whoever’s learning it would also remember those steps. So, good working memory is very important.

The second thing it needed to learn with reasoning. And if we think about other tool users in the animal kingdom, you can think about like ants and insects. even fish are known to use tools, but they’re, Using those tools in non-creative ways.

They learn it once and they typically use that over and over and over. Then they’re not problem solving. But what our most ancient ancestor would have done is learned with reasoning. you know, here you have a carcass, meat is tough, it’s difficult to process, and it needed to figure out that if you could cut it and pre-process it with a knife, that eating it would be easier.

And then lastly, it needed to have the physical ability to do this. It needed to have the ability to manipulate tools with its hands and arms and other body parts to actually use it. So, it’s that triangulation between working memory, learning with reasoning, and physical ability that would have led to that very first moment of tool use probably about three and a half million years ago.

Tom: Wow.

Chip: And initially, there wasn’t a lot of creativity. Some of the very first stone tools, for example, that emerged about 2. 6 million years ago, known as the Oldowan toolkit, that technology lasted for a million years. A million years. If you think about that, you know, our iPhone, our iPhones are changing every what, six months, year, this technology literally lasted for a million years, unchanged.

It’s really mind boggling, right? But then what begins to happen about a million years ago is you do begin to see some accelerated changes. And then by half a million years ago, you begin to see a lot of new types of material culture, not just, stone tools. You begin to see houses, the very first inkling of art, the very first inkling of religion, the very first inkling of personal adornment, tools becoming much more sophisticated and beautiful.

And by on this side of 50, 000 years ago, this is where we see the full flowering of modern human culture, material culture. So, it’s this very slow ramp up where our ancestors were behaving like we see ants interacting with tools or, beavers or, other animals like that.

But then there’s this magical moment where our tools aren’t just tools anymore, but now they are things with meaning.

Tom: yeah. So yeah, let’s get into that. tell me about this second transition for humans. We’ve made tools. Some of them work so well, we use them for a million years, but then there’s a ramp up, a big diversification, maybe different kinds of applications.

What is this next step?

Chip: So best we can tell, you know, most animals, A tool is just a tool, it’s a means to an end, it doesn’t have any added value or meaning to it. Somewhere, again, probably about 500,000 years ago is where we begin to see some initial shifts. like for example, there’s this really curious, a mussel shell that was found in Indonesia, made by a Homo Erectus ancestor about 500,000 years ago, and it has these kind of etch marks across them. We can’t discern any possible function in that. We know it was carved by a Homo Erectus. It was intentional. was it perhaps, Homo erectus seeing the waves at the ocean breaking and trying to replicate it.

Was it maybe a map? Some sort of form of self-expression? So, we begin to see these just very curious artifacts left behind that point towards things, not just having a means to an end for, eating or shelter or anything else like that, but there’s something more to it. This is probably tied to an emergent, an expression of an aesthetic instinct, which we also see in the animal kingdom, but also, is relatively flat.

Humans and our ancestors amplify those aesthetic values. And we do this most notably, through symbolic thinking. So symbolic thinking is one of the greatest inventions our ancestors ever came up with.

And it’s the ability to recognize, that a tree in the world can also be a concept in the mind, and then that concept in the mind can be symbolized through, for example, the outline of a tree drawn on a cave wall. So symbolic thinking is the basis of language, and it’s the basis of all of our material culture, because for humans, these aren’t just things that get us to a certain point, but they are expressions of values and meanings.

So, an aesthetic instinct is really important. The ability to self-express through material culture itself and symbolic thinking, the realization that the world itself can be represented through symbols.

And so those three elements lead to art. They lead to religious objects. They lead to, clothing and the formation of identities through things like clothing. So, it’s those elements that really bring to fruition, meaning making through things.

Tom: So we talked about humans making tools, but I want to ask you the flip side of that question. How do tools make humans?

Chip: Tools make us in so many ways, and it goes all the way back to the emergence of stone technology. Prior to these first tools, humans could survive without things, but with the emergence of these tools, the tools actually begin to transform the human body. So, if you think about what a knife does, a knife is basically a big external tooth.

It cuts up your meat, minces it, makes it smaller so that your teeth have to be less sharp, your jaw has to be less strong, and you can still eat it.

So basically, a knife is a big tooth. And as that big tooth becomes more sophisticated and does its work, you actually begin to see these biological changes of our ancestors. Their teeth do get duller, their jaws get more gracile, less robust, and then that creates more capacity in the skull for a bigger brain at exactly the same time that our ancestors were consuming more calories and fats and vitamins and all the stuff that our brains need.

So about two and a half million years ago, you begin to see biological changes because of these technological changes. And that is the emergence of the symbiotic relationship, truly symbiotic evolution between technology and biology.

Tom: Okay. So far, so good. We have talked about two great leaps in human history, talked about tool making, which originated as long ago as three and a half million years. We’ve talked about meaning making, emerging a half million up to 50,000 years ago with some really formative, first inklings of what’s to come. Tell me now, there’s a third great leap in human history that explains why we have so much stuff. What’s the third leap?

Chip: The third Great Leap is much closer to our time period and our world today. And that begins with the emergence of the industrial revolution. So, the industrial revolution kicks off in England in the 1760s, comes to Rhode Island in 1790, and that begins the Industrial Revolution of the United States. It then takes over the world.

the Industrial Revolution, though, had a few important, precursors or events that really shaped and enabled the possibility of what became our world today. Things like, globalization and the ability to mine and move resources across vast distances. The emergence of a commercial class that replaced a religious class, in the Renaissance starting in Europe. there’s a lot of shifts that start about 500 years ago that lead to the industrial revolution.

The industrial revolution takes off. And what is so important about it is that it can make more at scales that were. inconceivable prior to it, so instead of making a sock that would take, weeks of labor, you can now make 20 socks in a minute. And of course, it not just become socks, but then clothing and then becomes other kinds of tools and becomes all of our world today. So, you know, the emergence of factories and manufacturing is essential to the story.

What I argue in the book though, is that there’s not just the ability to make more in this great leap. But there’s also the ideology of more. There’s the ideology of abundance. And for much of the industrial revolution. There was more demand than supply. Most factories could only respond to the demand and could barely keep up.

What happens in the 1900s is there begins to be a shift through further advances in technology, but then World War II happens and you suddenly have all of these factories producing so much war materiel that at the end of the war, They didn’t know what to do with all this stuff and the technologies that they’d created, especially around plastics and other kinds of industrial products.

So now you have the marketers that need to convince people for the first time in history that they have to buy the stuff that already exists. And they do this. In incredibly savvy ways. And this is our world today of consumerism. And in my view, often an over consumption where we are convinced to buy more and more, even if we need it less and less.

Tom: How did we come to live in a society in which no matter how much money we spend, it’s never enough? There’s always something, just one thing more, just the newer model, or some feature that I don’t already have. How can that be? We live in the richest society has ever existed in humanity, and it’s still not enough.

Like, how can this be?

Chip: Yeah. And we all experience it, right? You buy a car and you’re happy with it. You love it. And six months later you see the new model and you think, “Oh, well, that actually even looks a little better. Like maybe I should sell mine, and get the new one.” And that again is a specific strategy that marketers created.

About a hundred years ago, there is a strategy around planned obsolescence where they intentionally put before you something that’s newer, brighter, better, they’re arguing than the thing that they just sold you. And this was, perfected by car manufacturers in the 1920s where they realized after, you know, decade or so of people buying cars, they didn’t need to buy a new one.

Because those cars actually ran pretty well. And there’s actually pride in the longer that you own something, the more value that it had.

But what they did at Chevrolet and then soon other companies was they use the exact same car, car parts, the engine, everything interior. And they simply remodeled the exterior of the car.

Tom: Mm.

Chip: And then they sold this as a quote unquote, new type of car. When in fact, it’s essentially identical. Only thing is it looked different.

Another strategy, the same vein, is to technologically ensure that things break or fall apart so that you actually do need to buy it again, if you want that product in your life. So, all kinds of electronics, for example, in our lives are designed to actually break earlier than they naturally would, and they aren’t repairable so that you can’t actually, even if you wanted to fix them, you can’t do it.

So, it’s through these techniques of planned obsolescence that marketers and industrialists have very adeptly created these wants and desires and the need to get more, even if you don’t internally want it or it wouldn’t come from you and your own internal desires.

Tom: So, say once, we kind of turn the gaze to society, turn the gaze to ourselves, we realize, boy, there is a lot of deception going on. it’s not making me happy; it’s actually making me fall into debt. I’m becoming enslaved rather than being empowered by some of my consumer choices. What are some alternatives to being on the hamster wheel of consumption of, giving into what we see before us and what we’re expected to do?

Chip: It’s certainly some of the world’s greatest philosophers and religious figures have made this point over and over, that we are being deceived by the material world and that material things will not bring us pleasure. they won’t bring us fulfillment, they won’t bring us happiness, and conversely, they often will lead us to suffering.

And so, many religious traditions and philosophers have encouraged us to find ways to live with less, and to not, anchor our lives in the things that, we surround ourselves with.

So how do we do this? so in the book, I talk about my own journey of trying to explore what a life of minimalism looks like. I kind of already have those personal leanings. I’m not too much into stuff, ironically. It’s why I was fascinated by why people have so much stuff. but I committed with my family to try buying just five. new things or five non necessary things, throughout an entire year.

And we call this our slow buy year. There’s other movements of a no buy year and so on, but we thought about five would seem right. And we pursued this with our family and, we did really well, for about half a year. we all bought less than five things. And then. COVID hits and we need more space, and we bit the bullet and move it into new house and anyone who’s moved a new house knows all the stuff that you need to buy.

So, we failed in our slow by year, but it was a really important project to reflect and evaluate why it is we buy the things we buy. So, when you’re, forced to ask yourself with every new purchase, do I really need this? Why do I want this, and will this last me, you begin to shift your relationship to the stuff.

And so even though we did buy more than five things that year and more than five things this year, we are reevaluating. Why we want these things and why they’re in our lives and what we can do to make them last longer so that we’re wasting less too.

So, I think what the call is for is a, is a more honest and humble look at our patterns of consumption. And asking ourselves, do we truly need these things? Are these things really necessary in our lives? Will they fulfill us, or will they get in the way of our fulfillment? And when we begin to answer that individually, that’s at least part of the solution to our world of overconsumption.

Tom: Yeah, so we’re living now in a world where consumption is revved up, to manic levels. And you mentioned that, there are clearly alternatives. The world’s great religions, forms of spirituality, ancient philosophies have seen this. They saw it thousands of years ago and have warned us against this.

Yet here we are. We’re in a consumer society, locked in, and society seems to be becoming more secular. the antidote to where we are. Seems to be diminishing in its influence and priority. What’s going on here, Chip?

Chip: Well, that struggle is a struggle that has been happening for thousands of years. So, I think it is important to take that long view and to note that as long as there’s been stuff, there’s probably been people asking, do we need this stuff?

So, I think it is, this is part of the human struggle. This is part of what it means to live in relation to things because it’s precisely that evolution over a millions of years that has enabled the symbiotic relationship between things and humanity.

Unlike most of our primate cousins, humans could not live without the things that feed us, that clothe us, that protect us, that shelter us, that give us water, that allow us to build our relationships with each other. We simply could not survive without stuff. So that is an essential part of being human.

What we need to find is that balance between the need for survival, the need for fulfillment, the need for that humanness, and the ways in which our modern overconsumption is destroying many people’s lives through debt, through keeping up with the Joneses and the misery that can bring, as well as the destruction it’s bringing to our planet.

Tom: So, at the end of your book, you propose some concrete questions that we can ask ourselves as we try to navigate how to live moving forward. Can you tell me a few of these questions that we can ask ourselves after we finish listening to this episode?

Chip: Yea, the first question I ask is: what can we change in our individual habits of consumption? So, this is, I think, taking an honest inventory of our own patterns of consumption, looking really hard at, when we’re buying things, when are we prompted to buying things? Are we prompted because we just saw a commercial?

Are we prompted because we just saw our neighbor get it? Are we prompted because, we feel compelled to give gifts and give more and more at holidays, for example, right? So, I think really analyzing critically and in a deeply reflective way, our individual habits of consumption is a really good, starting point.

I think another one to ask yourself is whether it’s possible to prioritize buying more items built for what I call planned perseverance. So instead of planned obsolescence where marketers and others are trying to sell us things that aren’t going to last very long, can we intentionally buy things that are meant to last?

Things that we know we’re going to hold for years and years, a new Practice of heirloom culture where, instead of buying a coffee table that’s cheaply made and you’re probably going to get rid of, within a few years, can you get a carpenter to build one that is beautiful and you’re going to love forever and you may even pass on to your children or beyond it.

You know, another question is, how can we all contribute to this leap of being mindful of our stuff? So, this is a bit of encouragement for us to have those conversations. and it’s precisely those conversations, I have them with my 12-year-old daughter, with my friends and family, that I think helps spread the message and expands the dialogue around consumption as a form of social practice as well, as much as a kind of personal choice.

I think it’s also important to ask ourselves what it means to address this crisis as a society. So, what can we do together to actually change how society itself is organized so that some of these objects are produced still at scale as they need to be, but done in a way with the least harm. What this means is changing policies, governmental strategies around waste and production.

There was a law that was proposed a few years ago in the U. S. called the Right to Repair Act that would entail certain, manufacturers to ensure that their products were repairable. In France, there’s An index of repairability that most major consumer items, have to be scored upon. Kenya has banned single use plastics, right?

So, it’s these kind of solutions at scale that we also have to look at and seriously consider and ask ourselves, how can we as individuals be part of those solutions?

Tom: Great. we’ve described, and in your book, you describe three great leaps in human history. And both the kind of opportunities, possibilities, and great things has brought as well as some of the great hazards.

Can you imagine humanity making a fourth leap? We’re looking back, a future archeologist or anthropologist says in the 21st century, or maybe in 22nd century, there was a leap to, the next stage of being human.

Chip: think another leap is not only inevitable, it’s also necessary. You know, the crisis that we are in with our relationship to our planet demands that we do our best to alter the course that we’re on. And one way I’ve framed these leaps is they are dramatic changes, but they aren’t necessarily dramatic changes for the better.

This is not teleological where, we started as simple primates and now look at us, we have achieved so much. These are leaps in different directions, sideways, maybe even backwards. And I think certainly, the third leap with not just the ability to create more, but the ideology of abundance, that was a step that has put us in harm’s way in our relationship with each other in our world.

So, I think this fourth leap is going to come and I think we need to encourage it to come to do our part, to see it. Arrive as soon as possible. And what will that look like? I think that is what’s so exciting actually about this moment. And what leaves me most optimistic. We look at the number of programs and engineering that now explicitly train around sustainability.

We look at the passion of the younger generations coming up and. Their advocacy for environmental protections. And we look at the minimalist movement and conversations there. I think we can look further to, those kinds of conversations to help people change their personal lives and their relationship to stuff.

So, I think this is going to be a total societal change that has to happen all the way from, the policy level on the ground, what’s happening in manufacturing, how we deal with waste. And our practices as consumers today.

Tom: What gives you hope about the future?

Chip: What gives me hope is that long view of what it means to be human. That a lot of our impulses, a lot of the ways we live, our relationship to our stuff, we’re experiencing it in new forms with new questions and new crises. But this is a long story and we have been around for millions of years and we have constantly found creative and novel ways of reimagining what it means to be human, what it means to live in our world.

And I have no doubt that we are going to continue to reimagine to look forward in just radically new ways, things that we can’t even conceive of at the moment, that those changes will come. And as a species, what makes us so special is that we can draw from the wisdom of that history, the wisdom of our elders, the wisdom of these philosophical and religious traditions.

We can learn from history itself. So, unlike other species that typically are only forward looking, you know, they can only anticipate the next few hours or next few days or beyond, we have the incredible capacity to both look forward and backwards, and that will transform our present moment. that’s really where I see the optimism is in the big story itself.

Tom: Chip, thanks for joining me on the show today. It was a great conversation, and I know I’m going to bring this conversation to my son Felix, to try to help answer his question. Why do we have so much stuff?

Chip: Thank you for that. And I hope he’s satisfied with the answer. Let me know how it goes.