Waste is not just what societies discard. It is one of the clearest records of who we are, how we live, and what kind of planet we are leaving behind. In this wide-ranging conversation, anthropologist Joshua Reno and geologist Jan Zalasiewicz explore waste as both a human problem and a geological force, moving from landfills and urban rubble to deep time, the Anthropocene, and the far future of Earth itself.  Joshua Reno, professor of anthropology at Binghamton University, studies the hidden systems societies depend on but prefer not to think about, especially landfills, disposal, and the cultural meanings of waste. Jan Zalasiewicz, geologist and paleontologist, has spent decades mapping the physical traces humans leave behind, from landfill strata and made ground to the broader geological signatures of the Anthropocene. Together, they bring two very different disciplines into unusually close conversation. They discuss why waste is both necessary and disavowed, how landfills reveal uncomfortable truths about human behavior, and why the geological scale of human leftovers is far larger than most people realize. They explore how cities preserve layers of industrial history like buried archives, why “waste as resource” is both useful and misleading, and how the accelerating production of waste changes our sense of time. From there, the conversation opens outward into questions of continuity, extinction, future readers, nuclear warning systems, the Fermi paradox, deep-time oceans, and what it means to leave a material record in a universe that may not care whether anyone is left to interpret it.   This conversation bridges anthropology, geology, environmental thought, philosophy, and deep time, revealing waste not as a side effect of civilization, but as one of its defining signatures.⸻TIMESTAMPS00:00:27 – Joshua Reno on landfills, hidden systems, and the paradox of necessary waste00:06:27 – Why studying trash reveals more than self-reporting ever can00:10:06 – Why many geologists resist treating landfill and waste as geology00:13:22 – The shocking scale of the technosphere and humanity’s waste legacy00:19:03 – Why pollution narratives are powerful but incomplete00:20:55 – Fly ash, landfill mining, and the complicated idea of “good waste”00:25:43 – Cities as layered archives: London, war, rubble, and urban strata00:29:23 – What landfill work feels like from the inside: constant motion, danger, and routine00:35:34 – Sewer epidemiology and why institutions often resist what waste can reveal00:39:00 – Future readers, lost continuity, and who might one day interpret our remains00:49:08 – Nihilism, speculative philosophy, and the spread of “the world after us” thinking00:53:12 – The Fermi paradox and whether civilizations accelerate into self-destruction01:00:35 – Nuclear waste, deep burial, and the problem of warning distant futures    ⸻GUESTSJoshua Reno – Professor of Anthropology, Binghamton UniversityAuthor of Waste Away: Working and Living with a North American Landfill and Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness. His work examines waste, disposal, landfills, and the hidden systems that shape social life.Jan Zalasiewicz – Geologist, Paleontologist, and StratigrapherEmeritus Professor of Palaeobiology, University of Leicester, Author of The Earth After Us and co-author of The Cosmic Oasis. His work spans geology, paleobiology, the Anthropocene, and the long-term material traces of human civilization.

Cultural evolution has shaped human nature far more than we realize, and economist Robin Hanson and evolutionary biologist Joe Henrich reveal why ignoring this changes everything about policy, innovation, and our future. In this deep dive conversation, they explore how culture doesn't just influence behavior, it rewrites our preferences, beliefs, and even our cognitive machinery.

Joe Henrich, professor at Harvard and author of The WEIRDest People in the World, explains how humans evolved to be uniquely reliant on social learning, making us a cultural species first and foremost. Robin Hanson, economist at George Mason University and author of The Elephant in the Brain, challenges the implications: if cultural evolution can account for most of human nature, then far more has changed in the last hundred thousand years than conventional wisdom suggests—and far more could change in the near future.

Together, they tackle why economists bracket preferences instead of explaining them, how WEIRD psychology has dominated research while studying statistical outliers, why the collective brain hypothesis suggests innovation depends more on population size than individual genius, and why organizations systematically suppress innovation despite claiming to value it. They discuss marriage norms and kinship structures that literally reshape cognition across cultures, big gods and moral religions that enabled large-scale cooperation, and the uncomfortable selection pressures modern societies refuse to discuss openly.

This conversation bridges economics, evolutionary biology, anthropology, and policy—revealing why cultural evolution deserves far more attention than it receives in academia, government, and institutional design.⸻

TIMESTAMPS

00:00:04 – Introductions: Economics meets cultural evolution

00:01:26 – What is cultural evolution and why does it matter?

00:03:31 – The ambitious scope: explaining preferences, beliefs, and values

00:04:08 – Why economists bracket preferences—and why that's a problem

00:04:55 – Cultural evolution as a return to Darwinian thinking

00:06:26 – How genetic evolution shaped us to be cultural learners

00:07:45 – Why cultural evolution rarely enters policy discussions

00:12:00 – The WEIRD problem: most psychology research studies outliers

00:20:00 – Marriage norms, kinship, and cognitive differences across cultures

00:28:00 – The collective brain: why innovation depends on population size

00:38:00 – Can individuals or small groups out-innovate large populations?

00:48:00 – Religion, cooperation, and big gods that enforce moral norms

00:58:00 – Why societies struggle with explicit reasoning about cultural evolution

01:08:00 – Selection pressures we're not thinking about: fertility, values, migration

01:18:00 – The challenge of integrating cultural evolution into institutional design

01:24:30 – Cultural evolution's influence (or lack thereof) in economics

01:26:00 – Innovation: overwhelmingly important, surprisingly poorly understood

01:28:00 – Why organizations suppress innovation while claiming to promote it

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GUESTS

Robin Hanson – Economist, George Mason University

Author of The Elephant in the Brain and The Age of Em

https://overcomingbias.com/

http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson

Joe Henrich – Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University

Author of The WEIRDest People in the World and The Secret of Our Success

https://x.com/JoHenrich

https://henrich.fas.harvard.edu

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ABOUT CURIOSITY ENTANGLED

Curiosity Entangled pairs distinguished thinkers from different disciplines for unscripted conversations about consciousness, science, technology, and humanity's long-term future. Hosted by Accelerator Media, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to science storytelling and long-term thinking.

In this episode of Curiosity Entangled, professor @DrEricAnctil and science fiction author Daniel H. Wilson meet for a wide-ranging dialogue on artificial intelligence, human nature, and the uncertain futures we're building together. What begins as introductions between a media scholar and a roboticist-turned-storyteller unfolds into a profound exploration of how humans interface with technology, the cultural implications of AI, and whether our species can evolve alongside machines without losing what makes us fundamentally human.

Eric traces his academic journey from sports media and higher education to inventing his own role studying media, technology, and the cultural dimensions of innovation—focusing not on how machines are built, but on how humans engage with them. Daniel describes his path from growing up in the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma through earning his robotics PhD at Carnegie Mellon to writing bestsellers like How to Survive a Robot Uprising, blending his technical expertise with indigenous perspectives and science fiction imagination. Together, they probe whether science fiction can help us navigate near-future scenarios, how different cultural frameworks might reshape our relationship with AI, and whether capitalism's profit motives can align with technologies that make us better people.

At the heart of the discussion lies a shared tension: we're living through a "wild west" moment with AI, simultaneously fascinated and terrified by what we're creating. The pair explore how social media addiction revealed humanity's vulnerability to engineered engagement, why "engaging" rather than "embracing" should be our stance toward new technologies, and how younger generations might inject different values into systems currently driven by shareholder interests. They also examine the anthropomorphization of AI in everything from autonomous vehicles to children's toys, and debate whether we can design AI companions that challenge us to be more empathetic rather than simply reinforcing our existing behaviors.

Through these exchanges, Eric and Daniel circle around an audacious hope: that despite the dangers ahead, humans can evolve together, retain their humanity, and create technologies that serve the greater good rather than merely extracting value.

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Learn More About the Guests

Daniel H. Wilson

Author and Roboticist | PhD, Carnegie Mellon University

Cherokee Nation Citizen | Author of Robopocalypse, The Andromeda Evolution, Pearl in the Sky

https://danielhwilson.com

Eric Anctil

Professor of Media and Technology, University of Portland

Founder, Cosmic North Studio | Author of Keep Evolving and Stay Human

https://cosmicnorth.studio

https://youtube.com/@UCjeiKRid_5RsYCWvMJ5KhVQ

https://ericanctil.com

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Timestamps

00:00:27 – Introductions: Robots, fiction, and the human side of AI

00:04:12 – How science fiction predicts and shapes the future

00:06:00 – Voyeurism, exhibitionism, and the psychology of social media

00:08:14 – The real “robopocalypse”: attention as the new battleground

00:10:47 – Consciousness, sentience, and the rise of AI companions

00:13:40 – Infotainment, learning, and the erosion of deep knowledge

00:15:45 – The domestication of robots and humans

00:17:18 – Psychosis, ego, and the hidden dangers of AI interaction

00:19:59 – Deifying machines and the illusion of digital gods

00:21:26 – Reciprocity, empathy, and losing our social reflexes

00:27:24 – Why machines flatter us and how it makes them dangerous

00:29:23 – Working inside the machine: morality, capitalism, and complicity

00:33:05 – Bezos, efficiency, and the dark logic of progress

00:36:25 – Hole in the Sky and the idea of Indigenous technology

00:39:51 – Is AI the new colonizer and are we its resources

00:42:31 – The peer-opticon: how we surveil each other for free

00:47:20 – Hive minds, utopias, and the illusion of collective intelligence