Rebecca Costa is a self-proclaimed sociobiologist, author of The Watchman's Rattle: A Radical New Theory of Collapse, and host of the radio program The Costa Report. Throughout The Conversation we have regularly talked about the question of cognitive limits in an increasingly complex society, but we have only addressed the idea in passing. Wanting to dedicate a full episode to cognitive limits, we launched a search for interviewees that lead us straight to Rebecca Costa. There are lots of connections in this episode, but the most developed ones are with Joseph Tainter and George Lakoff. The Lakoff connection is especially interesting because, like him, Rebecca calls our attention to the biology of the mind—in essence, calling us to recognize what kind of animal we truly are. Both cite science to support their claims about how we think and behave, yet both have radically different conceptions of what the human animal is and the scope of reason in the mind.