Fresh Air - Best Of: Emma Stone / The Birth Of Psychedelic Science

Episode Date: February 3, 2024

Emma Stone is nominated for an Oscar for her starring role in Poor Things. She spoke with Terry Gross about the film and her relationship to her anxiety. David Bianculli reviews Ryan Murphy's FX anthology series Feud: Capote vs. The Swans. Also, Benjamin Breen talks about his book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science. It's about the pioneering work anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson did on the use of psychedelics as a way to expand consciousness, and how that later connected to government research on the use of psychedelics as a weapon.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with Fresh Air Weekend. Today, Emma Stone. She's nominated for an Oscar for her starring role in Poor Things. Stone won an Oscar for her performance in La La Land and was nominated for Birdman and the Favorite. Also, Benjamin Breen talks about his book Tripping on Utopia, Margaret Mead, The Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science. It's about the pioneering work anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson did on trances and the use of psychedelics in the 1930s as a way to expand consciousness, and how that later connected to government research on the use of psychedelics as a weapon. And David Bianculli reviews Ryan Murphy's FX series Feud, Capote vs. the Swan.

That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Terry Gross. My first guest, Emma Stone, is nominated for an Oscar for her starring role in Poor Things. She won an Oscar for her performance in the movie musical La La Land, starring opposite Ryan Gosling, and was nominated for Oscars for her performances in Birdman and The Favorite. She co-stars in the new streaming series The Curse. She's been acting since she was 11 and was so determined to make acting a central part of her life, she convinced her parents to let her be homeschooled

so she could devote more time to acting and then convinced them at the age of 15 to go to LA so she could go to auditions. Although she did not have a conventional high school experience, she first became known for two movies about high school kids, Super first became known for two movies about high school kids, Superbad and Easy A. In addition to her nomination for Poor Things, the film is also nominated for

Best Picture, which means she is nominated for a second Oscar because she is a producer of the film. She plays Bella, a woman who has died by suicide jumping off a bridge. She's brought back to life by a weird surgeon played by Willem Dafoe. Dafoe's experiment is reanimating Bella and giving her the brain of an infant. She's trained and taught over time by the surgeon's assistant, but she never quite grasps the rules of society. When she discovers her genitals and pleasures herself, she demonstrates this discovery to her trainer. And when her brain develops into a young adult brain, she leaves the surgeon and her mentor to go on an adventure while traveling with a man who has become obsessed with her, played by Mark Ruffalo. He claims to be a prosperous sophisticate who can't be tied down. But in Paris, when his money is gone, Bella decides to earn money by working in a brothel, where she can learn what other men

are like sexually. In this scene, she's just left the brothel with some money after her first sexual encounter there. She meets up with Ruffalo, and he's in despair because he's now broke, and he's appalled when he learns what she's just done. I took his money. I thanked him. I laughed all the way to buy us these eclairs. And I thought so fondly, remembering the fierce, sweaty nights of ours. You f***ed for money. And as an experiment, and it is good for our relationship, as it gladdens my heart toward you. My heart has been a bit dim on your weepy, sweary person lately.

You are a monster, a horned monster, a demon sent from hell to rip my spirit to shreds, to punish my tiny sins with a tsunami of destruction, to take my heart and pull it like torffee to ruin me. I look at you and I see nothing but ugliness. That last bit was uncalled for and makes no sense as your odes to my beauty have been boring but constant.

And this simple act erased all that. You hoard yourself. What you are now going to explain to me is bad. Can I never win with you? It is the worst thing women can do. We should definitely never marry. I'm a flawed, experimenting person,

and I will need a husband with a more forgiving disposition. Emma Stone, welcome to Fresh Air. I love this movie and your performance in it. And the film, it's like really interesting and also really funny, which I hope people got a sense of from that clip. So, you know, the movie is in part what women's lives would be like if they weren't socialized, to have shame about sexuality. And if people weren't taught that it was impolite to talk about sex in public. And I'm wondering what it got you thinking about in terms of your life and how you were brought up about your body and sexuality and independence. That's well, thank you for having me. First of all, yes, it's lovely to get the chance to be here.

I'm from Phoenix, Arizona, and I was born in 1988. So the majority of my childhood took place in the 90s. And I definitely didn't think the way that Bella does. I didn't have that sort of freedom and acceptance in the same way around sexuality. But as time has gone on, I think that it's been very illuminating to me. I mean, one of the conversations that I've talked a lot about having worked with quite a few European people or people that were raised in cultures where nudity and sexuality is not as shame-filled, I guess. It's been very interesting, you know, and also talking to Yorgos, who's Greek, our director, it always kind of startles him how much violence is acceptable in sort of American media, but sexuality is, you know, really looked down upon, like as if

watching someone die on screen is less challenging than watching someone experience pleasure. And yeah, it's definitely expanded my mind more as I've gotten older too and sort of broken out of, you know, religion and things like that that I was exposed to at a younger age. What religion were you exposed to? Lutheran. We were Lutheran. So what did that mean in terms of your upbringing? It wasn't. It was not super dogmatic. I went to a, for the one semester that I went to high school before I moved to L.A. and was homeschooled, I went to a Catholic all-girls high school. And Lutheran is, in a way, kind of diet Catholic or Catholic light.

It's like many of the tenets of Catholicism, but you don't pray through the saints and there's not purgatory and you don't go to confession. But there still is that sort of viewpoint, I guess, around certain things. And it, you know, I have great respect for religion and I find theology really fascinating. I think also because, you know, the stories that take place in religion can teach you a lot, and all different religions can teach you a lot of things about, you know, ways to live or to approach other people, or the golden rule is, you know, extremely applicable to me to this day. But I very early on realized that religion didn't resonate for me. And so I guess the sort of relationship I had to it was more of a guilt and a sort of self-judgment rather than, you know,

focusing on the wonderful things that it can teach you, at least at a young age. So what did it make you feel guilty about? I think all kinds of things. I think, you know, there's guilt around sexuality. There's guilt around your body. There's, you know, different stories about womanhood and what it means to be a woman and to be of service to a man or to not ever be jealous or not covet and, you know, all these things that are just sort of human and live in the shadow side.

I went from religion into Jungian therapy, obviously. So, you know, learning that being complex and complicated and female was okay. You know, that took me a while, I think, to unpack in myself. And I actually, I don't, it sounds like I'm blaming religion for that. I really, I don't mean to. I think it is so cultural and deeply embedded in a lot of American sort of values that were raised in. So, Bella, your character doesn't understand emotions like jealousy and anxiety. You suffered from anxiety and panic attacks as a child, starting, I think, at age seven.

Can you describe what a panic attack feels like physically and emotionally when you're seven years old? Yeah, for me, I mean, people have different experiences of panic attacks. I know a lot of people feel like they're dying or that the walls are closing in on them. And I certainly have had those types of panic attacks. I've had probably hundreds throughout my life. So my very first one, when I was seven, I was at a friend's house and all of a sudden I was just sitting in her room and I had this deep knowing that the house was on fire. I believed the house was on fire, despite all evidence to the contrary. And my chest just started tightening. And I was like, we have to get out of the house. The house is

burning down. The house is burning down. And I ended up calling my mom, who didn't understand what was going on and confirmed there wasn't a fire, but came to pick me up. And then it just kept going. I just kept having panic attacks relatively frequently. And I started in therapy, I think, around age eight because it was getting really hard for me to leave the house to go to school. I sort of lived in fear of these panic attacks. What were you afraid of about going to school? I think just I had massive separation anxiety from my mom. That was a large part, I think, of what was setting off my anxiety. I, for some reason, had convinced myself that if I wasn't watching out for her

that something terrible could happen to her. So anxiety, as the interesting beast that it is, it feels like intuition, even though it's irrational. And it's a hard age to be able to sort of reason with yourself at seven or eight and tell yourself these things aren't true. This is just a situation, a condition that you're going through or the way your mind works. So it was very hard to convince myself otherwise. So going to school meant that I would have to be away from her for hours in the day. And if I couldn't keep an eye on her, what could happen?

As if I was the parent and she was the child. No, exactly. Like what were you going to do exactly to help her when you were seven? No idea. No idea. But that's that, you know, strange thing that happens with kids when, you know, you sort of – it's irrational. These things are irrational. It's just this – you're convinced of certain things with anxiety. And it's a tough one to unpack

until you have sort of the tools to do it or the understanding of it through therapy, which I was so grateful that, you know, I didn't want to go to therapy. And my mom had to walk back and forth in front of the window when I would sit in with the therapist because I didn't want her to leave.

So she would just sort of walk around outside for the hour. But I found it really, really life-changing. Where does acting fit into this? Like when you are acting, when you started acting as a kid, you were 11, I think, when you started performing. Do you feel like you were escaping yourself and therefore out of your anxiety and escaping your body because your body became controlled by the character? No, if anything, the opposite. I felt like I, and I've understood it more over the years because I think I've heard a lot of actors talk about, and maybe that's because they're doing these big dramatic kind of cathartic roles.

And I'm drawn much more to comedy or now dark comedy. I felt like every reaction in my body is permitted. All of my big feelings are productive and presence is required. So it's like a meditation because anxiety lives solely in the past or the future, you know, either future tripping or past tripping, you know, things you can't control on either side. And acting requires you to be so present, to listen, to be looking at the other person to be living in the experience and living in your body. And that was the huge gift of it to me and remains the huge gift of it to me to this day. I mean, no offense to you, Terry, I think you're fantastic, but this can stoke my anxiety much more than acting can because publicity or press or these things that are sort of move around the the um

promotion of of a project that you've made i'm myself and i'm thinking back about the past or i'm thinking about the future but when i'm acting i can't i can't or i'm not doing my job um but that's the thing because it's like your job, it gives you permission. It makes it obligatory to be in the moment. It's like you can't say, well, I can't control it because I'm worried about the past. It's like your job is to focus on now. Exactly. So you've got to pass.

What a gift. Exactly. It's a productive use of it. I've told a lot of younger people that struggle with anxiety that in many ways I see it as kind of a superpower because I think that you have a lot of big feelings if you're anxious. You have a certain level, and I say this to kids, I don't mean this about myself because I'm a dodo with anxiety, but I do think that it requires a certain level of intelligence about the world, you know, because who looks at the state of the world and really is taking it in and really feels a lot of empathy and no anxiety comes with that. And so just because we might have a funny thing going on in our amygdala, you know, and our fight or flight response is maybe a little bit out of whack in comparison to many people's, you know, brain chemistry. It doesn't make it wrong. It doesn't make it bad. It just means we have these tools to manage. And if you can use

it for productive things, you know, if you can use all of those feelings and those synapses that are firing for something creative or something that you're passionate about or something interesting, anxiety is like rocket fuel because you can't help but get out of bed and do things, do things, do things because you've got all of this energy within you. And that's really a gift. We're listening to my conversation with Emma Stone. She's nominated for an Oscar for her starring role in the new film Poor Things. We'll hear more of our conversation after a break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.

Let's get back to my interview with Emma Stone. She's nominated for an Oscar for her starring role in Poor Things and is a producer of the film. Poor Things is also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director for Yorgos Lanthimos, and Best Supporting Actor for Mark Ruffalo. So you lobbied your parents when you were, what, 11 or 12 to pressure them to homeschool you so you could focus on acting. And you prepared a presentation. Can you tell us what was in the presentation? So the first one was just about how homeschooling can be really beneficial and could be really helpful.

And, you know, this was year 2000. And so there was kind of a beginning of internet being available for schooling. And I was doing play after play after play at this place called Valley Youth Theater, which I was just obsessed. And it was something I wanted to focus kind of all my time and energy on. And then the second presentation when I was 15 was a PowerPoint to move to LA.A. for pilot season to try to be an actor professionally. Were there, like, graphics and photos? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. What were the photos?

I don't even remember now what the photos were. I tried to put in people who had started, you know, their acting careers young, the only one of which I was talking to my mom about it last night. The only one of which I can remember is Sarah Jessica Parker, who had done Broadway at a really young age. And then it was, you know, reasons that this is a good idea, how we could accomplish this. You know, L.A. is a six-hour drive from Phoenix, and that we could come back after pilot season was over, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, crazy, crazy stuff. They bought the idea. They did, which is also crazy, crazy stuff.

Your parents sound like really cool people. They are. I mean, I know that none of this, obviously, would be possible without their support, especially at that age. I mean, it wasn't like I had graduated high school and I said, okay, bye, I'm taking a plane or taking a bus or driving myself out to L.A. to try to do this. It was impossible without their support. And my dad started his own company in his 20s and was very much an entrepreneur and a guy that takes the bull by the horns.

And my mom's father, my grandfather, died when she was 22, very suddenly of a heart attack. And so her mentality had kind of always been, life is very short. We don't know what happens tomorrow. So when we have this kind of deep knowing about something, let's do it. So I think the combination of those personalities and the way that they were and the fact that we were financially able to do something like that because that's nothing to glaze over. I think that that's obviously hugely important that they were able to do that. And I know an uncommon thing. So I was extremely, extremely lucky to have the able to do that. And I know an uncommon thing. So I was extremely,

extremely lucky to have the opportunity to do that. I'm thinking your gut gave you really true and really false information. Terry, the story of my life. I mean, you got to, this is what I talk about in therapy on a weekly basis. Well, because he gave you really false information about the house burning down and all the panic attacks about things that weren a weekly basis. Well, because they give you really false information about the house burning down and panic attacks about things that weren't really happening. And it gave you true information that your calling was to act and you should go audition. I know it's a really it's interesting because over the years, it's it's I've been trying to understand that if it feels like my heart is racing and there's a fire inside me, that might be false information. If it feels calm and like a knowing and like a warmth,

that might be true information. But they both come out of the same place, that feeling right in the middle, you know, just below your breastbone, right in the top of your stomach, like the same place that when you go down a roller coaster, your stomach drops. You know, it feels like intuition and anxiety both come from that same spot. So it's a tough one to work out. What do you feel right before a shoot or right before walking on stage? And I'm thinking of Cabaret. You were in the Broadway revival of Cabaret and the role that Liza Minnelli made famous

in the movie. So like right before you step on stage, are you feeling anxious or like, I'm about to go to my safe place? A combination, but that's actually my sort of sweet spot, because I'm not trying to kill off the fears. And I'm not trying to just feel all confidence all the time, or like I'm in a safe place. I think my favorite feeling is a combination of both high stakes and low stakes. And that's what acting does for me. The high stakes is that you're either in front of an audience or you're, you know, this is being committed to film and will eventually last forever. But the low stakes is that you're acting,

you're storytelling, nobody's going to die and you're not saving any lives. They're not on the operating table. So that feeling of fear mixed with joy, that's my favorite combination. You have a very expressive face, which is obviously really good for an actor. I feel like I can watch sadness slowly wash over your face, and then maybe confusion or upset cover that right up. And is there a way to perfect that? Have you looked in the mirror to see what's happening, or do you just feel it and it happens no i i really try not to

not to be staring at myself emoting in the mirror the only thing this is disgusting but the only thing that i've really um actually in a moment of experience gone please try to remember what this feels and looks like for a role. This is so disgusting. But is vomiting? Wait, what? How does that figure into it? So I'm emetophobic. I have been since I was very young, and I have a lot of fear of vomit,

seeing people vomit, hearing people vomit. And so when I've had to throw up in a movie, which I do have to in poor things, I'm so like allergic and terrified of the experience that I physically don't do it well. Like I, you know, in acting it, I'm like, I don't remember, but I can't watch a video of it again because I'm emetophobic. So I can't listen to someone doing it or watch it on YouTube. So I do remember I had the stomach flu like six years ago. And I was just in hell, as you can tell, because of my phobia. And I was like, okay, try to use this for good.

Try to really remember what this feels and sounds like so you can use it for work because you can't watch videos of it. So that's the only time I've really kind of forced myself. That's hilarious. It's disgusting. Emma Stone, it's been so great to talk with you. Thank you so much and good luck at the Oscars. Thank you so much for having me. Emma Stone is nominated for an Oscar for her role in the new film Poor Things. She's nominated for a second Oscar for her role in the new film Poor Things. She's nominated for a second Oscar for

her role as producer of Poor Things because it's also nominated for Best Picture. In 2017, the FX network presented the first edition of Ryan Murphy's Feud, an anthology series dramatizing infamous real-life conflicts. The inaugural edition was called Feud, Betty and Joan, and detailed the intense rivalry between Hollywood stars Betty Davis and Joan Crawford. Now, seven years later, the second installment of Feud finally has arrived. It's called Capote vs. the Swans, and it's an eight-part drama about Truman Capote and the high society women he socialized with and sometimes very cruelly wrote about.

Our TV critic David Bianculli has this review. FX is promoting Feud, Capote vs. the Swans as the original Real Housewives, but it's a lot deeper than that and infinitely more watchable. Based on the book Capote's Women by Lawrence Leamer, this eight-part series tells of Truman Capote's friendships with and betrayals of New York's most prominent society women, the ladies who lunch. John Robert Bates, who created the ABC series Brothers and Sisters, developed and

wrote this edition of Feud for television, and Gus Van Sant directed most episodes, with others directed by Jennifer Lynch and Max Winkler. However, it's the names in front of the camera, not behind, who demand most of the attention here. Tom Hollander, from the most recent season of The White Lotus, plays Capote and captures him so that Capote is a character, not a caricature. And the women playing the Swans all get their turns to shine in a cast list that's almost laughably talented and lengthy. Naomi Watts plays Babe Paley,

the wife of CBS chairman Bill Paley. Calista Flockhart plays Lee Radziwill, the sister of Jackie Kennedy. Other socialites are played, rivetingly well, by Diane Lane, Chloe Sevigny, Demi Moore, and Molly Ringwald. Treat Williams, who died last year, is featured in his final role as Bill Paley. Even Jessica Lange, who starred as Joan Crawford in the previous Feud series and helped jumpstart Ryan Murphy's TV empire by starring in the first few outings of his earliest anthology series, American Horror Story, is here. She makes a few guest appearances playing Truman's late mother, and she's haunting in more ways than one. Feud Capote vs. the Swans jumps around in time, showing the characters before and after Esquire magazine published a chapter of Capote's in-progress book in 1975. It was a thinly-veiled

expose of the preening privileged women he called the Swans, and had hurt them deeply. But drama and pain were not new to most of these women. In the scene where we first meet Naomi Watts as Babe Paley, she's venting to her best friend Truman, played by Tom Hollander, about her husband's recently discovered philandering. What is it? What did he do? I told him I was coming. I gave him just enough warning. I found out Bill was still having his grotesque little affair with Happy Rockefeller. He was still? Now, in our home. Go back.

We're talking the governor's wildebeest wife here that was still going on? I thought that was a one time. So did I. The first feud miniseries veered at times into camp, but Capote vs. the Swans takes its story more seriously. It's got the loving details of a Downton Abbey or an Upstairs Downstairs, lots of lingering shots of the food and the fashion and the jewels, but this drama is almost exclusively upstairs.

And Bates and Van Sant, in particular, frame things beautifully. Capote's famous black and white masquerade ball in 1966 is the subject of the entire third episode, and it's shot almost completely in black and white. That's because the Maisels brothers were filming a documentary about Capote that same year, which allows Feud to adopt that perspective to interview some of the Swans about their literary acquaintance. Here's Calista Flockhart in a fabulous solo scene as Lee Radziwill, getting made up for her appearance at the black and white ball. We have a man, a celebrated little man, trying to outdo himself in a ballet called Dance of the Seven Trumans, wherein he spins himself into butter for having made so many declarations to so many friends. Best friends.

Oh, you're my best friend in the world, of course. Of course you're the guest of honor, babe. I mean, Slim. I mean, Lee. I mean... Et cetera. And here, in another wonderful scene, is Demi Moore as Anne Woodward.

She's been slandered by Truman and crashes his masquerade ball, but is thrown out by the author himself. As she's escorted away, she confronts him, memorable. What you're doing to us is so low, so poisonous. One day you will know what this poison tastes like. And remember, the only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty. You wrote that, didn't you? Well, this is that.

This is that. Well, one did write that. At least we know she was paying attention. Capote vs. the Swans deserves our attention, too. It's a good drama, a compelling story with a powerhouse cast, and in this new installment of Feud, they all do some very powerful work. David Bianculli is a professor of television studies at Rowan University. He reviewed the FX series Feud, Capote versus the Swans. Coming up, Benjamin Breen, author of the

new book Tripping on Utopia, talks about anthropologist Margaret Mead's vision back in the 1930s to use plant-based psychedelics to expand human consciousness and help heal the world. This is Fresh Air Weekend. Psychedelic science began much earlier than you may think, in the 1930s. At the center of that research was Margaret Mead, the famous anthropologist, and her third husband, Gregory Bateson, one of the most controversial anthropologists of his time. That early history is covered in the new book by my guest, Benjamin Breen. He writes about Mead and Bateson's early utopian-oriented research, then how during World War II they worked on a team using hypnosis and mind-altering drugs in an attempt to defeat Hitler and fascism,

the CIA's secret psychedelic experiments of the 50s and 60s, and how all this connects to the counterculture of the 60s, which popularized LSD, mescaline, and magic mushrooms. Breen goes down lots of interesting side roads along the way. For example, NASA funded an experiment giving psychedelics to dolphins in an attempt to teach them to speak. One of those dolphins appeared on the TV show Flipper. Breen's new book is called Tripping on Utopia, Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science. His previous book, The Age of Intoxication, Origins of the Global Drug Trade, won a medal in 2021 from the American Association for the History of Medicine. He's an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Benjamin Breen, welcome to Fresh Air. What an interesting book. You know,

when I learned about Margaret Mead in school, it was that she was a pioneering anthropologist who did groundbreaking research in New Guinea. No one mentioned her psychedelic research or that she was bisexual. It was just something else that you cover in the book. And how that nearly ruined her career, but we'll get to that later. Right. So Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, they started as utopians. What was their vision for was a period of rapid technological acceleration. You know, this is the beginning of a lot of the things we take for granted today. For instance, radio, or the automobile, the beginnings of the bad things in the world that they were trying to heal, but also something which could be a tool for fixing the world or healing a sick society, as Margaret Mead liked to say sometimes. And initially, their interest in what I, in the book called the science of expanded consciousness or this idea of enlarging human potential through science was not just centered on psychedelic drugs. It was centered on things like the exploration of trance states, which they were studying in Bali, expanding conceptions of human

sexuality. That was a large part of Margaret Mead's work. And also, they were fascinated by hypnosis. And so in the 30s, they begin separately and also together after they meet in New Guinea in 1933, to develop this vision of themselves and of science as potentially able to achieve something like a utopia on earth, to achieve things that were beyond the reach of previous generations of scientists. And that brings them together. Margaret Mead's specific interest in psychedelics begins in 1930 when she does field work on the Omaha Reservation in Nebraska and begins noticing that the people of the reservation were using peyote. And Mead comes to see it in a distinctive way. as something which predates the modern era and goes back to this ancient tradition, she came to see it as something which was modern and allowed people to cope with the rapid technological changes they were going through.

So she sees that with indigenous Americans and then goes to New Guinea. What does she see there that feeds her idea of how like trance or hypnosis or, you know, plant-based psychedelics could expand human consciousness in a positive way? One of the key moments actually comes after New Guinea. So in New Guinea, she's mostly studying, you know, things like kinship networks, pretty typical cultural anthropology of the era. She's also studying spiritual practices. But it's actually after she meets Gregory Bateson and they fall in love, she goes back to New York City. And she meets a guy named Jeffrey Gore, who is a fascinating figure in his own right, deeply eccentric man,

who had recently, before meeting Margaret Mead, participated as a volunteer in an early mescaline study. And mescaline is the key psychoactive ingredient in peyote. And initially, he had not liked it at all. He said it was like living in a color film. And he said, I resent these visions, frightfully cheap effect. So he wasn't a fan. But then as he was getting to know Margaret Mead and they become lifelong friends, he comes to see that mescaline experience as transformative. Because he thinks by tapping into the experience of this altered state of consciousness, it allows one to experience what it's like to be different people in different cultures. He says everyone who takes this drug has the same basic experience. And so it's like a skeleton key for unlocking the commonalities in human nature. And for Margaret Mead, that's a fascinating thing to learn. And he had just returned from Bali,

where he was studying trance states. And soon enough, within a matter of months, Mead and Bateson are preparing to go to Bali themselves to study Balinese trance. They find some interesting things when studying trance states. There's like very positive trance states, and then there's trance states that are induced through pain. And it seems like really bad pain. And the idea is to over, to like transcend the body through the pain. And in this trance state. Can you describe some of what they witnessed in Bali? Yeah, they were fascinated by this tradition of trance dancing in Bali, and they wrote a book about it together.

They saw it as, you say, a transcendence of the body, and also, crucially, a transcendence of one's sense of oneself as an individual, of the ego. So in their telling, a Balinese trance dancer could become an ancestor, a god, or even an inanimate object, like an object like a pot lid is the example that they give. It's a way of moving beyond the limits of one's own individual perception of the world. And an interesting thing that doesn't come across in Mead's public writings on this is that she herself prided herself on her ability to go into trance. And likewise, when I spoke to Gregory Bateson's second wife, Lois,

she said that he would sit sometimes for 10 minutes at a time or more in a kind of trance state thinking. So they both had a kind of natural inclination toward altered states of consciousness. And in Bali, they make it their life's work, I think. And one of the things that's important to them in this project is that they see it as not just relevant to Balinese society. They think the work they're doing is practical. It can be reapplied in different settings. And it can help, for instance, they're interested in curing

schizophrenia as a result of this research. And they also come to see hypnosis and altered states of consciousness more generally as powerful tools of the emerging science of the 1930s. So she and Bateson not only shared an interest in altered states of consciousness, they wanted to redefine gender as being on a spectrum, which was really interesting considering we're talking about the 1930s. What was Mead's vision? Because this was really something she was, I think, very passionate about. And being bisexual, she knew something about spectrum in sexuality.

But talk to us about her vision of gender. Well, it's fascinating because it changes a great deal over the decades. Early on, she's truly radical and I think really deserves to be remembered as a pioneer in understandings of specifically the division between gender and sexuality, which is now a widespread distinction that we make. But in the 30s, that was a very new idea that she helped develop. Margaret Mead actually became an anthropologist in the first place, partially because she fell in love with Ruth Benedict, who was a famous anthropologist in her own right.

And they originally met because Ruth Benedict was Margaret Mead's teaching assistant at Columbia. Margaret Mead was a student. And she falls under the spell of Benedict, who's actually in part studying visions in the Great Plains. And so the origin, perhaps, of Margaret Mead's interest in altered states of consciousness actually is this love affair she has with Ruth Benedict all throughout the 1920s. And together they begin to develop this perception of sexuality as on a spectrum. And in particular, Ruth Benedict and the early Margaret Mead are pushing back on the idea of what at the time was known as sexual deviance. They begin to make the argument, which becomes

very influential later on in the 20th century, that it depends on what culture you're in. You know, your frame of reference is completely shaped by the culture you grew up with, not just when it comes to sexuality, but your understanding of other forms of social deviance, for instance, drug use. But Mead and Bateson in particular, in the 30s and 40s, pushed this into a practical stance in society. So they begin to advocate very publicly, for instance, for the legalization of homosexuality. And alongside that, their interest in altered states of consciousness kind of exists as like a parallel, you know, this idea of sexual deviance, and this idea of the deviant as a drug addict or a drug user are really entangled in 1940s society. And they're pushing back against both those things. You know, Margaret Mead was never portrayed this way that I am aware of. Did she keep some of her research hidden? I mean, she published books, so probably not.

And even just like writing about bisexuality or gender fluidity, that was probably really risky then. It was, very much so. She published books, but one of the really fascinating things about Margaret Mead that drew me into this whole book project was that she was also deeply secretive. It's hard to convey just how secretive and private she really was. Her archive is enormous, and it seems like she's an open book. But then when you dig into that archive, there's all these little clues and hints that there's other parts of her life that she's concealing from virtually everyone. In fact, at one point, she says, Ruth Benedict is the only person who really knew her. And Ruth

Benedict dies in 1949. And from that point onwards, by Mead's own account, she's kind of a closed-off person. One of the reasons why she didn't publish all of her work or make it all public was she was actually involved in classified research in World War II and later in the 1950s. But the other reason is, I think, directly related to her sexuality. She was open about her bisexuality with people close to her. But in the world of the 40s and 50s, to go public with that would have been not just career ending, but potentially life ruining. And she knew people this had happened to. It's hard not to know people like that if you're moving government circles, especially in the aftermath of World War II with the McCarthy era. So while Margaret Mead and her fellow anthropologist,

Gregory Bateson, were still married, they became part of something that became known as the Macy Circle, which was sponsored by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation. Tell us about the Macy Circle and its role in early psychedelic research. So this is a group of people that I think deserves to be much better known. They're not only foundational to the history of psychedelic therapy, but interestingly, they're also at the very origin point of artificial intelligence research. This field of study called cybernetics also grows out of the Macy conferences, which are hosted in the 1940s and early 50s. And it's in large part a joint creation of Margaret Mead,

Gregory Bateson, and their close friend Lawrence Frank, who's an executive at the Macy Foundation, who actually they live with. They share a brownstone apartment in Greenwich Village together throughout World War II. The three of them basically create this new model of a scientific organization and a social and intellectual circle, which is hugely influential. The origin point for why this group gets interested specifically in psychedelic research is in World War II. It grows out of this belief that scientists needed to directly intervene in the war effort. And specifically scientists who are studying consciousness, like anthropologists like Bateson and Mead, but also psychiatrists and psychologists, they tried to find ways that they could contribute. What this really looked like in practice was what came to be known as psychological warfare. You know, forms of propaganda, ways of understanding

how altered states of consciousness could be used in the war. And this led to an interest in hypnosis. It led to an interest in what was called truth drugs. And it led to the very early psychedelic research in the United States. Mead and Bateson are not conducting that research, but they're crucial for bringing together this group of people from different fields and framing it in a way that allowed psychedelic science to flourish as a potential pathway toward benevolent treatments, treatments that were healing for society. But also, and this is the really fascinating thing about the Macy circle, it also got the attention of intelligence organizations and the military.

So by the early Cold War, by about 1952, the Macy Circle is being co-opted by the CIA. And that's the beginning of what I see as this really important split in the history of psychedelics between the public branch and the secret branch. The therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs is becoming increasingly popular. Can you compare the understanding of therapeutic use now and in earlier decades? To a striking extent, what we're coming back to now in the 2020s looks a lot like what people like Gregory Bateson and the people he was working with in the 1950s were developing. So the idea is that you are in a comfortable environment. You're listening to music you like. It's a nice fluffy couch.

You're with people you feel good around. You know, it's not like someone in a lab coat observing you. And you have a goal in mind. There's an intentionality to the way psychedelic therapy is conducted today. You're trying to solve some problem in your life or think through an issue. radical countercultural approach to LSD in the 60s, where it becomes more of a recreational drug or imbued with mystical significance. I think a lot of what we're seeing now with psychedelic therapy is actually a return to the older model. Yeah, and I think one of Margaret Mead's concerns was when you take mind-altering substances or trance states and you remove them from their cultural and historical context, their ritualistic context, things might go wrong. Yes, exactly. That's part of why I think she's such an interesting voice to add to this history and this debate because she's really an expert in this. And she studied this. Throughout her entire life, she was looking at the ways that too rapid change,

adaption to a really, really fast pace of life, can lead to things like the formation of apocalyptic cults or increased violence. Or, you know, cults of personality, like what happened, I think, to Timothy Leary. He became the object of almost spiritual veneration by some people. We have to be hesitant in some ways in too rapidly embracing these substances because they are powerful and they can lead us astray, as we saw, I think, with some of the stories of psychedelic use in the mid to late 60s. Well, Benjamin Brin, thank you so much for talking with us.

Thank you so much, Terry. It's an honor to be here. I really appreciate it. It was great to have you. Benjamin Breen is the author of Tripping on Utopia, Margaret Mead, The Cold War, and The Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden.

Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Orgy Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salat, Phyllis Myers, Roberto Chorok, Anne-Marie Boldenato, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelly, and Susan Yakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley.

I'm Terry Grumps.