Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 267 | Benjamin Breen on Margaret Mead, Psychedelics, and Utopia

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

The twentieth century was something, wasn't it? Margaret Mead, as well as her onetime-husband Gregory Bateson, managed to play roles in several of its key developments: social anthropology and its impact on sex & gender mores, psychedelic drugs and their potential use for therapeutic purposes, and the origin of cybernetics, to name a few. Benjamin Breen discusses this impactful trajectory in his new book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science. We talk about Mead and Bateson, the early development of psychedelic drugs, and how the possibility of a realistic utopia didn't always seem so far away. Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/02/26/267-benjamin-breen-on-margaret-mead-psychedelics-and-utopia/ Support Mindscape on Patreon. Benjamin Breen received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Among his awards are the National Endowment for the Humanities Award for Faculty and the William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine. He writes on Substack at Res Obscura. Web site UCSC web page Wikipedia Amazon author page

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If you know the feeling, you should know the facts. The eczema medication you're taking may not be right for you. Visit MyRawtruth.com and talk to your dermatologist about your symptoms and treatment options. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. This is one of those podcast episodes that honestly I don't know how to summarize very well. There's a lot going on. It's hard to put it into a small number of words.

But maybe we can start with the idea of psychedelics. psychedelic drugs and their effects on you and their possible uses. This is something we've talked about on Minescape before, most notably with Robin Carhart-Harris, who is a psychologist who studies the science of psychedelics, but we've mentioned it a few times before. And one of the themes that comes up is that maybe psychedelics have enormous therapeutic uses for this reason and that reason, but possibly we are not nearly as aware of those uses as we could be because the government banned scientific research on psychedelics for a very long time. That raises the question of the history of attitudes toward psychedelic drugs.

And our guest today is Benjamin Breen, who is a historian at the University of California's Santa Cruz, who's written a new book just came out called Tripping on Utopia, Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the troubled birth of psychedelic science. So Margaret Mead, what is she doing in there? If you're like me, you've certainly heard of Margaret Mead. She's an extraordinarily famous, well-known anthropologist. Her breakthrough book, Coming of Age in Samoa, is from her work in Samoa, doing field work in the 1920s. But while there, she became interested in, you know, not just the growing up and sexual

habits of the Samoans, but also, you know, the idea of trans states, of different kinds of states of consciousness that you could go into. And then in the 1930s, she did research with the Omaha Nation in the United States, where she came across the use of peyote, so an actual drug, unlike the Samoans, as far as I know, that was psychedelic in nature. And she became very interested in this idea because Mead was, among other things, a utopian, as we will see. In the podcast, it was a time when you could still think that if we did science and we did it really correctly, it would change the world into a kind of a utopian place. And then there's Gregory Bateson, who was Mead's husband for a while. They eventually divorced, but still worked together. He was also an anthropologist,

quite well known in his own right, and they sort of thought about these things together. But they did not, as you will hear, end up forming utopia. Instead, they sort of formed the CIA. And they didn't form the CIA, but they kind of played a role in the early days and some of the early exploits, if you want to put it that way. And they also weirdly, or maybe not weirdly in retrospect, but something you wouldn't guess if you didn't know the history is a huge role in the founding of cybernetics. So these are anthropologists who studies primitive societies, and they end up. playing crucial roles in the very first thinking about machines and their relationships to people and blurring the boundaries between machines and people. And maybe foreshadowing a lot of

current-day debates about artificial intelligence and things like that. In fact, I think the single most fun thing that you will learn in this podcast is what might be the first invocation of what we now call the simulation argument that all of the world that we see around us is just actually some big computer program. We don't know for sure because history is a messy thing,

but you might learn something like that. So anyway, I have trouble putting it all together. This is a great podcast going over many, many ideas. That's what history does. History is kind of messy. It is not a single final theory you put on a T-shirt.

It's a lot of individual events and anecdotes and personalities that come together to make the world. So let's go. Benjamin Breen, welcome to the Minescape Podcast. Thanks for having me, Sean. You know, LSD was discovered by Albert Hoffman back in the 1930s, and he sort of played with it in the 40s. But the idea of psychedelic drugs is much older than that, in indigenous cultures especially. So I guess my first question is, if we were talking to a typical European or American on the street in a diner in the 1920s, and we asked them about psychedelic

drugs. Is that something they wouldn't even have known about? Was there an existing opinion about that, or would they have thought we were talking about opium and cocaine? Good question, because one of the important things to nail down when we talk about this topic is the word psychedelic isn't even invented until 1957. Okay. So the whole history before that is arguably it's anachronistic or like historical to use that term. I do use it because it means mind manifesting and the concept of a drug which could give you insights into the nature of the mind or do something other than just intoxicate the body, it does go back quite a bit further. So probably if you started talking about anything to do with what we now call psychedelics with a person on the street in, let's say,

New York City, in the 20s, their reference point would most likely be peyote because that was actually in the news at that point. Okay. And it was actually, there was congressional efforts and state level efforts to ban peyote all throughout the 1920s. And it was, almost entirely associated with the Native American church, which was like the sort of new religious movement of the late 19th century. But it actually had been used by William James and other consciousness researchers as far back, I think, as the 1880s and 90s. So there was like a little bit of knowledge on that front, too.

It is very interesting how this subject immediately leads to some kind of moral panic in certain circles, right? to worry that we're letting humanity do things it's not supposed to be doing and the government should stop them. Yes, it's one of the really prevalent themes in the history of drugs. It's part of why I find the whole topic interesting because you can learn about what a society is scared of or what they care about by looking at the reaction to, you know, basically, like you say, looking at the moral panics around these substances.

And so, okay, so besides POT, like once we have LSD, et cetera, once we're into the 30s, Are people now actively talking about this? Did that discovery by Hoffman change the discourse? It was actually before Hoffman. And something interesting about Hoffman is even though he's remembered today as like this father of LSD, he kind of kept it to himself for a long time. So it wasn't like he trumpeted this announcement in newspapers. He was actually testing it on chimpanzees and other animals and himself for several years.

And so actually the first synthetic or like the first psychedelic drug, which was rendered scientific, we might say, turned into an experimental inquiry and used in studies was mescaline. Okay. Which is derived from peyote. So it's basically the active ingredient in peyote. And this was, there's actually a book by my friend Mike Jay called Mescal in a global history, which gets really into the details of this. But it goes back pretty far. You know, there was an English writer named Havelock Ellis, who was interested in. what we would now call psychedelic experimentation as a way of understanding the mind.

And then later in the 20s and 30s, especially in Germany, there's quite a lot of research into mescaline as an experimental or artificial way of causing altered mental states, which might help scientists understand schizophrenia and really just the nature of the mind itself, because this is when sort of the beginnings of modern neuroscience are coming into being. Well, it's always hard for me to judge what was in people's minds. That's why I like to ask these background questions. So is it, am I getting the impression that there was just a general interest in the idea of the self and how to alter it? You know, Sigmund Freud is that same kind of era. Certainly, I think that's why William James took it,

although it's one of those missed opportunities in the history of science, because some of your listeners might know that William James, he was the famous psychologist at Harvard, and really like arguably the first modern psychologist. He experimented with nitrous oxide as well and wrote like a really actually quite hilarious account of it where he thinks it makes him understand Hegelian dialectics. And one of the quotes from it is like, what is nausea but a kind of aasia?

So he's like getting really into this. So he got punchy like many of us would, right? Okay. But I think it ends with him saying like medical school, divinity school, school, school, and he's just writing it down in all caps. Ultimately, he didn't actually think that it gave him that much insight, but he gave him the perception of insight into the nature of reality. And so I think there's definitely like a strong current in late 19th century thought that

is broadly associated with modernism and Freud, I mean, but not just Freudians, to think about the unconscious mind and to think about mental illness in a new way. And to conceptualize science as acting in the world. That's a crucial thing that my book is about, this idea of applied science. So all those things kind of converge around psychedelic drugs in the 20s and 30s. Yeah, and your book is not just about psychedelics, but in particular about Margaret Mead and her one-time husband, Gregory Bateson. And I did not know that they had any involvement with psychedelics. You know, Margaret Mead is well known as an anthropologist, studied Samoans and Native Americans and so forth in the 20s, 30s and more.

And so who are, who gives the background first, for those who don't know. Who are Margaret Mead and Bateson? Well, they're two of the most influential anthropologists of the 20th century. And in the case of Margaret Mead, I would say one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century. Her star kind of fell a little bit in the 80s and 90s. Some people may know there was like a controversy with one of her colleagues who accused her of research misconduct in Samoa. That has since been debunked, I think, pretty authoritatively. But her scientific reputation sort of fell by the wayside a little bit and hasn't fully returned to what it once was.

But certainly in the 50s and 60s, when you just think about public scientists, Margaret Mead would have been up there with all the biggest names, Sulk and Oppenheimer and people like that. And she knew all of them. Like she was incredibly well connected. She was one of those people in history who kind of seems to move through every major event and have some connection to it, which is part of why I wrote the book about it. That was a fascinating aspect there. I couldn't help thinking sometimes when I'm reading, like, how does she know to be with these people the right place at the right time? I think that was actually her main scientific gift was she was like,

she called herself a listening post. I think she saw herself as like an antenna for the emergence of this global culture, especially after World War II. And crucially, a global scientific culture. So she's like the president of the American Association for the advancement of science. And she's bringing together actually any, history of the origins of AI research, I think, should put Margaret Mead in the first chapter because she helps bring together the Macy Cybernetics conferences, which are foundational for that

field. So I think part of why I was intrigued by her is that as a female scientist in particular, she both had a lot of personal struggles, but also I don't think got full credit, especially about her early work, you know, in the 30s and 40s. She was doing a lot of interesting stuff that wasn't just anthropology and she got kind of pushed off into this corner of like a scientist of gender sexuality in you know polynesia but in reality she was doing all kinds of crazy stuff i mean she was involved in researching the effects of space travel on humans and indeed she was involved in researching peyote that was actually the origin story for her her direct interest in psychedelics was she was actually studying the native american church and peyote use among a native american tribe in

Nebraska in 1930. And I do, I feel guilty about this with a female scientist immediately asking about her husband, but it is an important part of the story, right? How does Bateson fit in there? Yeah, I mean, you shouldn't feel guilty. I mean, she saw her life as a series of partnerships, intellectual partnerships. And so that's very much the way she structured her life. It was, you know, all three of her husbands were also scientists, and she worked closely with all three of them. She was also, a relationship with Ruth Benedict, who is one of the leading anthropologists of the 20th century as well. And so Bateson comes into the story in this very dramatic fashion that I talk about in the book.

They meet in New Guinea, Meads already married to another anthropologist. So there's a whole love triangle aspect. But I think, and it gets really complicated. It was like a Fleetwood Mac kind of situation there. Like a Fleetwood Mac. Yeah, it really was. There was a lot of parallels with a 70s rock band. Or I often thought about like 1920s Hollywood.

Like there's a lot of this kind of, you know, deceit and specifically 1920s era romance where they're stepping off the gangplank of steamships and seeing the other man there on the harbor front and stuff like that. So I think Bateson's role is twofold. I mean, first, he's already very embedded in the history of science and the intellectual history, specifically of British science because his father is a very famous geneticist, William Bateson. And so he's born into this important scientific family. And he's given from really, I think, the very beginning of his life, a mission by his father to become a scientist of greatness.

So he has like a lot of pressure put on him. And he also, I think, is a fascinating example of the way science and scientists became sort of polymathic and mixed up their disciplines in the time. 20s and 30s. You know, I often thought about modernism in the arts and literature when I was reading about science in this period because a lot of the scientists both liked modernism. You know, they're reading Joyce and T.S. Eliot and looking at abstract art. And I think they were actually approaching their science in a somewhat similar way of thinking, why do we have to go with these old categories of different disciplines? Can't we just kind of see what happens when we move

into different fields? And Bateson was really into that idea. We're almost halfway through the year and a lot of people are running on empty without fully realizing it. Grow therapy helps you find care that's covered by insurance before burnout becomes the baseline. Whether it's your first time in therapy or your 50th, grow makes it easier to find a therapist who fits you, not the other way around. They connect you with thousands of independent licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions nights and weekends. You can search by what matters like insurance, specialty, identity, availability and get started in as little as two days. And if something comes up, you can cancel up to 24 hours in advance at no cost. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments,

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I would define her larger intellectual mission as creating a science of expanded consciousness. And she meant that in a somewhat specific way, which is that she thought that science was allowing humanity to be more aware of both our evolutionary history, our actual history history, just like the actual story of humanity through time, but also the ways, I think this is a direct quote, that we could consciously shape our evolution. So how can science be mobilized to allow humanity, number one, to evade more destructive warfare because she was the generation that lived through World War I

and World War II? But even more expansively, how can we use science, to create the conditions for humanity to, you know, extend beyond the earth. That was something she was very interested in. And more generally, just kind of transcend the limits of our species. You know, we're primates. We evolved in a certain way, but how can we actually seize hold of the reins of evolution and actually decide where we're going to go next in the future?

That sounds very vague and very utopian, but that is actually the way she thought, especially in the 30s and 40s. and she did put it into practice in many ways. One specific way was the expanding concepts of sexuality. So she was very important in getting people to think differently about homosexuality, not as a form of social deviance, but as just one of the ways that human life manifests itself. And talking about other cultures where homosexuality was not stigmatized

was both very influential in the 30s and 40s and quite radical for a scientist to go there. So she was one of the first to do that. Likewise, more generally, just the idea, you know, especially in the 20s, there was still like almost a Victorian or post-Victorian way of assuming humans should act. You know, they get married, they don't have sex before marriage. They have strict social hierarchies. And that was already kind of breaking down in the 20s among young people.

But among scientists, it was not really questioned much. And she was just more generally interested in questioning the nature of our social reality and drawing on examples from other cultures to show that there's many ways of being human. That's very interesting, actually, because of course today we have utopian thinkers, especially kind of techno-utopian thinkers, right? But it's hard for such people to break into the wider discourse without meeting a kind of a weary cynicism because we've heard all these things before. And maybe that was different a hundred years ago.

You know, it wasn't that long after Darwin had come along. people were certainly trying to use ideas like that nefariously, or what we would now consider nefariously, in terms of the eugenic movement or social Darwinism, et cetera. But I guess there was also a more hopeful side to things. You know, the industrial revolution had happened, and maybe we could really, the idea of shaping humanity for the better was slightly less outlandish sounding then than it would be now. Exactly. That was like one of the main things that made me pretty, pursue this research as an historic science because just speaking for myself, I'm an educator. I teach at UC Santa Cruz and I talk to a lot of students. They're very, very cynical about the

future, especially people who are 18 or 20 right now. Surprisingly so. And every time I teach a new crop of students, I'm surprised because it keeps getting more pessimistic every year. I don't know if that's your experience too, Sean, but it's getting kind of bleak out there in university classes. And I liked how Margaret Mead was really willing to go there. as a serious scientist, not as like this religious prophet or this new age guru, but really as an empirical person doing real science, but arguing that science can be mobilized in this way. And I'm glad you mentioned eugenics because I think one of the key things to understand about both her and Bateson is they saw themselves as acting against that current in science. Right. You know, they were trying to fight back against the idea that there was like a unitary, like, Western scientific self that should impose itself on the rest of the world. They were arguing just the opposite, that there's, by drawing on all these global cultures

and understanding different ways of being human, we can reshape the way scientists think about themselves, too. And, you know, one of the things I really liked about her, she actually wrote this in 1924 when she was young, quite young. She said she was doing her science not just for the present, but for the people of 100 years in the future, which happens to be 2004. Right. And so she was thinking about the future in this, not, not just a lot of the future.

just an expansive way, but actually in a pretty concrete way, where she realized that she was gathering information that would not exist, you know, in 10, 20, 50 years from her time. These cultures were already fading away. And she was trying to like really create a repository of knowledge that would be actually useful for people even 100 years in the future. And when I was researching my book, I was like, thank you. That's cool that you did that because it was useful. And I guess some of the impact of coming of age in Samoa, her great book, was that the argument that coming of age in Samoa at the time in the primitive parts was a very different way of living than coming of age in Victorian England would have been, that there's not one unified way of being human,

that there are least options out there. Yes, yes, very much so. And that was really the original intellectual mission, I think, of both Mead and Bateson in the 20s. What's interesting is that in the late 30s in particular, and especially after and during and after World War II, they get even more expansive in response to how dark the world gets and how dark science gets. And so one of the things I'm interested in showing in the book, as I think one of the origin stories of psychedelic therapy and psychedelic science is that it's born out of this extreme crisis in science and the ethics of science. You know, it's born out of the Manhattan Project and this idea that science now is being wield it as a weapon, but it can also be used to heal the conflict of the world.

And that becomes like the basis, I think, for a lot of the early psychedelic researchers. It also becomes like the core conflict of the rest of the book is the divergence of science during World War II. So what were Margaret Meading and Gregory Bateson thinking about psychedelics before World War II? Like were they actively, was that on their minds? Like, okay, we have a new tool now to perhaps advance our hope for a year? utopian future driven by scientific advancement? No, it wasn't. So that's one of the interesting things is that if we just kind of do a word search in

historical text for like words like LSD or mesquine, we're mostly going to find stuff from the 1950s and 60s and 70s because that's when it becomes like a real object of scientific scrutiny. But one of the things historians of science do, and one of the things I particularly like doing, is finding what we might call like the prehistory of a set of of scientific ideas. You know, what's happening just before Isaac Newton develops his theory of gravity or just before germ theory of disease.

Like a great example is Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, in many ways anticipates his grandson's ideas but doesn't quite get there. And so I'm really fascinated by those like predecessor ideas and the kind of forgotten byways of science that don't quite lead to the famous idea, but are the undercurrent or foundation of it. And what's happening in the 30s is a really, broad-based interest in trans states and hypnosis and altered states of consciousness in general. So Mead and Bateson are actually quite interested in altered states of consciousness,

but they're actually studying trance in Bali in the late 30s. And so they're actually doing an anthropological investigation of trans states. And meanwhile, they're friends with a guy named Jeffrey Gore, who was actually quite an interesting scientist in his own right, who had been a participant in a mescaline study. in London in I think the late 1920s. And he started telling them and telling other people in their circle that mescalin is a sort of skeleton key that unlocks the mind and lets you understand other forms of altered consciousness.

Like for instance, Buddhist meditative states. And so that idea is kind of percolating and it's mixing together with people researching hypnosis and trance. And then after World War II is where I show how that kind of really forms the foundation for psychedelic science. So tell us more about the trans state. And I have a vague notion of what this is supposed to be, but there's a relationship to psychedelics, even though it doesn't actually involve taking any psychoactive drugs. I was actually listening, Sean, to your conversation with Brian Lowry about the social self. And I was thinking about this,

because the thing that really fascinated, not just Bateson and Nade, but other scientists studying trance in the 30s, was the idea of a transference of consciousness. The idea that you could feel that you, your sense of self, which is usually embodied in your mind, your sense of your body, can be transferred to something else, that you can imagine that you're another person or even an inanimate object. This is actually something particularly fascinated Mead and Bateson and another researcher they were working with in Bali. So they were interested in that transference of self as a state of trance and also the ways this interacts with your social world. What does it do to a society to have a built-in mechanism for people to transfer their state of self? Their sense of themselves as an individual. And how does that look different from Western society where we don't typically have that as like a social role you can play?

We don't have a shamanistic social type in the West. So it's not just meat and bates, and it's like a broad-based interest in shamanist practices in various forms of trans states, not just in Bali, but around the world that's kind of converging. I think partly because scientists in general are getting more interested in both proto-neuroscience, like the early, you know, development of theories of mind as a scientific study. And also like the idea that science is studying society becomes very prevalent in the 30s. And apparently Margaret Mead was proud of her own ability personally to go into a trance. Yeah, actually, there's a funny thing in the, in her archive, where she said that she was hypnotized by a famous hypnotist who was involved in scientific research

of trans states named Milton Erickson. And it was such like a potent hypnotic state that when her secretary typed out the transcript of this hypnosis work, the secretary herself was hypnotized by the act of transcribing it. So she was very interested by this sort of thing. And she was also aware of, in. Peote use, for example. She studied Indigenous Americans, right? Yeah, the Omaha people in Nebraska.

And one of the interesting things about that, because scientists have been studying peyote since, again, the late 19th century, Ruth Benedict also had. But she actually does something really interesting when she writes about it, which is that she says that the use of peyote is not, she doesn't frame it as a holdover from a pre-modern past, or even describe it as an indigenous religious tradition, she actually sees it as a beneficial reaction

to the disruption of the modern world. That peyote can be a tool which allows a culture which has been really damaged by modernity and by colonization to reform itself and become cohesive again. And it can connect people, connect to society in a new way. And I really think one of the main themes

I wanted to draw out throughout this book is that that model of psychedelics as something which can be a social tool and can actually play a beneficial social role as opposed to just a tool of individual exploration or religious experience gets lost in the 60s and 70s and I think it's now coming back

and I actually think Margaret Mead in that writing about peyote around 1930 it's one of the first people to frame it in those terms and I'm personally really compelled by that just that way of understanding psychedelics in society well I mean it's a little bit heartbreak to hear all of these stories about people getting excited, about the new science of the mind and all these tools that science is giving us. And then World War II happens. And I mean,

maybe we shouldn't have been too surprised because wars happen all the time. But that does seem to have marked a kind of shift in the relationship between science and utopianism, let's say. Yes, it very much did. And one of the interesting things, maybe your listeners who are interested in history of physics are aware of the sort of brain drain from Germany as German and Swiss physicists moved to the United States, you know, during the rise of the Nazis and just before World War II. And then also, of course, anyone who's seen Oppenheimer or read the American Prometheus, the great book that Oppenheim is based on, knows about this huge ethical dilemma that faced physicists during World War II, of course. But that was not just physicists who were

facing that. And in fact, Bateson and Mead directly reference atomic physics in their thinking about the ways that social scientists and people, scientists interested in social scientists and any researcher involved in consciousness faced a similar dilemma of how do I help the war effort with my scientific knowledge, but do so in a way that is not going to be potentially destructive for the faith of humanity. You know, how can you target it against the Nazis and not unleash a demon, you know, unleash like opening Pandora's box for the broad-based use of science as a weapon? And I think that the, I mean, atomic weapons are pretty in your face, right? And we're still in the aftermath of seeing the Oppenheimer movie, et cetera.

But there was a lot of science being brought to bear during World War II. And I get the impression from your book that hypnosis and the idea of sort of mass hypnosis or even maybe just misinformation, propaganda, et cetera, really came into its own at that time. Yeah. One of the main concerns of really, I think the American military and specifically American scientists who studied the German war effort in particular was this idea of propaganda as a form of psychological warfare. And so there was actually, it's kind of fascinating to read these really early psychological profiles of Hitler that were produced by American scientists because they often discussed him in the terms of a stage hypnotist, you know, as if he had hypnotized the entire German people, that he had this sort of hypnotic power or sway over them. And indeed, Hitler himself actually described himself as a sleepwalker. So there's like actually, I think that kind of a basis for that. And so they got very interested. When I say they, I mean not just meet in Bateson, but like a really broad-based range of psychologists and psychiatrists and other scientists in early in the war, 1941 through 43.

They were fascinated and I think also disturbed by this role of the science of the mind and the science of consciousness as a mass media weapon. And so Bateson, for instance, was investigating a German propaganda film that he thought had hypnotic elements in the film. like repeating patterns that could hypnotize the viewer. He actually played it backwards to listen to it and see if there was like, I think, presumably to find hidden messages. And that kind of work was being done at a pretty high level in the American fight against the Axis Powers. And they took it very seriously.

It wasn't obviously funded like the Manhattan Project, but it was like a pretty significant component of the war effort. Most people don't realize how much of their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making millions pulling details about you from public records and the internet, then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers. It's why you get endless robocalls and why ads seem to follow you everywhere. That's where ORA comes in. Ora actively removes your data from broker sites and keeps it off. They also instantly alert you if your information shows up in a breach

or on the dark web. But ORA goes beyond data protection. With one app, you get a VPN, antivirus, password manager, spam call protection, dark web monitoring, and even up to $5 million in identity theft insurance, all backed by 24-7 U.S.-based fraud support. Other companies might just sell credit monitoring or just a VPN. ORA gives you all of it, together, at the same price competitors charge for just one service. Start your free trial today at ORA. ora.com slash hidden. Protect yourself now at a ura.com slash hidden. Yeah, it's a very common story, I guess, but there's a certain mephistophelian aspect here where the scientists want to do the right thing, you know, for their country, the Nazis are bad,

that seems pretty an easy argument to make. And so they want to help fight for democracy, et cetera. And, you know, and then they end up doing terrible things with their science, or at least opening the possibility that other people can take their scientific breakthroughs and do terrible things with them. Yeah, and I want to say here, I don't think they did terrible things. You know, that's an important point.

Like, World War II had, I think, a lot of moral clarity around it. They were trying to defeat Hitler. They were trying to stop the mass murder of millions of people. And I don't judge the scientists involved for that. I'm not talking specifically about Oppenheimer here because that's kind of a different topic. Yeah, that's a different thing. They were related one.

But the social science. involved in studying propaganda and psychological warfare and indeed in applying it, which is a, you know, it was also used as a, as a offensive tool, we might say. They were acting with idealistic motives, and I don't think we can, I don't see it as my job as an historian to judge them for those choices that they made. But one of the things I chronicle in the book is that it gets a lot more complicated in the 1950s in particular. because one thing that happens is actually, I don't really have talked about it too much in the book, but Operation Paperclip, you know,

there's like a whole mission to bring over Nazi scientists to the United States. Most famously, Vernar von Braun, who's like the father of the, you know, the Saturn rockets and really of the Apollo missions and NASA, in many ways, he was a Nazi.

He was like a member of the Nazi party. And there was like several psychedelic researchers from Nazi Germany who came over too. So that's one part of the story that gets into very hazy ethical areas. And then also just the emergence of of kind of post-World War II, early Cold War,

conception of what was called psychochemical warfare, not a term used very often today, but quite prevalent in the late 40s and 50s in discussions of geopolitics. This idea that there was a quote-unquote battle for men's minds and that drugs could play a role in that. That took the U.S. government in particular

into some really dark corners. But I do want to stress that the central figures of my book and the psychedelic scientists I mostly write about were not directly involved. They just kind of were part of this larger, you know, Cold War. Yeah. Mess of all kinds of competing motives and complex scientific interest intersecting with the real world.

Well, it does seem that both Bateson and Mead remained involved, but in slightly different ways. I mean, they split around 1950, right? Yeah, they get divorced in 1950, but they, I think they separate around 1948. This is like when Margaret Mead is sort of approaching the high point of her celebrity as a scientist, and she's under a lot of pressure because she's also being investigated repeatedly by the FBI. And so this is like, you know, not quite the McCarthy era, but it's the very very, beginning of these investigations of American scientists to see if they're communists or in Margaret Mead's case, she was bisexual. And that was what came to be known as the Lavender Scare,

this period when the U.S. government started investigating the personal lives of government employees, including scientists, to see if they were, if they were gay or bisexual, because that was thought to be a security threat. So she faced a lot of pressure. And she increasingly becomes a kind of of an embattled figure. You know, she gets, she becomes kind of a lightning rod for controversy. And there's a split that emerges between Bateson and Mead that I think is emblematic of the larger decisions scientists faced, especially around 1950 when the Korean War begins, which is like the degree to which the World War II order that emerged were like, okay, we're going to, we're going to actually get involved in the war effort. This is our moral obligation to contribute. How long is that

going to continue. Do they have to get involved in the Korean War now? Yeah. And then later, do they have to get involved in the Vietnam War? It gets increasingly controversial and questionable the degree to which scientists should see that as a moral obligation, you know? And so Gregory Bateson becomes a pretty principled opponent of the idea that scientists should contribute to the military or the war effort. Whereas Margaret Mead, it's much harder to pin down her own thoughts on the matter. You know, she had a security clearance throughout this whole period. She was collaborating with the, certainly the Department of Defense and the State Department, and she definitely had some ties to CIA people that are quite significant, although it's because of the nature of the documentation.

It's hard to actually make any definite claims, but we can talk about the details of that, if you want, but she was pretty closely involved in particular with an LSD researcher named Harold Abramson in about 1954. That's one of the things I talk about in the book. I don't know if you know that the Lavender Scare plays a big role in the controversy over the name of the James Webb Space Telescope because James Webb was a NASA administrator. He was not a scientist who allegedly either helped or didn't stop a bunch of NASA employees getting fired for suspicions of homosexuality. I didn't know that.

Yeah. So the accusations go back and forth. I think it seems pretty clear that he at least didn't help. He didn't shield the employees from being fired, but whether or not he was active in doing it is less clear in my mind. So, yeah, so that's why we like to name telescopes after scientists rather than administrators, one of the reasons. But there you go. We don't get to make those choices.

Anyway, but isn't it true that Bateson did have some involvement in efforts to understand whether psychedelics or hypnosis or trance or something like that? could be used in interrogation situations in wartime? Yeah, not psychedelics, but there are documentation from both Meads' archive and Bateson's own archive that showed that there was a, so I should explain here, the Office of Strategic Services was a predecessor organization to the CIA. It was like the intelligence service of the United States during World War II.

And it pretty seamlessly moved into being the CIA. There was a gap of a couple years in between, but a lot of the same people, involved in the OSS just switched over like Alan Dulles for instance was in the OSS and then became CIA director Bateson was in the OSS and it does seem that he and actually Jeffrey Gore

among others the guy who was involved in Mesklin research early on and Margaret Mead appeared to have done some like studies about the role of hypnosis in understanding Japanese and German psychology and based on my reading

of the documents, it does seem like that understanding of how hypnosis can relate to German and Japanese psychology, given the context of it being 1943, and the United States is setting up these POW camps, it does appear that that would have been like foundational research for interrogations. Yes. And then later, actually, one of the interesting things about that story is that alongside that work, there's a somewhat better known, but also like quite shadowy chapter of, truth drug research being done by two people that maybe your listeners may have heard of one of them. George Hunter White is like this kind of notorious narcotics cop who was involved in MK Ultra in the 50s. But before that, he was actually the guy that the OSS asked to do real world testing of truth drugs.

This is right around 1943. And he actually partners with a guy named James Alexander Hamilton, who was a psychiatrist, who is lifelong friends from that point onward with both meat and Bateson. And so they were like, you know, spending time together all throughout the 40s, 50s, and 60s. I have to wonder whether Hamilton talked to them about this work because it had clear parallels with their own interest in altered states of consciousness. And that's one of the really interesting but also hard to research areas here because a lot of that documentation was actually destroyed in the early 70s by the CIA and then was investigated by a series of congressional committees in the mid to late 70s, which like recovered some of it.

Like Senator Ted Kennedy was involved in this and the church committee. It's like it was a whole thing in the late 70s. But a lot of the people involved either didn't talk or had died or just kind of. kind of, you know, said, I do not recall. So there's a lot that we don't know about that chapter. Interesting. And the CIA is just allowed to destroy those documents, or was that covering their own butts kind of thing? Well, I don't think they're legally allowed to. But yeah, Richard Holmes, the director, I think, made the call. I think they called this, these documents were part of what the CIA called the Family Jewels. Okay. Yeah. And it's in Richard Helms's memoir,

he vaguely alludes to this, but doesn't really go there. It's just like one of those moments in the 70s, of which there are several, including Watergate, where there's, you know, some shady stuff happening among government circles. And one of the, to get back now, you know, to World War II in the aftermath and also Margaret Mead, I mean, the CIA in the 60s and 70s and 80s is an endlessly fascinating topic all by itself, right? One can talk about that for hours. But how much did Margaret Mead worry, being worried about social or, you know, even legal disapproval of her own romantic entanglements, especially with Ruth Benedict, etc. How much did that like make her, you know, quiet down about her previous utopian ideals

of changing society? It's a really good question. So she actually never stopped being utopian. Like she actually gave a speech, I think to the American Association for the Advancement of Science at their big annual conference, it was like the keynote speech of, I think, December, 1996. It was published in 57 called Toward More Vivid Utopias. Okay. And if listeners are interested in, like, her actual writing on this, that's an interesting one to look at. She was, you know, a materialist, and she believed in science as, like, the central goal of her life. So she was making a case for scientists trying to work toward

utopia in a way that wasn't shaped by religious beliefs or by communism. But, you know, this kind of hazy ideal of, we just have to have a revolution or, like the end times have to come and then everything gets better. That's what she meant by a more vivid utopia. Like we actually have to have a concrete goal and not just expect this transcendence to come in the future. But she really was advocating for that. And this is the late 50s.

So she didn't stop saying this kind of thing. But in her personal life, I think there's a key moment. And I referenced Harold Abramson, this psychedelic researcher, probably I would say the most influential psychedelic researcher of the 1950s period. period. He was also a CIA consultant. So he's one of the important bridges between these different sides of the story of psychedelics at this time. She was interested in his LSD research, and this is from a memo she wrote, which is in the Library of Congress, because as she put it, she was interested by a study that showed LSD, quote, removing fear of homosexuality in one therapeutic dose.

Okay. And the key thing here is removing fear of homosexuality. So she was, I think, coming to terms with her sexual identity and wanting to kind of not be afraid anymore of that part of her identity, which it was, of course, easy to be afraid if you're bisexual woman in the 50s and there's a huge amount of public attention on you. So that is actually like the very beginning of her memo about her own intention to take LSD mentions that. but then, and she actually talks about truth drugs with Abramson too, she says we decided it was not a truth drug. So clearly they had a discussion about this 1940s and 50s chapter of investigating truth drugs.

Ultimately, she actually makes plans to take LSD and writes to other scientists about it, kind of like letting them know that she's going to publicly do this. I think to see how it would affect her cognition and her creativity, because she's very, you know, she's brilliant. and she's interested in like the intellectual properties of this drug, like whether it would give her new ideas, for instance. She decides not to do it in the end, as far as I can tell. And if you look at her archive, it's this very interesting juxtaposition

because she has this memo saying she intends to take it. She has letters saying she's playing on doing it that fall in 1954. And then she has a newspaper clipping about a woman who takes LSD, showing all these scientists standing around her with clipboard, and it says basically the newspaper clipping says it is a truth drug and when you're under LSD you say things that you try to keep secret and suddenly you like make your soul visible and lay everything bare and so then she starts writing letters saying I've decided to push the back the experiment and eventually I think she just doesn't do it my supposition and I should be clear that this is

just a this is what historians do we don't make definite claims about something without sufficient evidence But my guess based on this is that she had a change of heart because she was worried about revealing something about her personal life that could harm her career. Well, I don't know if it would be useful knowledge for her, but I did once take LSD as part of an informal experiment for my wife, Jennifer's book on the science of self. And my personal experiment was to ask whether it helped with physics problems. And the answer is no. It does not help whatsoever. It hurts very much with physics problems. I don't know what Steve Jobs was thinking when he said Bill Gates could have been great if only he had taken LSD.

It's just not the way it works as far as I could tell. Yeah, no, I mean, I've had several psychedelic experiences. And yeah, it definitely doesn't help with writing. I can tell you that. Well, like you alluded to how much it makes it hard to communicate, in fact. You know, I don't know if that was your experience too, but it's like very difficult when you're on it to actually share what you're experiencing in any kind of lucid way. Well, that's what I wonder about because even if it doesn't bring you any clarity, like you alluded to earlier, it might very well bring you the impression that you're seeing with greater clarity than you were before. But there's no way of actually communicating that clarity to the outside world.

So I think maybe people are fooling themselves a little bit. So this is interesting, Sean, because I think I disagree with you there in the sense that it's certainly, you know, this is one of the key things that the book looks at. And I think it was a false turn in the study of psychedelics. This idea that, like, psychedelics could make you more creative or meat in her memo, writes this phrase, extraordinary speed of communication. And she's interested in psychedelics almost as like a, you know, a cognitive enhancing drug, perhaps. And I agree with you there. They definitely don't have that effect in my experience.

And I think this is proven by neuroscience. It's not like it raises your cognitive abilities. But I do think, and I've actually talked to a lot of. of my friends in psychology and neuroscience, I would say that anyone interested in the nature of the mind and of subjective conscious experience should at least consider taking psychedelics, even if it's not a major part of your life or it doesn't change your life in any way. It's worth just seeing the ways that you can change the knob on your brain and experience a totally, radically different subjective state. And this is actually William James's big insight from

nitrous oxide. Like after coming down from it, he's like, I don't know why I thought I understood Hegel. It didn't actually help me at all with Hegel or any of my work, except it made him aware that what we think of is the standard conscious experience of the world is just one among thousands of other possibilities of ways of experiencing our consciousness. And that very much has been true for me. Like it's just interesting, especially if you're interested in, like I have a neuroscientist friend who took psychedelics not to help them do better

neuroscience research, but just to kind of get a sense of his own experience of his mind, to kind of understand the instrument better. And I think that's actually a really valuable tool, in my opinion. And especially like if you're a psychiatrist, I think it would be very useful. Anyone who spends time thinking about your mind and others' minds. Most concerts, you're in a seat. You're watching. Downtown Rocks at Fremont Street Experience is something else entirely. Three stages. Live music spilling into the street. into the crowd under the world's largest overhead screen. The neon's on, the night's wide open, and you're right in the middle of it.

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But I do, but there's a certain kind of creativity that also requires precision, which happens to be what I need in my day job. and it's not very useful for that because the precision kind of melts away a little bit. Yes. And actually, Sean, for this podcast, I dug up something from my research that I thought would be interesting to you and to your listeners. Am I right? Remembering you had Richard Feynman's desk or something? I did. Caltech.

Yeah. Is that right? Yeah, when I was at Caltech, I didn't have his office. That was a misunderstanding sometimes. But literally his desk was his administrator who was there when Feynman was there put in a request that His desk never leave at the fourth floor of the physics building, of the theoretical physics department, and always be used by a scientist. So the joke that I would say was it would be given to the incoming scientist who was the most senior scientist,

who was not senior enough to deserve a new desk when they moved in. They would get Richard Feynman's desk, so that happened to be neat. That's awesome. Yeah, I love Feynman. All the lore around him is fascinating, and he's just an interesting person. I couldn't find a way to work him into the book, but when I was doing research for this book for Tripping on Utopia, I actually went to the son of this famous psychiatrist and psychedelic researcher named Oscar Janager, who has his father's papers. And he was nice enough to let me look through Oscar Janager's archive, which was just sitting in his house. He actually had a little kitten at the time who was sitting on the box of documents labeled LSD.

So it was like a really fun research day just going through. And, you know, Oscar Janager was Carrie Grant's psychiatrist, so Carrie Grant participated in a psychedelic study series of them. And so I could read Carrie Grant's trip report, which was weirdly enough also about Hegel for some reason. Okay. You see the common denominator. But among the letters that Janegger had was a exchange of letters with a guy named Al Hibs, Albert Hibbs. Do you know this guy? He's a physicist.

Oh, yeah, a collaborator of Feynman's, yeah. Yes, he was Feynman's doctoral student. And he actually, interestingly enough, he was actually tapped to be an Apollo astronaut. He worked at Chip Propulsion Lab and was unfortunately supposed to be on Apollo 25, which did not happen. So that's like the TV show for All Mankind or something. Maybe he could have actually gone to the moon in an alternate universe. But Al Hibs was a very, very, you know, he's a serious scientist. He was a serious physicist.

And he was actually transformed by taking LSD for the better in his account. He participated in a psychedelic study that he thought gave him a lot of insights in the late 50s. And I found a letter from Alibs to Janager saying that he wanted to get his advisor, Richard Feynman, to try it. So there's an exchange of letters about Feynman taking LSD in 1959. And it looks like it's going to happen in one letter. It says, Professor Feynman has returned from the East and is quite interested in trying the experiment. And I don't know what happened as a result. I tried to figure out if he did or not.

I think he mentions it once saying he didn't do it because he was afraid of disturbing the instrument or something to that effect. He didn't want to mess up his mind that was allowing him to do physics. From what I know about Richard Feynman, never having met him personally, but there's no way that he would have done

and then not told everybody. So if he didn't tell anyone, that I don't think he probably did it. Yeah, it's another one of those missed opportunities in the history of science. I don't know what would have happened. Most likely he would have had a experience kind of like you

because he was so interested in pursuing physics that he didn't want to mess with that. But it is kind of interesting how Feynman kind of weaves in and out, because he also shows up with my chapter on John C. Lilly, the dolphin researcher and the inventor of the isolation tank. Feynman and Lilly become friends, and

Feynman spends a lot of time in isolation tanks, which is also a kind of altered state of consciousness. He does talk about that, yeah. And this brings us, I guess, if we think that we're now in the course of our slightly scattered narrative here, in the 60s, that was a wild

time, not just for popular culture, but for the CIA and the government doing all sorts of experiments. So you've mentioned the dolphins. Tell us more about the dolphins, because that is a wild story. Yeah, the dolphins. So this is one of the pop culture aspects of the story that some of your listeners may have heard of. Like there's a movie called The Day of the Dolphin that's based on John C. Lily's research. There was an S&L skit, I think, called The Dolphin who Learned to Talk or something like that, that was also based on this. Basically, John C. Lilly is a really serious scientist. He's like, he has a medical degree, and he's a physiologist.

He does research for the Air Force during World War II. He's actually a very early pioneer of brain computer interfaces. He's like one of the first scientists to try to hook a directly connect a mainframe computer to a brain. So that's actually like a big deal in the age of NeuroLink and a lot of the work being done. It's also a deeply strange man. He was originally going to be a central figure in my book. and he was honestly just so strange that I kind of had trouble

wrapping my head around him as a personality. You know, Mead and Bateson, I came to like. I enjoyed spending time with them in the archive, reading their work. And Lily, like, when I interviewed people about him, it was just like, it was just creepy to a certain extent.

Just a weird guy. And so he becomes a dolphin researcher, partly because he's just fascinated by brains. He just wants to have the biggest brain he can find. And he's dissecting brains. He's, as I said, hooking them up to computers. And he's fascinated by the mind as a computer. Like, he's an early theorist of the idea of like the mind as something programmable.

And the computational mind, we might say. So he's basically trying to find different modalities of interacting with dolphin consciousness or cetaceans in general. And specifically, he's trying to talk to them. But it's a serious scientific project. You know, he's funded by NASA. He's funded by the U.S. Navy. And it's like a, he's funded by the NSF. It's like a major project of brain science in the early 60s.

But because Lily is always kind of on the fringe and he's willing to go places that not every scientist is, it devolves pretty quickly. So he starts this project right around 1960. And by I think late 64, he's progressed from. spending a lot of time in the isolation tank to injecting himself with LSD and then injecting his dolphins with LSD. And it's still not entirely clear to me why he did this. He gives different answers. Honestly, like in different contexts, he gave a different answer.

He would say that it was to kind of increase their communication ability, to increase some kind of communion between human and dolphin. In other contexts, he says it's more just like, because you can't do experimental studies on humans with LSD in a totalizing way. Like, for instance, hooking their brain up to a computer is a pretty messy project in the mid-60s. So he can do that with dolphins. And so it devolves pretty fast into some pretty weird territory.

And actually, fun fact, Carl Sagan was friends with John C. Lilly. And I actually did research in Carl Sagan's archive, and he had started a secret society after the Green Banks Observatory Conference. Are you familiar with this early? I'm familiar with the observatory, but not with the conference now. It was a conference that Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, the astronomer, organized, I think in 1961,

that was really like one of the earliest conferences about the search for intelligent life using radar telescopes. And it was like basically the predecessor to, you know, the SETI project, which Frank Drake became a champion of. But John Lilly attended because they were thinking he's the closest thing there is to someone, studying alien life forms on Earth right now because he's talking to dolphins. And they became friends and this order of the dolphin that Sagan started was sort of like

a kind of a joke, but not really a joke of astronomers and other scientists who are just interested in questions of communication in alien life. And Sagan actually visits John C. Lilly just before he starts giving the dolphins LSD. And bio-ocounts has a great time, but then later concludes that something weird was going on at the dolphin left. Well, yeah, I mean, you're painting a wonderful picture of, like, for better, for worse, there was a freedom, a liberatory kind of perspective in ideas about the mind and things like that. And maybe that feeds into one of the things that I had no idea about, and I just feel bad about,

which is that Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson played a huge role in the founding of cybernetics, which is kind of in the opposite temporal direction of what I think of as anthropologists. caring about. You know, they study primitive societies and they're also helping to found the sciences of the future. Yeah, that's one of the main things I found both interesting about meat and Bateson in particular and also like important to communicate in a history book that this mixing of disciplines in the 40s was very productive and generative. So this isn't just a book about failure, although the dolphin work was a failure. It was also a book I think that has a lot deeply hopeful elements of interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists and like new ways

that ideas can be generated by the mixing together of these people from totally different fields. So yes, Margaret Meade in particular, I think deserves a lot of credit for bringing together the cybernetics group. You know, she's organizing, she's helping organize the Macy conferences in general, which are this foundation that sponsored a lot of scientific meetings at this time. but specifically the cybernetics conferences they funded and hosted, you know, Mide was directly involved in organizing them. She was friends with the director of research at this foundation and played a key role.

She was even editing the cybernetics transcripts of these meetings. And so I think she partly has been written out of the history of AI research and needs to be restored to it, in my opinion. It's like a really fascinating chapter. In my research, I found that she was friends with John von Neumann, which I didn't know. Okay. And like, actually, I'm curious, I want to throw this out there to listeners of this podcast. Please contact me if you know of earlier references. There were somewhere in her papers, she said that when Van Neumann has two drinks,

he starts speculating that the universe might be a computer simulation. Oh, my goodness. I've never heard exactly that, but it sounds entirely plausible. I will say that. Yeah. He would have done that. I'm curious if that's the earliest, like, you know, simulation hypothesis being explored in history. It might be because Von Neumann is like, you know, there's not really digital computers before him, right? Yeah. So she was very, like I said at the beginning of this talk, she was extraordinarily well connected. And that role of connecting, for instance, Claude Shannon was someone she that was brought into these conferences, Von Neumann.

But also, like, this is the really interesting thing. Another person at the cybernetics conferences was Heinrich Kluver, who is one of those German mescaline researchers who moved to the United States in the, the 20s and 30s. He was like one of the leading psychedelic researchers who was actually directly participating in these early discussions of the computational mind and the foundations of computer science.

And it didn't, so I guess, you know, tying it all together, the utopian visions didn't quite pan out. We have not quite achieved utopia 100 years after Margaret Mead started talking about it. And maybe part of it is part of the blame falls

in the 1960s, there was a big shift in the public discourse around psychedelics, maybe in a defensive backlash against people like Timothy Leary, who overclaimed a little bit. Yeah, I mean, a lot of this book is me thinking through the wrong turn that was taken in psychedelic research. And I don't say that just my own judgment. It's from talking to contemporary psychedelic researchers themselves. I did a lot of conversations with scientists currently engaged in exploring the therapeutic uses of psilocybin, LSD, etc. And I think I can say there's a broad-based perception that something went wrong in the 60s.

And certainly, legally speaking, it obviously did because psychedelics were banned. So that's not good if you're a serious scientist. You don't want to work with an illegal substance. So the question of why they were banned is actually very complicated and has a lot to do with you know, politics and like, you know, the transition into Nixonian America. It's not entirely because of misdeeds of Timothy Leary or anyone like that. But it is partly, I think, because there was a shift toward a very, I think, limiting conception of what psychedelics are.

Like one of the reasons my book has a chapter about Elron Hubbard, who didn't really play a role in psychedelic science, is because he embodied a possible. pathway for someone on the edge of science in the 50s and 60s, which is that he, you know, he started out with dienetics, which he portrayed as an alternative to psychology. And then it becomes the church of Scientology. It literally becomes a religion. And that is kind of what I see happening with psychedelics in the early 60s. And in fact, Timothy Leary, you know, obviously is a well-trained scientist.

He's a Berkeley PhD teaching at Harvard. but he does in fact end up starting a church of psychedelics. Like he turns it into a religion, literally. And so that model of like going from idealistic or even utopian scientists to religious guru is repeated again and again in this story. And just in the history of the late 20th century, you know, there's many stories like this. And I do think that was a missed opportunity. And like the choice to make psychedelics into a niche topic of interest to end.

people interested in, like, mystical experiences, as opposed to just exploring their broad-based use in society as a medicine, really limited them and made them associated with a single subculture, basically, the counterculture. That was, in retrospect, a key moment when psychedelic research went off the rails, because suddenly it becomes part of the culture war, and it becomes polarized. It becomes a political issue to attack hippies by saying they're drug addled and so forth, as opposed to in the 50s, Carrie Grant is going out in public saying LSD helped him a lot. Yeah. And it's kind of not that controversial. It's like widely reported and people are interested. But the main thing I found when I researched that the social reaction to that was people calling

up a psychiatrist asking, can I book an appointment with you? It wasn't like widespread condemnation of Carrie Grant. Right. And actually, another person I look at is Claire Boo's. loose, the Republican member of Congress, who's a close friend of Richard Nixon, is a very fervent advocate of psychedelic therapy in the late 50s. She's literally the person who introduced Nixon and Kissinger. So she's like deep in the Republican establishment and like really like a central part of it. And she's openly telling people that LSD helped her. So there was like a moment in the 50s when psychedelics were not polarized. And then by the 60s they totally are. And that really changed. changes the course of history.

Is there an alternative history where people like Mead and Bateson influenced the public discourse a little bit more strongly and we didn't panic about psychedelics? We sort of embraced the possibilities and responsibly studied them? I think so. Yeah. I mean, and one of the reasons why Bateson figures in the story quite a bit in the 50s is that he's bringing together this group of scientists associated with Stanford University. right around the mid-50s, they're actually interested in the origins of schizophrenia,

which is like a theme running through psychedelic research from the beginning. This group ends up forming a organization called the Mental Research Institute, which is really one of the pioneering organizations for studying psychedelics. But it's not really remembered in that way now. And that's partly because that research, even though it was considered very promising in the late 50s, and they were like on TV. Like literally, this group of people had a TV show, a TV special where they gave LSD on camera

to one of the psychiatrists involved. And it was public. You know, they were just like very upfront about this. They even co-authored a paper called LSD The New Beginning and saying in quite utopian terms that this could revolutionize psychiatry. I wonder how much of it has to do with just the happenstance of people's personal lives

because one of the people involved Joe K. Adams, who was mentored by Bateson and a friend of him, has a really bad LSD trip. And that does happen when you're taking psychedelics. He himself, the researcher involved, has a trip so damaging to his career that he basically quits science and kind of drops off the map and then resurfaces running a campground in Big Sur, California. Actually, I camp while I was researching the book without realizing it was his.

And he becomes friends with Alan Ginsberg and, you know, basically joined. joins the counterculture. And he sees that as a good thing. But it's, again, there's like a kind of split that happens socially among these people where one group becomes countercultural and moves away from mainstream science. And then the other mainstream scientists who were involved distanced themselves from this. You know, they don't see it as good for their careers. You know, they're employed by like UCLA and major institutions and they don't want to go there anymore.

So, yeah, I think if that hadn't happened, not just that one bad trip, but a series of more or less maybe not random, but like events that it's possible to imagine going otherwise, I don't necessarily think it's inevitable that psychedelics ended up being banned. That's certainly not the case. Maybe this is not your job as a historian. I don't know. I don't want to tell you what your job is. But are there lessons that at the end of the day we get about either,

I do think that psychedelic research is picking up again, which is good. But are there deeper lessons for utopia that we get? from the stories that you study? I mean, so often in history, there have been utopian ideals that crashed and burned one way or the other. And are there any cautionary lessons we can get from this? Yeah, I mean, I don't know if it's my job either, honestly,

but I'd still like to think about it. And I definitely think there are. I mean, one of them I want to really highlight is that I actually really think that that idea of more vivid utopias than Margaret Meade talks about in that speech I mentioned is a very useful way of thinking that we need to think in concrete terms, but also very ambitious terms about the role of science in society. And so, you know, one thing we see in our debates about science and technology today is another manifestation of the kind of utopianism she was

arguing against, which is like the singularity, right? Something magical will happen involving AI and everything will change for good or bad, but it will just be this unknowable future, this point beyond which nothing can be understood or known. And let's just wait for that to happen. You know, it's almost like a passivity involved in that way of thinking about Utopia that I think just speaking for myself doesn't appeal. But I am also kind of worried about the alternative of being framed as just a cynicism or a sense of, you know, we can't have big dreams. I like how Margaret Meade was talking about a vivid utopia, a realizable, practical, broad-based good that can be achieved not only by science, but partly by science,

science in collaboration with other factors in the world. I mean, there were good things that happened in her lifetime. She was born into a world where poverty was much more widespread than when she died, and when technology had actually achieved really major things between, let's say, 1900 and 1980. And so I think that there's a kind of a sense of optimism that we get from people of that generation, like people like Carl Sagan, for instance, is another one that I don't really see as much today in the ways we talk about science. And I like that kind of grounded idealism and optimism, empirical utopianism, you might call it, or practical utopianism, I find really appealing.

So that's one lesson. It's just like we should pay attention to this people of this generation because I don't see a lot of, a lot of idealism or optimism, especially among people my students age. And I don't necessarily think that's going to help us much to be ever more cynical about the future. Like, we need to have something that gives us hope. But then the other thing, yes, there's definitely negative lessons to be learned. And one of the main ones is not just the guru effect, the sense of a scientist, the temptation of a scientist to become a religious leader. But also the failure to think of scientific innovation and specifically, let's say, a psychedelic drug, you know, it's introduced into the world.

And there's a really interesting quote that one of the researchers in my book mentions, which is Sidney Cohen, he's a UCLA psychedelic researcher. He's saying basically, he uses this term the anthropological approach. He's saying we should insinuate or introduce psychedelics into the culture in a staged way, a careful way, not all at once, and with an understanding of the social and cultural roles that these things play, that it's not just like, here's a prescription medication, it'll fix your depression. You have to embed it in a social context and understand all the other factors in play. And I, you know, it's just, it actually sounds kind of obvious when I'm saying that now, but so often we have this magic bullet approach to new medicines in particular,

this idea that like, it's a wonder drug that will cure X ailment. And it keeps happening like that. most recently like opiates you know opioids were like a cure for pain and didn't work out the way people planned because again not thinking about the embeddedness in social relations and culture of these substances so that's something that I think is really important to learn lessons from as we I think psychedelics will probably become legal in the next decade and as we do that we need to figure out ways of taking an anthropological approach in my opinion I think that on both the optimistic side and the pessimistic side. These are very wise words to end on.

I can't improve on them. So Ben Breen, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast. Thank you, Sean. It was really fun to be on it. I appreciate the work you're doing too in talking to all kinds of different people. It's my pleasure, so I'm happy that other people like it. Woman, and I wear Ashrow.

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