267 | Benjamin Breen on Margaret Mead, Psychedelics, and Utopia

0:00:00.8 Sean Carroll: 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 Mindscape 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.

0:01:05.0 SC: And our guest today is Benjamin Breen, who is a historian at the University of California, 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 not just the growing up and sexual habits of the Samoans, but also the idea of trance 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.

0:02:08.8 SC: 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, [laughter] they didn't form the CIA, but they kind of played a role in the early days. In 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.

0:03:06.7 SC: So these are anthropologists who study 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.

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0:04:26.4 SC: Benjamin Breen, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:04:29.0 Benjamin Breen: Thanks for having me, Sean.

0:04:31.3 SC: LSD was discovered by Albert Hofmann 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 would even have known about? Was there an existing opinion about that? Or would they have thought we were talking about opium and cocaine?

0:05:02.4 BB: 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.

0:05:10.9 SC: Okay.

0:05:11.8 BB: So the whole history before that is arguably it's anachronistic, or like ahistorical 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 and let's say, New York City in the '20S the reference point would most likely be peyote, because that was actually in the news at that point.

0:05:44.5 SC: Okay.

0:05:45.4 BB: 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 a 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 a little bit of knowledge on that front, too.

0:06:12.4 SC: It is very interesting how this subject immediately leads to some kind of moral panic in certain circles. A worry that we're letting humanity do things it's not supposed to be doing and the government should stop them.

0:06:27.5 BB: Yes. It's one of the really prevalent themes in the history of drugs. It's part of why I find it, the whole topic interesting, because you can learn about what a society is scared of or what they care about by looking at their reaction to basically, like you say, looking at the moral panics around these substances.

0:06:42.8 SC: Okay. So besides peyote, once we have LSD, et cetera, once we're into the '30s are people now actively talking about this, did that discovery by Hofmann change the discourse?

0:06:55.7 BB: It was actually before Hofmann. And something interesting about Hofmann 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 [chuckle] and other animals and himself for several years. And so actually, the first synthetic, or the first psychedelic drug which was rendered scientific, we might say, turned into an experimental inquiry and used in studies was mescaline.

0:07:25.0 SC: Okay.

0:07:25.3 BB: 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 Mescaline: A Global History, which gets really into the details of this, but it goes back pretty far. There was an english writer named Havelock Ellis who was interested in what we 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.

0:08:10.3 SC: 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, am I getting the impression that there was just a general interest in the idea of the self and how to alter it. Sigmund Freud is that same kind of era.

0:08:29.7 BB: 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 arguably the first modern psychologist. He experimented with nitrous oxide as well and wrote a really, actually quite hilarious account of it [laughter] where he thinks it makes him understand Hegelian dialectics. [laughter] One of the quotes from it is like, what is nausea but a kind of ausea. So he's getting really into this.

0:09:03.9 SC: He got punchy, like many of us would. Right, okay.

0:09:07.4 BB: But I think it ends with him saying, "Medical school, divinity school, school." He's just writing it down in all caps. Ultimately, he didn't actually think that it gave him that much insight. But it gave him the perception of insight into the nature of reality. And so I think there's definitely this strong current in late 19th century thought that is broadly associated with modernism and Freud, 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.

0:09:46.2 SC: 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. Margaret Mead is well known as an anthropologist. Studied Samoans and Native Americans and so forth in the '20s and '30s and more. Who are they? Give us the background first, for those who don't know, who are Margaret Mead and Bateson?

0:10:15.0 BB: 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 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.

0:10:55.0 SC: Right.

0:10:56.1 BB: Selke and Oppenheimer and people like that. And she knew all of them. 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 her. And focus about with her.

0:11:09.1 SC: 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 at the right place at the right time?

0:11:18.2 BB: I think that was actually her main scientific gift, she was like, she called herself a listening post. I think she saw herself as 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 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 a scientist of gender sexuality in Polynesia.

0:12:17.0 BB: 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 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.

0:12:39.1 SC: And 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?

0:12:50.0 BB: 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. All three of her husbands were also scientists, and she worked closely with all three of them. She was also in a relationship with Ruth Benedict, who is one of the leading anthropologists of the 20th century as well. So Bateson comes into the story in this very dramatic fashion that I talk about in the book. They meet in New Guinea. Mead's already married to another anthropologist. So there's a whole love triangle aspect. But I think, and it gets really complicated.

0:13:26.7 SC: It was like a Fleetwood Mac kind of situation there.

0:13:29.9 BB: Like a Fleetwood, yeah. [laughter] It really was. There was a lot of parallels with a '70s rock band or I often thought about 1920s Hollywood. There's a lot of this kind of deceit, specifically 1920s era romance where they're stepping off the gang plank of steamships and seeing the other man there on the harbor front and stuff like that. [laughter] 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.

0:14:22.4 BB: So he has 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 '20s and '30s. 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, 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.

0:15:05.0 SC: And good. I would like to tease out how Margaret Mead gets from studying Samoans to studying peyote and other psychedelic drugs. But maybe, again, because not everyone will know, tell us what Mead was learning by studying Samoans and the Omaha, et cetera.

0:15:27.2 BB: It's hard to boil it down into one sentence because she was really very expansive in the way she approached anthropology, what I argue in the book, and I do make an attempt to really boil it down, 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 extend beyond the earth? That was something she was very interested in.

0:16:26.6 BB: And more generally, just kind of transcend the limits of our species. 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.

0:17:16.9 BB: So she was one of the first to do that. Likewise, more generally, just the idea, especially in the '20s there was still like almost a Victorian or post-Victorian way of assuming humans should act. 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.

0:17:52.3 SC: 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 100 years ago. 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. The industrial revolution that 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.

0:18:42.0 BB: Exactly, that was one of the main things that made me pursue this research as an historian of science because just speaking for myself, I'm an educator. I teach at UC Santa Cruz, and I talked 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.

0:19:28.5 BB: 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. They were trying to fight back against the idea that there was 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 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 2024.

0:20:10.0 SC: That is the now, right?

[laughter]

0:20:13.1 BB: And so she was thinking about the future in this, not just an expensive way, but actually in a pretty concrete way, where she realized that she was gathering information that would not exist, 10, 20, 50 years from her time. These cultures were already fading away, and she was trying to 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 what you did." Because it was useful.

0:20:44.1 SC: 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 and 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 these options out there.

0:21:03.2 BB: 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, 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. It's born out of the Manhattan Project, and this idea that science and now is being wielded as a weapon, but it can also be used to heal the conflict of the world. And that becomes the basis for a lot of the early psychedelic researchers. It also becomes the core conflict of the rest of the book is the divergence of science during World War II.

0:21:58.3 SC: So what were Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson thinking about psychedelics before World War II, were they actively... Was that on their minds like, "Okay, we have a new tool now to perhaps advance our hope for a utopian future driven by scientific advancement?"

0:22:15.1 BB: No, it wasn't. So that's one of the interesting things, is that if we just do a word search in historical text for words like LSD or mescaline, we're mostly going to find stuff from the 1950s and '60s and '70s, because that's when it becomes 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 the pre-history of a set of scientific ideas, what's happening just before Isaac Newton develops his theory of gravity or just before germ theory of disease, 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 predecessor ideas and the forgotten by ways of science that don't quite lead to the famous idea, but are under current or foundation of it. And what's happening in the '30s is a really broad-based interest in trance states and hypnosis and altered states of consciousness in general.

0:23:18.1 BB: 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 doing an anthropological investigation of trance 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, and I think the late 1920s. And he started telling them and telling other people in their circle that mescaline 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 really forms the foundation for psychedelic science.

0:24:14.1 SC: So tell us more about the trance 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.

0:24:27.1 BB: I was actually listening Sean, to your conversation with Brian Lowery about the social self, and I was thinking about this because the thing that really fascinated not just Bateson and Mead, but other scientists studying trance in the '30s, was the idea of a transference of consciousness, the idea that you could feel that 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 that particularly fascinated Mead and Bateson, and another research or 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.

0:25:20.2 BB: And how does that look different from Western society where we don't typically have that as a social role you can play. We don't have a shamanistic social type in the West, so it's not just Mead and Bateson, and it's like a broad-based interest in shamanistic practices in various forms of trance 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 development of theories of mind, as a scientific study, and also the idea that science is studying society becomes very prevalent in the '30s.

0:26:01.0 SC: And apparently Margaret Mead was proud of her own ability personally, to go into a trance.

0:26:06.1 BB: Yeah, actually, there's a funny thing in our archive where she said that she was hypnotized by a famous hypnotist who was involved in scientific research of trance states named Milton Erickson, and it was such a potent hypnotic state that when her secretary typed up the transcript of this hypnosis work. The secretary herself was hypnotized by the act of transcribing it. [laughter] So she was very interested by this sort of...

0:26:36.8 SC: And she was also aware of peyote, for example. She studied indigenous Americans, right?

0:26:45.1 BB: 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 hold over from a pre-modern pass 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 a cohesive again, and it can connect people, connect to society in a new way.

0:27:34.7 BB: And I really think one of the main themes I want 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 is 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 and society.

0:28:07.7 SC: Well, it's a little bit heartbreaking to hear all of these stories about people getting excited about the new science of the mind and all of these tools that science is giving us, and then World War II happens and maybe, we shouldn't have been too surprised 'cause wars happening all the time, but that does seem to have marked a kind of shift in the relationship between science and utopianism, let's say.

0:28:32.2 BB: Yes, it very much did. And one of the interesting things, maybe you're listeners who are interested in history of physics, are aware of the brain drain from Germany as German and Swiss physicist moved to the United States 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 Oppenheimer was based on, knows about this huge ethical dilemma that faced physicists during World War II, of course. But that was not just physicists who are 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 disruptive for the fate of humanity. How can you target it against the Nazis, and not unleash a demon, unleash like opening Pandora's box for the broad-based use of science as a weapon.

0:29:45.8 SC: And I think that the atomic weapons are pretty in your face, 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.

0:30:14.2 BB: 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, 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 sleep walker, so there's actually, I think that kind of a basis for that.

0:30:55.8 BB: And so they got very interested when I say they, I mean not just Mead and Bateson, but a really broad-based range of psychologists and psychiatrists and other scientists 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 itself, like repeating patterns that could hypnotize the viewer, he actually played it backwards to listen to it and see if there was like, [laughter] 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 access powers and they took it very seriously. It wasn't obviously funded like the Manhattan Project, but it was a pretty significant component of the war effort.

0:31:52.3 SC: Yeah, it's a very common story, I guess, but there's a certain method, stuffily in aspect here, where the scientists want to do the right thing 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 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.

0:32:20.2 BB: Yeah, and I want to say here, I don't think they did terrible things, that's an important point. World War II had 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.

0:32:40.6 SC: Yeah that's a different thing.

0:32:41.6 BB: Though a related one, but the social scientist involved in studying propaganda and psychological warfare and indeed in applying it, which is, it was also used as an offensive tool we might say. They were acting with idealistic motives, and 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 talk about it too much in the book, but operation paper clip, there's a whole mission to bring over a Nazi scientists to the United States. Most famously, Wernher von Braun, who's the father of the Saturn rockets, and really of the Apollo missions and NASA in many ways. He was a Nazi, he was a member of the Nazi party, and there was several psychedelic researchers from Nazi Germany who came over too.

0:33:42.6 BB: So that's one part of the story that gets into very hazy ethical areas, and then also just the emergence of post World War II, early Cold War conception of what was called psycho-chemical warfare, not a term used very often today, but quite prevalent in the late '40s and '50s, and discussions of geopolitics. This idea that there was a "battle for men's minds" and that drugs could play a role in that. That took the US government in particular into some really dark corners. But I do want to stress that the central figures in my book and the psychedelic scientist I mostly write about, we're not directly involved, they just kind of were part of this larger Cold War mess of all kinds of competing motives and the complex scientific interest intersecting with the real world.

0:34:38.0 SC: Well, it does seem that both Bateson and Mead remained involved, but in slightly different ways, they split around 1950, right?

0:34:47.1 BB: Yeah, they get divorced to 1950, but I think they separated 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 not quite the McCarthy era, but it's the very beginning of these investigations of American Scientists to see if their 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 US government started investigating the personal lives of government employees, including scientists, to see 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 kind of an embattled figure, 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 decision scientist face, especially around 1950 when the Korean War begins. Which is like the degree to which the World War II order that emerged were scientists were like, "Okay, we're going to actually get involved in the war effort, this is our moral obligation to contribute."

0:36:06.0 BB: How long is that going to continue? Do they have to get involved in the Korean War now? 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. 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, she had a security clearance throughout the whole period, she was collaborating with, 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 different claims, but we can talk about the details of that if you want, [chuckle] 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.

0:37:09.0 SC: 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.

0:37:30.7 BB: I didn't know that.

0:37:31.2 SC: Yeah. So the accusations go back and forth. I think it's 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 involvements in efforts to understand whether psychedelics or hypnosis or trance or something like that could be used in interrogation situations in wartime?

0:38:09.0 BB: Yeah. Not psychedelics, but there are documentation from both Mead's archive and Bateson's archive that show 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 the being the CIA, there was a gap of a couple years in between, but a lot of the same people involved in OSS just switched over. Like Allen 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 MESCO and research early on, and Margaret Mead appeared to have done some 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 there'd be, the United States is setting up these POW camps, it does appear that would've been like foundational research for interrogations. Yes.

0:39:22.8 BB: 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 the 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 around 1943. And he actually, partners with a guy named James Alexander Hamilton, who was a psychiatrist who is of lifelong friends from that point onward with both Mead and Bateson. And so they were like, 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.

0:40:20.2 BB: 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. Senator Ted Kennedy was involved in this and the church committee, 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 said, "I do not recall." So there's a lot that we don't know about that chapter.

0:40:54.7 SC: Interesting. And the CIA is just allowed to destroy those documents, or was that covering their own butts kind of thing?

0:41:01.3 BB: Well, I don't think they're legally allowed to, but yeah, Richard Helms, the director I think made the call. I think they called this... These documents were part of what the CIA called the family Jewels, actually.

0:41:10.8 SC: Okay. Yeah.

0:41:11.0 BB: 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 some shady stuff happening among government circles.

0:41:27.8 SC: And one of the, to get back now, to World War II in the aftermath, and also Margaret Mead, I mean this, 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 even legal disapproval of her own romantic entanglements, especially with Ruth Benedict, et cetera, how much did that make her quiet down about her previous utopian ideals of changing society?

0:42:04.6 BB: It's a really good question. So, she actually never stopped being utopian. She actually gave a speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at their big annual conference. It was like the keynote speech of I think December, 1956. It was published in '57, called Toward More Vivid Utopias. And if listeners are interested in her actual writing on this, that's an interesting one to look at. She was a materialist and she believed in science as 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, by 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.

0:42:51.8 BB: 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 in, I referenced Harold Abramson, this psychedelic researcher, probably I would say the most influential psychedelic researcher of the 1950s 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 that LSD "removing fear of homosexuality in one therapeutic dose."

0:43:44.7 BB: 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 the very beginning of her memo about her own intention to take LSD mentions that. 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.

0:44:43.9 BB: Because she's brilliant and she's interested in the intellectual properties of this drug, 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 planning 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 clipboards. 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 make your soul visible and lay everything bare. And 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 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. Yeah.

0:45:54.1 SC: Well, I don't know if it would be useful knowledge for her, but I did once take LSD as part of a 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. That just is not the way it worked as far as I could tell.

0:46:21.6 BB: Yeah, no, I mean, I've had several psychedelic experiences and, yeah. It definitely doesn't help with writing. I can tell you that.

[laughter]

0:46:31.1 SC: Well, like you alluded.

0:46:32.2 BB: It's actually striking how much it makes it hard to communicate. In fact, 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.

0:46:43.0 SC: 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.

0:47:04.6 BB: So this is interesting, Sean, because I think I disagree with you there in the sense that, it's certainly, 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 Mead in her memo writes this phrase extraordinary speed of communication. And she's interested in psychedelics almost as like 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 right cognitive abilities. But I do think, and I've actually talked to a lot 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.

0:47:55.6 BB: 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', big insight from nitrous oxide. After coming down from it, he's like, "I don't know why I thought I understood Hagel. It didn't actually help me at all with Hagel or any of my work." Except it made him aware that what we think of as 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 him 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, basically.

0:49:00.7 SC: Yeah. No, actually, I probably, was clumsy in how I put things. I'm very optimistic about the potential of psychedelics for therapeutic uses. We talked with Robin Carhart-Harris on the show a while back, and the most convincing thing or plausible thing that I have ever heard is the idea that they can help you get out of a rut. Whether it's a creative rut, or PTSD, or clinical depression or things like that. They can shake you up a little bit, 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.

0:49:43.6 BB: 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 that you had Richard Feynman's desk or something? You were at Caltech?

0:49:54.6 SC: I did. Yeah.

0:49:56.8 BB: Is that right?

0:49:57.9 SC: Yeah. What I was at Caltech, I didn't have his office. That was a misunderstanding sometimes. But literally, his desk was the 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 me.

[laughter]

0:50:32.8 BB: That's awesome. Yeah. I love Feynman, like all the lore around him is fascinating, and he is just an interesting person. And 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 Janiger, who has his father's papers. And he was nice enough to let me look through Oscar Janiger'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 Oscar Janiger was Cary Grant's psychiatrist. So Cary Grant participated in a psychedelic study, a series of them. And so I could read Cary Grant's trip report, which was weirdly enough also about Hagel for some reason.

0:51:19.7 SC: Okay. You see the common denominator.

0:51:23.3 BB: But among the letters that Janiger had was a exchange of letters with a guy named Al Hibbs. Albert Hibbs. Do you know this guy? He's a physicist.

0:51:30.1 SC: Oh, yeah. Collaborator of Feynman's. Yeah.

0:51:33.4 BB: 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.

0:51:45.6 SC: Yeah. Okay. Didn't get there.

0:51:46.4 BB: 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 Hibbs was a very, very, he is 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 Al Hibbs to Janiger 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, like 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 'cause he was afraid of disturbing the instrument or something to that effect. He didn't want to mess up his physical, his mind that was allowing him to do physics.

0:52:43.8 SC: From what I know about Richard Feynman never having met him personally, but there's no way that he would've done it and then not told everybody. So if he didn't tell anyone that, I don't think he probably did it.

0:52:52.4 BB: Yeah. It's another one of those missed opportunities in the history of science. I don't know what would've happened. Most likely he would've had an 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.

0:53:13.5 SC: Oh yeah.

0:53:14.5 BB: Feynman and Lilly become friends, and Feynman spends a lot of time in isolation tanks, which is also a kind of alterative of consciousness.

0:53:20.6 SC: He does talk about that, yeah. And this brings us, I guess if we, 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.

0:53:43.8 BB: Yeah. The Dolphins. So this is one of the pop culture aspects of this 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. Lilly's research. There was an SNL 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 has a medical degree and he is 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 up, directly connect a mainframe computer to a brain. So that's actually like a big deal in the age of Neuralink and a lot of the work being done.

0:54:27.4 BB: He was 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, Mead and Bateson, I came to like. I enjoyed spending time with them in the archive, reading their work. And Lilly, 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 is dissecting brains. He's, as I said, hooking them up to computers. And he is fascinated by the mind as a computer. Like he's an early theorist of the idea of the mind as something programmable and the computational mind, we might say.

0:55:18.0 BB: So he's basically trying to find different modalities of interacting with dolphin consciousness or satations in general and specifically he's trying to talk to them. But it's a serious scientific project. He's funded by NASA, he's funded by the US Navy, he's funded by the NSF, it's like a major project of brain science in the early '60s. But because Lilly is always kind of on the fringe and he is 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 context. 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.

0:56:22.0 BB: 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 a research into Carl Sagan's archive, and he had started a secret society after the Green Banks Observatory conference. Are you familiar with this early sort of proto-SETI?

0:57:00.9 SC: I'm familiar with the observatory, but not with the conference? No.

0:57:02.5 BB: It was a conference that Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, the astronomer, organized, I think, in 1961 that was really, one of the earliest conferences about the search for intelligent life using radar telescopes. And it was basically the predecessor to 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 kind of a joke, but not really a joke of astronomers and other scientists who are just interested in questions of communication and alien life. And Sagan actually visits John C. Lilly just before he starts giving the dolphins LSD. And Bio Accounts has a great time, but then later concludes that something weird was going on at the dolphin.

0:58:00.1 SC: Well, you're painting a wonderful picture of, 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 know. They study primitive societies, and they're also helping to found the sciences of the future.

0:58:34.2 BB: Yeah, that's one of the main things I found both interesting about Mead and Bateson in particular, and also 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 of deeply hopeful elements of interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists and new ways that ideas can be generated by the mixing together of these people from totally different fields. So, yes, Margaret Mead in particular, I think deserves a lot of credit for bringing together cybernetics group. 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, Mead was directly involved in organizing them.

0:59:30.0 BB: 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, like in my research, I found that she was friends with John von Neumann, which I didn't know. And 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. Somewhere in her papers she said that when Von Neumann has two drinks, he starts speculating that the universe might be a computer simulation.

1:00:10.1 SC: Oh my goodness. I've never heard exactly that, but it sounds entirely plausible. I will say that, yeah, he would have done that.

1:00:17.7 BB: I'm curious if that's the earliest simulation hypothesis being explored in history. It might be, because Von Neumann is like, there's not really digital computers before him. Right?

1:00:28.0 SC: Yeah.

1:00:29.8 BB: 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 that was brought into these conferences, Von Neumann. But also 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 '20s and '30s. He's 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.

1:01:08.2 SC: I guess 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 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 over claimed a little bit.

1:01:36.0 BB: 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 therapeutic uses of psilocybin, LSD, et cetera. And I think I can say there's a broad based perception that something went wrong in the '60s. 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 politics and the transition into Nixonian America.

1:02:24.4 BB: 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. One of the reasons my book has a chapter about L. Ron 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 started out with Dianetics, 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 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. He turns it into a religion, literally.

1:03:22.7 BB: And so that model of going from idealistic or even utopian scientist to religious guru is repeated again and again in this story. And just in the history of the late 20th century, there's many stories like this. And I do think that was a missed opportunity. The choice to make psychedelics into a niche topic of interest to people interested in 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. Cary Grant is going out in public saying LSD helped him a lot. And it's kind of not that controversial.

1:04:27.7 BB: It's like widely reported and people are interested. But the main thing I found when I researched the social reaction to that was people calling up his psychiatrist, asking, can I book an appointment with you? It wasn't like widespread condemnation of Cary Grant. And actually another person I look at is Clare Boothe Luce, the republican member of Congress who's a close friend of Richard Nixon, is like 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 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 changes the course of history.

1:05:14.8 SC: 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?

1:05:33.5 BB: I think so, yeah. 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 an 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. They were just 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.

1:06:37.6 BB: Because one of the people involved, Joe K. Adams, who was mentored by Bates and a friend of his, 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, where actually I camped while I was researching the book [laughter] without realizing it was his. And he becomes friends with Alan Ginsburg and basically joins the counterculture. And he sees that as a good thing. But 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 distance themselves from this. They don't see it as good for their careers. They're employed by like UCLA and major institutions and they don't want to go there anymore.

1:07:35.8 BB: 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.

1:07:54.2 SC: Maybe this is not your job as a historian. 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. Are there any cautionary lessons we can get from this?

1:08:27.5 BB: Yeah, 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 that Margaret Mead 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 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. It's almost like a passivity involved in that way of thinking about utopia that I think just speaking for myself doesn't appeal.

1:09:27.5 BB: But I'm also kind of worried about the alternative being framed as just a cynicism or a sense of we can't have big dreams. I like how Margaret Mead 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, 1980. And so I think that there's a kind of 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 that kind of grounded idealism and optimism, empirical utopianism, you might call it, or practical utopianism, I find really appealing.

1:10:28.7 BB: So that's one lesson is just like, we should pay attention to this people of this generation, because I don't see 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, it's introducing to 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.

1:11:25.0 BB: 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 will fix your depression. You have to embed it in a social context and understand all the other factors in play. And 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 it's a wonder drug that will cure X ailment, and it keeps happening like that. Most recently, opiates, 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.

1:12:32.5 SC: 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.

1:12:41.3 BB: 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.

1:12:46.0 SC: It's my pleasure. So I'm happy that other people like it.

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