Margaret Mead and the psychedelic community that theorized AI

Danny Crichton:
Margaret Mead is a towering figure in American letters and science, overturning entire fields and inspiring a generation of public science advocates who worked fervently to connect the curiosity of everyday people into the frontiers of discovery. While best known for her work in anthropology, she also intersected with many other fields including psychedelic research. And not only was she a part of a circle of scientists exploring psychedelics, but it was a community that stitched together the emerging fields of computer science, neurology, and consciousness into one decentralized web of thinkers. That early psychedelic work in computer science still has implications about how we think about computers today, and that's the subject for today's show.
This is The Riskgaming podcast, and I'm your host, Danny Crichton. Joining me today is Benjamin Breen, a professor of science at the University of California Santa Cruz, who just published his new book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, The Cold War and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science. Also joining me today is Lux Capital's scientist-in-residence, Sam Arbesman. Let's dive into Ben and the wild world of 1950s Utopian San Francisco scientists.
I just want to dive in. I mean, so Ben, you just published this book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, which did you come up with this or did you have an amazing marketer who came up with the title for the book? Because I feel like it hits so many things all at once to intrigue a reader looking at this in a bookstore.

Benjamin Breen:
Well, that's the goal. It's good to hear. It was probably the 50th or 60th title I came up with. The other ones were much longer and not as good.

Danny Crichton:
Well, let's dive in. So I mean the book is focused on Margaret Mead's relationship with Gregory Bateson, but Margaret Mead is sort of this towering figure of intellectual America, mid-1950s, '60s with massive influence in cultural anthropology and a bunch of other fields. And yet I think a lot of folks will recognize the name just given her reputation and renown. But what did she really do? What was her work focused on? Where did she start and where did it sort of end up that made her such a major figure in that period?

Benjamin Breen:
There's a book with another good name called Gods of the Upper Air by Charles King, which is a really good history of the origins of modern anthropology and Margaret Mead's at the center of that story. So she really created a whole field of science. When we talk about Margaret Mead, and all I really knew of her, to be totally blunt before I began this book project, the only book of hers I had actually read was Coming of Age in Samoa, which she wrote in her mid-20s, and she was famous for 50 years after that point and was writing all kinds of stuff. She was completely brilliant and extremely productive to a surprising extent that one book is what she became publicly known for and also it's what she became publicly infamous for.
So one thing I didn't discuss in the book itself, there was actually a publicity campaign slash academic argument the '80s and early '90s that was saying that Margaret Mead had mistakenly attributed traits or behaviors to people that she worked with in Samoa In the '20s. She was arguing that the sexual life of Samoans in the 1920s was quite different from that of the west or United States in particular. It was more liberated. There was more diversity of sexual expression and gender expression, and it was later disputed by this anthropologist named Derek Price and it managed to give her this reputation as a famous scientific figure, but also one that was controversial or in some ways almost like someone who has thought it was like a failed theorist.
And that's not really true. If you look at her total body of work, she was very good at noticing trends before they became prescient. She was researching the cultural impact of going into space the day before Sputnik was announced to the world. She was one of the first futurists. She inspired people like a young Carl Sagan was very inspired by Margaret Mead. As that implies, she was also one of the founders of the whole concept of being a science popularizer writing books that targeted a mass audience, being on TV. She was really the first wave of that and probably the most prominent scientist to do that.
And then that kind of brings us to my book. One of the many things that she was very ahead of her time about was psychedelic therapy. As I show in the book, she was quite interested in altered states of consciousness, and what I call in the book a science of expanded consciousness. And then in the 1930s, she studies peyote being used by the Omaha people in Nebraska and then in the '50s, we can talk more, but she got quite involved in LSD research for a couple of years there and played a key role.

Danny Crichton:
And when you think about it, just give a little bit of context because this is the 1950s where after World War II, LSD, the substance, it was discovered by a person and then ultimately the CIA took it up and that's the popular history of this, but what was the feel of psychedelics at this period of time? I mean, today it's a schedule one drug, you can't really use it, although there's a little bit of pushback on that. Was it just open exploration? Was it a couple of folks were experimenting with it? How did it feel back then when she was getting involved in that community?

Benjamin Breen:
One of the things I think we make a mistake about when we think about the history of psychedelics is we tend to emphasize the LSD history. And LSD has this colorful history, I think it should go without saying, but it bears repeating that there's multiple millennia of psychedelic use among indigenous non-Western people that goes back literally to the beginnings of the psychological record in some cases. And so that's a continuous tradition and that's always been there as an undercurrent. And that's part of why anthropology is unexpectedly important in the story of psychedelics because that's one of the points of connection between medical doctors or western scientists in the 20th century in that older history.
The key thing that changes is what you might call the industrialization of psychedelics. Much like every other scientific production in the '30s and '40s, it goes from being something which is made in a test tube in a lab, takes a lot of time. Classic example would be making enriched uranium. They could do it before World War II, but it took forever and it was extremely expensive and time-consuming, and then suddenly you have factories producing it. That's what happens in the exact same time period with psychedelics. And the first to become industrialized in that way was LSD. It's like literally a production line being sent around the world. It's being marketed under the brand name Delysid to physicians and it gets in the press, like Time Magazine is publishing articles about psychedelics. That's a big shift that happens in really the '30s through '50s, but specifically around World War II.

Danny Crichton:
And so let's go into your book. So you focus on Margaret Mead, her relationships in this milieu. She gets introduced into this and it becomes a part of her work in this era. How do you think about what brought her in? How did this network form and why did so many disparate institutions, people, groups, why did so many people come together around this idea of psychedelics?

Benjamin Breen:
I really think it has to do with this goal of saving the world, which sounds so corny now, but it's striking how utopian people were, specifically how utopian scientists were in the 1920s and '30s. They had lived through a generational change, which is probably unprecedented in human history. So when Margaret Mead was born right around the year 1900, airplanes didn't yet exist. Pretty much everything that we could check off all the boxes of modern life, they weren't really there yet in the year 1900. They were on the horizon, but they hadn't happened. And then suddenly by 1920, let's say, or 1925, the modern physical world that we inhabit was coming into being. Physics research completely changes over that period of time. Industrialization of life, like the assembly line, not to mention the Russian Revolution.
And so many things have changed in that 20 year period that to the people who lived through that, it kind of made sense to them to think that, "Yeah, maybe the next 20 or 30 years will be equally transformative in a good way." And it's weird for us to think that because we know that those next two or three decades were like World War II, the Holocaust, just horrible things one after the other, but they didn't know that. And in fact, they thought World War I really had been the war to end all wars in the '20s. A lot of people really believed that and that science could find a pathway to avoid future war, to extend lifespan, to transform the way people live and see themselves to transform their consciousness.
Aldous Huxley is kind of famous for his dystopian version of this in Brave New World, but he was very utopian in his own personal outlook and actually later wrote a utopian novel inspired by his psychedelic use. And so there's a very powerful thread of utopianism among American scientists, British scientists, but also in Latin America among Soviet scientists. There's this whole utopian movement, and Margaret Mead was really looped into that actually. She was part of that utopian moment in the history of science. She was an inspiration to science fiction authors. I don't think this is widely known, but like L Ron Hubbard and Robert Heinlein read Margaret Mead extensively. She was inspiring those early golden age of sci-fi writers.
Psychedelics kind of enter the scene at that moment when there's a sense that human consciousness can be improved, that science has a role to actually expand people's minds in a positive way, and crucially before the invention of modern psychopharmaceuticals, which is sort of a big word, but what I mean by that is just antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds.

Samuel Arbesman:
Yeah. So related to this utopian trend, I mean, was this the majority the default mode in this 1920s period or was it in the same way that there are many people who have this utopian thread in how they think about the future and certain science fiction writers and more utopians or dystopian, was there really this sense that almost all scientists and thinkers felt that we were on the verge of utopia and it was this thing that we bring about through science and technology?

Benjamin Breen:
It's a very good question. I wouldn't say it was the default by any means. I would say though that there's a generational cohort of people in science, especially really around the time of the Great Depression, who really are motivated by this way of thinking and maybe not utopian, but profoundly idealistic in a way that looks qualitatively different from idealism now.
Actually, the movie Oppenheimer kind of touches on this. J. Robert Oppenheimer was not really an ardent socialist. He was just a very ardent believer in an idealistic, socially applied form of science. And so he falls in with the communist crowd in Berkeley because they also were very utopian and idealistic in the '30s. He's one example of someone who really, really changes how they think about the world over that period of time. But a lot of the people in my book quite decisively shift toward a more pessimistic view, including Margaret Mead actually.

Danny Crichton:
It might be a little bit of a digression, but I will say it's interesting to see this transition, right, from this extraordinary utopia to this post World War II dystopia, which I think is generally triggered around the atomic bomb, but I also think the rise of Karl Popper, falsification, the decline of the Vienna circle and positivism, and so the kind of way we do science was revolutionized kind of contemporaneously with some of these big events that were on the front cover of the newspaper.
And so I just always wonder if that new approach to science that we started in the '40s, '50s and '60s around falsifying that you can't really find truth, but you can prove the negative, and so science is just whatever we haven't proven as false yet, to distill Karl Popper's huge amount of work down to a sentence. But it's interesting because it's almost a negative way of seeing science, right? It's no longer this we can create a utopia and on the other side of that is truth or something like this. That doesn't really exist because you can't really prove that that utopia can ever come.

Benjamin Breen:
There's this book, The Information by James Glick, the science writer, which is fantastic on this topic of the origins of the information age and the kind of origins of the flood of big data that is not just a huge factor in contemporary science, but just contemporary life, the flood of information that defines who we are now.
If I had to define one thing that makes Margaret Mead important as a scientist was becoming one of the first scientists to embrace big data, and she doesn't get credit for that, but in the '30s, she's actually creating this unbelievable record of minute-by-minute human interactions, almost like computer-like. It's really fascinating how in the exact era when digital computers are being theorized and the earliest ones are being created, scientists on the edge of what they're doing at the very forefront are starting to develop an approach to data collection, which is kind of computerish. She's using a video camera and audio recording equipment and her own note-taking, which is then in triplicate and all systematically organized to create a record of reality at an unprecedented level of detail. I've certainly never seen anything like it before.
And then from that, she actually directly becomes friends and collaborators with the founders of information theory, the people in that book, The information, like Claude Shannon was someone Margaret Mead knew. She knew John von Neumann, the creator of Von Neumann architecture, the kind of foundation of modern computing, and it wasn't just like she met these people. She was talking to them regularly. She was in dialogue with them. She was editing the cybernetics conferences. She was a key participant and editor of those conferences, which kind of were the founding of, I would argue the founding of modern day AI research. And they're in that book, The Information is one of these key moments in information theory.
And so I think that's actually the bigger shift that there's this flood of information in the '30s and '40s, this recognition that science is now really about getting beyond the level of anyone human to understand. This is why computers suddenly become almost a necessity. We usually think of that as calculating atomic bomb yields, but there's many other, obviously very quickly, there's many other applications that scientists are putting them to, but one of the things that shifts is that changes from something which seems very positive. Now we can figure everything out to a feeling of like, oh, now we don't know anything. Suddenly everything's kind of become very confusing.
All of that information I just mentioned that Margaret Mead was tabulating and recording, it didn't really add up to any new theory. A lot of what she was trying to do there was failed. It was like she was trying to discover the origins of schizophrenia, and we still don't know how that disease works really. It's still very poorly understood, and that's true of a lot of these early projects involving big data.
Actually another Glick book, Chaos: The Invention of a New Science, where he talks about how it takes a whole other generation of people to realize that you can't really fully comprehend this flood of data, that it doesn't really work using the mental models that existed in the mid-20th century. That's part of what's going on is that it's the beginning of the information age, but it's the very, very beginning. And so the earliest attempts to understand how, for instance, to compare the brain to a computer are failures because we're still trying to do that.
And just in passing, it would be I think super interesting to feed those kind of notes, like Margaret Mead's notes of A Day in the Life of a Balinese Village into an LLM like Claude 3, which has this huge context window, and imagine one, two or three years from now, which has a context window of 100 million tokens and you just feed everything in someone's archive from the '30s into it and find patterns. Maybe finally we're getting to a point where that actually makes it yield something new as opposed to just being this huge mass of data that no one knows what to work with.

Samuel Arbesman:
So related more broadly, just like the computer, I mean, you mentioned a computer is involved in big data and involved in doing things around weapons calculations and predictions and simulations and weather. What was Margaret Mead's take on the computer, especially in the early days? You mentioned that she was involved in these cybernetic conferences, which were sort of laying the foundation for AI and things like that.
In many cases, a lot of the things, the topics and the problems and the solutions that we're still working with computers, all the groundwork was laid during these very, very early years. What were the kind of problems or issues or ideas she was thinking about in terms of how they related to computers even just beyond using data for scientific research?

Benjamin Breen:
One of the really interesting things here is that the social circle that I'm really looking at in the book, which I call the Macy Circle, because those cybernetics conferences were part of a larger series of conferences sponsored by the Josiah Macy Foundation. The details are not really that important. The main thing is that it was a social and intellectual group clustered around New York City in the late '30s through 1950s. You really could make a case that they were one of the core engines of scientific and technological change in the 20th century, this group of people, a lot of them European emigres who fled Nazi Germany or just kind of moved to New York in that period around World War II, John Von Neumann being a classic example. They tend to get mentioned individually or pulled out to explain certain founding of certain disciplines.
I'll give an example. Warren McCulloch. Not a household name, but if you look any book about the history of neuroscience and the origins of neuroscience, that will be like the first chapter and specifically there's this paper that he coauthored with a very eccentric MIT scientist named Walter Pitts who is so eccentric that he actually refused to sign his name and therefore never actually, I believe, never had a real formal affiliation with MIT because he wouldn't sign the employment paperwork. Very strange man, but a genius by all accounts. I actually read somewhere that Margaret Mead and I think Bateson were talking about the smartest people they knew at that time, and they mentioned Von Neumann, but they were like Pitts was actually the smartest, and he's one of those, again, the person who's not a household name but was extremely respected.
There's this paper called What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain, which is a foundational paper in neuroscience, and it's actually known to computer scientists too, people who study computer vision for instance. It's very important in founding that whole concept of computer vision. And one of the key things that was happening there was a sort of naive assumption that the computer and the unit of thought in the brain, because the neuron is just being coined as a term at this point, so they're just starting to think in terms of neurons and neuronal activity, and also they're just inventing modern computing architecture at the same time.
So they're combining in this really fascinating way, they're cross-pollinating these two fields of very early computer science and neuroscience, but they're also leading to a lot of mistaken assumptions of parallelism. I think one of the things that Mead and Bateson were really good on ahead of their time in recognizing is that you can't say the brain is exactly like a computer, and they were trying to tease out how it's different, not necessarily how it's the same, but they were kind of the link between those two worlds.
And then the third world that they linked was psychedelic researchers. So one of the people who was participating in those Macy's Cybernetics Conferences is a German mescaline researcher named Heinrich Kluver who was using mescaline extensively himself all through the '20s and '30s, also giving it to humans and monkeys. And this guy was, again, quite an eccentric character who's actually a very foundational figure in psychedelic therapy. But if you look at what he was doing, he was actually the psychedelic scientist who's hanging out with the information theorists and people inventing modern computing and people inventing modern neuroscience. Mead was also one of those people who's like a missing link between those different fields.

Danny Crichton:
I want to follow up on that. I mean, so obviously we have this connection at the academic level, but we haven't actually talked about the monetary aspect and particularly this CIA connection that's funding some of Mead's work and connecting the dots here. Let's dive into that aspect as well, because that is a fairly large part of your book as well.

Benjamin Breen:
Yeah, yeah, so it's worth saying that a huge amount of the documentation for the CIA's role was destroyed in this 1970s by the director of the CIA at the time.

Danny Crichton:
Oh, good.

Benjamin Breen:
So everything [inaudible 00:18:49]. And apparently it was all their bad stuff, so everything we know now is the stuff that they didn't think was important enough to [inaudible 00:18:56]. They're just like, "Let's leave that out." But what we don't know is pretty bad actually, and it's actually kind of fascinating as an archival story because one of the key ways into understanding what was happening was actually this forgotten set of diaries or really appointment books left behind by a CIA... He was actually a narcotics cop named George Hunter White, but he was a CIA consultant on and off for a period of over a decade.
When he died, he lived in the Bay Area. He actually lived in Stinson Beach. He was the fire chief of Stinson Beach, this little beach town in Marin County. He died and his wife donated his papers to an electronics museum near San Jose, and it just kind of got forgotten there for a couple years until people realize that this is the thing that blows open the whole story of MKUltra, and then suddenly the New York Times is sending reporters there, the Washington Post. It became this international news story where they realized this guy's diaries were like the undestroyed remnant of this whole story that otherwise would've been pretty successfully covered up.
So I had a chance to look at those diaries at Stanford. Stanford ended up getting them, and they were digitized during COVID. They're fascinating and they're really, really interesting in terms of giving a light onto the actual mechanics of what was happening. The main thing that my book does that other books I've seen don't do is that it actually shows how the beginnings of the story were World War II. This guy George Hunter White and his colleague in the work of testing truth drugs, which he called TD, but a truth drug is basically this idea of an enemy spy is captured, you inject them with something and then suddenly they forget where they are and they start saying all their secret information. That was an object of serious importance during World War II.
There was a lot of fears on the part of the British and the Americans that the Nazis had a really effective truth drug, namely mescaline was actually being researched by the Nazis for this purpose and they were trying to find their own. They ended up finding a newly discovered drug called THC, which no one had heard of at the time, so they're all scared of THC. We now know that to be one of the main ingredients in cannabis that is psychoactive.
But basically, these two guys and a circle of people around them were doing truth drug research on civilians and soldiers in World War II in New York City, and they were also brushing up against that world of Margaret Mead. To give an example, the other person doing it, James Hamilton, was a good friend with Margaret Mead throughout her life, and he was actually in the CIA and was really one of the main people funded by MKUltra for a period of 15 years or more.
George Hunter White knew Gregory Bateson in the OSS and that whole circle around them, the Macy Circle, were kind of like the scientific overseers of this work. There was an advisory board for the Truth Drug Commission. Three out of the four people on it had participated in the first Macy Conference on topics of hypnosis and the mind during World War II. So it's kind of like this group of people in New York City who are scientists also become consultants for this World War II era drug research, and it's very patriotic. This is 1943, 1942, '43. This is the exact same milieu and the same mindset that led a lot of very well-meaning idealistic people to work on the Manhattan Project, and some of them later came to regret it, but in 1942 or '43, there was a genuine urgency and a genuine importantly genuine moral clarity on the issue. They're trying to fight the Nazis.
And so I think that makes the story a lot more complex because I am trying in the book not to make this a story of evil government scientists who are just motivated by some kind of mad scientist impulse or they're sadistic or whatever. Actually, they're really patriotic and idealistic in the way they're thinking, but it gets really complicated when we jump forward 10 years and suddenly the enemy is the Soviets or the Koreans or the Chinese, and a lot of it gets pretty hazy there for a period of time, and that's when the Macy conferences become on the radar of the CIA, again, newly founded CIA, and they start directly work with a Macy Foundation employee named Frank Fremont Smith, who's a good friend of Margaret Mead's, and is like a witting collaborator with the CIA to make these conferences and this social circle of scientists into a conduit both for CIA funding, but also a way to get very legit important scientists to give feedback and advisory roles on the secret project of finding a truth drug, and then later it expands out into all kinds of crazy avenues.
It's really hard to track them all. All I really managed to focus on in the book with clarity and with archival grounding that I've emphasized was the Macy Circle, their role in the story, and that is pretty clear from CIA documents that they were quite a central group of people involved in this. But yeah, it was heady stuff getting into these archival documents.
George Hunter White's diary is absolutely bizarre because he's very eccentric and he's also taking these drugs himself when he's testing THC on people. Even though it's an untested drug, he's smoking it. There's one entry where he's knocked out cold for two hours and then he goes to a Chinatown nightclub and gets really drunk. So he was a very weird character who it definitely felt like going into kind of a surreal mirror world version of the 1950s reading his work because it was not Leave it to Beaver. It was pretty weird stuff.

Samuel Arbesman:
Related to that, if there had not been government connection or color, how people ended up thinking about psychedelics more broadly, did these things come out too late for that to change the story? What is the impact on how psychedelics are perceived in the public imagination based on those kinds of things in terms of the government?

Benjamin Breen:
I think one of the main things is a recurrent strain of paranoia that runs through the whole story of psychedelics and psychedelic culture that I think is actually an underrated element in explaining why they failed initially to have this transformative effect on society, because I personally think psychedelic therapy, probably, I can't be certain, but I have a strong expectation that there will be transformative effects of psychedelic therapy in the future.
So the question is why didn't it actually work in the '50s? And one of the answers I think is that kind of background buzz of military, not just CIA, but also tons of military funding. Department of Defense funding is a huge role in the story of psychedelic therapy and the story of computing in the '50s too. Again, they're running, it's not just the same group of people, it's also the same sources of funding that are causing a push and pull between the idealistic element and the element that is like, "Okay, I'm a general. I'm in Virginia. How can this help us win a war against the Soviets?" That's always going on in this funding equation.
So there's the source of funding, but there's also crucially the background awareness of some kind of link to the Cold War. So one of the fun things that I found in the book that was again in Stanford's Archive was an audio tape recording of Alan Ginsburg, the poet, talking to Joe K. Adams, who's an early psychedelic therapist based in Palo Alto in the '50s. He was mentored by Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead's husband, who at that time was teaching at Stanford and nurturing the circle of scientists who was very influential in the formation of psychedelic therapy.
Joe Adams is a forgotten figure today in part because he renounced the whole concept of psychiatry and science really. He moved to Big Sur California. He bought a campground. He lived in the Redwoods. He started teaching at Esalen and kind of dropped out of society. In fact, very much dropped out of society, and Alan Ginsburg had been his patient in the '50s in an early LSD experiment. The first time Alan Ginsburg did LSD, it was actually with this guy Joe K. Adams in Palo Alto in 1959.
And then Ginsburg tracks him down I think in '65 when Alan Ginsburg is now famous. Literally the audio tape, one side of it is Alan Ginsburg hanging out with Bob Dylan backstage and they're gossiping about Marlon Brando and they're just like being Alan Ginsburg and Bob Dylan in the mid '60s. It was really interesting to hear that. But then the next side is him talking to the scientist who led an experimental trial in which Ginsburg had been a patient and Ginsburg asking him like, "Hey, do you still have those tapes?" And then he starts saying things like, "I thought there was something to do with the Cold War. Do you remember I thought that you were a Soviet spy when I was tripping?"
It was really interesting to hear that because that was actually a recurring theme of people I spoke to. I spoke to some people who had been alive and working at that time, but I spoke even more to people's children, and I heard that a lot that there was a feeling of paranoia or a suspicion that there's something beneath the surface of this world that shaped people's actual experiences with psychedelics crucially, and Ginsburg himself was constantly talking about the CIA's role in the drug trade writ large and in psychedelics literally for his entire life from that point onward. It was like a major recurring theme of his poetry actually, and that's kind of true of a lot of those 1960s figures. Ken Kesey also is like that.
And so I think that that was actually, it's almost like a vibe shift, you might call it. Once the Cold War really takes off, especially during the Cuban Missile crisis era, early '60s, there's so much fear about nuclear war and about communist infiltration and this whole kind of McCarthy era to the Cuban Missile crisis era, mid '50s to early '60s also happens to be the moment when psychedelics were legal and could have become really important tools in the repertoire of mental health and of science.
There's a book called American Trip by a historian named Ido Hardikson, which is really good, which makes it kind of counterintuitive and interesting argument that it wasn't actually a Nixonian reaction against hippies that led to the psychedelics being banned. It was actually that psychedelic scientists themselves were not doing very good science, and that there was actually just, again, this kind of question of positivism and empiricism and science. The science itself was not actually reproducible by subsequent studies. It was trials that involved not having a double-blind placebo group, for instance. They didn't use the cutting edge techniques available to medical researchers in the '60s that were being developed, and that lost them their credibility at precisely the moment when there was also all this other culture war elements, so it kind of was like a perfect storm of things that led to them being banned.

Samuel Arbesman:
I had one question about the actual book as a physical object. In it, there's maps in the beginning, which I think you actually made them, and they're not quite fantasy novel maps, but they seem very delightful and beautiful, and I'm just wondering what prompted the creation of that or the inclusion of those in the book?

Benjamin Breen:
Yeah, probably reading fantasy novels as a kid, actually, to be honest.

Samuel Arbesman:
I love it.

Benjamin Breen:
I always liked books with maps, and I think that just goes back to literally reading Lord of the Rings probably. I really liked thinking spatially about this world because it is to a striking extent one that involved people who knew each other and lived near each other in some cases. So New York City in the '40s, it's really fascinating thinking about the intersecting social worlds of people who could walk past each other on the street, L. Ron Hubbard and John Campbell, the science fiction editor, Alfred Kinsey, Allen Ginsberg. Alfred Kinsey met Allen Ginsberg in a Times Square late night diner, and you can pinpoint where it happened and stuff.
Those are all things that I got into when writing the book because I was trying to tell an actual narrative history that would give us a sense of what it was like to live through this rather than just summarizing scientific studies of psychedelic therapies, which is kind of the other way of doing it that I almost did. I'm an academic historian, so my impulse was to take a top-down intellectual history approach, but I wanted to actually get into the social history and the social worlds of these people, so mapping them out, showing where they lived helped that.
I also just... I keep mentioning Stanford's archives, but I'm really grateful to Stanford for having such amazing resources. Another thing that I should say, I did a lot of my research at UC Santa Cruz where I'm a professor, but then Stanford is right across the highway, so that was kind of the two main places I did a lot of my work, and they have a great map collection called the David Rumsey Map Collection. I don't know if you know it.

Samuel Arbesman:
I'm familiar with it.

Benjamin Breen:
It's amazing. It's incredible. It's one of my favorite things on the internet. I really recommend anyone listening to this just look it up. So many amazing maps, and I found some that were in the public domain and kind of made a pastiche of different elements from them, and then added my own little drawings and made my own kind of collage-y sort of maps of the... What did I make, 1930s New Guinea, 1940s New York City and 1950s Silicon Valley are the three maps. I actually wanted to make more, but I didn't have time.

Samuel Arbesman:
That's great.

Danny Crichton:
Well, I know we're almost about on time here. As always, it's a dangerous question for anyone writing a book, but when you start thinking towards the future in your work as a professor in history of science, where's the direction after this? Is it still down on the '50s in this milieu? Are you heading to a different era, different person, different focus, don't know yet? I always love pressing writers on the next thing they're going to write. I used to be an editor. Well, I am an editor, but it's always my next requirement question to go on next.

Benjamin Breen:
So I have two book projects I'm working on right now. They're both really fun to think about, but they're both in the phase of just thinking, just taking notes. One is called Technological Apocalypse, basically going to be looking at the changing idea of the end of the world. So the end of the world used to be exclusively religious, something involving a millenarian or apocalyptic event. If you're Christian, Jesus comes back, but take your pick. There's many world religions, have some kind of vision of futurity that involves the end of the world.
And then by the 19th century, we have this really fascinating story written by Samuel Butler called Darwin Among the Machines. He wrote it in 1860s. Fun fact for viewers of Dune or readers of Dune, this is the origin of the term Butlerian Jihad. Dune is set in a post-AI world where there's been this reaction against intelligent machines, and Frank Herbert named that after this Darwin Among the Machines, Victorian weird future essay kind of... It's hard to explain what this thing is. You can find it online, and it's one of the first times when there's a vision of the future where the apocalypse is brought about by technology. And so I'm trying to look at the first half of that story and just figure out what's going on.
The other project is kind of similar, but it's more of a fun narrative history. As you can guess, that first book is kind of dark, but the other one I'm thinking about is actually about William James. It's looking at his life in the 1880s and '90s. He's a fascinating guy in part because he was really, really involved in a group called the Society for Psychical Research, which was kind of like a Victorian era Ghostbusters. They were trying to find spiritual phenomenon and understand them and debunk them in some cases, but in other cases, they really were believers. William James kind of played both roles, and I'm arguing that this is a formative era for the history of science. It really is the beginning of modern science, and a lot of the people who are creating things that we think of as deeply important for the 20th century are members of this group.
To give one example, William Crookes, the inventor of the vacuum tube, who leads directly to this discovery of x-rays was a fervent believer in spiritual phenomena and was a member of the SPR. William James himself plays a key role in the whole science of consciousness and the development of modern psychology, and he was devoting quite a lot of his time to the Society for Psychical research. I'm getting really into that story, and it's fun because it's like Victorian London at the time of Jack the Ripper. It's New York City during the time of Edison and Tesla's electricity battles, and so it's a really fun little world to get lost in, which is what I like doing.

Danny Crichton:
Well, amazing. Well, Ben, you're going from, I guess, utopia to technological apocalypse or the era of Jack the Ripper, so going from one side to the other, but Ben Breen, author of Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, The Cold War and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science. Thank you so much for joining us.

Benjamin Breen:
Thank you. It was fun.

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