
Tripping on Utopia
Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science
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Narrated by:
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Suzanne Toren
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By:
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Benjamin Breen
About this listen
A bold and brilliant revisionist take on the history of psychedelics in the twentieth century, illuminating how a culture of experimental drugs shaped the Cold War and the birth of Silicon Valley.
"It was not the Baby Boomers who ushered in the first era of widespread drug experimentation. It was their parents."
Far from the repressed traditionalists they are often painted as, the generation that survived the second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the '40s and '50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated. American physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (and himself) with LSD in a NASA-funded effort to teach dolphins to talk. A tripping Cary Grant mumbled into a Dictaphone about Hegel as astronaut John Glenn returned to Earth.
At the center of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologists—and star-crossed lovers—Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Convinced the world was headed toward certain disaster, Mead and Bateson made it their life’s mission to reshape humanity through a new science of consciousness expansion, but soon found themselves at odds with the government bodies who funded their work, whose intentions were less than pure. Mead and Bateson's partnership unlocks an untold chapter in the history of the twentieth century, linking drug researchers with CIA agents, outsider sexologists, and the founders of the Information Age.
As we follow Mead and Bateson’s fractured love affair from the malarial jungles of New Guinea to the temples of Bali, from the espionage of WWII to the scientific revolutions of the Cold War, a new origin story for psychedelic science emerges.
©2024 Benjamin Breen (P)2024 Grand Central PublishingListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Benjamin Breen has crafted a brilliant and original history of the chemical dreamscape of American democracy. With a driving narrative and unforgettable cast of characters, Tripping on Utopia resurrects the promise, dangers, and sheer weirdness of one of the twentieth century's unsung frontiers of discovery: the quest to change the world by altering humans' perception of it." (Charles King, author of Gods of the Upper Air and Midnight at the Pera Palace)
“Tripping on Utopia is epic in its scope, cinematic in its rendering. This masterpiece of storytelling is underpinned by impeccable research and extraordinary material that will have you questioning everything you think you know about America's history of psychedelic drug use. Breen is an exciting new voice in narrative non-fiction.” (Lindsey Fitzharris, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Facemaker)
"Part biography, part intellectual history, this kaleidoscopic book reveals the century-long search for psychological liberation at the heart of today’s fascination with psychedelics. It’s a marvel of scholarship and impossible to put down." (Fred Turner, author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism)
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Aubrey Clayton traces the history of how statistics went astray, beginning with the groundbreaking work of the 17th-century mathematician Jacob Bernoulli and winding through gambling, astronomy, and genetics. Clayton recounts the feuds among rival schools of statistics, exploring the surprisingly human problems that gave rise to the discipline and the all-too-human shortcomings that derailed it.
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Rigorously Bayesian
- By Anonymous User on 01-25-22
By: Aubrey Clayton
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Letters from an Astrophysicist
- By: Neil deGrasse Tyson
- Narrated by: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Vikas Adam, Piper Goodeve, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has attracted one of the world’s largest online followings with his fascinating, widely accessible insights into science and our universe. Now, Tyson invites us to go behind the scenes of his public fame by unveiling his candid correspondence with people across the globe who have sought him out in search of answers. In this hand-picked collection of 100 letters, Tyson draws upon cosmic perspectives to address a vast array of questions about science, faith, philosophy, life, and of course, Pluto.
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Dear Neil...
- By Tina G. on 10-14-19
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Chemistry and Our Universe
- How It All Works
- By: Ron B. Davis, The Great Courses
- Narrated by: Ron B. Davis
- Length: 30 hrs and 6 mins
- Original Recording
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Chemistry and Our Universe: How It All Works is your in-depth introduction to this vital field, taught through 60 engaging half-hour lectures that are suitable for any background or none at all. Covering a year’s worth of introductory general chemistry at the college level, plus intriguing topics that are rarely discussed in the classroom, this amazingly comprehensive course requires nothing more advanced than high-school math. Your guide is Professor Ron B. Davis, Jr., a research chemist and award-winning teacher at Georgetown University.
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Great Professor, Hard to Follow.
- By Jen on 05-14-19
By: Ron B. Davis, and others
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Welcome to the Universe
- An Astrophysical Tour
- By: Michael A. Strauss, J. Richard Gott, Neil deGrasse Tyson
- Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
- Length: 17 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Welcome to the Universe is a personal guided tour of the cosmos by three of today's leading astrophysicists. Inspired by the enormously popular introductory astronomy course that Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss, and J. Richard Gott taught together at Princeton, this book covers it all - from planets, stars, and galaxies to black holes, wormholes, and time travel.
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All About What We Know About the Universe - ALL
- By J.B. on 02-17-17
By: Michael A. Strauss, and others
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Ranger Confidential
- Living, Working, and Dying in the National Parks
- By: Andrea Lankford
- Narrated by: Julia Motyka
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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The real stories behind the scenery of America’s national parks. For 12 years, Andrea Lankford lived in the biggest, most impressive national parks in the world, working a job she loved. She chaperoned baby sea turtles on their journey to sea. She pursued bad guys on her galloping patrol horse. She jumped into rescue helicopters bound for the heart of the Grand Canyon. She won arguments with bears. She slept with a few too many rattlesnakes. Hell yeah, it was the best job in the world! Fortunately, Andrea survived it.
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Depressing from Cover to Cover
- By Drew (@drewsant) on 04-13-15
By: Andrea Lankford
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Inspired
- How to Create Tech Products Customers Love, Second Edition
- By: Marty Cagan
- Narrated by: Marty Cagan
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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How do today's most successful tech companies - Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla - design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently from the vast majority of tech companies. In Inspired, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides listeners with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love.
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Great book, terrible audio wanted to ask a refund
- By Srikanth Ramanujam on 11-15-18
By: Marty Cagan
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Cosmic Queries
- StarTalk’s Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going
- By: James Trefil, Lindsey N. Walker - editor, Neil deGrasse Tyson
- Narrated by: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Lauren Fortgang
- Length: 6 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In this illuminating audiobook, Tyson and coauthor James Trefil, a renowned physicist and science popularizer, take on the big questions that humanity has been posing for millennia - How did life begin? What is our place in the universe? Are we alone? - and provide answers based on the most current data, observations, and theories.
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Not worth it
- By Daniel Earl on 03-15-21
By: James Trefil, and others
What listeners say about Tripping on Utopia
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Markland fountain
- 03-16-25
Completely wild
Completely wild history of a corner of social science and two giants related to it. The name dropping in here, in a good way, is off the charts. Incredible how many people they touched and influenced.
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- JP
- 10-14-24
fascinating history and essential to understanding the 20th century
the narrator of this incredible history is excellent. the scholarship and research for the book is solid and the connections made are revelatory and important. so often people stay in the bubble of a specific story and fail to remind us of other threads of thought or counter arguments but this one remarkably does and I will continue to cite and share from it for years to come.
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- Shirley Baldwin
- 02-20-24
The good of the greater..
..isn’t always necessarily so. The chronological explanation of events were well documented by the author, making it easier to understand. The narrator had good expression; it was a pleasant listening experience.
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5 people found this helpful
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- gertrude perkins
- 01-17-24
A good book
You could just get lost in lost life Margaret Mead. So I suggest you do it!
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1 person found this helpful
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- Jeffrey D
- 03-04-24
Interesting cast of characters
This book will be of interest to anyone who is fascinated by psychedelics and in particular the history of LSD in the mid-twentieth century. The book focuses in particular on Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, along with Timothy Leary. A major theme is the role of the CIA in research on LSD. Many of the characters either worked for the CIA or were in the social orbit of those who did. My feeling is that the author sort of hoped he would find evidence of connections between Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson and the CIA, but that all he was able to substantiate were connections with some people who did work for the CIA. Bateson and Mead did work for the government in WWII, though.
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13 people found this helpful
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- Tony Pelusi Jr.
- 02-29-24
Fluid thread
Enjoyed how the author followed what appears to be the thread of. MM & GB life and philosophy
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2 people found this helpful
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- Off The Grid
- 12-17-24
Revealing and comparing my own lifetime experiences
The lack of neutral acceptance in the some time snarky intonations of the narrator which will require me to buy and read the book.
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- AQWF
- 03-31-25
So so
Very interesting topic, important history documented, but read more like a document of facts rather than an interesting story, more a list of names than an in depth understanding. Also REALLY didn’t like the narration.
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