For the Medical Record - Interview with Benjamin Breen
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Mia Levenson: Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of For the Medical Record, a podcast from Johns Hopkins University's Center for the Medical Humanities and Social Medicine. We are your hosts, Mia Levenson.

Richard Del Rio: And I'm Richard Del Rio.

Mia Levenson: And today we have with us Benjamin Breen, an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who recently came to Hopkins to present on his new project. Uh, The title of the presentation was "Surveillance Science: the James Siblings in the Age of Quantification, 1880 to 1910. " He is also the author of several books, most recently "Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, And the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science."

Benjamin Breen, we're so excited to have you here. Thanks for joining us.

Ben Breen: Yeah. [00:01:00] Thank you Mia. Thanks, Richard.

Mia Levenson: So to get us started, we just kind of wanted to ask, you know, a bit about this upcoming project and how you came to it. What about the James siblings sort of excited you, um, to, to do a whole sort of project just on this family?

Ben Breen: I didn't expect to, and I, my training is actually in early modern history. My dissertation, the timeline was I think 1640 to 1755. It was about the, the early modern drug trade and the Portuguese and British empires. So I, I, um, never really thought I would be reading through the collected letters of Henry James and so forth. It was sort of like not my, uh, skillset or even necessarily, um, my interest, like I, I didn't come into this via Henry James as a literary figure, but I did come into it via getting really interested in the entanglement between [00:02:00] family and science. If you wanna think of it as just those two big things like we, we think of science and technology often in these very impersonal terms.

Like the industrial Revolution, right. Or, And especially when it's taught, uh, and this is something I'm guilty of and anyone who teaches a history of science class is guilty of the great man theory of history. And just, even if you're trying to say it's not a thing and trying to fight back against how students have been taught in high school, it's almost impossible to teach the history of science without making a sort of a totem of Darwin or Isaac Newton or the Enlightenment. Right? It, it's like virtually impossible in my experience to cover that the story in 10 weeks or a semester and not just focus on the key names. So I, I got really interested as a methodological question of what happens when you look at the family members of people who are those key names and how does it change?

And maybe the root of it at some weird level is having kids. You know, I started thinking about this project [00:03:00] when both of my daughters were, I, I have a, a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old. So it was sort of like emerged in my mind along with them coming into the world and then remembering Darwin's children, scribbling little kids drawings all over the manuscript of Origin of Species, and just thinking about those little moments where there's these crossovers.

So that's one of the things is I just got interested in William James as this key figure in the history of science. And then his siblings, Alice James, the diarist and in her own self description an invalid. Um, and then Henry James, the writer. Uh, as like this, what if you think of them as like a trio, moving through the machine age in the, in this period of history of science as opposed to just individuals.

And then the other thing was just thinking about the current era. You know, my wife is, uh, involved in researching the human rights impacts of ai. And I've been thinking about that a lot myself. Uh, just what is the current moment? Is this the AI era? You know, how will it be remembered and historicized?

And if we're thinking of it in those [00:04:00] terms, if that is the case, or even if it's not, it's certainly the era of mass automation, algorithms governing many aspects of our lives, digital life becoming predominant. So when did humans start thinking about themselves as computational? Or even just machine-like, and when did that become like the way that science interacted with the human, you know?

And so that was kind of, I kept kind of coming back to the late 19th century. So that's a long answer. But it was like family and then I just got really into, interested in the 1880s for different reasons.

Mia Levenson: Well, and I think I, I really want to get to talking about ai 'cause I, I think that so much of this project is so cool on its own, but then to put it in, like, conversation with the ethics that we're talking about right now with AI and also how AI researchers are citing William James is just so cool.

But just to step us back for a second, just to make sure our listeners know who the James siblings are. You know, you talked about Henry [00:05:00] James, the writer. But, but who are the James siblings? At least how you're thinking about them.

Ben Breen: So I should say that there's five of them and everyone forgets about the other two. Wilkie and Robertson James. And they are, they're one of the most, I would say, one of the most complex and, to me, one of the most interesting families of the 19th century United States. Sort of like material for an epic 19th century novel.

Their grandfather was an Irish immigrant who became a millionaire in the early Republic of the United States. I think he was involved in building the Erie Canal. And then their father, Henry James Sr. Was like a sort of a religious writer, sort of Emerson adjacent. He was friends with Emerson and Thoreau and the, You know, Kind of that transcendentalist New England tradition. And then he was a very, very unusual father in many ways. And one of the ways that made him his children very unusual people, is that he kept moving them around the world. So he would just like [00:06:00] decide that they needed to change schools. And so these five children grew up in the 1850s and 1860s, just constantly moving from Switzerland to Paris to London, to Germany, to New York, to Boston, and then back to all those other places as well. Like more than 20 times, I think in their, in their childhood. So William James is a famous psychologist, but one of the side effects of that upbringing, I think, was that he was also a wouldbe fine artist. He was a psychical researcher, meaning he's researched, um, fringe phenomena.

He, he, he kind of I think, was one of, the people who coined the concept of the fringe. Is it fringe science? He was a physiologist. He was a philosopher, and so he kept kind of changing around, and didn't really decide what he wanted to be until his mid to late thirties. And then I, so I find him interesting because I had always just heard of him as a psychologist and I had read the Varieties of Religious Experience, which is probably his most [00:07:00] famous and greatest book, uh, you know, in my late teens.

And I really loved it. But I didn't really know about that background. And so when I started reading about the family and the biographies of James, of William James, which are really good, I just started seeing him as like this really interesting way to, into understanding what was happening with the late 19th century and the transformations of, you know, just before the modern world kind of begins. Because he, he himself transforms a lot in the late 19th century, like. You know, he struggles a lot with questions of religion, and then he's transformed by reading Darwin and Spencer and Evolutionary thought. It becomes like this defining concept in his life. But then he pushes back against scientism, which is a word he actually uses.

Uh. You know, to me, like a naive faith in science scientific rationality is the pathway or the soul pathway to, to knowledge. So I, I saw him as this, you know, when you think about people evolving over time from their teens to their forties or fifties, it was really fun to, to [00:08:00] see this figure as like someone who lived through this period of rapid technological change and cultural change. Then emerged from it with like a, I, I find it, his basic approach to life to be very compelling and useful for me as a person today, like pluralism. Just the idea of not having, I won't try to define pluralism on the spot, but, but basic, I would say fundamentally one of his main, um, main anti antipathies in life was against certainty.

He just really, really had an allergy to people who were a hundred percent sure of. Scientific theory, a theory of life or society, and he was very open to changing his mind. and, I, I find that really compelling right now because everything is so polarized and, everyone is so entrenched in their little algorithmic silo of content that they receive and and it just, it, it started speaking to me as a human while reading about him.[00:09:00]

Richard Del Rio: William James kind of sits on the pantheon American social scientists. You know, he's part of that long history of of, of great American social scientists. And I'm curious, how do you parse out between the influences of him engaging with the science of the period versus the influence of his families. And, and also. During your talk, I recall you mentioning that this is a family that's coming up in, in, in a larger history of imperial technologies and that his thinking is influenced by this. Could you elaborate on, on, on, on that point?

Ben Breen: Yeah, I so, I, I, it's a, I need to tread carefully when I, when I actually turn this into a book, 'cause this is still an early stages project, um, where I, I'm, it's, it's way too easy to draw direct lines between people's childhood or their siblings or their parents [00:10:00] and scientific theories or creative works that they produce, right?

I mean, this is like a very richly mind territory in literary history and it's much debated. There's a school of thought that we just need to kind of, draw, like, you know, create a firewall between people's personal lives and their intellectual life or creative life. And just like, don't try to cross those two. I'm more open to trying to find those connections. But at the same time, you really have to avoid a simplistic approach, to thinking about, you know, was William James for instance, interested by the science of religion, which is what the varieties of religious experience was trying to do. Because his father was obsessed by religion throughout his life and spirituality. And also because William James rejected his father's spiritual viewpoint. I think certainly, like there's no doubt that there's something going on there, some influence, but you can't be like, he wrote this book because of his father. Right? It's like, it's not a good approach to this, sort of , delicate connections that you need to draw.

And so I'm still [00:11:00] thinking this through, but in terms of putting the family against a framework of changing culture, of science changing society, one of the things that I was really drawn to and one of the focuses, focuses of my research is disability or sickness or, or just the psychic ailments of various sorts, which really haunted the James family.

And I think it's part of what makes them jump out to me. Alice James was, you know, profoundly shaped by, a basically mysterious illness, sometimes described as neuresthenia , sometimes hysteria, you know, American nervousness is this famous term that American physician, , Beard, , coined to describe it.

We would maybe just say anxiety and depression now, but it's kind of all the same nebulous set of symptoms that just change the names we use for them over time. I got very interested by thinking about Alice James as sort of a patient, zero for the [00:12:00] epidemic, the mental health epidemics of modern life, and which she kind of saw herself as, you know, I think that she was aware that her brother was developing modern psychology and that she was living through this transformation in the world of society and technology and her ailment, neuresthenia, was blamed on, you know, the telegraph, long distance communication. Women's literacy was one of the causes that was like pinpointed for the, for the causes of this disease that no obviously is no longer, in the DSM. And and so she saw herself as a product of the machine age and of modern life and as someone who had been psychically damaged by it.

And I think to a large extent, William James did too. 'cause he also was diagnosed with neuresthenia and also you know, had major struggles with mental health, including a suicidal period, which profoundly shaped him. So every biography talks about that, but I started thinking about it as a history of technology, history of science topic, not just William James as a figure in the history of [00:13:00] psychology, but this family as emblematic people and instructive and interesting people to think with in a history of modern mental health and you know, that that kind of contemporary entanglement between technology as a potential cure for, for psychic ills or ailments and a potential cause. When I'm trying to find where that goes back to, you can find different points of origin, but I really think there's like this nexus around the 1880s, 1890s, the concept of neurasthenia. I don't, I don't think it's a coincidence that this is when Freud is, you know, undergoing his medical training and developing his early theories. And it's also when William James kind of comes into his own in developing this concept of a subliminal self or subconscious mind, which really preoccupied his thoughts in the same period of the 1880s.

Mia Levenson: And that, that kind of reminds me of, you know, some of my own work that I've done in this world and, and how, [00:14:00] you know, one of the other causes that George Beard points to for neuresthenia is also like the steam train and how it's rattling is also shaking like the spine and the brain and how that obviously can't be good for us. And then how this like fits into this, this larger history of, people thinking about the mind as a place where sickness arises. Right. Um, and I think that this really nicely kind of bridges us back into what you mentioned earlier as thinking about this project as maybe a, a, a pseudo proto- history of AI and artificial intelligence and so how, how are you making this connection between the contemporary conversations around AI and ethics around AI with the James family?

Ben Breen: Yeah. I. know. It's, it's a, that railroad thing I was thinking about that. I was talking to someone about how, like [00:15:00] modern technology is so fast moving and you know, he was talking about not having a cell phone, not having a smartphone, and how people find that so strange. But I was saying like, you know, people in the 19th century would've thought you were like this product of modern technology 'cause you take the subway or you take trains and you would have like, what is it called What is it called? Railroad Spine. or something? I, I've seen those references.

Mia Levenson: it was called

Ben Breen: Railroad brain. Yeah.

It's like the jostling of the tracks makes your brain change and stuff. And so they would've seen all of us, even those of us who are not early adopters or who, who in fact reject many elements of modern technology. All of us are just these extremely, you know, modern, uh, technologically shaped machine people from the perspective of the 19th century. Just, you know, 'cause of how we live our lives. Like, you have a, a wristwatch that's digital wristwatch on your wrist and headphones On your head.

People walk around with AirPods in their ears and it's, we're all kind of like getting a little, you know, cyborg in terms of our, accoutrements, our, our [00:16:00] like ordinary lifestyle. But the, specifically the ai, the prehistory of AI angle that I'm taking with this book, I'm, I'm still working out how much I want to frame it in those terms as opposed to framing it as a prehistory of the algorithmic society or the, the, the kind of, governance of, of data as this predominant factor, this sort of the main force in the world.

But I do think there's something really interesting going on with mass data collection, biometric data collection, but also, you know, crowdsourcing scientific knowledge, is, is sort of an invention of 1880s and 1890s via William James was doing it. Francis Galton, this, founder of Eugenics, who I'm sure you write about, , was developing this in the England, but it was just sort of like in the air.

It was just a lot of crowdsourcing of data, questionnaires, circulars, surveys, censuses right are, are becoming much more systematic in this period. So if we're trying to find the, the beginning of like, you know, when does the regime [00:17:00] of, of being data hungry, when is the, this idea of data is like the currency of the realm really become a dominant force in the world.

I think it's the 1880s. It's not after World War ii. It goes back earlier than that. So that's the undercurrent there and the, the foundation. But then also there's really interesting things with William James as a theoretician or a philosopher or psychologist of consciousness specifically, because once you start thinking about consciousness as something which is framed in Darwinian evolutionary terms, you know, people have thought about consciousness for a very long time, but post Darwinian theories of consciousness are different. Right. And if you start thinking about what is the origin of the concept of reinforcement learning, this really key tool in machine learning and AI research, it's Darwinian, right? It's like, you're, you're getting many, many different, versions of a machine learning model, and you're, you're giving, sort of like survival pressures to them.

You're making some of them want to do certain things and then you're, you're encouraging the persistence or [00:18:00] the duplication of some, which do those things better., It's all in a Darwinian scientific framework, and it's all going back to that moment when people started to apply evolutionary theories to society. You know, Spencer, social Darwinism, William James, you could call what he was doing sort of darwinian psychology, you know, he was thinking a lot about that. And he was thinking about consciousness as something shaped constantly by selective pressures and shaped by attention. And so I'm really intrigued by how attention mechanisms are now like the central fact of the transformer architecture, which is underlies large language models.

And it should be said when people who are, you know, doing machine learning and developing generative AI models talk about attention. It's not the same as human attention, but they're still thinking a lot about how to get algorithms, to get machines to pay attention to stuff. And that was one of the key insights of the recent AI research is that once you, once you can get them to sort of focus their attention [00:19:00] selectively, they suddenly seem to get smarter.

Seem to get smarter, right? And so there's really a fascinating through line from that focus on, uh, post Darwinian concept of consciousness focused on attention, and also focused on like what James called the cash value of a thought, you know, does it, how does it actually act upon the world? What are the practical effects of a thought or a theory that's very much entangled with how machine learning works, right?

You're like thinking about the outcomes. Does it do better on this measurement? Does it act on the world? So I I really think that like the, if you're trying to find the sociological prehistory of ai, you're gonna end up with like the Macy Cybernetics conferences or Alan Turing, right? As a group of people, as a discipline, it's forties and fifties, 20th century.

If you're trying to find the theoretical or empirical underpinnings, you're gonna end up in the beginning of the era of big data, which I think is the late Victorian period [00:20:00] in World War I, that that zone. And then if you're trying to look for like this kind of philosophical influences, it's gonna be people like Galton and James because it's like, you, know, the sort of high priest of data is, is galton. Uh, the, The high priest of thinking about consciousness in a Darwinian, but also expansive way and thinking beyond the limits of the conscious mind of a human as being the only thing is, I, think that's one of his big insights just in passing, it just, it's weird how so much of his thinking about that gets framed as ghost hunting or paranormal research. Which he was obviously fascinated by, but he was, I think more than that, just fascinated by the idea that consciousness is not just a thing that sits in your brain necessarily, like extended mind and, and the idea that it could persist in different ways or be kind of traced outside of just the pure realm of, of, a single human brain thinking about consciousness in a more [00:21:00] expansive way.

Richard Del Rio: On the questions of consciousness attention, during your talk, you gave a little bit of a roadmap for what the rest of the book might look like, and a word that came up to me, because similar to you, I, I cut my teeth on the history of drugs, that was a section called the Hallucination Crisis. Now, in the context of ai.

Ben Breen: The Hallucination Census.

Richard Del Rio: Yes, that's, thank you. forgive me for the, for the misquote. Um, I would love to hear you elaborate on that.

Ben Breen: Yeah, so the Hallucination Census was like this sort of group project of james and then the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, which still exists. It's still a ongoing concern. And one of the ways this project got started is I went to their archives at Cambridge, England and looked through them and I found one of [00:22:00] William James's little calling cards inviting people to the first meeting of the American branch of the Society for Psychical Research.

And I just was so interested by this as an object. It was so evocative. And I just started researching that history and reading. There's a lot of good books about the this and I got really interested in the sort of negative space around that group because they're, so, the way I had heard of them was I just thought of them as like Victorian version of the Ghostbusters. They're just like researching haunted houses or like researching spirit mediums and seances, which they definitely did like a lot. They were very interested by that.

But they were also like some of the leading psychological researchers of their period. You know, when, when there's this congress of experimental psychology at the 1889 Paris World's Fair, the, the the, emissaries coming from England are Francis Galton. And basically everyone else is the key members of the Society for Psychical [00:23:00] Research. And they're taken really seriously. They're meeting with like Charcot and all these kind of famous, you know, French psychologists and, they're, they're extremely influential in the history, the mainstream history of science.

It's not that they get written out, but I think that they definitely, two things like one, there was a push from psychologists a little bit later, like around 1900, 1910 to push back on the paranormal stuff. 'cause they wanted to make their discipline established, right? They wanted chairs of psychology at all the universities.

They wanted it to be a famous field of study. So there was kind of an intentional, like, let's get the ghost stuff out of psychology and push it off. But then the other thing is that I just think the ghost material of the SPR is so, resonant and you know, it's like fun. It's interesting to people. So that's just like kind of what gets picked up when people talk about the Society, society for Psychical research.

But this, the hallucination sense, the hallucination census is actually more in keeping with what they were really focused on It [00:24:00] wasn't about ghosts, it was about unexplained forms of conscious communication. So what they were really interested by is not just hallucinations as such, but moments when someone has a premonition of a death or some kind of feeling that someone is sharing a consciousness with them.

Communication across cons, consciousness is, is a preoccupation of this. And what it was doing, how it actually worked was that they just basically mailed out a bunch of letters and, and kind of issued public notices that they were asking for people's personal accounts of their subjective experiences of hallucination.

And it explicitly was not it, it was explicitly aimed at, you know, sane mentally healthy people. That's how they were framing it. So they were trying to kind of, I, if you know, like Oliver Sacks, I kind of feel like it was a very Oliver Sacks sort of project of like investigating this unexplained [00:25:00] brain related thing, in, in a very open-minded, almost literary way, because it was just compiling these people's, like really personal accounts, memoir type of accounts, dreams that they had, or like moments after waking up or moments of trauma in people's lives.

Like a lot of them involve, you know, things like, my son had died, I didn't know. But then I had this vision that he came to me and his face was disfigured. That's one of them I was reading. So it was, it was part of the psychical research phenomenon, but it, it was also very overtly like a serious scientific project.

That was actually, I think, one of the first mass crowdsourced psychological studies in the sense that it gathered information from willing participants who like shared it with, with a, like, you know, they had this big filing system. They had this whole multi-year, you know, two continents of teams, of people compiling this. They had a index card file, you know, it was very systematic. And, uh, it, it, [00:26:00] it interests me because it's sort of like using the methods of what I call surveillance science. 'cause Francis Galton directly inspired some of the methodology. But it's not doing it to create, for instance, a state repository of fingerprints, which is also being done at this time. Or in the more sinister, even more sinister like. Eugenics record office sort of things where it's like tracing supposed, you know, um, debility or degeneration through families like that.

That's like the really dark part of this form of scientific data collection in this period. Um, and today, but what fascinates me about this project is that it's actually using those methods of statistical data gathering and like mass data collection to make a case against the normative framework of the average human mind or thinking about humans as normal or abnormal. It's actually kind of carving out this much more open-ended space for, you know, various forms of different [00:27:00] experiences of consciousness and different experiences of like the nature of reality, which are again, like on the fringe between science and something beyond science, which I think was the main. I. Don't know if it was William James' main preoccupation in life, although maybe it was, but it was definitely his preoccupation in the 1880s when he was like developing, you know, his, his sort of like mature form of, of psychology. He was just obsessed with the fringe, with the, the edge of the knowable and with, frankly just like with telepathy, with, you know, the, the transmigration of consciousness outside the body. He was just really into that.

Richard Del Rio: That's far out.

Mia Levenson: Brought up eugenics , which is to use Richard's phrase like what I cut my teeth on. You know, it's so interesting the way that Francis Galton and, his early interest in biometric data and then how that influences like the, the creation of eugenics [00:28:00] as both like a science but also a movement in the late 19th century, early 20th. And how that this, how you're essentially connecting these threads between this interest in biometric data and also interest in consciousness and the mind. And then if we think about today where the recent interest in what we might think of as eugenic thought about, You know, effective altruism and, pronatalist, rhetoric, is primarily, you know, coming out of technocrats like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and I guess I, I who are of, you know, are also interested in what you're calling like surveillance data. And I guess, you know, connecting this back to the conversation around ai. I, I think I'd just love to hear your thoughts on, like, is do you think that there is this connection between an interest and like consciousness and this interest in like, quantifying the human [00:29:00] mind, or the, the human body? What, what do you see as this like connection between the 1880s, 1890s and the current rhetoric we're seeing today?

Ben Breen: It's, this is another thing where it's very tempting to be, to draw really clear connections. 'cause there is so much about the 1890s in particular that reminds me of the president. I mean, you know, all these debates about tariffs like there, it's always like, not since the 1890s have tariff rates been this high.

And likewise, there's a nexus of several things, but you could define it in terms of like, there's like a muscular rhetoric of manhood, which I think is very much an 1890s trope associated with Teddy Roosevelt. But he was just one among many that has revived a lot recently. Uh and, and then that combined with actual like eugenics.

So eugenics as a concept emerges in the 1890s In, particular. I think it's maybe coined a bit earlier. You know, better than me, but it seems like it sort of becomes [00:30:00] institutionalized for the first time around then. And, and likewise, census taking biometric data collection, Galton, I I talk about fairly as, as sort of a exemplar because he is not the only one.

It's like a, a larger movement to begin keeping records of people's biometric data. Their fingerprints is the first one, but. Galton had records of all kinds of stuff about people, their reaction times, et cetera. So there's like this kind of combination of a, a belief in a sort of, masculine ethos of procreation, virility, generation, right? Plus science. Plus an an overt imperial desire for control that like galton is just like one exemplar of, but there's obviously, Teddy Roosevelt is another of just like, let's have an empire of science. Right? And so that's the 1890s version. The present day version. I, I think parts of it are traceable to that as like the [00:31:00] intellectual foundation zone for that ethos, I, there's been people, like Timnit Gebru, who, who have written about this as a contemporary phenomenon, who have, who've kind of directly linked the sort of technocratic tendencies of some in Silicon Valley and beyond to the history of eugenics, and I think that's valid.

And I, I think what I, what I'm trying to do with this book though, is actually just go back to the 1890s and actually learn more about that rather than just, I, I, I don't wanna risk anachronism or teleology by saying like, this caused that, or this is that, now just the same. It's not the same of course, but, it, it is really striking how the first machine age witnessed these changes in response partly to the effects of mass technology and, and sort of a perception of, of social decline and instability caused by technological change. A lot of the rhetoric around not just eugenics, but American imperialism, the [00:32:00] British Empire, the sort of , overall like vibe of the 1890s was we are living in a world that has been profoundly shaped by technological change. And if we don't, careful and if we don't steer it carefully, we are gonna de degenerate. You know, if you read like HG Wells' book, "The Time Machine", it's very much a product of that era. And I do find that to be kind of a pervasive ambient feeling among my students actually, like young people right now are really, really concerned about. Brain rott. You know, this concept of like being always attached to an algorithmic stream and AI is part of it, but it's also just so, and social media is part of it, but it's, I think it's something bigger. It's just like being connected to data and technological media for being enveloped by data and, and surveilled by those media is a perception that like it's doing something bad to us as a species and bad for our brains.

More than anything I feel like that is the real comparison. So it's [00:33:00] like, I'm not saying, I definitely think that there's like, are, you could argue that there are direct intellectual links between like the Peter Thiel wing of the contemporary president and Francis Galton. I think that's probably true. But it's also bigger than that where there's just like this, I see the 1880s and nineties and the present as being really defined by a pervasive sense that technology is doing stuff to us that is beyond our control and that we are like buffeted by it and that it's either leading us toward some glorious transcendent future or leading us toward a, an apocalypse. Right. And I, that's such a pervasive sentiment that it's like expressed in all these myriad different ways by people of different political beliefs and different, different nationalities, right? It's not just an American thing at all.

But I, one of the things I find so interesting about studying the past and, and actually making that specific and not trying to be too direct, is that we do know what happened to the 1880s and 1890s. Right. It's not a mystery. They, to them, they didn't know to we, to us. I mean, I ended my book in [00:34:00] 1914, right? And it, there is kind of a sense of a closing of an era of human consciousness and human society in 1914. And I think that's, you know, it can be overstated, but it really was kind of the end of a epoch of humanity. So in a sense, the apocalyptic feeling that they had was accurate actually, you know.

Richard Del Rio: In, in the short amount of time that we've had together, you have told us very gripping stories about cultural and conceptual underpinnings of our now algorithmic dominated society. At least the distant underpinning. I, I just have to know. Before we close, what do you hope to discover next as you continue on this project?

Ben Breen: That's a good question. I, yeah, thanks for asking that. I, I don't, , I'm trying to be pluralistic about just not, not see what, see what I find in [00:35:00] archives. The main thing I think I can do differently with this, 'cause William James has been, there's so many good books about him. But I do feel like because there's so much published material on not just him, but a lot of figures in late 19th century science, they just, like their complete letters are published.

I, I have found that when you start going to archives and looking at the, what's scribbled on the back of a letter or a little slip of paper that falls out of a book or, or marginalia, you know, you start finding some interesting stuff. So the main thing is I just hope to like have a chance to really spend time in the archives and find new things that illuminate, , familiar stories. That's kind of what I like to do. So I'm just desperately hoping to find like a little forgotten diary entry or a letter that says, burn this at the end, but it never got burnt. I, I love stuff like that.

Mia Levenson: Benjamin, thank you so much for joining us. You have been a spectacular guest. You know, it's not easy to bridge the gap between me and [00:36:00] Richard's work and fielding questions from both of us that are of course, very specific to, to what we do. But thank you again for, for being here and for chatting with us.

Ben Breen: Well, thank you I had a great time. It was great talking to both of you.

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