6 hours ago
4
Microsoft
co-founder Bill Gates revealed about his experimentation with drugs like
LSD
and Cannabis with Apple founder Steve Jobs during his teenage years.
In an interview to The Independent, Gates said that he tried a lot of things because his personality is kind of optimistic, and he was willing to take risks.
“But another thing about my personality is that I like my mind to work and be very logical. So I stopped doing even marijuana early in my 20s just because it made my mind sloppy, either during or the day afterwards,” Gates said.
“I smoked pot in high school, but not because it did anything interesting. I thought maybe I would look cool and some girl would think that was interesting. It didn't succeed, so I gave it up,” he added.
Microsoft co-founder said that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who didn’t know about his past drug use, teased him on the subject.
“Steve Jobs once said that he wished I'd take acid because then maybe I would have had more taste in my design of my products,” recalled Gates.
“My response to that was to say, ‘Look, I got the wrong batch.’ I got the coding batch, and this guy got the marketing-design batch, so good for him! Because his talents and mine, other than being kind of an energetic leader, and pushing the limits, they didn't overlap much. He wouldn’t know what a line of code meant, and his ability to think about design and marketing and things like that... I envy those skills. I'm not in his league,” he added.
Gates added that he was a fan of Michael Pollan’s book about
psychedelic drugs
, How To Change Your Mind, and is intrigued by the idea that they may have therapeutic uses. “The idea that some of these drugs that affect your mind might help with depression or OCD, I think that's fascinating,” said Gates. “Of course, we have to be careful, and that's very different than recreational usage.”
Gates expressed interest in the potential therapeutic applications of psychedelic drugs, referencing Michael Pollan's book "How To Change Your Mind."
"The idea that some of these drugs that affect your mind might help with depression or OCD, I think that's fascinating. Of course, we have to be careful, and that's very different than recreational usage."
In his memoir, Gates describes his first LSD experience, which culminated in an unsettling dental appointment the following day while still under the drug's influence.
The book reveals another LSD experience shared with future Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and friends while watching Kung Fu. During this episode, they traced mathematical symbols on a dewy car trunk.
"The two backwards Es together, side by side, to him, to us, held some profound meaning. 'Bill, see this. Existence exists,' he said as we stared at the dewy car trunk. It was one of those moments that seem perfectly cosmic at the time and purely silly once the acid wears off."
Gates ultimately stopped taking LSD due to concerns about potential memory loss. He worried about the possibility of accidentally erasing his memories, comparing his brain to a computer's data storage system.
