*My goodness that's interesting.
He was there and he always kept his wits about him, so he would know
(…)
It was spring of 1966, and we had been in space for 10 years, and nobody had taken a photograph of the Earth, not the Russians or Soviets as they were then, nor us. I saw that button: “Why Haven’t We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?” That was purely a low-dosage LSD afternoon in North Beach.
How do you feel about the idea of the “hippie-to-tech pipeline”? Biopics of Steve Jobs, for example, that focus on his mind expansion and how it turned into his technological ideas later. Is that characterization of early tech correct in your estimate?
Stuff that happens to somebody in their twenties is going to be formative, no matter what. For lots of people it’s travel. They work in the Peace Corps and that’s who they are. Their first amazing job establishes their sense of what’s possible. And psychedelic drugs were new, so they were unique to us. They were indeed potent, and led to revelations and occasions. Maybe more occasions than revelations. In any case, they were definitely formative in the case of Steve Jobs. The couple of times that he and I talked, we would reminisce about acid trips.
You say it brought more occasions than revelations. What do you mean by that?
The occasions that… From ’66 on, LSD was illegal and marijuana was illegal. I never actually bought dope in my life; it was always given to me. There was a lot of sort of handing around of this contraband. So it was necessarily underground, and necessarily a kind of trust connection. A lot of people got started in business being young entrepreneurial drug dealers who went on to great things later on in other businesses. There was this medium of exchange that we were all engaged in….
