year after joining the board.) His title as “scientific director”
notwithstanding, Hubbard himself said during this period, “My regard
for science, as an end within itself, is diminishing as time goes on . . .
when the thing I want with all of my being, is something that lives far
outside and out of reach of empirical manipulation.” Long before Leary,
the shift in the objective of psychedelic research from psychotherapy to
cultural revolution was well under way.
• • •
ONE LAST NODE worth visiting in Al Hubbard’s far-flung psychedelic
network is Silicon Valley, where the potential for LSD to foster “creative
imagination” and thereby change the culture received its most thorough
test to date. Indeed, the seeds that Hubbard planted in Silicon Valley
continue to yield interesting fruit, in the form of the valley’s ongoing
interest in psychedelics as a tool for creativity and innovation. (As I write,
the practice of microdosing—taking a tiny, “subperceptual” regular dose
of LSD as a kind of mental tonic—is all the rage in the tech community.)
Steve Jobs often told people that his experiments with LSD had been one
of his two or three most important life experiences. He liked to taunt Bill
Gates by suggesting, “He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once
or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.” (Gates has said he did in
fact try LSD.) It might not be a straight one, but it is possible to draw a
line connecting Al Hubbard’s arrival in Silicon Valley with his satchelful
of LSD to the tech boom that Steve Jobs helped set off a quarter century
later.
The key figure in the marriage of Al Hubbard and Silicon Valley was
Myron Stolaroff. Stolaroff was a gifted electrical engineer who, by the
mid-1950s, had become assistant to the president for strategic planning
at Ampex, one of the first technology companies to set up shop in what at
the time was a sleepy valley of farms and orchards. (It wouldn’t be called
Silicon Valley until 1971.) Ampex, which at its peak had thirteen thousand
employees, was a pioneer in the development of reel-to-reel magnetic
tape for both audio and data recording. Born in Roswell, New Mexico, in
1920, Stolaroff studied engineering at Stanford and was one of Ampex’s
very first employees, a fact that would make him a wealthy man.