went to work for Willis Harman at SRI, his first job out of graduate
school. By then, Al Hubbard was more or less retired, and Schwartz was
given his office. On the wall above the desk hung a large photograph of
Richard Nixon, inscribed “to my good friend, Al, for all your years of
service, your friend, Dick.” A pile of mail accumulated in the in-box, with
letters addressed to A. M. Hubbard from all over the world, including, he
recalled, one from George Bush, the future CIA director, who at the time
was serving as head of the Republican National Committee.
“Who was this fellow?” Schwartz wondered. And then one day this
round fellow with a gray crew cut, dressed in a security guard’s uniform
and carrying a .38, showed up to retrieve his mail.
“‘I’m a friend of Willis’s,’” Hubbard told Schwartz. “And then he began
asking me the strangest questions, completely without context. ‘Where do
you think you actually came from? What do you think about the cosmos?’
I learned later this was how he checked people out, to decide whether or
not you were a worthy candidate.”
Intrigued, Schwartz asked Harman about this mystery man and, piece
by piece, began to put together much of the tale of Hubbard’s life. The
young futurist soon realized that “most of the people I was meeting who
had interesting ideas had tripped with Hubbard: professors at Stanford,
Berkeley, the staff at SRI, computer engineers, scientists, writers. And all
of them had been transformed by the experience.” Schwartz said that
several of the early computer engineers relied on LSD in designing circuit
chips, especially in the years before they could be designed on computers.
“You had to be able to visualize a staggering complexity in three
dimensions, hold it all in your head. They found that LSD could help.”
Schwartz eventually realized that “everyone in that community”—
referring to the Bay Area tech crowd in the 1960s and early 1970s, as well
as the people in and around Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Network—“had
taken Hubbard LSD.”
Why were engineers in particular so taken with psychedelics?
Schwartz, himself trained as an aerospace engineer, thinks it has to do
with the fact that unlike the work of scientists, who can simplify the
problems they work on, “problem solving in engineering always involves
irreducible complexity. You’re always balancing complex variables you
can never get perfect, so you’re desperately searching to find patterns.
LSD shows you patterns.
frankie
(Frankie)
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