Bill Gates got into some wild talk about LSD and Steve Jobs with Jimmy Fallon this week on The Tonight Show.
The 69-year-old tech mogul stopped by to promote his new book, Source Code. When they hit the 4-minute mark in the clip below, Gates brought up Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s love for Jimi Hendrix.
This got Fallon talking about how Gates wrote about Allen’s acid trip in Source Code.
“He made me do the same thing,” Gates admitted.
When the crowd went wild and Fallon joked about not wanting his guest having any “flashbacks,” Gates called his acid experience “a little crazy” before bringing up Jobs, the late Apple boss.
“The funny thing was, later, when Steve Jobs was kind of denigrating me, he said, ‘Oh, Bill Gates has no design taste. He should have taken acid,'” Gates recalled. “And I was like, ‘Wait a minute. I took the acid. It was just, I got the batch that’s about code, not about design.'”
He cracked, “He got a very different batch than I did.”
But Gates isn’t out here promoting acid trips – he called the experience “kind of fake.”
“And I like it when my mind works well,” he told Fallon. “And I was kind of worried afterwards. ‘Did I mess up my mind and erase all my knowledge?’ So even though I was a big risk-taker, then I thought, ‘No, no more of that. I’m gonna just work super hard.'”
Jobs, who openly called LSD a life-changing experience, wrote in his 2011 biography that Gates would’ve been a “broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.”
Chatting with The Independent recently, Gates joked that Jobs must’ve gotten the “marketing-design batch,” explaining why they turned out so different.
“Because his talents and mine, other than being kind of an energetic leader, and pushing the limits, they didn’t overlap much,” Gates shared with the outlet. “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.”
