Fortune remembers that in 2011 Steve Jobs had told author Walter Isaacson that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates would "be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger."

But The Indendepent notes that in his new memoir Gates does write about two acid trip experiences. (Gates mis-timed his first experiment with LSD, ending up still tripping during a previously-scheduled appointment for dental surgery...) "Later in the book, Gates recounts another experience with LSD with future Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and some friends... Gates says in the book that it was the fear of damaging his memory that finally persuaded him never to take the drug again." He added: "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."

Gates went on to say 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."

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."
Touring the country, 69-year-old Gates shared more glimpses of his life story:

• The Harvard Gazette notes that the university didn't offer computer science degrees when Gates attended in 1973. But since Gates already had years of code-writing experience, he "initially rebuffed any suggestion of taking computer-related coursework... 'It's too easy,' he remembered telling friends."

• "The naiveté I had that free computing would just be this unadulterated good thing wasn't totally correct even before AI," Gates told an audience at the Harvard Book Store. "And now with AI, I can see that we could shape this in the wrong way."

• Gates "expressed regret about how he treated another boyhood friend, Paul Allen, the other cofounder of Microsoft, who died in 2018," reports the Boston Globe. "Gates at first took 60 percent ownership of the new software company and then pressured his friend for another 4 percent. 'I feel bad about it in retrospect,' he said. 'That was always a little complicated, and I wish I hadn't pushed....'"

• Business Insider adds that according to his memoir, Gates "eventually gave his additional 4% stake to [Steve] Ballmer to convince him to quit business school for Microsoft. 'He joined in 1980 and became the 24-hour-a-day partner I needed,' Gates wrote."

• Benzinga writes that Gates has now "donated $100 billion to charitable causes... Had Gates retained the $100 billion he has donated, his total wealth would be around $264 billion, placing him second on the global wealth rankings behind Elon Musk and ahead of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg."

• Gates told the Associated Press "I am stunned that Intel basically lost its way," saying Intel is now "kind of behind" on both chip design and fabrication. "They missed the AI chip revolution, and with their fabrication capabilities, they don't even use standards that people like Nvidia and Qualcomm find easy... I hope Intel recovers, but it looks pretty tough for them at this stage."

• Gates also told the Associated Press that fighting a three-year antitrust case had "distracted" Microsoft. "The area that Google did well in that would not have happened had I not been distracted is Android, where it was a natural thing for me. I was trying, although what I didn't do well enough is provide the operating system for the phone. That was ours for the taking."

• The Dallas News reports that in an on-stage interview in Texas, Mark Cuban closed by asking Gates one question. "Is the American Dream alive?" Gates answered: "It was for me."

Thursday Bill Gates launched a new podcast called "Unconfuse Me." ("What do you do when you can't solve a problem? I like to talk to smart people who can help me understand the subject better...") Join me on my learning journey as I talk to brilliant guests about Alzheimer's, artificial intelligence, the future of education, plant-based meat, the evolution of language, marijuana, and more.
The first words of the first episode are a clip of Seth Rogen saying "Edibles? I don't mess with that. Snoop Dogg doesn't eat edibles. Like, that's how wild the variation on edibles is, and I do not recommend this."

Then Bill Gates' voice says "I love learning, even if a topic's complex, I like to see if I can figure it out..." People reports that the 67-year-old Microsoft co-founder and former CEO also spoke to Rogen and his wife Lauren Miller about the future of Alzheimer's research: With studies showing that "40% of cases" are preventable, according to Rogen, the "five brain healthy habits" in their framework are important: sleep, exercise, nutrition, mental fitness and emotional well-being.

He even confessed that his being a celebrity encourages people to better care for themselves. "I taught this coursework of brain health, and we've also had a neurologist teach the coursework, and we scientifically proved that people retain information better from celebrities than doctors, which is it's a heavy burden," he joked, adding that this information "was published..."

Miller also shared that she goes to a neurologist and the pair are both "open" with their doctors about their habits, and "no one" in the medical world has told them that smoking weed is bad for their brain health. They even believe its benefits of boosting hunger and relieving stress might be good for preventing Alzheimer's. "It's not federally legal, so there isn't money to fund research," Miller said.

Gates later concluded the podcast with his own funny anecdote, laughing about his first time he ever smoked weed — back when it was a "rebellious" thing to do. "In school out of the, say 105 people in my class I think, there were three or four who didn't smoke," he said. "Because it was kind of a, 'Hey, I'm an adult! Hey I can break the rules!' But I will say, sometimes it's like, I guess I'm doing this to be cool. It wasn't so much smoking for pot's sake."

Online electronics retailer Newegg said it is now accepting dogecoin as a method of payment. From a report: Customers will be able to complete transactions using the dogecoin held in their BitPay wallet, according to an announcement Tuesday. Newegg first began accepting payments in bitcoin in July 2014. The company is now among the first retailers to accept dogecoin as payment. Further reading: Dogecoin Rips in Meme-Fueled Frenzy on Pot-Smoking Holiday.

The recent interview Elon Musk conducted with Joe Rogan, where Musk took one puff from a marijuana cigarette after a lengthy conversation around AI, social media and space, is prompting a NASA safety probe at SpaceX. The Washington Post reports that NASA was not amused with Musk's antics and has "ordered a safety review of SpaceX and Boeing as a response to the colorful chief executive's shenanigans," reports TechCrunch. From the report: In an interview, NASA associate administrator for human exploration, William Gerstenmaier, told the Post that the review will begin next year and would examine the "safety culture" of both Boeing and SpaceX. Rather than focus on the safety of the actual rockets, the Post said that the review would look at the hours employees work, drug policies, leadership and management styles, and the responsiveness of both companies to safety concerns from employees. The review is going to be led by the Office of Safety and Mission Assurance within NASA, which has conducted similar probes before, according to the Post report.

According to the NASA official, the process could be "pretty invasive," with the potential for hundreds of interviews with employees at every level and across all locations where the companies operate. At stake is the potential $6.8 billion in contracts the two companies received in 2014 to revive crewed missions to space. SpaceX grabbed $2.6 billion from NASA for the program, while the remainder went to Boeing. In a statement given to the Post, SpaceX said, "We couldn't be more proud of all that we have already accomplished together with NASA, and we look forward to returning human spaceflight capabilities to the United States."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Blood tests that try to quantify marijuana use are in fact useless at assessing how impaired a driver is, according to a study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. The study found that people with low blood amounts of THC -- or delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, the main psychoactive component of pot -- may still act as if they're really stoned. On the other hand, some people may have THC measurements off the charts yet still act normally. The finding is critical because several states have already set legal limits for the amount of THC a person can have in their blood while driving. AAA concluded that such limits are "arbitrary and unsupported by science, which could result in unsafe motorists going free and others being wrongfully convicted for impaired driving." The conclusion echoes that of other researchers that also noted no correlation between blood THC levels and impairment. Still, there is a need to deter people from smoking pot while driving, AAA argues, as it can impair driving. It recommends that until scientifically valid measures of impairments are put into place, law enforcement should use a combination of behavior and psychological tests to assess whether drivers who use marijuana are safe to drive.

Bruce66423 writes: A large scale European study shows that students who were unable to buy cannabis legally were 5% more likely to pass their University courses. Below-average students with no legal access to pot were 7.6% more likely to pass their courses, and the effect was five times more pronounced when dealing with courses involving math. One of the study's authors said, "We think this newfound effect on productivity from a change in legal access to cannabis is not negligible and should be, at least in the short run, politically relevant for any societal drug legalization and prohibition decision-making. In the bigger picture, our findings also indicate that soft drug consumption behavior is affected by their legal accessibility, which has not been causally demonstrated before. ... Considering the massive impact on cognitive performance high levels of THC have, I think it is reasonable to at least inform young users much more on consequences of consuming such products as compared with that of having a beer or pure vodka."

An anonymous reader writes "Reuters reports, 'In a study of adults who experienced psychosis for the first time, having smoked marijuana daily was linked to an earlier age of onset of the disorder.' ..."This is not a study about the association between cannabis and psychosis, but about the association between specific patterns of cannabis use ... and an earlier onset of psychotic disorders,' Dr. Marta Di Forti, who led the research at the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College, said in an email. Among more than 400 people in South London admitted to hospitals with a diagnosed psychotic episode, the study team found the heaviest smokers of high-potency cannabis averaged about six years younger than patients who had not been smoking pot. Psychosis is a general term for a loss of reality, and is associated with several psychiatric diseases, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. ... "The thorny question is whether they might otherwise have developed the disease or would have not had mental illness. It's a distinction we haven't figured out yet," Compton said. ... It is still unclear whether there are safe levels of use for cannabis, she added. '"

Hugh Pickens writes "A recent assessment by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, based on random roadside checks, found that 16.3% of all drivers nationwide at night were on various legal and illegal impairing drugs, half them high on marijuana. Now AP reports that with marijuana soon legal under state laws in Washington and Colorado, setting a standard comparable to blood-alcohol limits has sparked intense disagreement. Unlike portable breath tests for alcohol, there's no easily available way to determine whether someone is impaired from recent pot use. If scientists can't tell someone how much marijuana it will take for him or her to test over the threshold, how is the average pot user supposed to know? 'We've had decades of studies and experience with alcohol,' says Washington State Patrol spokesman Dan Coon. 'Marijuana is new, so it's going to take some time to figure out how the courts and prosecutors are going to handle it.' Driving within three hours of smoking pot is associated with a near doubling of the risk of fatal crashes. However, THC can remain in blood and saliva for highly variable times after the last use of the drug. Although the marijuana 'high' only lasts three to five hours, studies of heavy users in a locked hospital ward showed THC can be detected in the blood up to a week after they are abstinent, and the outer limit of detection time in saliva tests is not known. 'A lot of effort has gone into the study of drugged driving and marijuana, because that is the most prevalent drug, but we are not nearly to the point where we are with alcohol,' says Jeffrey P. Michael, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's impaired-driving director. 'We don't know what level of marijuana impairs a driver.'"

Yoga class not relaxing enough for you? Try taking one were all the students are high. Dee Duss's "Ganja Yoga" lets students enjoy some marijuana before each session. Dee says the pot makes people more receptive to the poses and philosophies involved with yoga. 35-year-old enhancement smoker Tanya Pillay says, "I like the idea of smoking pot as a spiritual experience, not just for recreational use. When you take an activity like yoga and take the altered state smoking pot creates, it combines to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Yoga and marijuana, together, it’s like putting salt on your food. It’s just a little enhancement.”

A man confused by years of pot smoking, believed he was married for almost a decade, but discovered he wasn't after trying to marry a new partner. When the The Births, Deaths and Marriages Registry could find no record of the marriage he said he could not remember a wedding ceremony taking place but always believed he had been married. He told the Family Law Court in Sydney that the details of the wedding must have slipped his mind because he was so stoned. In fact he had no "meaningful recollection" of significant portions of the marriage. He and his "wife" fought all the time and in 2003 she gave him a document to sign, which he believed was their divorce papers. When he contacted her for proof of their divorce, she told him it was a residential tenancy agreement. The new couple are free to marry now provided he can remember where the ceremony will take place, who she is and why all these people are here?

h.ross.perot informs us of research out of the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute suggesting that a compound found in cannabis may stop breast cancer from metastasizing. Cannabidiol, or CBD, could develop into a non-toxic alternative to chemotherapy some years down the road, if animal and human trials bear out its effectiveness. The article notes that smoking cannabis will not deliver significant quantities of CBD.

MoNickels writes "Turns out, those endless news reports and blog entries in April about "texting makes you stupid" were inaccurate. As linguist Mark Liberman at LanguageLog now reports by way of apologizing to Wilson, it wasn't Wilson's fault, but that of "rotten science journalism." Psychologist Glenn Wilson was reported to have done a study said that chat and email, as the Guardian put it, "are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis." But Wilson says, "This...is a temporary distraction effect—not a permanent loss of IQ. The equivalences with smoking pot and losing sleep were made by others, against my counsel, and 8 [subjects] somehow became '80 clinical trials.'" The original Slashdot story was covered back in April."

Thanks to IGN PS2 for its hands-on preview of Midway's PS2/Xbox action title NARC, an update of the classic '80s anti-drug arcade title of the same name. This game, which Game Informer notes has been "built on VIS Entertainment's State of Emergency engine", takes the "good cop/bad cop" gameplay concept to an extreme, as GameSpot explains: "You'll actually be able to use the illegal drugs you confiscate throughout the game. In fact, they'll actually give you short-term benefits." The drugs include "pot, speed, LSD, crack, and the newly invented Liquid Soul", and effects vary - for example, IGN notes: "Smoking marijuana in NARC slows time down and makes the screen blur, but also gives incredible focus", and GameSpot mentions: "Dropping acid fills the screen with crazy colors, but it also gives innocent citizens large jester heads while giving criminals large devil heads, for easy identification." But GI also cautions: "By taking one of the addictive drugs... the controller vibrations will get longer and longer until the player will literally have to fight to keep the shakes at bay."

Here is the eighth part in our continuing reprint of the columns Jon Katz wrote following the killings at Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Below are more of the many charged comments that the story drew.