Peter Schwartz

Peter Schwartz is an engineer and futurist whose recollections illuminate how Al Hubbard’s LSD sessions reached beyond clinical research into the Bay Area engineering community. Joining Willis Harman at the Stanford Research Institute in 1973, Schwartz encountered the traces of Hubbard’s earlier work before meeting the man himself. He later described a community in which engineers used LSD to look for patterns in problems of irreducible complexity, and argued that Hubbard’s influence was felt in the emergence of Silicon Valley.

Identity and Arrival at the Stanford Research Institute

In 1973, Schwartz took his first job after graduate school, working for Willis Harman at the Stanford Research Institute. Hubbard was by then more or less retired, and Schwartz inherited his office. The room offered an unexpected introduction to a figure whose work had crossed the boundaries of research, therapy, and government: above the desk hung a large photograph of Richard Nixon, inscribed to Hubbard as a friend and thanking him for years of service.

The correspondence left behind was just as suggestive. Letters addressed to A. M. Hubbard had arrived from around the world. Schwartz recalled one from George Bush, then head of the Republican National Committee and later director of the CIA. Before he knew Hubbard’s history, Schwartz had already found himself surrounded by material evidence of the man’s unusual reach and connections.

Meeting Hubbard and Reconstructing His Role

One day, a round man with a gray crew cut appeared to collect the mail. He wore a security guard’s uniform and carried a .38. He introduced himself as a friend of Harman’s, then began asking Schwartz questions about where he thought he came from and what he thought about the cosmos. Schwartz learned afterward that these seemingly unprompted questions were Hubbard’s way of assessing whether someone was a worthy candidate for a psychedelic session.

The encounter turned Schwartz into an investigator of Hubbard’s past. He asked Harman about the visitor and gradually assembled the story. What emerged was not simply a tale of an eccentric man passing through an office: Schwartz recognized that many of the people he met who had interesting ideas had taken LSD with Hubbard. The circle included Stanford and Berkeley professors, people at the Stanford Research Institute, computer engineers, scientists, and writers. In Schwartz’s account, the experience had transformed many of them, linking private sessions to a much wider intellectual and professional network.

Schwartz’s testimony also clarified what Hubbard was doing at the institute. The account identifies Schwartz as the former employee who confirmed Harman’s description of Hubbard’s job: not security work, but running special sessions. That distinction mattered amid suspicions that Hubbard might have been involved in investigations of illegal drug use. Schwartz’s recollections instead placed him in the continuing effort to provide LSD experiences to political and intellectual leaders, even as that work became quieter and more difficult to see.

Engineering, Complexity, and LSD

Schwartz’s explanation for the particular appeal of psychedelics to engineers began with the nature of their work. Unlike problems that can be simplified by isolating a few variables, engineering problems often involve many interacting factors that cannot be optimized independently. The engineer must search for patterns while holding the complexity in view. Schwartz believed LSD could help users perceive such patterns, making the experience relevant not only to spiritual inquiry but also to technical imagination.

He recalled that some early computer engineers used LSD while designing circuit chips, especially before computers could assist with the design. The task demanded that they visualize formidable three-dimensional complexity and hold it in their minds. Schwartz connected that practical challenge with the pattern-seeking quality he associated with LSD. He went further, expressing the conviction that the LSD taken by people in this circle had significantly affected the birth of Silicon Valley. His claim is presented as an informed participant’s interpretation of a cultural influence, not as a measured account of how much the drug contributed to any specific invention.

The Whole Earth Network and a Changing Technology Culture

Schwartz’s account places him within the Bay Area community that Stewart Brand helped gather around the Whole Earth Network. Brand received his first LSD experience at the International Foundation for Advanced Study in 1962, with James Fadiman as guide. Though Brand remembered that first session as difficult, he went on to have further experiences that reshaped his outlook. Schwartz later counted himself among a technology-oriented circle whose members had taken Hubbard’s LSD.

The network’s importance lay partly in how it reframed computers. Brand’s circle helped shift the image of computing from a top-down instrument of the military-industrial complex—with the punch card as a symbol of impersonal organization—toward a tool for personal liberation and virtual community. Schwartz’s account does not reduce that cultural change to psychedelics alone. Rather, it links LSD’s role as a stimulus to creativity with the collaborative experimentation that helped shape the West Coast computer culture. Brand, in turn, saw computers eventually superseding drugs as the more powerful source of new possibilities.

Retrospective Significance

Schwartz’s importance in the narrative is that of a witness and interpreter positioned between the period of Hubbard’s sessions and the later world those sessions were said to have helped shape. He encountered Hubbard’s legacy at the Stanford Research Institute through an office, a photograph, and a backlog of mail; then, through conversation and recollection, he pieced together the network behind those traces. His engineering background gave him a particular way to explain why LSD might have mattered to technically trained people: it seemed to reveal patterns in systems too complex to simplify.

That explanation joins two stories that are often kept apart: the history of psychedelic research and the development of computer culture. Schwartz’s recollections make Hubbard a connector between them—not by establishing that every technological change came from a drug experience, but by describing a community in which engineers, researchers, and writers shared those experiences and carried their effects into their work. His account thus gives a human and professional dimension to the broader claim that psychedelic experimentation helped nourish the creative ethos of Silicon Valley.