Bill Gates Remembers Taking LSD as a Teen — and How It Didn't Wear Off by the Time He Went to the Dentist

• In his debut memoir Source Code — which will be published on Tuesday, Feb. 4 — Bill Gates shared candid stories about his first experiences with alcohol and drugs, including LSD

• "It's all Paul's fault," Gates, 69, joked with PEOPLE in an interview, referring to his late friend, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen

• "Everything I did, I'm blaming it on him and Jimi Hendrix," he added

Years before Bill Gates became a billionaire tech tycoon and then philanthropist, he was just a teenage boy in Seattle — and like many teens, part of growing up meant experimenting with alcohol and even some drugs.

In his debut memoir, Source Code — which will be published on Tuesday, Feb. 4 — the Microsoft co-founder, 69, shares a number of candid stories about his early years.

For instance. during the summer of 1972, while Gates was still in high school, he spent a lot of time at Lakeside School with his good friend Paul Allen, who had already graduated and was home from college for the summer. (Years later, the pair would go on to start Microsoft.)

Although much of their time was spent working on a computer program that Lakeside could use for the upcoming academic year — “the school gave us master keys to the building, allowing us free rein all summer on the empty campus,” Gates writes — during their intermittent breaks, Allen gave his younger friend an education on “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.”

“He was far more well-versed than I was in all three, which is to say that I hadn’t tried the first two and knew almost nothing about the third,” Gates writes.

Related: Why Bill Gates Is Telling All About Life Before His Billions, from Trying LSD to Being Put in Therapy by His Parents (Exclusive)

As for his practical education, first came alcohol.

“It started with scotch. Really cheap scotch that Paul brought to the computer room,” Gates writes. “He got me drunk for the first time, so drunk I threw up and passed out that night in the Lakeside teachers’ lounge.”

A few days later there was a “demonstration of how to smoke a joint,” Gates recalls.

However, although Allen then argued that his friend “couldn’t be truly experienced without trying LSD,” Gates writes that at the time, he didn’t agree — so he didn’t try the hallucinogen.

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His first time dropping acid wouldn’t come until his senior "sneak" day.

“I had smoked some pot earlier, so I was feeling a bit uninhibited when a friend offered me acid,” he writes in Source Code. “This time, I decided to see what it was all about.”

“Part of the trip was exhilarating,” Gates admits in his book. It was a lot less fun the following day, though, when he was still “feeling its effects” during dental surgery.

“I sat gaping at my doctor’s face, his drill grinding away, unsure if what I was seeing and feeling was really happening,” he writes. “I vowed that if I ever dropped acid again, I wouldn’t do it solo and I wouldn’t do it when I had plans for the next day, especially a dental procedure.”

In the memoir, Gates does go on to mention one other time he took acid, which occurred when he was in college. Surprise, surprise, Allen was involved.

“Paul had some LSD that we all dropped while watching Kung Fu,” Gates writes, sharing that at some point that night, he and Allen went outside to check out the woods and had “one of those moments that seem perfectly cosmic at the time and purely silly once the acid wears off.”

At another point in the evening, Gates said he found himself wondering if it was possible to “zero out all my memories” — like how a computer functions.

“Taking a shower the next day, I ran through an inventory of my cherished memories, relieved to find that everything was intact,” he writes, adding, “That would be one of the last times I would do LSD.” 

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In an interview with PEOPLE, Gates says these past experiences all boil down to one thing: “It’s all Paul’s fault.”

"Everything I did, I'm blaming it on him and Jimi Hendrix," he quips.

But when it came to his experiments, it didn't take much before enough was enough.

“I’m a huge risk-taker willing to try new things, but I also like my mind working well,” he says. “During those trips and even after, you wonder, 'Hey, did I scramble up my mind?' "

"So I gave it up after, I think we did it four or five times in total. I think the last time was when I was like 21,” he says. “And I'm definitely not recommending that because even though you think some of your thoughts are profound, in retrospect, they're not.”

Plus, there was another way that smoking pot didn't work out: Gates says part of why he thinks he did it when he was younger was "to try to be cool" in the hopes that "maybe some girls would be impressed."

“It didn’t work out,” he says. “But I tried.”

Source Code will be published on Feb. 4.

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