The intensity of the Super Bowl is one-of-a-kind. An NBA finals is best-of-seven. But the Super Bowl, one game, winner-take-all. The intensity is off the charts.
— Paul Allen
There was a time when the government cut off funding to SETI, basically, and I thought it was something that should continue, and it was a very interesting scientific question.
There's a whole different way to express yourself in music and the other arts, and it hopefully complements other things you do in technology.
In an ideal world, everybody would find it easy to talk to the press... but not everybody is so excited.
Your dream, when you buy a sports franchise, is to win the championship, the Super Bowl.
Some people are great at the pure mathematical things - like Bill Gates, he's great at math things. He loves to do puzzles. Me, I like to look at an overall landscape and try to figure out, how do you solve a problem?
Part of life has to be about enjoying life and having different experiences, especially if you're with friends and you're on an adventure on a boat or a submarine - it's a lot of fun.
Whenever you make the Super Bowl, so many things - you have to have the good general manager and the coach and the great players, and you have to have not too many injuries - everything, game plans and everything, has to fall very much your way for that to happen.
I really do care about the health of the players. That's one of the tough things about the NFL - it's so physically tough on the players.
Facing your own mortality forces you to re-evaluate your priorities.
The brain has this amazing level of almost fractal complexity to it. When you start looking at any part of it in detail, you realize that it's much more complex than you thought.
There are so many intricacies to our brain that won't be understood unless we start to look at the system as a whole. All these different details don't operate in isolation.
I first got interested in the brain through computers.
AI2 was born from a desire to create a system that could truly reason about knowledge, rather than just offer up what had been written on a subject before.
I'm trying to transmit the visions of creativity and build institutions that are incredibly catalytic to their fields.
In Portland, I am more involved in the details of trade discussions because I've been around that sport longer and can watch tape and can give some input to the drafting process. In football, not at all. It's so specialized.
I got a taste when I was in Kenya a while ago of what medical care was in rural Africa. I was in a town of about 10,000 people, and a shipping container with a rusty microscope was their medical clinic.
The NBA is intense, but the NFL is a whole 'nother level of intensity and dramatic, game-changing plays.
I have held Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock guitar and imagined what it would be like to play it, but that's the extent of it.
There's no enjoyment to losing money.
It's part of the juice of sports that you tend to find certain sports figures that you cheer on from other cities and others that you're a bit skeptical about.
What people don't realize is the human body and the brain are so well designed to do - by millions of years of evolution - what we do.
Everyone's dream is to take a pill - take a pill every day so you won't have Alzheimer's.
I'm not somebody that just has one or two things in life that are laserlike focused.
I have to admit, between the Seahawks games and the Blazer games and playoffs games, we're talking about close to 100 games a year, so I don't really follow other sports a lot.
To me, it's the kind of interesting question the human race should be investing in. Is there intelligent life out there? Are there other beings out there?
We know a certain amount about neurons. You can do fMRI and watch parts of the brain light up. But what happens in the middle is poorly understood.
As a programmer, you're working with very simple structures compared to the brain. So I was always fascinated by how the brain works.
One of the things I've come to appreciate about the brain is the importance of location. It's not just a set of interchangeable parts that you can swap in and out.
I'm always trying to calculate the mathematical probability of certain outcomes.
Something that is characteristic of me is the breadth of my interests.
It's very challenging to carve back market share.
Sports is such a cyclical thing; it's often feast or famine. But what you try and do as an owner is build a winning organization.
Blame me for having to type the backslash in DOS.
Of course I love basketball.
I have had some amazing experiences as a musician - even with my modest skills.
I choose optimism. I hope to be a catalyst not only by providing financial resources but also by fostering a sense of possibility: encouraging top experts to collaborate across disciplines, challenge conventional thinking, and figure out ways to overcome some of the world's hardest problems.
The thing is, once you're in the Super Bowl, you want to win. As time goes on, you want to win more and more.
Back to Microsoft days, I'm always looking for, 'OK, that's great, but what can go wrong?'
If you have the chance to realize some of these dreams you had as a kid, and you have the opportunity, why not pursue that?
I think few people in their lifetime have the chance to be involved in something like the creation of Microsoft - that's always going to be something I'm known for.
I'm trying to do some things with my brain institute to understand more about the impact of concussion on brain tissue, because we have some scientists over there who are really good at looking at brain tissue and the effects of things on brain tissue.
I've lived in Boston.
Anybody doing philanthropy has to find something that appeals to them from their own personal background or from intellectual curiosity.
The brain is one of the richest green fields of science. There's so much yet to be discovered.
There's a long history of artificial intelligence programs that try to mimic what the brain is doing, but they've all fallen short.
In order to be truly intelligent, computers must understand - that is probably the critical word.
I'm trying to show people that they can activate their own passions and find their own path.
The brain is the most complex, challenging scientific puzzle we have ever tried to decode.
Long periods can pass between the times you play for a championship, so you have to savor those moments.
