Anybody doing philanthropy has to find something that appeals to them from their own personal background or from intellectual curiosity.
There are people out there who don't see value in intellectual property, and so they're always going to have a problem if there are lawsuits involving intellectual property.
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?
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.
Objectively speaking, Traf-O-Data was a failure as a company. Right as our business started to pick up, states began to provide their own traffic-counting services to local governments for free.
Seattle has a long tradition of celebrating local and non-local art - from the Burke and Seattle Art Museums to the Asian Art Museum.
If you think about making a difference in the community, my family has always had a strong interest in the arts. I'm always interested in finding ways to innovate... It's a blend; it's not a point focus.
It's very challenging to carve back market share.
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.
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.
Our net worth is ultimately defined not by dollars but rather by how well we serve others.
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.
The thing you realize when you get into studying neuroscience, even a little bit, is that everything is connected to everything else. So it's as if the brain is trying to use everything at its disposal - what it is seeing, what it is hearing, what is the temperature, past experience.
Moore's Law-based technology is so much easier than neuroscience. The brain works in such a different way from the way a computer does.
In the university library my father helped lead, as the Associate Director of Libraries from '60 to '82, I spent hours and hours as a kid devouring piles of books so I could follow the latest advances in science.
It turns out, if you go 1,000 feet down in the ocean, it's really dark, and the animals are really strange, but if you put on some Pink Floyd, it's fantastic.
You've got to enjoy time with your family and friends, and if you're involved in sports franchises, those peak moments in playoff games. You have to enjoy life.
It's always interesting to bring scientists together, because they typically have very polarized views.
Facing your own mortality forces you to re-evaluate your priorities.
Recording studios are interesting; a lot of people say - and I agree - that you should have a lot of wood in a recording studio. It gets a kind of a sweeter sound.