CHAPTER 22
I wasn’t raised as an adventurer. As a child, I traveled through books, the way my mother did. The piles of National Geographic in our basement depicted the larger world out there, but I didn’t envision myself as a globetrotter. Then, as a young man at Microsoft, I simply lacked the time to explore. All that changed when I became ill at twenty-nine. I started scuba diving in Hawaii; I came to love France and its culture and cuisine, so different from what I’d known. Still, the last thing I thought I’d ever own was a yacht. Here was my image of boating: a society of snobs who drank Scotch and smoked cigars and wore double-breasted blazers and captain’s hats. I wanted nothing to do with it.
But friends kept telling me about the great trips they’d had to Alaska, and that the only way to do it was to charter a boat. In 1992, I rented an eighty-five-footer and took my family up the Inside Passage. We saw a whale swim underneath us, and many others spouting. We dined on fresh spot prawns bought from passing fishermen. In Anan Bay, we watched bears gorge on salmon swimming upstream, so numerous that (as the Indian saying went) you could have walked across the water on their backs.
I had the time of my life. A boat seemed like the best possible way to share my budding passion for exploration, not to mention a terrific platform for my newfound passion for scuba diving. The following year, I was able to buy Charade, 150 feet long and five hundred tons, with a crew of ten. It had five staterooms and a Jacuzzi up top. I thought, My gosh, I’m buying more boat than I’ll need.
Fast forward to a few years later, when my captain said, “What’s your ultimate boat, Paul?” I told him that I’d been absorbed by the undersea world ever since my parents took me to see Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World, one of the first documentaries with underwater color cinematography, including shots from a twoman submarine. I said that I’d love to have my own sub to take my explorations literally down to the next level. While I wasn’t after size for its own sake, a bigger boat could accommodate more of my friends on our far-flung journeys. I also wanted to upgrade my onboard recording studio with a full digital console. Dave Stewart had an idea for a shipboard concert stage, with audience seating on the aft deck.
That’s how Octopus was born, in the spirit of Cousteau’s underwater adventures. I went to Espen Øino, the naval architects based in Monaco, and they created a two-foot model that looked reasonable. Then the work started. It took a full year for more than a hundred draftspeople to design Octopus, and three years more for two companies to construct it. Midway through the process, the prime contractor invited me to their shipyard in Kiel, Germany, to show me how they built submarines for the German and Turkish navies. One of them had a torpedo, which piqued my interest. At the end of the tour, I asked them, deadpan, “Could I add a torpedo tube to my yacht?”
The two engineers looked at each other, and you could see the deutsche mark signs going off in their heads. One of them said, “Ja, ja, we can add the tube, it’s possible to add the tube, ja.”
I let the image hang in the air for a few moments before telling them I was joking. And the guy nodded his head and said, “Ja, we could have added the tube, but getting the license for the torpedoes, that would have been difficult.”
I’ve owned a couple of other yachts, Meduse and Tatoosh, but I was stunned by the sheer size of Octopus when it was delivered in 2003. At 414 feet, it was a third longer than a football field, more than twenty yards wide, seven stories high. At the time, it was the fourth largest yacht in the world, with the top three built for heads of state. (As the yacht industry continues to extend the realm of the possible, Octopus has dropped in the rankings and is now ninth largest overall.) It had a full-time crew of more than fifty and the most advanced nautical technology. When I first stood on the bridge, I felt as though I was on a spaceship.
It took me six months to get used to owning something of that scale. But over the years since, Octopus has realized every mission I had in mind for her. All my passions come together in one moveable feast: a basketball court, a movie theater, a swimming pool. The recording studio has ocean views in all directions and is painstakingly soundproofed from engine noise and vibration; it’s about as good musically as any in the world. Dave Stewart has recorded there, and so has Mick Jagger. U2 once previewed their latest album on board and played it so loud that they burned out the speakers. We’ve had too many phenomenal jams in that space to count. Each year we host a shipboard party during the Cannes Film Festival, and the studio becomes a bandstand.
But while Octopus is ideal for get-togethers, musical and otherwise, my very favorite spot on the boat might be the most intimate one, a little aerie that seats a few people in total quiet at the very top. I’ve looked out over the Venice rooftops from there, and the factories and naval yards along the Huangpu River in Shanghai. With a top speed of twenty knots, Octopus has the range for long-haul explorations in the tradition of Cousteau’s Calypso, the minesweeper that carried the oceanographer’s crew of scientists and adventurers. It’s less a Bentley than a Range Rover.
There’s a glass-bottomed room where you can watch the stingrays and jellyfish swim by when you’re at anchor, and a remote-controlled robot vehicle with a high-definition camera that can descend to three thousand meters. But no video can capture the immediacy of deep-sea exploring in a submarine twelve hundred feet below the surface. The sub holds eight people and launches from an internal lagoon, like a yellow underwater bus. For some reason, Pink Floyd sets an ideal mood as the surface recedes and the dark envelops us. For the next half hour, we’re going down.
Our most memorable dive was onto the hangar deck of the USS Saratoga, the aircraft carrier that was sunk in the Bikini Atoll nuclear bomb tests in 1946. Another time we explored an ancient Roman wreck in the Tyrrhenian Sea. The wooden hull had long since rotted away, exposing its cargo of hundreds of graceful, long-necked amphorae, ceramic vases two thousand years old. They were just outside my porthole, close enough to touch.
Octopus has a reinforced steel nose to push aside small pieces of ice, and in February 2007 we traveled to the Antarctic. We had a rough crossing; the big boat doesn’t roll, thanks to stabilizing wings, but it can pitch in a head sea when the wind is on your bow. As we went south from Ushuaia, Argentina, toward the Antarctic Circle, the iceberg traffic got heavier. Our captain ceded control to a specialist in polar navigation, the ice master. He sat on the bridge with binoculars, in a seeming Zen state, and calmly intoned, “Bring the ship to 273, please. … Now bring the ship to 142.” He knew how to estimate the size and shape of the ice masses beneath the water, which were eight or nine times larger than what we could see above it.
It was near the end of summer, with the days still tolerably warm (often in the forties) and an endless twilight fading to a night about four hours long. Antarctica is a monstrously beautiful landscape, dead quiet whenever the wind stops blowing. It’s a vast white canvas on which nothing has been written, except for chunks of ice a vivid blue where glacial pressure has squeezed out the air bubbles. You can helicopter to a mountaintop, seven thousand feet above sea level, and see fifty miles in every direction—with no sign of a living soul.
We had some unforgettable encounters there: a forty-foot humpback whale circling our tender, with its apple-size eye gazing at us in open curiosity; a bulbous gray leopard seal lazily basking on an iceberg barely large enough to hold it; thousands of squeaking penguins, as tame as puppies. I tried scuba diving in water one or two degrees above freezing, using a canister of argon gas to fill the suit and help keep me warm. The exposed part of my face went instantly numb, and my fingertips stayed blue for an hour after I got out.
SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA is the opposite of the alien Antarctic—hot, rolling landscapes, deep green after the rains come, with the clean smell of wild sage in the air. Strangely, it feels somehow familiar; some think it’s our ancestral memory of this cradle of humanity. From the first time I set foot there, it became one of the most special places in the world to me.
I love to venture into Africa’s sprawling animal preserves, most of all to see my favorite animals, the elephants. They are smart and curious, and even seem to have a sense of communal responsibility. There’s an elephant orphanage in Nairobi for animals up to four years old whose mothers were poached by hunters. The young ones are fed with milk four times a day from the world’s largest baby bottles. If a juvenile runs off into the bush before he’s ready, wild elephants have been known to escort him back to his keepers.
We met a couple in Botswana who adopted three elephants when they were two and three years old, and that was twenty years ago. If you take a morning walk with one of them, you may find a trunk lightly touching your shoulder, like a friend placing his arm around you. (It’s called beaking.) In the wild, though, they are a force to be reckoned with, as we discovered on our first trip to that country, in 2006. It was winter there, when male elephants are often in musth, a hormonal condition that’s equivalent to a female going into heat. They secrete a pungent discharge from the sides of their heads and are unusually aggressive. When our Land Rover was a mile or so from camp, we spotted an enormous bull elephant fifty yards away, chomping his way through the grass. Our driver said, “I’m going to drive right past him.” And I’d never done this before, but I said, “No, he looks upset, let’s stop and let him eat.” There was something about the bull’s body language that bothered me.
The elephant kept eating till it was almost past us, and then our driver got restless and put the Land Rover in gear. The bull promptly wheeled and charged at full speed from thirty yards. It must have weighed twelve thousand pounds, twice as much as our vehicle. In a collision, we would come out second best.
Everyone’s head swiveled toward me, as though I’d know what to do next. But I was a rookie, too, and I had no idea. As the elephant closed to ten yards, a veteran guide named Sandor Carter sprang into action. He jumped up, threw his arms over his head, and shouted, “Knock it off!” The elephant pulled up and stopped and went back to eating. He had charged to let us know we were invading his space. By “getting big,” our guide had made it clear that we would assert ourselves, leading the bull to doubt the wisdom of doing battle.
The most memorable part of our trip came in Kenya’s enormous Rift Valley, where we stayed by the Maasai Mara game reserve. From a helicopter or hot air balloon, there are zebras and gazelles and wildebeests as far as you can see. They move in concert like a living lawn mower, up from the Serengeti and back down again in a circular path. Prides of lions lie at rest, waiting for the dark and a tasty wildebeest dinner.
The Maasai are a nomadic people who cling to tradition even as they’ve begun to use cell phones. As part of an animal conservancy that we’ve supported, they have agreed to let more wild animals return to the tribe’s grazing lands in exchange for a share of government tourist fees, which in turn help build schools and basic infrastructure. One night, in a barren salt plain close to the Tanzania border, we celebrated a new dam that we’d funded to bring water to the Maasai and their livestock. (Cattle are their primary asset, and also a source of protein in their milk-and-cow’s-blood tonics.) We set up a stage on the reddish, cracked-earth moonscape, with portable generators under an orange canopy. By late afternoon, we had a crowd of more than a thousand Maasai who’d walked dozens of miles to get there.
I was with my band and our special featured singer, Dan Aykroyd, a kindred spirit and true lover of the blues, whose absurdist humor never fails to crack me up. That night he sang and played harmonica, and danced as only Dan can. As we made our way through our set, the Maasai men answered by jumping in their red and orange and turquoise robes, spears in hand. Then a woman’s clear voice sailed over the top of their layered chants. We were together in spirit but not always in tempo, and I felt the urge to create a song that would mix our two cultures, like Paul Simon’s “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.” But that’s not something you can do on the spot, so we stuck with what we knew.
Halfway through Dan’s rendition of “Messin’ with the Kid,” the Maasai suddenly switched from their regional chant to the staccato rhythms of our song. They even changed their dance to a stomp and a little stutter step, mimicking Dan. And they sang along with the chorus:
What’s this I hear, well there’s a whole lot of talk,
People say they’re trying to mess with the kid—hey hey hey. …
It was transcendent, sharing that Junior Wells song with the Maasai on the salt flats. A few bars later, they returned to their original rhythms, but we all felt that we’d connected. The sun set. As the stage lights came on, every six-legged flying thing within miles converged on us, and we called it a night. The Maasai seemed delighted. For most it was their first live encounter with the low frequencies of a bass guitar. As a chief told us afterward, “I liked your music because I could feel it in my stomach.” I knew just what he meant. I’d felt the same way, the first time I heard rock live.
FOR VISITORS WHO’D known it mainly from stereotypical jungle movies, Africa is filled with an amazing variety of landscapes and peoples. One of my favorite places is the Okavango Delta in Botswana, where the river ends in an inland estuary and creates a verdant swampland. In the rainy season, when the floodwaters are high, the tops of hillocks become small islands. There are ebony and fig trees and an amazing profusion of predators and prey: hippos, giraffes, impalas, lions, leopards, African wild dogs. A few years ago, I leased Abu Camp. (It’s named after its famous late resident, the bull elephant who costarred with Clint Eastwood in White Hunter Black Heart.) The camp stables train elephants who have been separated from their herds, and guides will take you through the lagoons in the golden light of the early morning or late afternoon.
I also love the Skeleton Coast of Namibia, where storms from the Kalahari Desert keep pushing the Atlantic coastline westward. In the nineteenth century, untold numbers of New England whaling ships were wrecked there in the treacherous currents. From a helicopter you can see miles of masts and splintered wood, like weathered matchsticks by the brilliant cobalt blue water.
Namibia is a dry, stark, isolated place. It feels like the edge of the earth, and you meet some intriguing people who thrive there. One was a guide named Chris Bakkes, a wild-haired, red-bearded South African who fought in the war in Angola and is also a fine published author. During our first dinner together, there was talk about the monstrous river crocodiles we’d seen that lie in wait for the zebras crossing the water. Trying to make conversation, I asked Chris how close he’d ever come to a crocodile.
The burly guide stared at me, raised the stump of his left arm, and asked, “How close do you think, Mr. Allen?” He’d lost the rest of it to a pair of crocs as a young game ranger in Kruger National Park.
Chris sometimes lends his services to Flip Stander, the Cambridge-educated carnivore expert who founded the Desert Lion Conservation Project. Flip lives out of a ramshackle truck and goes everywhere barefoot. He darts lions to sedate and collar them, then tracks their wanderings over hundreds of miles of the Namib Desert. When a collared lion is flagged as it approaches civilization to prey on cattle, Skip rallies Chris and others to set up a Land Rover picket line. The light and noise deter the big cats from coming in and getting killed by the farmers.
On one darting expedition, Skip invited me to check out a sedated lion up close. The animal’s forelegs were massive, its paws a foot across. It wasn’t so hard to imagine it breaking a zebra’s back with one blow.
Skip said, “You need to smell the paw.” Ignoring every primal instinct, I knelt down and stuck my nose a few inches from those razor claws. The smell was surprisingly sweet, but I didn’t push my luck and linger too long.
IN 2008 I returned to Africa to visit the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda, the fertile habitat for half the world’s endangered mountain gorilla population. With our guides using machetes to hack a path through the dense vegetation, our party of five trooped down into a sun-dappled ravine. Three hours in, we spotted a big silverback, the alpha male: eight hundred pounds of primate muscle, knuckle-walking up the slope. Whenever we got within twenty yards, he’d move on, not wanting to be bothered. Then I happened to look up. Directly overhead, a juvenile gorilla was sliding down a moss-covered tree. When he was eight feet off the ground, just a few yards away, our eyes made contact in one of the stranger moments of recognition I’ll ever have. Then the gorilla grabbed a vine, swung into the brush, and was gone.
From there we had to climb farther down and then up the back side of another ravine. Drenched with sweat in the misty humidity, I felt unusually tired and had to cling to a staff member’s pack to get up the last series of hills. I took it as a sign that I was out of shape. I didn’t know that I’d soon face the most challenging period of my life.
Two days later, after our tour boat skimmed past colonies of crocodiles and stopped before a stunning waterfall, we cast our lines for some Nile perch. The next thing I knew, I had collapsed in the bottom of the boat. I immediately went back to Seattle, where I had a similar episode on a walk around Green Lake. I felt odd and sat down to have a drink, and then I couldn’t get up. An emergency room EKG found an arrhythmia that called for an immediate heart valve replacement. That weekend I was in surgery.
I woke up fitted with some internal technology, my pacemaker. Then one problem led to another, as fluid built up in my left lung. In March 2009, I had the Bill Clinton surgery, in which they deflate the lung and peel off scar tissue. “It went great,” the surgeon told me. “Everything’s going to be fine.” But during a trip to Jordan a few months later, I became so short of breath that I could hardly make it up a flight of stairs. After a buildup of fluid in my other lung, a chest biopsy revealed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the disease that had so terrified me when I was misdiagnosed as a young man. I had the most treatable variety, but the cancer was so aggressive that it had already reached stage IV, spreading beyond the lymph nodes.
I was feeling far worse than I had with Hodgkin’s, and I thought my number was up—that the deadly threat I’d dodged twenty-five years earlier had finally caught up with me. My internist was optimistic, my oncologist more down the middle. The standard chemotherapy was a cocktail called R-CHOP, which included a monoclonal antibody to stimulate the body’s immune system. With luck, it would eradicate the lymphoma, though the odds of a cure were less than 50 percent.
In November 2009, I began treatment: six rounds of chemo, with three weeks between each round. It takes about six hours to pump a dose of R-CHOP into you, and I stayed overnight in the hospital the first time to make sure I could tolerate the treatment. Aside from a mild allergic reaction that turned the top of my head bright red, everything else was normal. Chemotherapy makes your body a battleground, and the first cycle kills so many tumor cells that it stresses your kidneys. There wasn’t any nausea, but the fatigue was intense and lasted for days each time.
Early on, I thought I could hunker down and handle everything myself, but it was a bad idea to be alone. Nights were the worst. Jody was terrifically supportive and came over each evening to watch movies. I appreciated the company, though her choice of programming left something to be desired. She recommended a BBC miniseries of a Dickens novel, and at least one or two characters died of tuberculosis in each episode.
“Boy, this is really bleak,” I complained.
“What do you expect?” Jody said. “It’s Bleak House.”
Throughout this difficult period, one of my most regular visitors was Bill Gates. He was everything you’d want from a friend, caring and concerned. I was reminded of the complexity of our relationship and how we always rooted for each other, even when we were barely speaking. It seemed that we’d be stuck with one another for as long as we lasted.
I’d begun working in earnest on this book, and there were days when I feared that I’d never see it in print. It was only after the second round of chemo, when my scans came back nearly clean, that I had any confidence that I might actually pull through. In late April, after my sixth and final round, I nervously awaited the results of another pair of scans. That phone call was euphoric. I was officially in remission.
I wasn’t totally back to normal, however. The tips of my fingers were slightly numb for a while from the treatments, which didn’t improve my guitar playing. It takes months after the end of chemo before you feel completely normal again.
My illness didn’t turn my head around the way Hodgkin’s had, but it has left its mark. I want more than ever to cram as much as I can into life. Shortly before my last treatment, I traveled to Tahiti for my first scuba dive in three years. It went fine, though my pacemaker limited me to a 50-foot descent. (I might go back for an upgrade to a model rated for 220 feet.) A week after my last report, I went white-water rafting in Utah’s Cataract Canyon. I love the red-rock canyon lands, and the one-day outing sounded harmless enough. Failing to check the fine print, I hadn’t realized that I’d have to splash through twenty-nine separate rapids over a two-hour span or that we’d get battered by the storm of the year, with horizontal rain and forty-mile-an-hour winds. That trip wasn’t the smartest thing I’d ever done, and it left me with a touch of pneumonia. But it also affirmed that I was very much alive.
RECENTLY I RETURNED from my annual trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, a magical mountain town with some of the best theater on the West Coast. I took in a play called American Night, about a young Mexican immigrant who learns about U.S. history in unexpected ways while preparing to take his citizenship test. It was highly satisfying theater, even more so because our foundation’s funding helped make it a reality.
I find regional and local philanthropy truly gratifying because you can see how one well-placed grant can make a difference. My first major effort was to help preserve endangered old-growth forestlands in the North Cascades, which circled back to my father’s passion for green things and his love of the outdoors. (When you grow up in the Northwest, the impulse to safeguard the environment seeps into your consciousness.) Partnering with the Trust for Public Lands and other conservation groups, we purchased privately owned tracts, reconnected wildlife corridors, and repaired vital ecosystems that lend our region its health and natural beauty.
Of the billion dollars or so that I’ve given to date, the greater part has supported the work of nonprofits in the five states of the Pacific Northwest, my roots. Now in its twentieth year under Jody’s leadership, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation has five areas of focus that reflect my long-held personal interests: medicine and technology, community development, safety-net social programs, education reform, and arts and culture. In response to the Gates-Buffett challenge, I recently announced my long-held plan to leave most of my estate to these efforts.
In particular, I haven’t forgotten my weekly childhood jaunts to the Seattle Public Library and what they meant to my development as a thinker. We’ve contributed $22.5 million to build an endowment for collection acquisitions and to help construct a children’s center in the new downtown facility.
Outside the foundation, much of my giving is channeled into scientific research. I like to inaugurate small investigative programs with breakthrough potential or resuscitate worthy efforts that have stalled for lack of funds. We’re also active in support of learning institutions and museums that celebrate some aspect of our common history, like the EMP—or the Flying Heritage Collection in Everett, Washington. Inspired by my father’s service in the European theater, I’ve assembled fourteen vintage warplanes from the main combatants in World War II aviation: the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, Germany, and Japan. They’ve been painstakingly restored inside and out with period materials, and most of them take to the air on “fly days.” Some are the only models of their kind in existence, and all are living relics of sacrifice and bravery. Seeing them takes me back to my boyhood plastic kit model warplanes, which I’d glue together and paint with just the right camouflage markings.
Whenever I visit Flying Heritage, I feel uplifted by the beauty of those machines and their watershed technology. Two days before the museum’s formal opening in 2008, I arrived for an emotional moment. Bud Tordoff, an eighty-five-year-old veteran, climbed into the cockpit of the actual P-51D Mustang fighter that he’d flown more than a dozen times over Germany. Bud recounted a 1944 mission on which he’d shot down two enemy planes to protect some B-17s, an event we’ve been able to document with gun-camera footage. (When the media asked him if he was tempted to fly the plane again, Bud reminded us all of the passing of time. “My wife won’t even let me drive,” he said.)
While I remain committed to our region, I also want to help Africa, where we’re making some small headway at the Abu Camp and my other holdings in Kenya and Zambia. We’re supporting vermiculture (worm composting) as part of a project to encourage sustainable farming, along with community development initiatives, micro-enterprise funding, and school subsidies. Recently Jody and I donated $26 million to Washington State University, the largest private grant ever given there, to finish construction of the Paul G. Allen School for Global Animal Health. An important part of the school’s mission is to build up Africa’s capabilities to respond to animal-based diseases. Research will focus on improving detection, blocking animal-to-human transmission, and discovering new vaccines to protect livestock and all the livelihoods that depend on it.
In years to come, I hope to find new ways to supply electric power and clean water in Africa, and to conserve threatened animal populations in the wild. If we do these things right, we’ll create a better future while still guarding and respecting the past.
IN SUM
When Saturday Night Live celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1999 in New York, Dan Aykroyd took me underneath the stage and flashed back to how it all started for him. “I was mainly a writer,” he said, “but then they asked me to do one of the first skits,” playing a home security technician who breaks into a home to show a terrified couple—John Belushi and Gilda Radner—that they need his service. Dan admitted he was nervous, “but the skit went great. When I came off the stage, I knew that I’d found what I wanted to do.”
I know that feeling. I found my own path when I helped create Altair BASIC in that two-month rush of creativity back in 1975. Later, when the IBM PC shipped with our operating system at its core, it struck me that the code I had helped to write would fundamentally change the way people worked, played, and communicated. Having that kind of impact forever changes your sense of purpose in life. It’s a feeling you’ll always want to find again.
When I became gravely ill in my twenties, I found myself regretting that my life was so narrowly focused. But after I recovered and traveled the world, I soon became restless. I discovered that what I missed most was creating things. And so I went back to work.
If there’s any irony to my life, it’s that my time with Microsoft was atypically one-dimensional. When I was younger, I immersed myself in rockets, robots, music, and chemistry. An omnivorous reader, I thrilled to the exploits of pilots and explorers. I was inspired by Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. My curiosity was boundless.
I went on to spend eight driven years with the single purpose of making Microsoft the leader of the personal computer revolution. And it happened, far beyond what I could have hoped or expected. But my old passions still tugged at me, deferred but not forgotten. They were squeezed into playing along with Hendrix at three in the morning or stealing a weekend from coding to watch a momentous spaceflight.
After I left Microsoft, the wealth that I’d helped create there—and then the company’s explosive growth—freed me to pick up where I had left off. At times I cast my net too widely. But my choice of ventures wasn’t arbitrary. Most of them were seeded long ago, in my youth. Over the last twenty-seven years, I’ve been able to do things I once only imagined.
I have now lived half my life post-Microsoft. What we achieved there will always be a source of pride. But my second act, in all its range and variety, is truer to my nature.
SOME PEOPLE ARE motivated by a need for recognition, some by money, and some by a broad social goal. I start from a different place, from the love of ideas and the urge to put them into motion and see where they might lead. The creative path is rocky, with the risk of failure ever present and no guarantees. But even with its detours and blind alleys, it’s the only road that I find fulfilling.
From early on in the Microsoft era, I was looked at as the source of seminal ideas. These days, my role is often to listen to smart people and recognize when something special has emerged. Then I try to place the thought into a new context or extend it into something more powerful, as we did in our neuroscience charrette. The idea of a genetic brain map had been batted about in many private meetings, but it crystallized when a dozen top scientists came together and engaged in a free flow of ideas. The Allen Brain Atlas, a product of their consensus, emerged as the most persuasive way to move the field forward.
Few things worth doing can be done alone. To get past the conceptual stage, ideas need to become crusades; you’ve got to convince people to join you. I was lucky right off the bat to find Bill Gates, whose passion for business matched mine for tracking technology. Later I’d be fortunate to meet Bert Rutan en route to SpaceShipOne and to find Allan Jones to lead our brain work.
I’ve also seen what can happen when the right team isn’t in place, how the best ideas can founder. I made more mistakes in pursuing the Wired World than I can count, but the first and worst was this: I often failed to find the right people to help me execute my vision. My own history probably swayed me to take a flier on some with slim track records and to entrust them with too much too soon. Since then I have learned to be more careful. Talent is indeed essential, but seasoning and maturity are not to be underestimated.
Above all, I’ve learned the pitfalls of getting so locked in to looking ahead that you miss the pothole that makes you stumble, or the iceberg that sinks you. Still, any crusade requires optimism and the ambition to aim high. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to find my own challenges, see them through to fruition, and—if everything breaks right—change the world for the better.
PEOPLE ASK HOW wealth has changed me. It’s a question I find difficult to answer. There are times when I feel unaffected, and then I wonder if I’m kidding myself. The manifestations of wealth—homes, boats, planes—have clearly altered how I live and get around. More important, though, are the doors of possibility thrown open to me, the opportunities I’ve enjoyed.
Yet for all these evident changes, the people I’ve known longest tell me that I’m much the same in the ways that matter. I still try to take people as I meet them. And I’m still a dreamer more intrigued by what might be doable than by what has already been done.
My recent illness made me more impatient and patient, simultaneously. It was a harsh reminder that there is no time to waste, and it’s made me more urgent and demanding of myself and those who work with me. Still, it’s humbling to await the results of a PET scan and know that you can’t make the clock wind faster. I’ve come to realize that many things happen at their own pace, beyond your control, from the development of a young point guard to the trial of a potential Alzheimer’s therapy. I’m learning to be less harried in anticipation and more accepting of each necessary, incremental step.
I do my best to keep up with science, technology, and current affairs, and most of my reading now takes place online. I want to keep stretching the boundaries of the possible; I want my thinking to stay forward-looking and unconstrained. What is next? That’s a question that will never get old for me. I’ll always be on the hunt for the next Big Idea.
And there’s one more thing that hasn’t changed. I’m still fascinated by the inner workings of machines of all sorts; I still love to delve into their intricacies. At a minute level of detail, I’m doing it with the Allen Institute’s journey to understand the human brain, the most complex mechanism in the history of the planet. At the other end of the spectrum, I’m just now considering a new initiative with that magical contraption I never wearied of sketching as a boy: the rocket ship.
Someone, after all, is going to have to get behind SpaceShipThree.