And however much you are promoted over the years, you keep your Specialty.
#PETER FURGESON BEHOLDER 2 PARTY RECORDING DRIVER#
but you are also designated a Specialist: You are a rifleman, or a cook, a driver or a mechanic. "Well," he went on, "listen up! When you join the Army, you receive a rank. "Young man", asked General Schwarzkopf, "what do you know about the U.S. I explained that we were the generalists, standing in the middle of the experts and yanking them back to the center of our mission for seriously ill kids, when human nature made our experts tend to follow only what their own silo of expertise had taught them. I explained that we were pulling experts into our meetings who would never otherwise meet or work together: directors, writers and programmers inventing this thing alongside pediatricians, psychiatrists, oncologists and hospital administrators. a zig zag trajectory in right angles, more an Etch-a-Sketch maneuver, but one that seemed to work in our prototypes. This was before the computer mouse, so really one 'walked' the avatar using the Up, Down, Left and Right keys. Seriously ill teenagers in hospitals around the world would log-on, select an avatar (ET was reserved for Steven) and then walk it around one of our 3D 'worlds'. I launched into my pitch: this new social network would be revolutionary. "No," said General Schwarzkopf, "The pistol is for dealing with journalists." Innocently, I enquired whether it was for security, Saddam's assassins presumably still being a threat, as suggested by his special elevator, which trapped and vetted me before letting me out on the his floor. Lying on the desk was the biggest gun I had ever seen - a revolver for sure in shape, but about four times larger than any handgun I'd previously encountered. And here I was, two weeks later, sitting in front of the General in his office in a Tampa high-rise, as he towered above me from the other side of his epic-sized desk. I suggested our best course was to ask Steven to sign a letter.
The problem was that none of us knew him, and we also didn't know anyone who knew him.
#PETER FURGESON BEHOLDER 2 PARTY RECORDING FREE#
Perhaps, we imagined, someone who had recently won the Gulf War, liberated Kuwait and marched the armies of the free world to the gates of Saddam Hussein's Baghdad? Yes, we thought, General Schwarzkopf would be a great leader for our fundraising. Someone who had led from the front through sheer willpower and clout. And while I was happy to go around begging, the corporate CEO's who needed to be begged were much less interested in meeting me, as we now had Steven, and why wasn't he flying to meet them? Kathy, Lee Rosenberg, Steven and I decided we needed a man who was unstoppable. And worse, Steven was much more the inventor of our User Interface than the beggar for donations. We needed hardware, and software, and dedicated T3 lines between pediatric hospitals, and, and, and. What we needed was more like $50 million in high-tech everything. But I think I may be hallucinating." There was a long silence, and then my wife asked, "Should I come and pick you up? You don't sound safe to drive."īut there was a slight problem. I think he agreed to be Chairman, and I think he just donated two and a half million dollars to kick it off. I hid behind a tree in the Amblin parking lot and called my wife, Saryl, "I think I just met for hours with Steven Spielberg. I had gone to meet Steven for the first time, to propose all this to him, in what was supposed to be a 20 minute meeting, and had emerged three hours later with a 'yes' and an astonishing personal pledge. And in the brave new tech world of the early 1990s, we imagined using the new-fangled Internet to build them a virtual clubhouse in cyberspace. We knew that when children are seriously ill, their interaction with their peers goes away, and they feel isolated and depressed. I was in Tampa to persuade the General to become the Chairman of the Capital Campaign for Starbright World, the non-profit social network for seriously ill teenagers that Steven Spielberg, Kathy Kennedy and I had dreamed up a few weeks earlier. I was like Jon Stewart when he greets, well, pretty much anybody. General Schwarzkopf was so tall, and so wide, that standing in front of him I felt seriously small.
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