This is the Barnett session that will be broadcast on C-SPAN this thursday. It should be at 7PM EST. I will confirm here when I get the word.
It's a wrap for C-SPAN at the Highlands Forum
Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 6 December 2004
Gave the brief for the camera this morning at the Highlands Forum to a wonderfully high-end cast of conferees in a wonderfully intimate environment. The Highlands Forum I attended back in late 1998 on Y2K was one of the best I've attended across my entire professional career, and this one is just as good.
But, of course, this one is better in the sense that the program uses PNM as its operating theory of the world, meaning every presenter after my kick-off address was asked to couch his or her remarks around the basic themes of the book, the biggie being "disconnectedness defines danger." As you can imagine, it's awfully cool to kick off a conference of this caliber while being taped for CSPAN and then sitting through the rest of the day when all-star after all-star explores their topic while trying to relate their material to your thinking. And I'm talking people like Daniel Yergin and Robert Hormats talking global finance, and Rebecca McKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman talking the Internet.
Then the CEO of WorldSpace, the global company that's bringing satellite radio to the planet (he sold off the U.S. version, XM Radio, to others), gives a presentation where he says his life dream is to blanket the entire Gap with coverage, or what he calls "a future worth building" (he loved the book, can you tell?). And he does that after coming up to me just after my presentation and proudly showing me how his brief includes a slide where his satellite coverage zones encompass my entire Non-Integrating Gap. And I'm talking a guy (Noah Samara) born in Ethiopia to an Ethiopian mother and a Sudanese father, who later emigrated to the U.S. as a teenager and now he's running the biggest satellite radio conglomerate in the world. You gotta love this guy's story, I'm telling you. |
