Interview: Tom Kalinske (2025-02-20) by Alexander Rojas
by Alexander Rojas with Tom Kalinske
Sega Retro · February 20, 2025
AR:
I had interviewed you on February 18th, but my phone had deleted the entire half-hour interview we had. You're incredibly understanding and patient in allowing me to re-interview you. Thank you again. Because the last thing I want to do is make you repeat yourself - now I'm repeating myself - I'm just going to very quickly run out everything we discussed.When you first arrived at Sega of America, you don't recall them having any charitable fronts really. You were inspired by a number of things in bringing a charitable presence to Sega of America, including working with a similar organization, the Mattel Foundation, from your time with Mattel. Is that all right?
TK:
Yes.
AR:
Alright. Let's see, another inspiration we discussed: Anique Kasper, including the- sorry, about her name… How do you pronounce her last name?
TK:
It was Anique Kasper. Bruce Kasper was her father.
AR:
There was an organization that I- it was Anique's Something or other, that was…
TK:
The Pediatric AIDS Foundation was founded by Elizabeth Glaser. You can look up Elizabeth Glaser. She was married to an actor, whose name I can't remember now [Paul Michael Glaser]. She was an actress herself. They had a daughter, Ariel, who had a blood transfusion as an infant at Cedars-Sinai and passed away. They founded the Pediatric AIDS Foundation and Anique was getting help from them as well.
AR:
Gotcha, okay. I thought there was maybe like a smaller sub-organization with her name on it. Perfect.
TK:
There may be, but I'm not sure.
AR:
Gotcha.
TK:
You had the picture of the KIIS Unite event that we held to support pediatric AIDS?
AR:
[in confirmation] With the big check and you guys standing in front of the check.
TK:
Right, and Anique's in that picture. You can see how thin and frail she was.
AR:
Okay. I'll have to- I have a small page up on KIIS and Unite, I'll have to point that out. I didn't actually know she was in that picture.
TK:
Yeah, she is.
AR:
All right. We transitioned into discussing Sega of America's support of a taboo subject like pediatric AIDS, especially in a time where corporations were afraid to be associated with these topics. In addition to supporting Anique's specific case of her pediatric AIDS, you also mentioned working with Magic Johnson, producing an informational pamphlet on AIDS. Then we briefly discussed the KIIS and Unite concert as well.You had confirmed that the Sega Youth Education and Health Foundation was just another name for the Sega Foundation, that it was operated out of Sega of America's headquarters. You also mentioned the Foundation's larger charitable partners, especially two. There was the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, which KIIS and Unite raised money for. Then, I apologize, what was the name of that education foundation you were the chair on? You are the chair on?
TK:
The NFIE, National Foundation for the Improvement of Education.
AR:
Perfect.
TK:
I was just on the board. I wasn't chair of it. I was on the board of it, though.
AR:
On the board. I'm sorry.
TK:
It was located in Washington, D.C.
AR:
Perfect. I briefly brought up the Girls Task Force. I mentioned that you were one of its more notable executive supporters. You did recall Pamela Kelly being one of the more prominent members, which was important.
TK:
Yeah, Diane Fornasier and Cindy Hargrave and Michealene Cristini. I don't remember all of them actually at this point.
AR:
There's a couple more. We have a small Girls Task Force page that lists them. I still need to fill that out a little more.We discussed your more recent charitable efforts where you detailed your work with children in developing nations, particularly the use of tablets to facilitate interactive education on a large scale. You had mentioned working with tablets and education at LeapFrog, and I agreed and I drew a parallel to the Pico, and I asked if there was a good amount of Pico DNA in your LeapFrog work, which you confirmed as well, correct?
TK:
Correct.
AR:
All right.
TK:
The other foundation I'm still working with is Teach the World Foundation, which is the one that's doing work in Southwest Asia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Rohingya, Mali, and then now in Northern African countries as well, teaching them to read and write their local language and then teaching them some math and teaching them some English, with software from Footsteps to Brilliance, is the name of the company.
AR:
Perfect, I'm glad I got that down again because I didn't want to miss that with the last [interview]. We discussed the Pico. You mentioned that it was a success in Japan as well as being a success for Sega of America in the States, and you said it returned… what is it, a hundred thousand in sales?
TK:
A hundred million!
AR:
Hundred million, oh my gosh I'm so sorry, I missed the zero there! Hundred million, that's incredible, wow!Let's see here. You had also mentioned that Sega of Japan didn't really get the educational aspect of it, that it was too difficult to put into practice for them. That despite the platform's successes, Sega of Japan felt the resources could be better spent on even more successful properties, like in your example, a Sonic property.
TK:
Doing another Sonic game, right.
AR:
Would you say that was kind of the primary reason for the Pico's cancellation, that it was just not as stable a bet as a… Sonic something?
TK:
Yeah, it was that we could make more money by doing video games - regular video games - than by supporting Pico. The feeling in Japan was that it's too hard to do, it costs a lot, and we could use that money in other ways that would return more profit.
AR:
Gotcha, perfect. We discussed Blake Harris' Console Wars and that it was a fairly big project. You recalled that Harris actually stayed with you for about 40 days during the writing of the book and that you would spend hours working on the book with him, and that it was a fairly big deal for the time for what you guys were doing.
TK:
Yes.
AR:
Then one particular anecdote I wanted to document here because we did discuss a lot… was you having to be selective about what you retained from your work with Sega and Mattel. Like you had said that if you had kept every product you worked on at Mattel, you wouldn't be able to fit them inside your house.
TK:
That's true. I think I mentioned that if I'd kept every product I'd worked on at Mattel, it would be worth more than my stock portfolio. Because those old toys are worth a lot of money.
AR:
On that note, do you recall sending Michealene Cristini Risley a ton of Sega product in an effort to headhunt her from Marvel's animation department?
TK:
I probably did. I don't really recall, but that sounds like something I would do.
AR:
Gotcha, that might have been more Toyoda's thing, because she said that you and Toyoda had flooded her house with all the Sega products at the time in an effort to bring her over.
TK:
Yeah, that sounds correct.
AR:
That's everything that I just wanted to touch on from the last interview. Again, I really appreciate the patience. This is kind of an unexpected thing for me, to happen. I do appreciate you letting me run down [that list] there.Sorry, I gotta take a breath here. I still haven't quite gotten over the fact that I'm speaking to Tom Kalinske. I do appreciate it.
TK:
[laughs]
AR:
Did any aspects of the Mattel Foundation go on to inspire the Sega Foundation or would that be a question for Trizia?
TK:
No, for sure it did. That was one of the inspirations. We had done some such good work at the Mattel Foundation, a lot of it with the UCLA Children's Hospital. No question.
AR:
Again, thank you for texting me the name of the head of the Sega Foundation. Just to confirm: because I looked up her name Trizia… Magagnini? I'm probably butchering that.
TK:
Her maiden name when she worked for us… it was just Trizia Hill. Then she got married and that's the new last name.
AR:
You said Trizia Hill?
TK:
Hill, her last name was Hill when she worked for us, and then she got married and added the Magagnini or however you say that.
AR:
Gotcha, okay, I'll have to look up Trizia Hill. Would you be able to quickly describe who she was and her responsibilities with the Sega Foundation and/or other parts of Sega?
TK:
She had no other responsibility, she was in charge of the Foundation. She reviewed proposals that were made to us from different organizations that wanted us to donate money. Sometimes it was also donating product. Mainly it was to donate money, and we were funding it through the profits of Sega of America. We did a lot of different programs. It would be good if you could talk to her, because I don't remember a lot of the smaller programs that we funded.
AR:
I was going to ask if- normally I don't straight ask for someone's point of contact information, but if I'm not able to reach out to her, would I maybe be able to have you put me in contact with her for some questions?
TK:
I don't have her contact info, but I know she's a realtor in the East Bay. She's a realtor in the Danville-Walnut Creek area. If you go online and just search her in Google, I think, you'll pop up a picture of her and her realtor company.
AR:
Gotcha. Okay. I'll have to look for that. You mentioned that there were challenges involved in Sega supporting a taboo subject like AIDS. Not counting Sega of Japan here… but other than Sega of Japan, what other notable challenges did you run into in bringing support to a taboo subject like this?
TK:
I think I mentioned to you, it was just both inside and outside. In those days, businesses, American businesses, just did not even mention the word AIDS. It was literally a taboo subject. I know it sounds strange today but it was. A lot of people were critical of our support of the Pediatric AIDS Foundation. I think you knew I was also part of the… maybe I didn't mention. Did I mention I was part of the Milken Family Foundation way back when?
AR:
Possibly, it was kind of a struggle for me to remember everything we discussed.
TK:
The Milken Foundation also supported pediatric AIDS. Two different foundations. I was on the board of the Milken Foundation for a few years. I had met the Kaspers because they lived down the street from me, and my children played with Anique before she got sick. I knew about pediatric AIDS before I think the Milken Foundation did, but they also supported it.
AR:
Okay… and speaking of Sega of Japan, you did mention them not getting behind the Pico's educational aspect. Did they have any strong feelings about the Sega Foundation specifically, or Sega of America's charitable efforts?
TK:
I don't think they were crazy about us doing the pediatric AIDS because, again as I said, that was a taboo subject back then. They didn't stop me. That's the good news.
AR:
Speaking of Sega of Japan and the disputes that it had with Sega of America, I feel like that… didn't entirely define Sega of America, but that was kind of just a running theme through its operation, especially through the 90s when you were there. I feel like you would probably be the best person to kind of describe… could you summarize the relations between Sega of America and Sega of Japan back in that time?
TK:
When I agreed to join [Sega of America], I had a conversation with the CEO Hayao Nakayama in Japan and said, "Look, I know how you guys like to run things, but if I'm going to become the CEO of Sega of America, I have to be able to make the decisions. You can't interfere too much," and he agreed. Initially my relationship with Sega of Japan was fantastic. In 90, 91, 92, 93, even though I know they didn't agree with me being very aggressive and advertising and making fun of Nintendo… which is something you just don't do in Japan. You don't make fun of a competitor.
AR:
Right.
TK:
They let me do it. They let me enlarge the operation at Sega of America and hire a lot of developers and R&D people, and we were doing a lot of product on our own. Before I joined, most of the product came from Japan. It was translations of arcade games that Sega of Japan did in Japan. After I joined, we were doing a lot of sports titles, a lot of American licenses with Disney and Universal Studios and other licenses. Garfield, things like that. We obviously had to hire a lot of people to do all that.Initially, they let me do all of that. Even though I know [they] disagreed on a lot of things, eventually that relationship changed. I must tell you, I didn't really understand why it changed. Because we were wildly successful in the US. It was kind of hard to figure out. I remember one instance where we were going to shoot a new commercial on… I don't remember which product it was now, but we were going to shoot a new commercial. Nakayama or one of the other senior executives said, "Well, why are you doing that? Why don't you just take- here's a commercial we did in Japanese. Just dub it into English."
AR:
[laughs]
TK:
I said, "Well, first of all, it will look very strange."
AR:
If it were only that easy.
TK:
Second of all, you guys never got above a 10% or 12% market share in Japan, and we're at a 55% market share. Why should we copy what you're doing? Maybe you should copy what we're doing. That didn't make me very popular, I don't think, rubbing that into their face. I didn't realize how much I had ruffled their feathers until after I'd actually left the company.
There's a number of other things. I wanted to do a deal with Sony. I was doing the deal with Sony. Sony didn't have a game platform and they were publishing games on Sega Genesis and Sega CD. We did kind of a partnership where we each used a studio in Santa Monica where they funded three games on Sega CD and [Sega of America] funded three games on Sega CD. We had a very good and very strong relationship… and the head of Sony games in those days was a guy named Olaf Olafsson. He was a brilliant guy. He was Icelandic [and] he was a PhD from… I think MIT. He agreed with me that we should do one hardware platform together, because you don't really make money on hardware. In most cases, you make all the money on software. It's the classic razor/blade kind of thing. We were going to do one platform, whether that was called the Sony Sega or the Sega Sony, it didn't matter to us. Actually, his bosses in Japan (same kind of situation as I had) agreed: that was a good idea.Nakayama and the board of Sega didn't agree, they said "Why should we help them more?" It was a huge mistake. Then one of the other problems was… I live here in Atherton, and I was close to Jim Clark, who at the time was chairman of Silicon Graphics. Silicon Graphics, as you may know, made all the high-end chips for Hollywood to do special effects and at the time it was the beginnings of AI, way back then. I got to know him, and he said, "Hey, we've got a chip here, why don't you come take a look at it, that we think is perfect for a video game machine." I went and looked at it, and I thought it was [perfect], and my head of R&D Joe Miller thought it was too. We asked for the Japanese engineer (head of engineering) to come over take a look at it.By the way, that chip was developed by someone you may have heard of. There was an engineer working for Jim Clark called Jensen Huang. He founded NVIDIA later.
AR:
I was gonna say, if there was an NVIDIA connection. Interesting.
TK:
Most of the Japanese guys who came over, they said, "Ah, that chip's too hard to manufacture. There'll be too much throw-off." In other words, when you're making the chip, there'll be a lot of waste. They didn't want to do it. As it turned out, I learned later that… one of the heads, one of the exec VPs, a guy named Irimajiri, really liked Jensen Huang, and they became good friends. Several years after I left, they ended up cooperating on a project for whatever the next, at that time, I guess it would have been the Dreamcast machine from Sega.My beginning introduction through Jim Clark of that chipset did turn into something good for both NVIDIA and Jensen Huang and for Sega. They didn't want to do that chip, and I remember Jim Clark (after they had turned it down) saying, "Well, what do I do now?" I said, "Well, there's this other game company in Seattle you might want to go talk to." Of course he did. That chip became the brains of the Nintendo 64.
AR:
Wow.
TK:
Those are some of the reasons why I left, basically. I was having arguments over everything, and I got very frustrated over it, and left.
AR:
Right. It seems like it was a- at least from the Japanese perspective, it was a sense of control. Ken Horowitz has suggested that it was kinda Sega of Japan wanting to make Sega of America follow plans which required very little input from the Japanese, but also allowed them to exert a lot of control over you.
TK:
Right.
AR:
Here you were arguing, "No, I should be having this control because you guys don't understand this market."
TK:
Right. That's pretty much it.
AR:
All right, let's see… I think because of LeapFrog and your more recent work, I associate you with the Pico. How involved were you with the Pico's inception?
TK:
I was very involved with it. In really… the way of programming it… basically a paper book on top of [it] with a ROM cartridge that interacted with a TV screen. It was really, at the time, revolutionary. Most people didn't think of doing things like that. I really liked it, and again, my head of R&D at Sega Joe Miller really liked it. By the way, I took him out of Sega to LeapFrog when I went to LeapFrog. He continued to run the R&D operation for LeapFrog after we both joined the company. We had a lot of Pico DNA in LeapFrog.
AR:
I can imagine. There's a lot of similarities there, and I'd love to take a look at that sometime.
TK:
Yeah.
AR:
Would you be able to quickly, in your own words, describe Joe Miller? Because we don't have a chance to speak with him anymore…
TK:
I miss him. Joe was a brilliant engineer. Absolutely brilliant. He ran the R&D group for Sega, and as I mentioned later, for LeapFrog. He was really good at spotting what was gonna make a good video game and what didn't. He was very good at improving interactivity. He was good at managing a large group of engineers.One funny story about him, at least funny to me, was I had done a deal to do the first cable device at Sega where you could plug this device into- if you had a home cable system, plug it in, and you would be able to play up to- I think it was twenty different Sega games. We would rotate new ones in, and rotate ones that didn't score well out.
AR:
The Sega Channel!
TK:
Yeah, on the Sega Genesis. The problem was, every cable system in the United States - not every, but many - use a different input device that you had to plug into the Sega Genesis. One day, Joe calls me, he says, "You gotta come down here." I was on the sixth floor of a building in Redwood Shores and he was on the first floor and at another building actually too. I go down there and he's got all of these systems hooked up with different devices in them.He says, "Look what you're making me do." I said, "What?" [laughs]
AR:
[laughs]
TK:
Every one of these requires different programming. There's no one single device that works on every cable system in the United States. There were a hundred different devices that he had to figure out how to make work with the Sega Genesis. He did and the Sega Channel became pretty successful. In the early days nobody was doing this stuff. Of course it's very common, but back then I think we had, at one point- we charged $15 a month, as I recall. I think we had 250,000 subscribers.
AR:
Woah okay, that's a number that we didn't [have verified]. That's wonderful, because I also manage the Sega Channel page and that's going right on there, thank you.
TK:
Joe was a huge baseball fan by the way. He loved the Giants. He went to almost every game. I remember later on… I had season tickets too. My tickets were not that close, but I could see Joe at the game. I noticed he was losing weight and looking frail and what have you. Another story about Joe is he was a smoker; he was like a chain smoker. At one point, when we were working together at Sega, I said, "I'll tell you what, I'll pay you $1,000 to stop smoking."
AR:
[laughs]
TK:
He couldn't. He just- it didn't work. That's what ended up- of course, the cancer ended up killing him.
AR:
That's unfortunate. Thank you for letting me know. Because Joe Miller is someone that I wish we knew a little bit more on. I'm definitely going to get that added to his page later. I appreciate that.Let's see, just to quickly wrap it up, because I don't want to take too much of your time, you're already being so nice to me. What was Ken Balthaser like?
TK:
Ken and Joe had actually, they'd known each other for a long time, back when they both were- I forgot where they were working, but they were working somewhere in the Midwest, maybe in Indiana. They were working for a company there [Authorship Resources] that was one of the early computer companies, as I recall.They were friends back then. They both worked for the same company. When I joined Sega, Joe wasn't part of it then, but Ken was. Ken was running R&D. Ken actually recommended that we hire Joe Miller. Miller ended up replacing Ken. Ken had other things to do, it wasn't like a difficult thing.
AR:
It was friendly.
TK:
It was very friendly. Ken, he just wrote a book recently. I don't remember the name of it right now. I've got it here somewhere, I'll have to look it up for you. You can probably find it online too. Ken, one of Ken's sons, I think, was also involved in doing video games. It's a family of video game people.
AR:
[laughs] Let's see… lastly, would you be able to tell us about Knowledge Universe a little more?
TK:
It's kind of a long story… it can be a long story, I'll try to make it short. When I left Sega, I actually- before I left Sega, I mentioned to you that I knew Mike Milken fairly well, and had served on his board of directors. He had refinanced Mattel back in the days when Mattel was a conglomerate. You may not be aware of this, but back in the late seventies the CFO at Mattel decided that the toy business was too risky. He convinced the board of directors of Mattel to buy a whole lot of companies, like Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus. You may not have known that.
AR:
Oh. Interesting.
TK:
Western Publishing, the children's book publishing company, Monogram Models, a tubular steel company called Turco.
AR:
[laughs]
TK:
Why would we own a tubular steel company, don't ask me. A company called Audio Magnetics which manufactured audio tapes. Optigon Organ, a company that made electric organs. I spent so many years since I've done all this, I'm going to forget a lot. Mattel became this conglomerate. We invested in Intellivision. The early video game company that competed with Atari. This guy, Seymour Rosenberg on the board, loved the idea of competing with Atari. The problem of course became, fairly quickly: one year, all of the companies, except for the toy division, went to hell. They all lost money.The Ringling Bros. lost money, Western Publishing lost money, Turco Steel lost money, Monogram Models lost money, then OptiGon Organ lost money, Metaframe lost money. That was an animal pet supply company. Of course, Atari went to hell and then Intellivision followed it. All of a sudden, here we were, I ran the toy company, which the board didn't really like because we were too "risky."
AR:
[laughs] How funny.
TK:
I was the only surviving entity that was making money, and no one would finance us. The toy industry: you have to have financing for the first nine months of the year to pay for your R&D, your tooling, your inventory, your headcount. The banks were so mad at us for losing all this money that they wouldn't lend us any money for the first nine months of the year. I went hand in glove to Mike Milken's Drexel Burnham office on Wilshire Boulevard in LA (and the chairman of the company, Art Spier, went with me) and we said, "Well, we're going to have to go bankrupt." The banks that had been financing us, Bank of America, GE Capital, a whole bunch of them, they wouldn't finance us any longer. Mike said, "Barbie should never go bankrupt. I'll refinance you in 36 hours." He did.
AR:
Wow.
TK:
We survived, very happily survived. Of course, he- it was not cheap financing. It cost like 15%. The so-called subordinated debentures, which people later called junk bonds. We ended up paying it all back and it allowed Mattel to survive.
A number of other companies that Milken financed ended up surviving very well. I think RJ Reynolds Foods was one. Oh, I know one: CNN. Ted Turner's company, he financed. Milken was a genius at figuring out how to make this financing stuff work. He obviously refinanced Mattel and it was a very good deal. Later I went on his board. The board of his foundation, rather, not his company board. He supported pediatric AIDS as well, and we're still friends. When I was trying to figure out what to do with Sega, he offered me, he said, "Why don't you come work for me? I'm teaming up with Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, and we want to do technology and education to improve education." We worked on a business plan, and it was the strangest business plan you've ever seen, because it was literally defining every segment of education, whether it's preschool, grammar school, middle school, high school, college, corporate teaching, corporate learning, all of that. Our goal was to use technology to improve education, cradle to grave basically. Larry invested two hundred fifty million dollars, and Mike invested two hundred fifty million dollars, and I was CEO of a startup with five hundred million in the bank.
AR:
Wow…
TK:
A number of those companies ended up doing very well. LeapFrog was one. We bought LeapFrog when it was doing $3 million dollars in revenue. We grew it to doing $680 million in revenue. We bought Children's Discovery Centers, which was a chain of preschools mainly in California and Oregon and a few in Arizona. We ended up expanding it, starting new ones, and then we bought KinderCare, which had 3,000 preschools across the country.
We started something called Productivity Point International which was basically teaching Microsoft software to corporate people. "How do you use the Microsoft software better?" We did the same thing in Europe: we bought a company, at the time called CRT, which stood for - there in England - it was called Consulting Recruitment, and Training.Pretty interesting business model. You would train mainly guys who were engineers in how to do programming, how to really use Microsoft and others, how to use Oracle better. We would train them up to a certain level and then we would put them out on consulting jobs with corporations. We were training them, consulting and recruiting them. That's the CRT part of it. We ended up selling that to a company called Adecco. We ended up selling the preschools to a Swiss private equity firm for $2 billion.We got a nice return for Mike and Larry on all these different investments we did. We did Knowledge Kids Universe, we did teacher's training, a knowledge [based] teacher training company [TeacherUniverse]. We did lots of different companies. I'm forgetting half of them, I'm sure. That was what Knowledge Universe was.
AR:
Cool. Thank you so much, because I was looking to expand on your- I guess, your entire career, especially on the charity front.Last question, because again I do want to be very careful about your time here. Out of everything you accomplished at Sega, what are you the most proud of?
TK:
God, that's a great question. Well, I think I was most proud of the fact that when I went to Sega, a lot of Wall Street analysts and a lot of my friends said, "What the hell are you doing? Trying to compete with Nintendo? Nintendo has 95% of the market share and Sega has 1% or something at the time."
AR:
Right.
TK:
"You're going to get killed by Nintendo. They're a giant and you're a little pimple. You're crazy to do this." I guess I'm most proud that after three years we passed Nintendo at share of market.
AR:
Wow, yeah, that is honestly a big- it kind of seems like you were the… I can just say it: you were the driving force in Sega of America success. I don't think that Sega of America would be the company that it is today without you being there.
TK:
Thank you. Yeah, I have to agree. [laughs] But they still do… I wish they were doing other things. They're starting to by the way.For years after I left Sega… by the way, the other thing I'm really proud of is, I had a great team of people, my goodness. Joe Miller, Al Nilsen, Michealene Cristini Risley, Diane Fornasier, Rich Burns, just great people. Paul Rioux, I dragged from Mattel over. I really had a great team of people that I'm very proud of. They're all- almost all of them are doing very well today if they're not retired. I'm very proud of that as well.The other thing I'm proud of is, they still like me. [laughs] We had a Sega reunion a few months ago and I think a few hundred people showed up.
AR:
Was that Sega Reunion [2022]… was that in the last year, was that 2022?
TK:
No, I think it was last year. Maybe it was that far along ago. Gosh, time flies. We did it at the hotel, the Sofitel Hotel. It changed names now. I don't know.
AR:
Yeah, the Sofitel, next to Redwood Shores.
TK:
Next to our office, yeah.
AR:
If you look on Sega Retro, the photos that were taken there are on Sega Retro, if you wanted to look.
TK:
Okay, good.
AR:
Then as we wrap up here, is there anything you want to share because this is going to be published? Is there anything that you'd like to share about your work or your time with Sega?
TK:
I just did share a lot, didn't I? [laughs]
AR:
Sorry, anything we didn't discuss, I apologize.
TK:
It was a great time, we had a lot of fun, and we were very successful, we made a lot of money for the corporation, and had great people. I was very pleased about all of that.
AR:
You really had established a stellar executive team there. I don't think we've seen anything quite like the team that you've built at Sega of America.
TK:
I am also very proud about what we started talking about: the Sega Foundation and the work we did at a time when people didn't talk about pediatric AIDS or HIV… and we kind of opened up the minds of people that… "Hey, we gotta do something about this."
AR:
Right, it brought normalization to something when… I remember at the time, you didn't even want to touch- there was a thing about touching kids with AIDS, people thought it was infectious. [Then] you do your thing at Sega of America, and then six or eight years later, it's pretty much normalized to the point where no one thinks like that anymore.
TK:
[in agreement] No, it's just too bad we couldn't find a cure and save Anique's life before she passed. Great little kid.
AR:
I'm glad that this is being documented because I did want more of her story put out there.
TK:
Do look up Elizabeth Glaser and, gosh, I'm trying to remember the names of the other founders. There were other women who founded the Pediatric AIDS Foundation. I want to say one of them is, oh gosh, there's a movie producer who has a daughter who is big in it as well. I'm forgetting the name again, of course.It's a movie producer who lives in Napa. Does that help? I can't remember. His daughter was part of it. Then Elizabeth was married to this actor and… I remember going to their house down in I think Pacific Palisades. Probably burned down now, but they did a lot of great work.
AR:
I'll have to reach out to her. All right, so I think that's all I'll take up your time for today.
TK:
Okay.
AR:
Again, I've been apologizing and stepping over myself this entire conversation. I was very nervous going into this and I do appreciate the patience and understanding. My wording hasn't always been perfect and I really appreciate it.
TK:
No, no, you've been good. That's fine. Look forward to seeing this or maybe talking again.
AR:
You know what I'll do is: when I get it transcribed and published, I'll shoot you an email with the link.
TK:
Wonderful.
AR:
All right, thank you so much again, Mr. Kalinske. This was an absolute pleasure. I still can't get over the fact that I spoke to you today.
TK:
Well thank you, Alex. All right, bye bye.
AR:
Bye bye.