About Nolan Bushnell
In 1972 Nolan Bushnell created an industry when he founded Atari and gave the world Pong, the first blockbuster video game. Today his design credo—that games should be “easy to learn and difficult to master”—is inspiring a new generation of developers. A prolific entrepreneur, Bushnell has started more than 20 companies, including Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theater, Catalyst Technologies, the first Silicon Valley incubator, and Etak, the first in-car navigation system. In the process, he pioneered many of the workplace innovations that have made Silicon Valley a long-standing magnet for creative talent. Bushnell was the first and only person ever to hire Steve Jobs, which he details in his 2013 book, Finding the Next Steve Jobs.
He is currently Chairman of ExoDexa, a gamified education company, CKO of Moxy, a “play to earn” game and token platform, and an advisor to companies in the gaming and esports spaces. Additionally, he sits on several Boards, focusing on games, gaming and robotics.
A true icon of the digital revolution, Bushnell was named one of “50 People Who Changed America” by Newsweek. A biopic about Bushnell, tentatively titled “Atari”, was acquired by Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company and is in pre-production.
Game On! – Guest Nolan Bushnell - Transcript
Introduction: Hello, and welcome to The Game On Podcast! My name is Adam Bellow. I am the CEO and Co-Founder of Breakout EDU, but I'm also a father, a serial ed-tech entrepreneur, and an advocate for positive change in the classroom. Each episode of The Game On Podcast is going to feature a new voice from someone who's making an amazing impact in helping to pave the way for the future of education. We're going to get to explore their ideas and opinions as well as learn from those successes and failures of these amazing educational gurus. All right, let's get started.
All right. Welcome to The Game On podcast. I'm your host, Adam Bellow, and I am just incredibly excited to have an amazing guest today on the show, who is an incredible inspiration. He's someone who is considered not only the father of the video game, but just someone who's a deeply creative and dedicated entrepreneur, someone who's taken a lot of risks in his career, and someone who's also just deeply passionate about innovation and also about education, specifically ed-tech. So we're really super lucky to have you on the show today. Nolan, welcome to the show.
Nolan Bushnell (01:09): Great to be here. It's always fun to pontificate on all kinds of things in education and games and fun.
Adam Bellow (01:19): Hey, that's what we're all about here. So, before we get started, I mean, listen, I think everybody will have some working knowledge of who you are, but how would you describe yourself? I mean, you've had such an incredible career and you've really have pioneered so many things obviously; Atari and Chucky Cheese, I swear to you, I feel like I'm talking to, as, as I mentioned to you before, it's like Thomas Edison, the person who's been responsible for many of the things I've enjoyed doing over my life. But how do you talk about yourself with that such a long list of accolades?
Nolan Bushnell (01:52): It's sometimes tempting to live your life in the rearview mirror, but I feel like the most exciting things are the things I'm working on now. So I'm kind of forward-looking, not backwards-looking, and I've often thought what would I like on my tombstone probably ‘He was crazy like a fox.'
Adam Bellow (02:17): I love it. I love it. I love it, and I will tell you, I mean, despite obviously your most well-known accolades as we mentioned before, the stuff you've done in education whether it be brain rush and we'll get into your kind of newer ventures as well. I just have always been a fan writing and the fact that you've kind of dipped your toes into so many things along the way. Having read, I don't know, I don't remember exactly when the book “Finding the Next Steve Jobs" came out, but I remember reading that and being like, "Wow”, It’s just so much insight so much great stuff there.
Nolan Bushnell (02:54): Well, you haven’t seen nothing yet.
Adam Bellow (02:57): Love it.
Nolan Bushnell (02:58): I've got a book coming out, probably end of fourth quarter, early first quarter called "School of the Future", and it's basically a manifesto of how we fix the worldwide educational mistake, the educational morass. I am very hostile to the way we are treating our children. I think it's right on the edge of child abuse that our education system is so based on the dynamics of the 1850s, and it's like they don't know that the computer has been invented. And if you look at the efficiency of business, there was a big singularity when businesses started to computerize. But it wasn’t. They started out kind of having computers play a bit role, and then the companies that really got into it became massively successful, and the whole idea of using data and understanding things on an individual basis instead of a group basis is really important. School right now is group based, and when you say that you're in the third grade, that means that you are a collective of third-graders. That's wrong. You should be a collection of one. There's this old idea - is a classroom of 30 effective? No.
Is a classroom of 15 better? Yes. What about a classroom of eight? For some things, yeah. So if we can individualize learning, I feel like we can do a lot of things. Right now, let me tell you why groupness is bad. What you create is a pecking order in which kids early on think of themselves as being the smart kids or the dumb kids. If you self-select as being one of the dumb kids, that does a whole bunch of things to your mindset, and what kids should do is not compete with their classroom classmates, they should compete with themselves. Some kids just don't do well under time pressure. Does it matter? Does it matter whether you're a fast learner or a slow learner? No, the idea is that you want to be a learner and you want to maintain what's the most critical characteristic of a human being.
It's creativity and optimism, and so if you crush creativity and you crush optimism, you've crushed the individual and you created a permanent underclass, and I think that we can, with a proper school system, break that underclass construct, because a lot of people are very, very, very capable and they show up in later in life when they had horrible school experiences, and yet go on to be a real estate investor and making millions of dollars. And so I guess, in my book, which is kind of a manifesto, in some ways, and it's unabashedly so, and what I want to do is start the dialogue, asking the right questions. I think college right now is so broken.
Adam Bellow (07:50): Agree there.
Nolan Bushnell (07:54): I mean, student loans are a burden that no sane society would allow to happen. We know that the part of your brain that deals with long-term consequences don't really mature until you're 22, 23. One of the reasons that they didn't allow debt to be taken on by 19-year-olds is that they didn't feel like that was good. That was part of the world. Now we encourage 19-year-olds to take on massive debt. Many are just driven to delay adolescents or prolong adolescents as much as they can, and so they go to college, take an easy curriculum, take a silly thing like ethnic studies, women's studies, all those things that have virtually zero ability to help you get a job, but then all of a sudden you're asked to repay a massive debt that you've taken to get that. It's just wrong. And so I want to be an outspoken hostile observer of the college systems, and I'd like to fix it through ExoDexa, which is my current gamified education platform in which we've shown efficacy that is astounding 10 times faster.
Think about compressing four years of high school into six months. I believe that's possible.
Adam Bellow (09:49): Wow.
Nolan Bushnell (09:49): With better retention and better outcomes. So do we graduate people at 14? No, but think of all the extra things the kids can learn; entrepreneurship, biology, DNA unity. I mean, there are kids right now that are programming video games at nine years old. And, there is no reason why kids who graduate from high school shouldn't be able to enter the workplace at salaries of over a hundred thousand dollars. There's no reason. I mean, not everybody, but many and so that's my dream, that's my idea. I think the world is moving towards every day a gig economy and so what does it take to be an entrepreneur, to build a company of one or two or five and get a group of your friends together?
Nolan Bushnell (11:06): My youngest son just put together a game company and they published their first game. It's called Escape Academy.
Adam Bellow (11:17): Awesome.
Nolan Bushnell (11:18): It's number three on Steam right now. He's going to make a million dollars at 28 years old.
Adam Bellow (11:23): That's amazing. That's awesome.
Nolan Bushnell (11:28): It is. I have a lot of kids. I have eight kids, five boys, three girls, and they're the delight of my life. That's much more important to me than Atari or Chucky Cheese or any of that stuff. The whole idea of making the world a better place, and I like the old phrase that "if you want to live in the future, you need to help invent it" and that's kind of the watchword that I live by.
Adam Bellow (12:01): I love that. I love that, and I will remind you actually we had spoken almost a year ago, and you had sent me your book/manifesto and preach. I mean I am very, very much both like-minded in your lofty ambition and goals for it, and I think that a lot of our listeners probably are as well, in terms of truly wanting change and knowing that it's possible.
Nolan Bushnell (12:26): Yeah.
Adam Bellow (12:26): And I think only a crazy fox that change has to happen and it needs to be, as someone who's been a disruptor that you have in multiple, multiple ways and not just the ones you've mentioned, you have to take that leap and that jump, and so I'm kind of really, really excited to pick your brain and our podcast. We'll go through some questions over here, but this is a great framework and I'm excited to kind of dig in more and get your opinion on where we're going in education and kind of some of the advice that you have to folks as well, because you've certainly had an incredibly storied career, and I love the fact that as a father myself, that your focus is still obviously on the things that matter most so.
Nolan Bushnell (13:08): Yeah.
Adam Bellow (13:09): That's wonderful and I will tell you, I tell my kids all the time, you watch people play video games on YouTube, get on the computer, go build your own Minecraft mods, get on Unity. We've had my friend Steve Isaacs was on recently, he's the one of the people that works at Epic Games in their education department. I'm like, "Listen, build games, build the things you want to play."
Nolan Bushnell (13:30): Exactly.
Adam Bellow (13:31): Preach, preach, preach.
Nolan Bushnell (13:32): I can remember turning the corner with my kids when I taught them how to do a doom wad.
Adam Bellow (13:41): That's awesome.
Nolan Bushnell (13:42): I don't know if you go back that far.
Adam Bellow (13:43): Oh, I do go back that far. I know exactly what you're talking about.
Nolan Bushnell (13:46): The right way to teach kids how to program is you start them with things like Doom Wads.
Adam Bellow (13:57): Yeah.
Nolan Bushnell (13:58): Second, you show them how to go into the code and modify existing code, because starting from scratch is daunting but when you start modifying code, you start to see how this number means that the cape is blue and this number is the cape is red. Oh, that's cool.
Adam Bellow (14:25): Yeah, I would love that.
Nolan Bushnell (14:27):
And so I think this piece-wise, where you give every step a positive, easy outcome is a good onboarding process.
Adam Bellow (14:39):
Yeah. I mean I love it. I don't know if you know the company, there's a company called Cano. They're a very, very simple plug-and-play build computers like kind of built on raspberry pie but the best part about it to me was the fact that they had a version of Minecraft that was three-pronged. One was like block-based, kind of like a scratch where you drag and drop and manipulate it, and you see on the screen split screen what you're doing that affects your actual Minecraft game, and then it was the JavaScript underneath it, so it's exactly what you're talking about where like you're able to literally go in and change the color of the bricks and whatever. It was just was such a great way to start my own kids on learning how those things work so love it.
Nolan Bushnell (15:21): Yeah.
Adam Bellow (15:23): I feel like we've had a great conversation so far. I'm going to kick it to our level one question, our icebreaker, which is play is super important and at Breakout EDU, obviously play is important, and obviously, it's been important to you both in your current endeavors and your past ones as well. What was your favorite game to play as a kid? And it could be anything, obviously, since you didn't invent the video game yet, I'm assuming it wasn't pong, but what was your favorite game to play when you were a child?
Nolan Bushnell (15:53): Early on Clue.
Adam Bellow (15:56): Oh, yeah.
Nolan Bushnell (15:59): Monopoly, all those typical board games and then I got fascinated with chess, and so chess sort of took over from, I think I was 10, and that became sort of an important part of my early life. I think too, there was just the start of some of the more complex games that were coming out of Germany and those, I'm trying to think of the names of them right now and I'm drawing a blank but yeah, those were pivotal for me, and of course, pinball.
Adam Bellow (16:44): Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. What about now? So obviously, as someone who's birthed many games, I don't know if you're still playing chess or still playing other board games, but do you play video games, modern video games as well, or no?
Nolan Bushnell (16:59): Oh, yeah. I mean, I deep dive on things on my phone. I play on airplanes and various things. I also have a coin-op video game simulator in my house that's built by one of my other sons called Polycade.
Adam Bellow (17:23): Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nolan Bushnell (17:24): And so that's fun, and recently, believe it or not, I've been playing Dig Dug.
Adam Bellow (17:32): Really?
Nolan Bushnell (17:34): Yeah.
Adam Bellow (17:34): Wow. Okay. On the Polycade?
Nolan Bushnell (17:37): On the Polycade.
Adam Bellow (17:39): That's awesome.
Nolan Bushnell (17:41): There's another game that I really like, it's called Quicks. I don't know if you remember that Old Chestnut.
Adam Bellow (17:47): I don't know. Refresh my memory. Q U I X.
Nolan Bushnell (17:52): Yeah. Q I X, I think QIX.
Adam Bellow (17:54): Qix. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, Kind of Stroller Tunnel.
Nolan Bushnell (17:59): Still my favorite. I mean, I play virtually every day is Go.
Adam Bellow (18:06): Yep, yep. Yeah. Go is, I mean, especially if you're a fan of chess. Go, my kids have gotten better than I am now, which is we're at that point where we play, even chess, it's like, Oh gosh, you teach them a little, and it's like, alright, but no, that's awesome.
Nolan Bushnell (18:28): I think as a parent being beaten by your kids in a game it's like Christmas.
Adam Bellow (18:34): Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Let's kick it up to level two, and this is a history round, so everybody has an origin story, obviously. I think that we've talked a little bit about yours, but more specific than what you've created and kind of those pivotal moments. What put you on the path to kind of get here and be doing the work that you're doing? Whether it be the education-focused work, or just even going back to starting Atari. How did you get from where you were then to doing the things that you've accomplished?
Nolan Bushnell (19:09): The OG story on video games, I like to attribute to two distinct happy accidents. The first one was I had an advertising company. I've always been somewhat entrepreneurial, and I had an advertising company that created the campus water, and it was basically the calendar of events surrounded by advertising that I would sell $3,000 worth of advertising and it had cost me 500 to have them printed up, and I'd them out at the bookstore at the beginning of every quarter or semester, and there are four universities in Utah, and I did it for all four of them, and life was good. I was driving a 190 SL Mercedes sports car and living in a nice apartment and putting myself through college, and like I said, life was good, but I knew I had a prodigious ability to spend money and so I decide I was going to get a minimum wage job, which I always thought was for suckers, at the amusement park. And I thought it's a night job. I can sell advertising during the day, and it turned out that once you did the first level of advertising, each successive quarter, 90% of them would re-up for the next quarter so I found that I really didn't have to work that hard during the day, but the whole idea of working at the amusement Park was a fun job and it was to keep me out of trouble.
Adam Bellow (21:02): Okay.
Nolan Bushnell (21:05): I can resist everything but temptation, and so I was working there and it turned out that I was pretty good at it, and I've always sort of been able to sell, and so I was standing on the midway selling balls for a quarter to knock down milk bottles, and of course, you meet a lot of cute girls in the summer and life was good, but then they made me manager of the department and so that was kind of my MBA if you would because my boss was a really good tutor and I had to manage labor percentages and inventory percentages and train and hire and fire and the whole thing. But in addition to that, I had two arcades that reported to me at the amusement park.
Adam Bellow (22:08): Yeah.
Nolan Bushnell (22:08): And so I knew the economics of the coin-operated game business. I knew how much they cost, how much they had to earn to have a good payback-Happy Accident 1.
Happy accident 2, in the sixties, if you were going to see a monitor connected to a computer, there were exactly four places in the world. MIT, Champagne Urbana, Stanford, and the University of Utah.
I was pursuing an engineering degree, Dr Evans at the University of Utah, who later started Evans in Sutherland. It's a big display computer graphics company and I played Space War on the computers that he had set up. We'd sneak up into the computer center at night, we'd jam the locks and sneak in at two in the morning and play until five or six, not great for grades, but it was great fun. So, that happy accident gave me the idea. I said to self, self, if I could take this screen and put a coin slot on it, it would make a lot of money in my arcades then you divide 25 cents for three minutes into a million-dollar computer and the math didn't work but I thought maybe one of these days, costs will come down and we can do it.
Happy accident three- my first job was at Ampex where I really polished my skills in video processing. Not everybody knows how to do that, and just turned out my first job, that was my purview and I got very, very acquainted with the bullion blocks of MSI chips, and so along the way, one day across my desk, when you're an engineer, you get all these free publications that sell you parts and stuff, and coming across my desk came a mini-computer for $3,000. I thought, huh, maybe that time is right and so I actually started a paper design using that, I hadn't bought it yet, but I started a paper design on how to do space war on that minicomputer. The computer was massively slow, chips in those days didn't want to run at more than a megahertz, and so I kept having to do these little circuits that would create things like score and that so I'd offload the challenge of the computer but I kept running out of time on the computer. The computer just couldn't keep up with all the calculations enough so I basically abandoned the project. I mean, I remember it today. I had a thanksgiving holiday weekend and I basically abandoned it the first day of the weekend.
Then Saturday I had the epiphany, let's not use the computer, I'll do it all in hardware and I figured out how to do it and all of a sudden, that changed the economics tremendously. Instead of a $3,000 computer, now I had a circuit board with a bunch of chips on it that had a cost of about 300 bucks.
Adam Bellow (27:01): Yeah, that's amazing.
Nolan Bushnell (27:02): And that became computer space.
Adam Bellow (27:05): That's unreal. What year was that?
Nolan Bushnell (27:09): 1970.
Adam Bellow (27:11): Wow.
Nolan Bushnell (27:12): I was a scrapping 28-year-old.
Adam Bellow (27:16): That's unbelievable. Unbelievable! Well, as I said when we were chatting before, I don't think anyone's going to top that origin story, but maybe, and the rest, as they say is history.
Nolan Bushnell (27:29): Yeah.
Adam Bellow (27:29): We'll bring it up to our level three question, which is about challenges. Obviously, you've been in lots of different companies and you've done a lot of interesting things, not all without challenge. What is something that you feel was a challenge or an obstacle that you overcame in the journey to get here? I know it hasn't all been roses and home runs every time, but what was one challenge that you're proud of kind of besting?
Nolan Bushnell (28:00): Well, Atari never had any money. We were capitalized by $250 so it was $500 of paid in capital. That's what started.
Adam Bellow (28:12): Mm-Hmm.
Nolan Bushnell (28:12): And the challenge was how do you run a company that has no money? And the answer came back, You turn inventory very quickly and you sell it for cash before you have to pay the bills, and so you can operate the company in positive cash flow and that is until all of a sudden your stuff quit selling and now all of a sudden your cash flow stops and you still got a payroll. That was an obstacle.
Adam Bellow (28:43): Yeah.
Nolan Bushnell (28:44): And the number of times that I had a payroll due on Friday, and there was not enough money in the bank on Wednesday to do that and scrambling around to get a distributor to pay you or what have you earlier and giving them a discount and what have you, just to keep the wheels on.
Adam Bellow (29:08): Knowing the story or at least published stories of Atari, is that a challenge you feel you overcame or is that something was a challenge?
Nolan Bushnell (29:17): It was an ongoing challenge and I've often thought I sold Atari because we moved away from the video game, coin-op video game into the consumer, and the consumer business was really hard to operate in positive cash flow because you had to build a lot of product. Consumer business tended to be a fourth-quarter business around Christmas and a lot of times the retailers wouldn't pay until January or February and so that, we were okay because we had seaters for the early home pong but when it came to the VCs, it was a product that I knew was going to be massively successful, but we just didn't have the money to do it. And so I started out trying to raise money and I was going to take the company public, and then the market kind of blew up on me and so I thought, I'll find a corporate investor, and it was Warner and they decided they wanted to buy the whole company, and I was tired. I'd been on this thing and with the stress of making payroll and things like that, and it just sounded like a vacation to sell it, and have somebody else worry about it.
Adam Bellow (30:43): Yeah. I mean, it's funny because in hindsight, obviously it's one of the most pioneering impactful companies, and I think that obviously you, not being the front row seat, but literally being in the seat itself, I don't think anyone has that sense of how exhausting that is. I mean, yeah, even running a business that's nowhere near any scale of Atari or anything else like that. I always say it's a rollercoaster that starts off every day. There's like, this is the best day of my life and the worst day of my life, all at the same time.
Nolan Bushnell (31:16): Oh yeah.
Adam Bellow (31:17): It's like, you're constantly flexing emotions and positive and negative and so yeah. That's amazing. Let's bring it up to our next level question, which is about passion, and obviously, you know, having, having read an early draft of the manifesto and hearing you talk about it earlier, I could tell obviously you're extremely passionate both about things in education as well as a whole bunch of other ventures that you're involved with. But what are you most passionate about? Is it changing college? Is it changing the way students learn in a younger grade level where you're talking about being kind of focusing on an individual learner and individualizing education versus having sort of group classroom dynamics?
Nolan Bushnell (32:02): What I want to do is I want to create a gamified education edu -gaming, if you call it, that actually starts in k through couple years of college. Right now exadexa is just high school and as we get moving forward and get good cash flow, that's my word again. We'll expand both up and down to pre-college, early college, and then we'll go down to junior high school and then we'll do full elementary. There are a lot of rules and regulations you have to comply with when you get down to the younger kids, but we can do all that, and then we'll go laterally with language. We'll start out with Spanish and then we'll go to German, Italian, what have you, Mandarin to become more geographically omnipotent if you would. And with that, we will also be expanding the curriculum to include more entrepreneurship, not just STEM fields, but more what I'd call life skills. And the life skills I think, properly done, can be the most important for outcomes of kids.
Adam Bellow (33:43): Yeah. I mean I couldn't possibly agree more. I think that that's exactly where, what we do here at Breakout EDU our games have all of them have the social skills, those soft skills, the 4C skills at the heart of everything that we do, because ultimately the game is content-based, and yes, they're learning about curriculum or students are able to solve puzzles that are aligned to different problems, but the ultimate part of it is the fact that they're working together, that the collaboration and the creativity get to bubble up, and it's a unique way of seeing things that you can only get, I think, not only in games in general but the games that we have created are really all kind of immersive and really deeply rooted in the fact that these students will have an experience not just having a content repetition or trying to memorize a regurgitate content.
Nolan Bushnell (34:38): The most important thing is keep enthusiasm, optimism and creativity alive. The difference in creative testing between kindergartners and sixth graders is appalling. I mean, we're training our creativity way too much and creativity and passion are going to be the drivers of the gig economy. We want to be creative problem solvers, and that's where the iconic class really shine.
Adam Bellow (35:12): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think you hit it before when you're talking about kids designing their own video games and it's something where during the pandemic, I really thought that we would have this renaissance moment of the system blew up like schools have changed, and in reality, I think what we found early on was that, or at least what I was seeing, was a lot of technology was coming to replicate the classroom experience so much, so many ed-tech startups came up where it's like we're going to replicate what sitting in real and looks like and feels like, and then instead where it's like this is a moment where you could kind of really take a deeper dive into individualizing it and making things different.
Nolan Bushnell (35:54): That's where I come in.
Adam Bellow (35:56): Yeah. Hey, I'm here to here to fight the battle with you. It's certainly a noble mission and I know it's not one that you share alone, which is, which is great.
Nolan Bushnell (36:08): Well, one of the things I want to insert here is this is in no way diminishing the role of teachers. It does require them to become mentors as opposed to the sage on the stage. The individual learning is just a first step. Our software is really good at the blooms taxonomy up to probably level seven, maybe eight, but it takes a certain amount of mentorship to move that into wisdom which is hard to define and yet a very important step. I mean, the only way you can get wisdom is through experience, time and mentorship. I can look back on my mentors as being very important and one of them was Mrs. Cook in the third grade, which really put me on this path so that's an important step.
Adam Bellow (37:30): Well, you just gave me the perfect segue to our final question over here, which is about what is the best advice that you've gotten in your educational journey. So I don't know if there's something in particular that Mrs. Cook gave you, but if not her, I'm sure someone else along the way. But I'd love to know kind of the best advice you've gotten along the way.
Nolan Bushnell (37:56): I think it's part and parcel to the advice I gave Steve Jobs when he was working for me, and that is, if you have an idea and I'm dismissive of ideas, hey, that person stole my idea, what have you. No. If you have an idea, you don't own that idea until you really work it. You research it, you understand it, you even business plan it because until you have gone to those extra steps, you don't really own your idea because it's just vaporware.
Adam Bellow (38:48): Mm-hmm.
Nolan Bushnell (38:50): But once you've gone through that and you're convinced that you're right, you can be in a room of 50 people that say you are wrong, stick to your guns because everybody else hasn't done the research you have. If you are confident in your research, everybody else is just noise.
Adam Bellow (39:21): Yeah. I love it, and I think that's something that students often where there is a hierarchy, whether it's a student and a teacher or a parent and a child, it's an important lesson to learn that your conviction is ultimately an important driver.
Nolan Bushnell (39:39): Yeah.
Adam Bellow (39:39): Despite age, and this goes back to where we started the conversation with third grade being grouped by age versus by ability, you have the conviction, you followed it through, stick with it. I love it.
Nolan Bushnell (39:52): Well, there's this other thing that I play with a little bit that I have, it's called intellectual arrogance but there can be a danger with intellectual arrogance if it's not grounded in reality. I mean one of the things they teach you in engineering is know what you know, but more importantly, know what you don't know.
Adam Bellow (40:36): Yeah.
Nolan Bushnell (40:37): Because when you build a bridge on things that you think, you know, but you don't know, those are the ones that fall down, and so your intellectual arrogance has to be tempered with humility and those are really two things that fight each other. Can you be humble and arrogant at the same time? It's a fight, but I think you have to keep a little bit of both going on in your brain at the same time.
Adam Bellow (41:10): Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. Absolutely agree. I mean, this has been such a fascinating conversation and I feel like we've kind of run the gamut. I really respect your views on not only education, but also just the fact that you've been pioneering different things for as long as you have and just really I don't know, just a lot of respect for kind of not only the work that you've done that's the big blockbuster numbers so to speak, but just the other things you've done, brain rush and other things that I've seen you do. In my 20 years in education, have a deep, deep respect for it, and as I said, I just really think that you're on to the right track and ExoDexa a game company ourselves, like very much looking to change what educational gaming and education itself can be is just great to connect and to pick your brain a little bit. So thank you so much for sharing your story. It really has been incredible having you as a guest, and I'm sure everyone's going to be looking for not only the new book but looking for ExoDexa. Are there other places online, Nolan, that they should either connect or follow you?
Nolan Bushnell (42:26): I'm involved with a company called Moxi right now, which is a middleware gaming platform where you can challenge other players and, say if I beat you put a wager on it and so it's all blockchain-based so that there's a smart contract created so that the winner gets the value in their wallet and the loser loses and I've always liked tokenomics. I like to say that I was into tokens with Chucky cheese long before the block chain.
Adam Bellow (43:21): Yeah. Hey, that's true.
Nolan Bushnell (43:24): But then I think Moxi is going to be an important thing, and I'm having a lot of fun with it. Are we going to cure cancer or fix the world? Probably not, but we're going to have a lot of fun, because a lot of people don't realize that competition adds a dimension to games that are really interesting that the quality of the graphics doesn't matter as much as the fundamental game algorithms. I like to say when I play chess, I play with the black and white wooden set that was identical to what they were playing with in the 1600s.
Adam Bellow (44:11): Yeah.
Nolan Bushnell (44:14): When I play Go, the black and white stones, nothing special, no special graphics there. In fact, when I see some of these chess sets you can't tell the pawns from the Knights, that's the wrong thing. They're adding noise into the game. Well, I feel that there are going to be some video games that will come out of these challenges that will be unique and fun and simple to play, but really test your fundamental skills of deduction, problem-solving, and sometimes reaction. One of the problems that we have is that we lose a millisecond of reaction time for every year you are over 26 or 23.
Adam Bellow (45:02): Oh boy.
Nolan Bushnell (45:05): So if I'm playing a twitch light game where reaction time is important, and I'm playing with one of my kids. I'm dead. They've packed up and gone home before I know I've even been shot.
Adam Bellow (45:20): Sure. Oh my gosh. Yeah but I mean, I honestly think that we're seeing more of a resurgence as much as there are those and the graphics will get better and now we'll be looking in the metaverse and all that. I feel like there's been such a resurgence of even more like point and click, like adventure game style I've seen. I don't know Ron Gilbert just released the new Monkey Island and there are all these new, I think even Ken and Roberta Williams is building an Oculus version of Colossal Cave. I feel like there is a resurgence of so many of these older, longer-form genres. so thankfully our reaction time won't matter as much.
Nolan Bushnell (45:59): Well, I look back on my kids and one of them got their start on the Pajama Sam and Spy Fox and the Humungous games, which were really revolutionary at the time and I like that. I think that's a good onboarding process. My youngest son Wyatt was playing Pajama Sam, he'd come down to my office, I was doing a lot of work at home at the time. I had a computer set up for him, off the side and he turned to me and he says, "Dad, I could do better at this game if I knew how to read."
Adam Bellow (46:47): That's amazing. That's amazing.
Nolan Bushnell (46:50): And so I said, Well, let's start to figure out how to read and so he was not proficient but he was reading at four or five.
Adam Bellow (47:01): That's great. Listen, when there's a necessity, I'll do better at the game. Why not? That's the whole point.
Nolan Bushnell (47:05): Exactly. Motivation really works.
Adam Bellow (47:09): I love it. Well, Noah again thank you so much for joining us. Until the next time… Game On!