Creating New Ideas & Inventions | Brent Bushnell

Thanks so much for having me, you guys. Appreciate the introduction, Werner. So, yeah, I titled this Lasers, Fire, and Robots. Really, this is a story about sort of imagination, creativity, and sort of following your passion. So I'm a nerd. I imagine many of you are nerds. I started out as a nerd. And me as an 8-year-old, nerds generally, you sort of always got the tools that you need with you. So for me, as an 8-year-old, you know, that was like toys and stuffed animals. But, you know, as you move on, those tools start to get more complex, more interesting. I ended up as an engineer at UCLA, which I liked quite a lot. Of course, I never graduated, but managed to hire all my favorite coworkers in one of my first startups. Woo! But, you know, ended up in all sorts of different stuff. I worked in DNA synthesis and fiber optics and as a systems administrator and even as a sushi chef for a little while. But didn't— Very weird experience. But, you know, didn't really sort of find what I loved and what I was really having a ball with until I started collaborating with my co-founder, Eric Bradman. And he's a clown. I'm actually a clown. And his background was robotics, or is robotics. And we, you know, wanted— we were both very frustrated with what we were doing. I was working on a failing startup We had put touchscreens on all the tables of a restaurant, displays on all the walls. You could order all your food from the screens and play games against everyone. And what was that? There's a restaurant in London called Yanami. Yeah, you know what? They launched just like maybe a year or so after we did. And sadly— so I could go really down the rabbit hole with you on this. But we spent really a lot of time and money building an iPad. about 5 years too early. So, you know, timing, opportunity, preparation, you guys probably learned all about that. But, and so, and he was working at a big think tank in LA building robots for the military. Pretty sure he was facilitating, you know, killing people. And so we were both sort of like, meh, with like our normal lives, and started to collaborate in 2007 making interactive art. And, you know, it was a really special time for tech. Computer vision was getting cheap, sensors were getting easy to use, You know, the sensors that make your iPhone possible had gone from thousands of dollars to, you know, less than $10. You know, if you think about the camera in a Kinect, right? That was a $10,000 camera before it was $100. So there was this sort of really awesome confluence of opportunity to be able to really make something awesome in a weekend. So we started doing just that. And our first thing was this interactive whiteboard. We basically pointed a camera and a projector at a whiteboard. The camera would pick up the state of what you were drawing. The projector would project a physics simulation, it would sort of bounce off the stuff you were drawing. Cool. Super simple, fun. We took it to a party and people liked it. They, you know, they started making games out of it. And so we were like, all right, our confidence was bolstered. This was fun. We kicked this out in, you know, 8 hours. Let's start making more stuff. And we challenged ourselves to make something new every single month. So our next thing was this sort of as close as we got to an arcade cabinet was this 6-player game table. And my favorite part about this is These are lame graphics, right? There's 6 colors in this thing. It's a really simple game. But it didn't matter. People come to parties in 2s and 4s. 6 kind of guaranteed you were meeting somebody new around the table. And we took this back to this one event over and over again. People started coming up being, the only way I meet new people is around your Hexacade. We were like, wow, cool, no way. And this was not Halo. Decidedly super simple. And yet that was enough. Equivalently, we filled a room with fog and laser beams. And my favorite part about this is everybody knows what to do in a room of laser beams, right? It's like, you don't have to do anything. It doesn't matter what you're wearing. Cocktail attire, high heels, whatever. People commando rolling across the floor. Super fun. But not all of the— you throw a bunch of stuff against the wall, and it doesn't always all work. We thought, OK, rock band, totally awesome. Space battle, totally awesome. Rock Band for Space Battle is going to be great. It's a sure thing. So we literally spent a whole month building this entire 3D world, 2 big project— you know, 2 ships, gunner, navigator, pilot on one ship, gunner, navigator, pilot another ship, 3 computers, 3D world, multiple displays, all this kind of stuff. People sat down to it and they were like, huh? You know, and we were like, God, you know, we thought this was going to be so amazing. And since then we've sort of started We've started to joke that the things that we're the most excited about are probably going to totally suck. And it's the stuff that we just sort of throw out the door that ends up being awesome. Like a wall of buttons. Right? Like, this is— you wouldn't think that there is a lot of opportunity for fun. We're on like the 7th version of this. And I'll sort of come back to this a little bit later. But remember, this was sort of the earliest version that we did for a big hotel up in Seattle. This sort of series of interactive rooms. But this thing transitioned into a multiplayer game and all sorts of fun. But just remember this. I'll come back to it. One of my favorites is our dunk tank flambé. You remember the old dunk tank where you throw a ball and you fall in water? We were like, water's all right, but fire's so much cooler. And so you are wearing a fire suit so you don't die, but, you know, literally someone hits the ball and you're enveloped in that flame. I think I have a— This is a really quick video from our last big event here. This is my co-founder going into this thing. He's got a GoPro wrapped in fire-retardant cloth. And some little kid's gonna try to throw that, hit that target. He missed. Eric's doing a good job of taunting him. Oh my God. I just can't believe that. So I just love that. And you know, we're a bunch of nerds. We do it by the book. We get the fire marshal out there. And the thing that I've just loved, fire marshals, firemen, they're all total pyros. I mean, they just love it. The fire marshal was there the whole time. His daughter's throwing the ball. Like, it's hilarious to sort of watch them interact. So, maybe about 2011, this rock band finds out about this big band of nerds in downtown LA, and they're like, hey guys, like, we'd love your help with our next project. We want to be able to dance with a machine in our next In our next music video. And we all sort of like scratched our heads a little bit. We're like, dance with a machine? God, what are we going to do? What about a Rube Goldberg machine? You know, the things where like the ball rolls down a ramp and hits a cat and the cat pops a balloon? It's sort of those big whimsical crazy machines. So we thought, what if we do a Rube Goldberg machine and instead of dancing with it, it's going to abuse you a little bit? Are you guys all right with that? And they were like, yeah, sure, that sounds great. So if you know the rock band OK Go, the guys who did like danced on the treadmill and stuff? Yeah. So we did that. It started with this, and then it ended like this. And over the course of it, it was like 2 huge floors, like a 20,000-square-foot warehouse. And we dropped pianos and smashed televisions in this whole sort of massive thing that took us 3 months to build and was a total nightmare. I mean, literally, the fact that those things look like they're not going to work is because they're not going to work. Like, we filmed it 80 times and missed the overwhelming deadline, like all sorts of punishment. And so, you know, as the suffering of that sort of faded into the background and the thing went viral, we were like, oh, wow, you know, that was fun and, you know, good band of nerds. We had all sorts of trending analysis in our newsgroup. But the part that we didn't expect was a bunch of parents and teachers started calling. And we were like, God, why? We're not educators. Like, why are teachers calling us? This doesn't make any sense. But it turned out that they were using this in their physics classes. Their kids got excited and they were making their own Rube Goldberg machines and They were sending us the videos about it. And so we were like, God, that's pretty interesting. This is not normally a thing you would think of as a teaching tool, but it was actually ending up being sort of useful in that capacity. As a result of this, Madison Avenue started calling and saying, hey guys, we want a viral video too. And we were like, oh, sure. We'll just throw the viral switch. That'll be no problem. And of course, most of them also wanted a Rube Goldberg machine. And we were like, nope. out of that business. Thank you so much. Those things are terrible. We're never going to do it again. And said, no, no, no. I mean, even the guys from— the ones that are all the bathroom humor. I forget their name. But they were— we were like— Jackass. Jackass. Yeah. We were like, no, we're not going to do it for you guys. But then Google called. And we were like, gosh, all right. Well, we do really love you guys. And we'll do it on 3 conditions. We can use lasers, fire, and robots. And they were like, fine. Done. So if you're open to it, I've got that video here. Let me just see. Yeah. So we did this for their Google Science Fair. Oh, I realize maybe I'm not going to have audio here. We did this for their Google Science Fair. Let's see if this works. Great. So it was all made of a bunch of science fair projects. We got wind. Magnets, baking soda and vinegar. That's actually a vacuum tube, so that feather fell at the same rate. So that's about 10,000 volts of electricity. I love lasers. Uh, so now if you know this, but you can buy glow stick fluid by the gallon. This is like a— my co-founder is underneath this table with a huge syringe pumping all this Glowstick fluid through that whole map. Google presents the first global online science fair. But that— so that Glowstick fluid— Thanks.