S T E M | Brent Bushnell

That glow stick fluid is so ridiculously toxic. Like, we spent half a day just trying to figure out how to contain the stuff. It was melting through every container we tried to put it in. And then we sort of all looked at each other and we're like, isn't this the stuff we give to kids? Yeah. It's like ridiculous. So things sort of started to continue to kind of get weird from there. I guess you can't live in LA and not have Hollywood sort So we ended up as the on-camera inventors for Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, which was super funny because they were like, hey, we think you should be on the show. We're like, what show? We don't even know what this is. Move that bus? We're like, what are you talking about? So they're like, here, watch these and then we'll talk. So we ended up building some new invention for each one of the families. If you know the way that show works, they find some family that's sort of living in destitution, and then we would build some new installation. Sort of help whatever their condition was. So we adapted a pitching machine to a sip and puff controller so that a former baseball player who had become a quadriplegic could pitch to his son again. We made a high-tech puppet show. And what started to happen again was parents and teachers called. And they were like, hey, you guys, this is really interesting. We'd love to make that puppet show in our class. And, you know, how do we— you know, our kids think this is really neat. And so we finally were like, hey, there's sort of a real opportunity here to do something about this. Like, clearly there's this massive disconnect between what kids, you know, what we do as engineers and what's made possible sort of today with engineering and science and sort of what the popular, you know, belief is around that kind of stuff. Because we were doing like real engineering. You know, we helped Chevy launch a car by launching it off a tower of shipping containers. We took 25 black and white cars out to the desert, ripped all their batteries out, hooked them up to one Die Hard battery, and allowed Gary Numan to play the song Cars on the cars. Every key he hit, the corresponding car, its lights would turn on, its horns would blow. I'm going to show you just the beginning of this video because it's too long. But Gary Numan is such a weird dude, you just have to watch this part. We powered a cube of lights, a double-step Keyboard, 24 cars without batteries, and Gary Newman. He might run out of batteries, actually. So he goes. OK. The funniest part about that whole thing was those were all rental cars. They were all different. And then all those things ended up going back to whatever Hertz or whatever. So we didn't feel great about that. But we love immersive entertainment, started playing around a lot with virtual reality. So we built our own 360 camera and stitching software. strapped it to an IndyCar with a bunch of extra sensors so that we could then create a whole immersive experience of feeling what it's like to be in an IndyCar. And, you know, you get all the other sensors moving around. You got a fan blowing you in the face. That's been on tour with Indy all year. For the Super Bowl, we rented Cardinal Stadium, got 20 football players in full wardrobe, put our camera on a robot at head height, and then choreographed a whole experience of what it's like to be a football player running down Catch the ball, run down the field, people try to tackle you. Installed that at the Super Bowl in this sort of crazy rig. These black plates would vibrate as you were running. There was a little transducer that would hit your chest right as you catch the ball, and this huge helmet, which was sort of comical for photos or whatever, but also had the acoustics in it. So we sort of formalized this ridiculous band of nerds into a company. It was sort of a drinking club with an art problem to begin with, really. But as a real company, we felt like we had an opportunity to kind of really reframe what it means to be a nerd and what is possible. And for us, there's a term that the world uses to talk about this stuff. It's called STEM— science, technology, engineering, and math. And it's about as boring as it sounds. And frankly, people think of this guy. I mean, hey, I'm super thankful for the work that he's contributed. But this is not exactly— you know, a will.i.am or a rock star that we want, you know, that our kids are going to be like super excited and passionate to kind of grow up and be. But, you know, contrast that with this guy, right? Da Vinci. Sure. STEM guy. Engineer, inventor, all that cool stuff. And an artist and a creator and an inventor and all sorts of, you know, had all these wonderful, you know, he was, what a polymath. Wow. And, you know, for me, it reminds me of this quote, which I love. If you know Robert Heinlein's Specializations for Insects, Actually, the beginning of this is what's so awesome, and so if you haven't heard it, I'll recite it for you here. If you have heard it, indulge me. A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. That's it. Specialization is for insects. Yeah! I love that meme! Right? Is that awesome? Like, those are the kind of people we want in our world, right? Like, problem solvers, people with capacity to do lots of different stuff, right? We've got all these wonderful tools. You as one person can be so powerful. And, you know, how can we incite an entire generation to think like that? So, why is this important now? Well, there's sort of a lot of reasons. America sort of sucks at this in general. You know, there was a recent study called the PISA study, sort of pits all the nations in the world together in terms of student understanding. I think we ranked somewhere like 47th in math and science, which means there's 46 other countries that did better than us. So that was pretty terrible. But the better side, the sort of good news, is all the technological changes out there. You guys know a lot of this stuff, but there's a couple of demos that I have that I think really drive it home. So the fundamental test, or your sort of introduction in computer science, is how do you print the words Hello World in whatever language you're trying to program? Well, in the '80s, in assembly language, it looked like this. Right now, I studied computer science, and that's terrible, right? It's not intuitive. It takes a lot of time. It's really, you know, brain damage. 10 years later, it looked like this, right? That's a lot easier. Now, it's still like your grandma can't do this, right? Right? This is still like a little complicated. What's going on here? But it gets better 10 years later. Right now, all of a sudden, Python, it's like, that's pretty simple. Anybody can do that. And what? Now you can do it on your iPad in pictures, right? Your 6-year-old can do this. So that's ridiculous. You know, that is true. Pick your favorite domain across the board. CAD used to look like this. Now you can do it on your browser. You know, IDF, Intel's been a partner of ours for years, and, you know, they have a developer conference. Arguably, you know, I mean, a chipmaker convention, right? Arguably the nerdiest convention on the planet, right? I mean, engineers, we sort of— there's shades of engineers, right? And the guys who make the chips, those are the super engineers, right? Those are like the most— we actually call them dark matter developers because you know they exist but you never see them. But the thing that was so fascinating was the last couple of years It's not just those guys at IDF, right? In fact, not only is it not those guys, there were a bunch of other folks— theater people, artists, you know, fashion designers. I mean, it was nuts. It was like you were at South by Southwest or something, right? I mean, that is not what you would expect from a chipmaker convention. But the reality is all those tools, all of their tools, are getting that easy. And so any sort of artist and creative finally has access to sort of the entire spectrum of technology and engineering and whatnot to be able to implement into whatever it is that they're building. Combine that with this sort of awesome trend toward experiential and immersive entertainment. If you don't read it, I highly recommend JWT's deck. Every year they release— this is one of the big ad agencies— and they'll release sort of what they believe to be the coming trends of the world. And they have identified entertainment and immersive, going immersive, as being one of the big ones. All the major agencies are adding experiential divisions. They're not just buying billboards and ads anymore. They're creating customized experiences. And you might think to yourself, God, does that stuff really scale? But the reality is, is you do some massive activation at Comic-Con for the people that are your superfans, right, the 1%, they're gonna go through that thing, they're gonna totally love it, and then what they're gonna do is they're gonna talk and tweet to all of their following, and they become this massive audience. that is now promulgating your message to everybody else, the 9 and the 90%, if you've heard those terms. So there's this sort of awesome opportunity to kind of lever the people that are your superfans. And there's a— one of the Dropbox execs has this great quote around, you know, a brand is started by the company and finished by the customers, right? That's a really sort of modern way to think about the way in which your company will grow, right? It's not gonna be you always by fiat pushing out everything, right? It's gonna be an interactive back and forth with that, with your customers and your partners and whatnot. Uh,