Brent Bushnell built a carnival that blended lasers, robots, and games, drawing 5,000 daily visitors and a quarter-billion media impressions. When the pop-up wasn't sustainable as a business, he turned it into the Two Bit Circus Foundation, which now runs makerspaces and teacher programs internationally. He's now building a 50,000-square-foot micro amusement park in Los Angeles with VR stations, story rooms, and a robot bartender.
Chapters
How many people know the term STEM? Science, technology, engineering, math? Okay, so STEAM, STEM plus art. This was, we were one of the really early ones to be championing this term. At the time we were talking about it, it was really just John Maeda at RISD, but we really thought that was awesome because here we were, a bunch of nerds, right, STEM-trained people, but the sort of public sentiment, right, is it's not cool to be a nerd, it's not fun to be a nerd. But we got to play with lasers and fire and robots all the time. We were building huge attractions and building games like This is a lot closer to being a DJ or a basketball player than being something that is less exciting. So we put it all over the place. It got a quarter billion media impressions, which was just nuts. We were on Discovery Channel and Time Magazine and on stage at All Things Digital with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher swinging a carnival hammer. So really ridiculous. Sold out, 5,000 people a day. And in fact, it was 2 years ago today we brought it to San Francisco. 2 years ago, roughly around now. And we had this moment where, so we'd done it in LA, we'd done it in San Francisco, sold out, thousands and thousands of people a day, crazy, 120,000 square feet, so just for context, that's like 2 football fields of content. And we left San Francisco like, oh my gosh, people totally love that, and we're gonna die if we do this again. We took a year to raise all the sponsorship, right, we raised $1.5 million in sponsorship, a year to plan it, 10 days to set it up, And we operated it for a weekend, right? 3 days to set up 120,000 square feet. Are we masochists? So it was really a struggle to sort of get home and be like, God, there's something that people like here, and this is not a business. Like, this is not going to work. There's got to be another way for this to live. And so what we ended up doing was we launched a nonprofit. We'd been talking for a long time about a nonprofit, and it's hard to talk about for-profit and education. The world sort of gives you a hard time about that. And so we had been working with a nonprofit in Los Angeles for a long time that we really liked. They were frustrated with their brand and really loved the time we had worked together at the— on the carnival. And so we basically open sourced our carnival, you know, took our— the whole teacher training we built and merged it with their program. And we now have the Two Bit Circus Foundation. It's a team of 10, big warehouse in Gardena. We have another warehouse in Fresno. And it's basically a full-stack replacement for the science fair and the bake sale. Kids build their own games. They learn STEAM building their own games. And then they learn business throwing their own carnival. The carnival raises money for the school, and it's more exciting than a science fair. The community can come and play and engage. So sort of everybody wins. It's a 4-part, 5-part system. We do the teacher professional development. We teach the teachers. We do all the consumable classroom materials. We basically aggregate clean waste from from companies, package it up as art supplies for kids. So a bottling company buys too many bottle caps. They're clean on the loading dock and they're going to throw them away. Instead, they give them to us. We then package that with some extra cardboard and some other stuff and all of a sudden you have a kit that we sell to the school. We deploy makerspaces, STEAM labs. So now they've got the consumable materials, they've got the permanent materials, and then we have the whole toolset on how to build their own games. So the community then throws the carnival. As a company, as a for-profit, we threw 2 carnivals. We have done, the foundation's done 6. We've got licensing deals with Australia. We're in talks with Dubai and Lebanon and Hong Kong. The next one happens in literally a month in Dallas. So really exciting. It's going fast as hell. We finally sort of got it into the right format and it's really taking off. So the other piece was we were like, okay, well now that that's dialed, what are we gonna do around the corporate? What's the next step for corporate, right? The consulting stuff was nice, but we still wanted our own thing. What's the format that will work? So we're getting ready to open an amusement park. We call it a micro amusement park because it's small for an amusement park but huge for a retail complex. It's half a city block, 50,000 square feet. So it is called Two Bit Circus and it is an immersive social play space. This is something that is, Again, out-of-home entertainment hasn't changed in a long time, right? The last innovation, frankly, is escape rooms. And in LA, there was zero escape rooms a few years ago. There's over 100 now. So if that's not sort of demonstration there's new appetite for immersive entertainment, I don't know what is. But before that, it was like laser tag. I don't know what the other thing was that was awesome and new. And we really— it's funny to use this word up in Silicon Valley, but it's a platform. And if you think about out-of-home entertainment, there's a lot of things. That are platforms, and there's a lot of things that are interactive, but not both. So something that is interactive, bowling, mini golf, escape rooms, really interactive, not a platform, right? It's the same every time. Things that are platforms, movie theaters, concert venues, right? Super awesome platform, you can change the content, you invest in projectors and bathrooms and whatnot, change the content, right? And as a result, your demographic changes. So, and we value novelty in our entertainment, right? So the movie industry, hell of a lot bigger than the mini golf industry. Our first location is in the middle of downtown LA, the Arts District in downtown. We actually just got our permits last week. We started demolition this week. I mean, oh my God, we literally signed the freaking lease. This is how frustrating it can be to do stuff like this. We signed the lease on this. Like 8 months ago, we've had an empty 50,000-square-foot building in the middle of downtown LA that we could do nothing with. I mean, that was so frustrating. So anyway, and it's so funny, it's like they knew the circus was coming. The building already had this weird-ass paint job. But so right in the middle of downtown, we did a whole analysis. There's like $5 billion of investment going in around there from a new campus for Warner Music and a SoHo house, all kinds of stuff. And we've got a whole bunch of fun stuff planned for it, some early conceptual renderings. And this is a rough layout. We have an interactive supper club. We have what we call story rooms, which are basically— an escape room is always the same format. And frankly, what happens if the story is not about escaping the room? And you want to do something for Barbie, right? Or NASCAR, or physics. So there's lots of different ways in which you can do this kind of immersive entertainment. We call them story rooms. This is one example. We built this starship. You're all on the bridge of a starship, and then you have to collaborate to solve all kinds of different puzzles, explore the galaxy, and whatnot. We'll definitely have a bunch of virtual reality in there, different varieties, a whole reimagined carnival midway. When we think about this, carnival midways, right, they're social, this sort of format, but we've really reimagined a lot of that with different technology, computer vision, whatnot. A reimagined arcade with a whole bunch of different toys. We've had a lot of fun with food and beverage, including a robot bartender. So yeah, we're gonna be open early next year. So we're very excited about that. We've ended up landing an incredible woman from the amusement park industry that's basically a freaking celebrity. How many have heard of Great Wolf Lodge? You know that name? Yeah? OK. So the CEO of Great Wolf left to do this with us. So she was a client of ours. What's that?
Sorry. So will you actually serve food and beverages in an unconventional way? Like, you're into virtual reality and you're—
No, we won't probably. It's interesting. We have experimented with food in virtual reality. It's actually not that awesome yet. There's definitely places that are doing that well. There's a place in Shanghai called Oblivion, I think, that's supposed to do a really cool VR thing, VR and food. I've tried a couple of VR food things. I don't think that it's— it's not quite there yet. The food and the VR will be separate. There will be food. There will be VR, not necessarily at the same time. OK, so sorry to talk your ear off, but that sort of brings us to current. I've got some stuff around some of our process and things that I could share. Time-wise, how are we doing? We got some time? Yeah?
