Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Nolan Bushnell, Creator of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese

Episode Date: August 14, 2019

This week’s conversation is with inventor and entrepreneur 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.His latest startups are ModalVR, which offers wireless, multiplayer VR entertainment systems for turn-key commercial use, and X2 Games, an independent game publisher focused on Blockchain Technology.A true icon of the digital revolution, Bushnell was named one of “50 People Who Changed America” by Newsweek.Currently a biopic about Bushnell, tentatively titled “Atari”, was acquired by Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company and is in pre- production.Nolan is an absolute legend and I can’t wait for you to learn from him._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And so if you're a surgeon, you need a lot of experience and all that sort of stuff. But when you're doing a brand new company in a marketplace that previously hasn't existed and the technology hasn't been put together that way or what have you, anybody with passion is probably at the same starting line. All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais, and by trade and training, a sport and performance psychologist, as well as the co-founder of Compete to Create.

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created an industry when he founded Atari and gave the world the first blockbuster video game ever, Pong. And today his credo, the way he built his first game, is still present and it's shifted the environment, shifted the industry on this premise that video games should be easy to learn and difficult to master. And so he's also this prolific entrepreneur. He's started more than 20 companies, including Chuck E. Cheese. I mean, how cool is that? Catalyst Technology, the first Silicon Valley incubator, and the first in-car navigation system. I mean, his companies go on and on, and he's got this beautiful mind, this very creative mind. He's got a very disciplined approach about how he builds out

products and systems. And in doing so, he was the first and only ever person to recognize the extreme talent of Steve Jobs, which he details in his book, Finding the Next Steve Jobs. His latest startup is Modal VR, where he offers wireless multiplayer VR entertainment systems. So he's betting on VR in the future. And then he's also got K2 Games, and it's an independent game publisher focused on blockchain technology. He's definitely a harbinger for the digital revolution. And he was even named one of 50 people who changed America by Newsweek. He's also got Leonardo DiCaprio's production company acquiring his rights to his life, aptly titled Atari. And so Nolan is an absolute legend. I can't wait for you to learn

from him. I'm really excited about this conversation. So with that, let's jump right into it with Nolan Bushnell. Nolan, how are you? I'm great. Yeah, thank you. And I've been looking forward to having this conversation with you for a long time. So I just want to start off by saying congratulations on incredible body of work. Well, thank you. Yeah. Okay. So where did it first begin for you? Where did your curiosity and interest in creation and wanting to create and innovate. If you look back, where did that first begin for you? And I know it's a broad question. I think as long as I can remember, I was interested in stuff.

I was building stuff and intertwined in that was entrepreneurship. And I think back to a very defining moment in which at dinner one night, my mom, we had a garden in back, said, we've got so many strawberries, we're going to have to start giving them away and that same day or the next day I went with her to a grocery store and I noticed they had baskets of strawberries for 50 cents and I thought to myself interesting so I got a bunch of the little baskets picked strawberries went around the neighborhood and sold them for 50 cents. So I kind of at eight years old did market research and then executed a business plan and ended up with like 10 bucks, which for an eight year old kid was more money than could have been ever possible. You know, I love hearing this story. I had not, not a similar story,

but something close to it is that there was these beans. I was about the same age as you. And there was these beans that fell from a pod in a tree. This was in Virginia. And I picked up the beans just out of curiosity. I dragged them across a brick wall and I realized they got hot. And so I was like, Ooh, these are hot beans. I took them to school. Now, this is again about, I think it was like first or second grade. I took them to school and I showed them to some kids and they're like, oh, I want more of those. Or I want those. And I said, I'm the only one that knows where they are.

So I went back and I was selling hot beans for 25 cents a piece. So like I think you and I had a similar eighth grade or eight-year-old experience. That's funny. So you were different. You were different as a kid. Very. I was a ham radio operator when I was 10. If you were going to be a techno geek in the 50s,

personal computers weren't available to you but ham radio was and so that represented you know antennas and you know putting red and white striped poles on your on your roof and i realized my parents were were really angels i mean to let your kid put a red and white striped pole on top of your house and string antennas back and forth. You know, I mean, just come on, give me a break. Okay. Oh, my. All right.

So tell me about your parents. Like what were they like? What was it like growing up? My dad was a cement contractor. And so that meant that we always had a lot of stuff. You know, we had the wood pile and we had tools and we had things. So there was always a lot of stuff to build, build things. And, uh, my mom was a stay at home mom, but she'd previously been a school teacher and, uh, you know, she would pull us in every, you know, during the summer, she'd pull us in and read stories to us.

And sometimes she'd read these, I could call them science fiction books for kids, which were mesmerizing to me. And I think that that early introduction to science fiction was also sort of been this pathway. Because when you're reading science fiction, you're kind of living in the future. And you kind of want to be there. So that stirred your imagination. I think so. Yeah, for the rest of your life, it sounds like. Okay.

And then what was money like for you guys? Middle class? Wealthy like for you guys? middle class Wealthy did you guys struggle? The way I looked at it, and I don't know how to characterize it, but we were the second richest Family on our block okay. How did you know that? Well my dad my dad, had his own company. Okay. And, um, you know, we, I don't know how you knew that.

I, I just, I kind of knew what everybody else's fathers did and they tended to work at, at, uh, the Hill Air Force Base, which we were, I was just adjacent to it in there. And one of the kids' fathers owned a canning company, you know, and I figured that they were richer than we were. Okay. So in that vein, when you think back, were you more interested in how – like what was that like? Was it, was there an embarrassment that you were one of the wealthier kids on the block

or was there an excitement kind of pride thing to it? Did you not care at all? What was that like? You know, it was a pecking order issue. It was? Yeah. Okay. How did that play out for you?

I don't know. I mean, you know, it was not, I mean, it was actually a very, very minor threat in my life. Okay. Yeah. That's okay. Got it. Brothers and sisters. Did you have brothers and sisters? Three sisters.

Three sisters. And what order are you in? I'm number two. I had an older sister and two younger. What did your older sister teach you? She taught me how to be tricky because she was often the authoritarian babysitter. And I could always outsmart her. Okay.

And then how did that cleverness, that trickiness, the outmaneuvering show up later in life as an entrepreneur? Oh, I think that you always are looking for an edge as an entrepreneur. And many times that edge is an embracement of being tricky. Cool thought. I've never heard it that way. I've heard about, you know, like the words that we throw around a little bit cleaner, right? Like ingenuity or relentlessness or whatever, like very PC words. But it makes sense to me that you grew up trying to figure out how to find your freedoms to get

around your sister and so you just carried that thread along with the science uh fiction thread a little bit too and then the cleverness of having to put things together like your dad did and make things um what was your what was your room like your bedroom actually kind of a lot like this yeah okay so this will be audio so folks that can't see it's like i'll describe it like the what i'm looking at right now is it seems like it's a small little room but i can't see it's actually a big room but i built bookcases and everything all around it so that my stuff so i only have to reach to get parts is that what you've done okay now nolan no no critique it looks like a mess it looks like it is total chaos okay why have you created that what does that serve well the reality is

that if you have a lot of stuff as as long as you know where everything is, it's okay. And it's virtually impossible to organize the amount of parts that I have in organizing parts. And I'm not going to put my time into doing that. Got it. Okay. So your messiness is actually a function of efficiency. Absolutely. Okay.

All right. So then let's get through some of the early days. So you're figuring out how to build stuff, you're inspired by science fiction fiction and you're figuring out kind of this relationship stuff with your sister. What else were some of the more foundational, formative stuff in your early life? And I'm only asking to set you up like for – Mrs. Cook's third grade class. Oh, all right. Mrs. Cook was really interested in Aud you know, Audubon Society, bird watching and science and things like that.

And she had what we call the magic science box out and assign one kid to prepare an experiment. It could be in optics. It could be in heat. It could be in various things. And I was assigned to do an experiment with electricity. Pulled out the dry cell batteries and the wire and the switches and the lights and what have you and i set up and you got to go to the back table while the rest of the class was doing something else and i made you know wrapped wire around a

nail and turned it into an electromagnet. I figured out how everything worked and presented it to class. And I was hooked. I went home that night and that afternoon, set up a card table in the corner of my bedroom, searched the house for every piece of wire, old light switch, flashlight, battery, what have you, and started to tinker and I just never stopped.

Oh, no kidding. Okay. That type of passion at an early age is relatively rare. And so I want to understand that for you because I think most people flounder a bit in life because they look at and hear that story and they're like, I don't have a thing. I don't have my thing. You know, I didn't have that early education experience or early life experience that set me down the path. so do you feel like that was just an amazing serendipitous event that took place or from that moment with hindsight, were there ways that you had to cultivate and work and there was some cost associated with that as well as, as there are costs associated with not knowing purpose and meaning in life?

I don't think so. I mean, the world became extremely clear at that point because up till then I wanted to be a fireman and after that I wanted to be an electrical engineer. It was clarifying to me. Maybe that sounds funny, doesn't it? But no, no, it doesn't. I think it's rare. And I listened to it and I go, okay, so I want to understand like, what was the hard part then? Because you had the illumination early. And many people, as you would imagine and recognize, is that most people struggle with clarity. They struggle with like, what is my purpose in life? What am I meant to do?

Or what am I supposed to do? Or what should I do? And that is a daunting task to try to sort out as an adult. So you sorted that out early. And I know that it's not a bed of roses. Like you didn't just arrive to be one of the great innovators and great shapers in technology. Like there's been some hard times that you've gone through.

A lot of hard times. Hard times for me, often when I have too many options and I can't decide which one to pursue. Once I'm in the execution mode, things are very clear and yeah, things can be shitty. Things can be hard, what have you, but I've just always been a put one foot in front of the other and you get, you, you, you get through it, you know, you just got to do it. And there are people that you go on a sailboat with and you take a knockdown and everybody has to work to get the boat back ship-shaped and going.

And some people have a death grip around the mast and other people are part of the team. And, um, and I've always felt that you want people on your team and you want to be that person that when things are tough, you just muddle through, you just say, okay, if I'm going to write this ship, I have to do this. Then I have to do that, then I have to do that, then I have to do that. And I actually think another thing that was formative with me is that I learned how to play chess at a very young age. And I think that chess teaches you to look into the future, to plan, move sequences. And in your life, I think it's helpful to solve problems. If you say, how am I going to get out this out of the problem? You envision the end point of getting out of the problem, and then you organize steps to get you out of the problem.

It's a mental discipline that I think chess really helps you get. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentous. From the moment I sat down with Jeff Byers, their co-founder and CEO, I could tell this was not your average supplement company. And I was immediately drawn to their mission, helping people achieve performance for life. And to do that, they developed what they call the Momentus Standard. Every product is formulated with top experts and every batch is third-party tested, NSF certified for sport or

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And then the second is you used your imagination to create solutions. And then you practically, this is maybe the third set. Practically you backed into how you're going to be able to execute on what you imagined to be a solution. Absolutely. So did you – all right, I love this. How good are you, how skilled are you at imagination? Very. Okay. What do you do, besides chess, what do you do to water that skill, to amplify it, to grow it, to enhance it?

How do you nurture that skill? I believe that the skill has a lot to do with maximum life experiences. God, I love that you went there because the mechanical answer is like I daydream a lot or I think a lot. But you said, I got to live. To imagine well, you need to live well and you have to i've actually have a formula on this that you know when i speak to young people and i say you know travel like a peasant there's nothing like a peasant. There is nothing like a foreign country to open your eyes to different possibilities. But one four season looks like this other one. So you need to travel like a peasant

to get a fully immersive foreign experience. The other thing that I do is I go to random trade shows. When I say random trade shows, if I'm in Las Vegas, there's always three or four of them going on at the same time. And I just go and visit and walk the trade show floor. And a trade show is like an encapsulation of an industry. And there's always something that you learn with the exception of the international carpet show in which i went out and found that there was a lot of controversy

about loop and cut pile that i really didn't care about oh my god i thought you were like you're literally talking about carpet. That is hilarious. Okay. I was like, where's he taking this story? Oh my God. It's amazing. Oh God. That's great, Nolan. Okay. So you walk trade shows to get a sense of like how other people see and what their culture is and what they're interested in and how they relate to each other and how they present their ideas? And a lot of times it's about the technology that they use. Oh, yeah, okay. And like for example, I went to a manufacturing mechanisms trade show, International Association of Automation or something like that.

And I noticed that like 90% of what they were doing was pneumatics, these little cylinders. I talked to the guy and I said, wait, you know, how many, how many actuations do you get before the, you have to replace them? He said, no, they never break. I never replaced them. And so later on, when it came to doing the Chuck E. Cheese robots, I decided to use pneumatics because they'd just work and work and work and you didn't have to worry about it. Oh, that's okay. Look at that. Cross-pollinating insights.

Yeah. And so is that, you know, is that inspiration or is it having the dots that later on you can connect? And that's kind of it. People talk about connecting the dots. Well, if you've got a whole bunch of dots, you can make a better matrix. Okay. So the insight is brilliant. I'm on the other side going, God, you're a game changer for technology. And I've got this thought or this question I want to ask you about imagination in a minute. And then I hear all these beeps and sounds and pings in your environment. I'm like, it's perfect. like for most most people like it would be like oh gosh i hope that's not distracting to folks

that are listening but it is like the ambience is perfect for this conversation so okay um on the imagination did you imagine oh sorry go ahead you say all i need is a few bubbling cauldrons right yeah it's perfect right okay did you imagine as a youngster did you imagine the impact that you were going to have on this generation, maybe three generations later, four generations later of young people, you know, the video game industry and how it was going to change the nature of how we interact, how we communicate, how our brains are stimulated, overstimulated at times. But did you have any sense of that?

No, not at all. So what is that like for you now to see something that you created innocently, of interest, and has taken the globe by storm? I try very hard to not live life in the rearview mirror. And I look at that as something nice. But what's much more interesting to me is what I'm working on now. So you think forward more than you think back? 100%. How do you learn from your history?

Do you process quickly and then move forward? Or is reflection and maybe self-reflection not really part of how you organize your thinking? Oh, I do a lot of self-reflection and that which I don't do, my wife does for me. How long have you been married? 42 years. Oh, okay. How did that you been married? 42 years. Okay. How did that come to be? Oh, I just was mesmerized by this woman who looked to be a really fellow adventurer. And, uh, and I was, when I decided to get, I was married very young. I was married at 22 and had two daughters and that lasts about seven years. and and my first wife was really kind of based everything on fear didn't want to do things that were outside her comfort zone most things were outside her

comfort zone and what was really nice for me is when I found Nancy is that she would pull me in directions that I had never been or even thought of. And my life was richer because of the direction she pulled me. Relationships are so important, aren't they? Oh, they are. And, you know, I've been married 42 years and I would do it all over again. So how many people can say that? And so I've been triply blessed there. And if you look back at those 40-some years, as an analysis, relationships are hard, evidenced by the divorce rate. They are difficult.

And in the difficultness lies the gold dust, like the actual real special elements of connection and bonding and love and figuring things out. When you look back, you've been successful for the 40 some years. What are some of the mechanical pieces or more aspirational ways that you've engaged in your relationship to bring out, um, not only the endurance of the relationship, but the depth? Well, I think one of the things that we do is we fight out loud. You know, there's, there's no hidden agendas festering. You know, if, if Nancy's giving me the silent treatment,

I come and bugger. And so I think, I think that communication, have we had some rough patches? Absolutely. But I think that in the bottom rung is that we both really respect and like each other. I mean, I like who she is as a person. And she's maybe the most honest person I know. And she thinks that I'm the most dishonest person she knows.

But that's just another story for another time. Why? Why another time? That's amazing. No, but she basically is like, I have not written a check for 35 years. She takes care of it. She takes care of everything. In fact, I have to ask her for an allowance, which actually irritates me, but we're going to do it. That's another part. But it's a thing where when I start a company, she's the CFO for the first year or so.

She can set up health plans and make out W-2s and keep the books. She's really, you know, she, and, and, and it's, it's gone on, you know, I, we have five sons together and a daughter and all the boys are entrepreneurial and she sets up the books for them. And, you know, she's the first CFO for every one of their companies. Wow. Okay. So what is, how does she, so obviously she's skilled because you've had, did I read like 30 some companies? Yeah.

And then they've had multiple companies. Maybe each one of your sons has had a couple as well. Okay. So what is her skill set to be like, how does she do that? Because that's a real skill. It's funny. Notice I said 35 years, not 40. When we were first married, everything was fun and everything.

And then we had a little bit of a bad patch. Financially? Financially. Financially, okay. bit of a bad patch and uh financially financially financially okay um i mean it wasn't you know my bad patches is a bump in the road to you know it's a kind of level but she basically went back to school and got um and got a wharton degree uh in finance and uh decided that was one of the things that she was interested in doing, that she could figure it out. And so she knows accounting and a certain amount of business law

and a lot of corporate governance issues. Cash flow. Okay. And then she, so she holds the strings for finances for the family. Correct. Yeah, okay. So she's more left-brained by nature, and I know that's an old thought, but more logical, sequential, more systemic in that way. But you are as well. You're an engineer, but maybe you hold more of that creative, intuitive, divergent thinking.

A lot more creative, intuitive. And, you know, like, when I come up with a new idea or an idea for a new company, she's the absolute first one to say, oh, that'll never work. Is she more pessimistic, cynical by nature? By nature. I think I forced her into that. I was going to. Yeah, I was going to.

Because you are wildly in the other direction. Optimistic, I would imagine. Yeah. Okay, so as a counterbalance, she's got to keep the sanity of the relationship and the health of the two of you guys and the future viability of both companies and relationship. I always feel like it's my job to kind of pull her along, kicking and screaming into these new things. Do you like that? Is that a fun energy for the two of you guys? Is that a good dynamic? Yeah, I think so. Okay, that's cool. So I want to go back to when you fight. How do you repair? What are the ways that you guys repair a relationship?

Well, I mean, I think that it's really usually around me saying, I'm sorry. I love it very much. And I'll never do it again. Okay. I can't tell. I can't tell if that's just like you're saying, I say that, but then I know I make mistakes.

Or like, is that coming from a place that you really mean it? Like, I screwed up again. I really mean it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. All right. coming from a place that you really mean it like i screwed up again i really mean it yeah okay yeah all right and then um does she do the same or is it more lopsided that you you're the one she she she very seldom does anything that i mean when i get pissed off at her it's over the little things that just irritate me i do the big whoppers. Oh, you do. Okay. All right. Okay. I want to go back to like your company design as well. Do you have a passion for setting up new or is the passion for running businesses?

Like, is it the innovation spark that you love or do you like to actually get in the weeds and run a business for an extended period of time? I know when I come up with something, understand that I don't have a lot of volition in this. When I come up with an idea, I have to execute it. You know, it's just that that's not the question. The issue to me is when I execute, I find that I can't do it by proxy or by remote control. And so I have to climb in for the very, you know, like I'm,

I'm, I'm the guy with the chunk of marble who can turn the block into something that kind of looks like the statue. I'm not the guy with the Emery board that takes off the last bit. And so I've often said that I'm maybe as good as they come at zero to 20 to 50 million sales. And after that, I'm probably the worst. Wow, that's a big, cool, that's a really cool statement

because there's two parts. Like you can see David inside the stone as the eloquent capture of, it was Michelangelo, right? Like Michelangelo said that. And then you're able to build it from there to a significant amount, but then you got to take, you know that you've got to take your hands off the wheel to get to the 200, 300 millions. Okay.

Now, what do you do, Nolan, to create those images or be available to those images and ideas? How do you organize your inner world, your thinking to do that? There's actually two methods that are separated by about 20 years. And, uh, the early method was, you know, start doing that on a really a lot of planning. Like Atari never really had a business plan.

We just started building shit and selling it, making it up as we go along. I can remember that. Well, there's all kinds of funny stories about how in the early days of Atari, we were massively clueless as to what it was like to build actually a big company, but anyway. But later on, I discovered that if you only have one idea, there's only one time for it, and that's now. And oftentimes, now is the wrong time. And so what I've developed lately is what I call the marination pile. And so I get an idea of a business or a product or a technology, and I write a two-page business plan along with just guesses about the finances and how much it could cost to build and how much engineering and what have you and then i have to put it on the marination pile and what that does is it gives me several things that i can work on and now all of a sudden there will be a technology that comes along that really makes it easy.

And I say, ah, now I'm going to get, that's the one there. And so I pull it off and then I execute. Or lately it's been, is there somebody, here's the right talent. Maybe I can get him to come in and be the president. I'll be the CEO and chairman and we'll march off together. And that has been the methodology lately that I like is, you know, constantly add to the marination pile. Let them age a little bit and then one of them will talk to me. What a cool process.

So you're full of ideas, and what you need to do is capture them in some way so they're not these things that just disappear, but so you want to crystallize or harden them in some way. And is it an actual physical file or just something you keep on your desktop? Like a document file? Oh, it's actually a document file. I print them out. You print them out.

Yeah. Well, I kind of had that thought for you. Why do you print them out? I just think that the printed word somehow solidifies it a little bit for me. It's weird. I love whiteboards. Like I love, do you, you do too? Well, actually I prefer blackboards.

Oh, you go way back. Yeah. Oh, my favorite office was one where we've had blackboard paint everywhere and people would write on the walls and do that and it looked like the most creative place that the world's ever seen and it was you know the thing that's like that drives me nuts though is i find myself constantly taking pictures because i know it's going to like evaporate or i gotta wipe it down at some point you know like i because I run out of space. I don't have like this large room.

I've got, you know, I don't know if a 20 foot wall, which is, it's a big space with a whiteboard. But I know it's going to get, you know, written over or erased at some point. So that part does drive me a little bananas. How do you solve for that? Well, remember the whiteboard is really a communication tool so that you can put things down and collaborate with people as as you're talking i've often said that a engineer without a whiteboard is could be considered to be mute I didn't know that. That's fun. Okay. It's like an Italian with no arms is mute.

I love it. I heard somebody say the other day, a friend of mine says, we're arguing about something. He goes, you know what? The point you're making is a little bit like, how do you put it? The point you're making is a little bit like traffic laws in Italy. They're just suggestions. I just thought that was too much. Okay. Sorry, sorry, sorry. So you love to see it as well. Yeah.

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A shampoo, conditioner, and a hair serum. With Caldera Lab, it's not about adding more. It's about choosing better and when your day demands clarity and energy and presence the way you prepare for it matters if you're looking for high quality personal care products that elevate your routine without complicating it i'd love for you to check them out head to calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. You obviously have a craft of engineering and deep electronic understanding and how to put pieces together. You also mentioned that you have an eye for talent that

could potentially run a business. What is the golden thread for your businesses? Is there a thread behind all of your businesses beyond just the easy version, which is like application of technology? Real simple. Passion. Some of the best hires that I've made is hiring a waiter or a waitress that was really full of life and kind of in a joking sense. And when I'm giving a speech on entrepreneurship, one of the things I like to say is don't hire dead people. And, uh, and the reality is, is that there's a significant percentage of the population that are dead from

the neck up and they died at 16 and, uh, and they're just basically turning the crank until they die. You don't want those people, you know, let them go to the DMV, let them do something but they're not going to work for my companies because generally one of the things about innovation is that experience doesn't help that much because we're figuring new stuff out and so the need to have a you know if you're a surgeon you

you need a lot of experience and all that sort of stuff but when you're doing a brand new company with in a marketplace that previously hasn't existed in the technology that hasn't been put together that way or, or, or what have you, anybody with passion is probably at the same starting line in general. How do you ensure that the people and the cultures that you create amplify that passion or keep passion alive? because it's easy to lose, right? Like I think the two culprits to passion are fear and fatigue, like anxiety and exhaustion. And I'd love to hear how you think about passion, like lighting that fire, keeping it alive, stoking it where people are working hard because on the frontier, and I hope that

you, well, if you do disagree, I hope you'll, you'll tell me, but on the frontier, it's rugged, it's difficult. There's cliffs, there's uncharted territories where there's potholes and sinkholes and all types of stuff that can go wrong. And it's rugged and dangerous. And there's a fatigue that walks, you know, side and side to that. So can, can you talk about like how you help stoke passion or keep it alive for people that are maybe some of the hardest working people on the planet? I always say work hard, play hard.

But more than that, I think humor is really an important thing. I think everybody needs to laugh at themselves and laugh at what we're trying to do and remind us what crazy idiots we are. Because one of the things that you don't want to do is have people define their happiness on some of these things. What you want them to do is be vigilant, be diligent, but not feel like their life is over if it fails, because that's where fear sets in. And fear is the big demotivator. People, you know, unvoiced fear is what you want to stay away from.

And so what I try to do is I say, you know, if this thing works, we're going to really have a great life. And if it doesn't, it'll have been a hell of a ride. Okay. You've got a great quote. Everybody believes in innovation until they see it. Then they think, oh no, that'll never work. It's too different.

So that's the hell of the ride thing. Trying to go from idea to execution on the idea. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. idea to execution on the idea yeah yeah okay that that is that the hell of the ride or is the hell of the ride like the fun you're going to have being in the trenches trying to solve together or is it all of that it's all of that it's all of that because it and it's all of that more because a lot of times it's stuff that you have i mean, the stuff that you don't anticipate is the thing that whacks you.

You know, if you're playing go or chess and you've got it all planned out, you're not surprised until something comes off the left field and whacks you to the side of the head and you say, shit, I should have thought of that. It's a factor. And so, you know, that's where you have to always be diligent and listen, you know, don't let your optimism give you blind to bad data.

God, I love that thought. What are the early days of your businesses like? I think the most important thing you can do is don't go for perfection. Go for speed. Just get a really shitty product done god i i i hear it all the time you know like i i bounce around in this in in the valley that you live in i don't know if you're up in in the silicon valley anymore but like i hear it all the time and it it i cringe like i don't want to put out a product that is sloppy. And so tell me how, how do you, can you coach me? Like, I don't want to butcher or abandon the wisdom and fidelity it takes to train one's mind to have something that is substandard. And I also know that I got to learn and the best way to learn is to create, innovate, explore, you know, how to grow. Like I do get the two, but I'd love some guidance there.

Well, if you, you will always have a much higher perception of what good is than any of your customers. Your customers are seeing it for the first time and that's, and it's just, that's what it is. And your perception of what good is, is not at all resonant with the customer. And more than that, you're floundering around in the dark until you get customer feedback. You're just flopping around inside your own head and getting feedback from your friends that will lie to you. So don't just focus on data. Focus on good data. Like I always say, never use a subjunctive when talking about your product. Would you, could you, will you? You know, this is for sale.

You want to buy it you know buy it if we came this and we did this and that uh customer you know market research is so flawed that i don't use it anymore but i do an awful lot of over the shoulder research but but you when you're dealing with something new maybe if maybe if you're focus grouping a new a new box of tide maybe that can work but in the in a world where you're doing something that nobody knows what it is yet it's virtually useless god what freedom in that thought that you just offered me. So like, seriously, thank you. That's that just created space to play a little bit more.

Yeah. Fast. Fast. Yeah. Fast. Be fast. Just be fast. And the other thing about fast is that we can create a product like a Christmas tree, and everybody wants to hang a goddamn ornament on it.

And, you know, somewhere along the line, you've got to say, whoa, stop. And each one of the ornaments a lot of times is noise in your system and so by going fast it takes occam's razor and carves off an awful a lot of ancillary bullshit and then you then once you start getting it back then you start adding things and then then you get feature creep and sometimes the feature creep creep will actually kill you later on but at least you have a starting point it's pretty good i love it did you make a quick decision on hiring steve jobs or did that take time i didn didn't do it. I, my, um, Al Alcorn hired him,

my vice president of engineering. Um, and it was only a week later that I, I actually met Steve. How was that relationship for you guys? Cause you know, he's a legend. Yeah.

It was good. Yeah. Yeah. Now there's my thing in passion squared. Steve had one speed all on all the time. And the most intense person I ever met. And somebody who really, really really really thought about things and uh and you know where my foundation was kind of go and gameplay and things like that

um I had a fundamental fascination with philosophy, but it was primarily Western philosophy, Hegel, Marx, Kafka, Kierkegaard, what have you. Steve was fascinated with Eastern religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, what have you and so we had a lot of really good conversations contrasting and me learning a little bit from him and him learning a little bit from me and uh and you know it was it was really interesting that i was a determinist at the time he was a free will guy and I think engineers tend to be determinants and Eastern religions give a lot more off thing well some of them some of them are actually very deterministic but they leave the door open for free will and then quantum mechanics came along and free will really blossomed in my mind. Got it.

Okay. Yeah. The idea that we can choose. Yes. Okay. When you do businesses, are you more interested in return of investment or are you more interested in culture or are you more interested in the experience of the people or the products that you create? Like, how do you think about it? Because in sport, it's like you can have lots of different mindsets, of course. But are you outcome focused, process focused, performance focused or relationship focused?

Look, those are kind of it. And so for you, when you create a business, how do you set tone? What I like, what I'm looking for is self-sustainment. In every business, there is a level of sales in which if the wheels come off, you're, you're still alive. You know, you, you have enough cash in the bank, you have enough process that if you have to lay off half your people, you're still alive. You haven't done a face plant.

So that's kind of one of the first goals, is I want to get to that level of safety sustainability. And one of the, one of the codicils to that is that when you're, when you're still in business, you have great opportunity to modify, to match things that are not working well and to fine tune and to your reason you're resilient. And, um, and that's, that's, that's important to me in terms of my outcome. I, I'm always fascinated by the product and the outcome.

And I always figured that money is going to, if it's a good product and that the money is going to, uh, follow. But I say that, but I don't really live it because in these little business plans that I do very, very focused on cash flow and return on investment. So, so I don't know, you know, it's, it's not, I don't think of it as being top of mind, but my actions say that it is. Oh, that's interesting. Okay. So you're aware of all sides of it. It is really like more like a tapestry than it is a puzzle. You know, it all kind of weaves together and stitches, hopefully eloquently. And then when you think about burn rate... That's why go is so important. Go

as a construct is the most brilliant game ever because it causes you to focus as much on the periphery as in the main thread. And, uh, anyway, I, I'm, I'm, I'm all about these metaphors. Okay. I don't know the game go. I'm sorry, but I, I'm going to look it up. Is it, um, black and white stones on a 19 by 19 matrix and uh you know it it is it has just recently been conquered by a by a computer called alpha go that google did and uh and it took 15 years longer to solve that AI-wise than chess. It's much more complex and fascinating. Oh, cool.

I'm looking forward to that. Okay. Well, it's a great game because the rules are so damn simple, you can learn them in a minute. Oh, this is one of your great insights, right? To make simple rules that are hard to master is this where it came from go absolutely so okay so it's a physical game is that right yeah and do you play it on computer or do you play it physically like a chessboard

both you play both okay yeah that's a really cool insight like make it simple but hard to master yeah that's what i call the money shot. That's the, that's the formula of real excellence. Okay. And then how I want, I keep getting tactical with you, but like, how do you create that? Cause that, that is like, okay, makes make music where somebody feels right. I get it. But then how does the artist actually organize their inner world or outer life to do that is a totally different thing. So maybe, actually, as I'm talking to myself here, maybe what you do is you have a principle,

make it simple and make it difficult to master. And then that helps inform your decisions as you go. It's not like there's some magical process. Like hiring. I hire very quickly. And I fire quickly. Because my attitude is that anybody can often fake a resume, fake an interview,

but you know what they're made of three weeks into them working for you. Oh, very cool. Okay. How many hours a week do your people work? I try to not have them work more than a 40 hour week in general and sometimes less, but I expect them to be thinking about things and,

uh, and all the people are fascinated by what we do. And so they'll be surfing the web and come in with insights of what's going on here and there. And it's just a, you know, this comes back to what's the definition of work? Your work's your play, your play's your work. And, you know, I haven't worked a day in my life. I've just been playing a lot okay i want to say thank you in advance like i've really enjoyed you the way that you think and the clarity of being able to articulate it so thank you for that and then you know i want i want to make sure we highlight brain rush. And being a geek of psychology and neuroscience, I'd like to highlight that.

But I compete with that statement because I also want to talk about your work in AI. I want to talk about your VR work. So there's so much that you're doing that is so stimulating. Maybe can you walk through a couple of the highlights that you're super stimulated by for the next generation of applied technology? Yeah. I think that the overarching principle is that I do rabbit holes. I get curious about something and I consider myself to be a secondary scientist. And a secondary scientist doesn't do primary research, but reads all the research in the area and tries to apply it. I vibe with that. That's totally me.

I've got a handful of original research articles, but I'd much rather be part of science and apply it than to go deep. I don't have those skills. And so than like to go D I don't have those skills. And so I vibe with that. I don't have patience. Yeah, neither do I. Yeah. Cool. But what did you call it? Secondary science? The secondary scientist. That's what I call it. I don't know. I've never heard it. I like it.

So I went down the rabbit hole of saying, how do we learn? How can we learn as efficiently and quickly as possible? What's the difference between learning and not learning? And it turns out that our brains are designed to forget, not to remember. That we see things, we hear things, you know, all over the place. And if we remembered everything, it'd be dripping out of our ears, you know? And so what is the act of learning? And I said, well, you can decide I'm going to remember that, but we know that really doesn't work either. So what I discovered is that the real time that you learn is if I ask you a question and then you think about it and regurgitate it.

And that questioning, that Socratic method of questioning and answering. And so we created Brain Rush in which it's all activity, that you are making a decision, you're thinking about it because you have to think about it before you make the decision, and that walks it in. And so we call it adaptive practice. And to do a brain rush lesson, you're making decisions three to five times a second, you know, two or three times a second. And or every three to five seconds, you know, depending on the unit. And so what that means is that you cannot complete our lesson until you understand it a hundred percent. And this is really good for disconnected non two items, vocabulary, nouns,

verbs, process, sequence, adjectives, what have you. And so that's why it's so effective. We were teaching Spanish vocabulary in Spanish 1. The teachers that did it would have several classes. The teachers that used our software, at the beginning of the following year, the kids had an active vocabulary of 2,000 to 2,500 words. Kids who didn't use the software had an active vocabulary of 150 words. They couldn't put in Spanish 2, they couldn't mix the classes. Wow. Very cool. So is that so mechanically, so you start, but you started with a curious, um, curiosity, like how do we learn? Oh, we don't learn very well. Okay. So what are some steps to help people learn? Well, that means that they need to be active in the learning process. You

can't just decide. So then you like the old way of doing that is like crossword puzzles and fill in the blanks and that type of stuff. So you took that a little bit further, though. Yeah, I decided that I wanted my objective was, can I figure out a metric by which I can teach four years of high school in six months? Whoa, was that the guiding thought? Yeah. Yeah. He says, why not? I built Chuck E. Cheese and Atari. What are you talking about? We could do high school in six months. I mean, I, I think that our school system is beyond horrible. It is so toxic. It is destroying kids' lives every day. And I'm just appalled by it. Did you have a tough time in high school? No, I loved it. Okay. So you did well, but you say for most people, it is slowing down the rate of growth. Well, more than that, I believe that if you look at the high school curriculum, it's all designed to get kids into college.

At least a third of the population, if not a half, should not go to college. It's a waste of time and money and The way you know and the way colleges are going right now they are Basically very extended expensive extended adolescence and And you know and and with a burden that is That is life-changing for them. For example, when I was growing up, a person could not go into debt until they were 21 at all. And why is that? It's because the part of the brain that is associated with long-term,

with the evaluation of long-term consequences has not developed yet. It doesn't develop until 2022. Prefrontal cortex you're talking about? Yeah. Yeah. And that's why 19-year-olds make really great soldiers. It's so not funny. But you're right. And this is why, like, when I see young kids that have tattoos, I'm like, oh, it's the inability to see long term. I've got nothing against the artistic expression. No. But you and I both know that that part of the brain wasn't able to see what 65 with a tattoo on your cheek is going to look like.

And the whole idea is, you know, do you really want to do you know that in Japan, if you have a tattoo, they won't let you in a in a Rokan. How about. so but anyway uh and and that um that whole idea you don't you don't want me to rant on schools yeah i'm i love your position on it though so you you took a active process to try to create or circumvent an accelerated learning environment. Yeah. Brain rush. Here's the other problem. Okay. If you go into an inner city school or if you go into a prison, you will find the results of our school system.

And essentially the dropout rate in the inner city is as high as it is because they're not learning anything that is going to be appropriate. They know they're not going to go to college. And so learning things to get into college is a waste of their time. Back in the old days when there was vocational education instead of this focus on STEM and all the other stuff, they were getting life skills. Right now, if you're an inner city kid and your mother doesn't give you – it's a single mother household. Your mother doesn't give you any money and so if you're 10 years old and you want to go to a movie there's only one way you can get the money you can steal it or join a gang and become a criminal our law you know we make it illegal for you to make money. So do we really expect every kid in this inner city to fast until they're 16

where they can legally get a job? It's the stupidest thing I've ever seen. So we are, by our laws and our conventions, we're creating this ecosystem of criminal creation. So one of the things that's in my pile over there is an addition to BrainRush in which we use a smart contract on cryptocurrencies and it unlocks to the account when you complete a brain rush oh so we are going to pay kids to learn oh and i think I can get Standard Oil and Nike and everything to buy these crypto tokens to pay the kids to buy. And then the tokens can be either redeemed for cash or in a prize center of some sort. Think of it as Chuck E. Cheese tokens for –

Why, yeah. Okay. Okay. So, I get the business in it, meaning that you'll find a sponsor and the sponsor would be into it because maybe those kids will buy those shoes. So it's not benevolent in that respect, right? There's a trade.

I think it's benevolence, too. I mean, I think I can package this to be that doing good is while doing well. Okay. And if I go on brain rush and I take, I pass some of your courses, then potentially there's a monetary, a monetary reward.

You get a token for every, every lesson you complete. And then that's a cryptocurrency. So it either stays in the crypto Bitcoin world, or you can pull it out at some tax tax rate and whatever. And then, okay, then, so if I challenge that, can I challenge it? Or is that, is it too sensitive that you don't want, you don't want to hear a counterpoint? No, I'd love to hear a counterpoint.

So we know from motivation that as soon as we add, when somebody really loves the art of learning, and they want to get better at something, and then we add an external reward to it, it cripples that drive and passion for learning. I know you know that. You're at the ground zero of it. I'm aiming at the section of the population that's never going to get that passion yeah so you're you're acknowledging yes i understand that um you're going to target a

population that like listen learn and get paid for it and then so you can go do something later with the knowledge that you've acquired. Okay. All right. What a cool business model. Yeah, I think it'll work. So people that are not familiar with Brain Rush, where can they go get it? Where can they find it? Where can they play?

BrainRush.com. Yeah. How fun. Nolan, I was looking forward to meeting you and I didn't know where we're going to go because you're such a game changer and legend in the field. I feel like I don't know if I've done your genius service and I always have that trepidation. But you've delivered in such a beautiful way, just your simplicity and thoughtfulness. And so I want to say thank you. And I got some philosophical things I just want

to run by really quickly. How do you finish this thought it all comes down to getting off your ass and doing something pressure comes from a desire to see actualization love is my wife relationships are best thing in the world wisdom is Love is? My wife. Relationships are? Best thing in the world. Wisdom is? Knowing yourself. Oh, God, I love that. Good flow, huh?

Okay, so what do you do? Now I've got to pull out for a second. What do you do to know yourself? Be brutally honest and observe yourself in context with the people around you. Way more sensitive than I thought you were going to say. And I'm nodding my head like, I love the nuance in that. Okay. Do you have a meditation practice or a prayer practice? Or I know you were part of Latter-day Saints for a long time, but no longer with them necessarily, but like, do you have a contemplative approach to introspection and

awareness building? Not really. I feel like that's kind of the thing that you have to just develop as a life skill. You know, you don't necessarily need it to be formulaic. But I think one of the things that helps me is that I consider myself to be an existentialist in which I'm focused on the journey. And that allows you to abstract yourself a little bit and be an observer of your life as opposed to a participant. And that de-stresses and allows you to objectively

make decisions. Try to remove yourself from in the middle of the decision and put yourself as the observer of the decision and then maybe the judge of the decision. And how are you doing what you just did with your phone ringing in the background? How did you process like the noise and the distraction? Oh, noise is just going on all the time. So you're able to gate out noise really well, aren't you? Absolutely. I have eight children. You know.

Yeah. Okay. All right. So signal to noise ratio is an engineering concept. Yeah. It's also a psychological concept. Really? Yeah.

Right. Is the ability psychologically to gate out noise and get to the signal is a real skill. And you just did it. I just watched you and listened to the signal is a real skill. And you just did it. I just watched you and listened to you do it. And that is a trainable skill to help people live in this moment, the present moment, more often. It's actually, I would consider it my life efforts, is to understand those mechanisms. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you. How do you organize your inner world, your external life to line that up so that you can be in the present moment to innovate, create, build whatever verbs and

adjectives we want to put in front of it? Well, you know, my kids will tell you that you, that I don't hear them unless they can ask me questions if I'm engaged in something that I don't hear them. I don't hear my wife if various things are going on. If I'm focused on something, everything else is closed in and I just don't hear them. I really don't. Wow. Yeah. They must love that. It's good for you. They complain a lot. And so they'll come over and slap me sometimes. Dad, pay attention here. I got something I want to tell you. So on that note, like you're laughing and having fun with it. If they were in this conversation, or let's say, let's say, oh, let me, can I go morbid for just a minute? Sure. conversation or let's say, let's say, Oh, let me, can I go morbid for just a minute? Okay. Let's say when you pass away and your children are at your funeral, your service, and they, or let's go 20 years from, from that point. Right. So there's space with how, if they were just judged like

one to a hundred or something like that, how connected are you to your relationships with your loved ones in comparison to your relationship with building business? Oh, I'm much more involved with my kids than my businesses. I really have a blessed life if you would. I don't like to use the word blessed. It sounds too religious. For example,

we have a family vacation every year for two or three weeks somewhere. We get a big house. Everybody comes. The married ones and if they've been with one significant other for a year, they can come. But not some bimbo that they – Oh, my God. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

And so secondarily, we have a Sunday night dinner almost every Sunday. And almost all the kids show up. And we play games, drink too much. And my wife is a massively wonderful world-class chef and she can throw together a meal for 20 people without breaking a sweat. And it's, it's organic all sourced at the farmer's market. Wait, this is every Sunday you do this? Yeah. How many people show up at the house? Generally, on any Sunday, there are 20 people that show.

So this is part of family culture. This is part of, right? Oh, my God. And there's usually a couple of sort of extras. Like we have in-laws that will come up to us. And sometimes there's somebody in from out of town that we've been friends with. And so, you know, it's generally family plus one or two. How fun.

It is. Yeah. How fun. Okay. family plus one or two how fun it is yeah how fun okay that that inspires me when when my wife and i um we've said we want to do that but we haven't created that right mechanism you know and so start you know yeah just gotta start yeah you gotta start it. And get a table outside. Think of an Italian summer table. Because we have this wonderful table outside that all summer long we have it lit. And it's a pergola with vines on it and that sort of thing. And it's just a great environment in the summer. What is your heritage?

Danish, English, and my wife is Irish-Italian. Yeah. Okay. There you go. God, I want to, no offense, but I want to talk to your wife oh you should yeah like i mean she sounds like a flat out switched on like amazing human she is everybody knows that she is maybe the most amazing woman in the world. Yeah. That's an awesome statement about your wife. Okay. All right. Last question. What mastery is,

how do you articulate or define mastery? Elusive goal. Nolan. Thank you. I mean, thank you for your brilliance, your time, what you've added to the community and super inspired by this conversation. So thank you. We'll have some fun. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't

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