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In this episode, we discuss innovations with the exciting potential to shape an all-new future of education.
My guests are Nolan Bushnell — the “father of electronic gaming” who has founded 20+ companies, including Atari and Chuck E. Cheese’s — and Dr. Leah Hanes, CEO of the Two Bit Circus Foundation.
Nolan and Leah are currently working together on the gamified education company ExoDexa and have co-authored the book Shaping the Future of Education: The ExoDexa Manifesto, an Amazon best seller.
Topics we cover:
- How Nolan got interested in tackling education
- Steve Jobs: “What if you’re in a room and everybody thinks you’re wrong, but you think you’re right and you’ve thought more deeply about it than anybody?”
- The biggest solvable problems Leah and Nolan are focusing on
- The vision and goals of the school of the future
- What it really means to be designed around students first
- Artificial intelligence (AI) and why we should embrace it
- Entrepreneurship in the classroom
- “Competing” with video games vs. leaning into their organic ability to support learning
- Challenges and opportunities of using video games in the classroom
- “Games should be easy to learn but difficult to master.” Are schools focusing on mastery?
- What are the critics saying?
- The St. Crispin’s Day Speech and the “band of brothers”
Shaping the Future of Education is available on Amazon. Learn more at https://www.exodexa.com.
Subscribe to The Authority to get more deep-dive interviews with education authors. It’s available wherever you get your podcasts.
Visit https://bepodcast.network to learn more about the Be Podcast Network.
About today’s guests
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. 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 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. He 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.
Leah Hanes, PhD, is CEO of the Two Bit Circus Foundation (2BCF). During her tenure, 2BCF has developed a strong voice in the current STEAM education discourse. Bringing potent creative play allies like T4T.org, STEAM Carnival, Imagination.org, and LA Makerspace under the 2BCF big top helped increase both reach and impact in education.
Prior to joining 2BCF, Dr. Hanes held a variety of positions focused on children and education. Most recently, she taught courses on adult developmental theory and ethics at Antioch University Los Angeles. Her PhD included a study of ethical decision-making and gender at Antioch University’s Graduate School of Leadership and Change.
About the host
Ross Romano is a co-founder of the Be Podcast Network and CEO of September Strategies, a coaching and consulting firm that helps organizations and high-performing leaders in the K-12 education industry communicate their vision and make strategic decisions that lead to long-term success. Connect on Twitter @RossBRomano or LinkedIn.
Are you a professional looking for insights to reach the next level, find a fulfilling new career, or achieve peak performance? You may be a candidate for performance coaching. Schedule an introductory chat here.
Creators & Guests
Host
What is The Authority Podcast — Expert Insights and Fresh Ideas for Education Leaders?
Are you looking for proven ideas to increase your influence, hire and develop an excellent staff, build a stronger culture, lead meaningful change, and form a strong foundation for learning and leadership success? This is the podcast for you.
Whether you're a leader to seeks to refine your command of core educational strategies, learn new management techniques from those who have used them at some of the world's largest corporations, gain fresh perspectives on personal development or student success from practitioners across fields, or a little bit of everything, you'll find powerful content on The Authority.
Join leadership coach, storytelling strategist, and edtech advisor Ross Romano as he interviews the prominent education authors you already admire, up-and-coming voices, and experts from the worlds of business, personal development, and beyond — including Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Amazon bestsellers — to take a deep dive into their wealth of practical insights.
The Authority Podcast - Nolan Bushnell and Leah Hanes
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[00:00:00] Welcome in, everybody, to another episode of the Authority Podcast here on the Be Podcast Network. And this isn't just any episode, because you're going to be hearing my interview with Nolan Bushnell and Dr. Leah Haines. We're going to be talking about their latest endeavor, Exodexa, a gamified education company.
We're going to be talking about their book, Shaping the Future of Education. And a whole lot else. These are well known, successful people, not just in the education world, but way beyond, um, and, you know, we touch on a whole lot of things. Nolan, as you may know, is considered the father of electronic gaming.
In 1972, he created an industry when he founded Atari and gave the world Pong, the first blockbuster video game. Nolan is a prolific entrepreneur. He has started more than 20 [00:01:00] companies, including Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theater. Catalyst Technologies, which was the first Silicon Valley incubator. And ETAK, which was the first in car navigation system.
Nolan was the first and only person ever to hire Steve Jobs. We're going to talk a little bit about that in our interview. And he detailed that in his 2013 book, Finding the Next Steve Jobs. Dr. Leah Haynes is CEO of the 2Bit Circus Foundation. Which, during her tenure, the Foundation has developed a strong voice in the current STEAM education discourse, bringing potent, creative play allies like T4T.
org. Steam Carnival, Imagination. org, and L. A. Makerspace. Under the 2Bit Circus Foundation Big Top, she helped to increase both the reach and impact in education. Prior to joining the foundation, Dr. Haynes held a variety of positions focused on children and education. Most recently, she taught courses on adult developmental [00:02:00] theory and ethics at Antioch University, Los Angeles.
As I mentioned, Nolan and Leah are currently working together on the gamified education company Exodexa, where he is the chair and she is the CEO, and they've co authored a brand new book that just recently came out called Shaping the Future of Education, the Exodexa Manifesto. Um, so... Stay tuned. You're about to hear my interview with Nolan and Leah in just a moment.
Uh, I did have a sinus infection while we were recording. You may hear that in my voice. It may be a couple of octaves below normal, um, but we had a great conversation. We talked about You know, given Nolan's long entrepreneurial journey and being really one of the founding fathers of Silicon Valley when he got interested in education and the investments he's made in the space so far, we talked about some of the solvable problems that Leah and Nolan are really focused on, their vision for the School of the [00:03:00] Future, which Bye.
You When you hear about that, it's going to paint a whole new picture of what schools potentially could look like. Um, there's a lot here. It's going to sound brand new, . It might sound, um, completely outside of the norm, but it is all things that are doable with the types of commitment and investment in team, uh, that Nolan and Leah are putting together.
And they also will lay out. a variety of ways for listeners like you to get involved. So there's a lot of great stuff here. Uh, I truly hope and believe that you will enjoy this conversation. So stay tuned. Here's my conversation with Nolan Bushnell and Dr. Leah Haynes.
Ross Romano: Nola and Leah, welcome to the Authority.
Nolan Bushnell: Hi, I'm glad to be here.
Ross Romano: Yeah, it's such a pleasure to have you both here. There's, I mean, there's so many topics we can talk about here. So we'll see how we do here. Let's see how much we can cover. But you know, wanted to start with one here because it's great to contextualize these conversations for our listeners, right?
Ross Romano: And understand [00:04:00] where are our guests coming from, especially You know, those whose trajectories getting into the education field is nontraditional, right? And so, Nolan, of course, a lot of people are going to know you from your work in the gaming industry and in entrepreneurship and a variety of fields. But I also know education is something you've had an interest in for a long time, even before you founded Exodexa and got to this thing.
Ross Romano: current hands on position, but tell us a little bit about your interest in education and what really draws you to it.
Nolan Bushnell: I have eight children, and so I was very involved in bringing them up and seeing each of my kids is quite different, and I saw how school was good for some and not so good for others. Like I, my youngest son, I had a hard time keeping him in high school. He came home one day and says, I'm out of here.
Nolan Bushnell: I don't do busy work. I have children [00:05:00] that have an awful lot of arrogance, if not chutzpah, and are creative and a little bit nutty. So and that fits certain types of school and, but not everyone. And and Leah has been working with my oldest son, and that's kind of how we met and she's actually a serious, real educator.
Nolan Bushnell: I'm just kind of a hack.
Leah Hanes: Well, really what Nolan said about eight kids and some of them it worked for and some of it didn't like that is the story of education. I think now, yes, I have graduate degrees, I have a PhD. But I was considered a slow learner in school and no, no part of me when I was in elementary school or high school thought there was a chance that I could complete a university degree.
Leah Hanes: That was just not even conceivable because I was convinced by the system that I just was not up to it. And [00:06:00] it really, when Nolan and I first started talking, it was at a conversation at the bar at his oldest son's venue. And it was about Attention Deficit Disorder, and I know there are some kids who really have this problem and but Nolan's point was you can give me a bunch of kids that have been diagnosed with that and I'll put them in front of their favorite video game and you'll see that it's not that they have a problem concentrating.
Leah Hanes: They have a problem concentrating when they're bored and school is not engaging enough the way we're doing it.
Ross Romano: Right.
Nolan Bushnell: I like to say that when I was going to school. School was the most interesting thing in town. The alternative was watching the river flow and the corn grow. And, but that's not today's youth. You know, with the screen and you have a teacher with a piece of chalk competing against video games with hundred million dollar budgets.
Nolan Bushnell: You know, in the the [00:07:00] reality is that who's going to win that it's an arms race and young minds have a hard time separating value of content with production values and schools lose the production value race, but more than that, I found that my kids got into certain of the games and All of a sudden, they were, they knew ancient history because they were playing civilization.
Nolan Bushnell: And and so, all of a sudden, I felt that gameplay and education could in fact meld together to create a super powerful outcome. And sort of, that's... That's kind of the bedrock of where we're coming from.
Ross Romano: anD it illustrates, I think the importance of a mindset shift from the thought [00:08:00] of, as a system or in the classroom, we're competing against games for kids attention or we're competing against whatever for their attention versus looking at, okay, what are things that are organically engaging that they're learning from one way or another, right?
Ross Romano: And how do we leverage that to work for us instead of feeling like that's our opponent?
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Nolan Bushnell: We take this attitude that there are some kids that just don't take tests well and so when you embed testing and gameplay and learning all in one where kids don't know that they are being tested, but they've able to complete the game, which is equivalent to an A because you don't get through the game without understanding it completely.
Nolan Bushnell: And so some of these metrics from the game world adapt like a hand in glove to to the [00:09:00] process of raising powerful adults.
Ross Romano: Yeah, totally. So Leah, I know as you're kind of looking at, right, the goals and the vision for the schools of the future and the type of transformation that we want to see, the starting point is, okay, we can identify and clearly see there's some shortcomings in the system as it stands, right?
Ross Romano: There's a good amount of students for whom it's not really working. And there's things we need to do differently. And of course, that conversation is more productive. When we can get into specifics and talk about, okay what are the solvable problems that we're really focused on that we that are in our sites that we're saying, look, when we're developing solutions, this is what we're talking about.
Ross Romano: Are there some of those that you can highlight?
Leah Hanes: Well, I think Nolan just touched on it in that, like, bury everything you want to teach kids in the body of a game that they want to play. And I've seen a lot of educational games and some of them better [00:10:00] than others and some of them really good, but very few that a kid would actually choose to play on a Saturday morning.
Leah Hanes: And I think in order for this to be really effective, it has to be game forward and the content is what we're delivering. And we talk a lot in education about if you can't see it, you can't be it. And so in a positive sense, you're putting role models out there for kids. The same is true. for the negative side of the world.
Leah Hanes: If they see it, and that's the most exciting thing, then that's what they're going to be drawn to. So creating a game that has all of the game elements that the AAA games have and yet what they're learning, what they're gathering through the game, the information that they have to gather to get to the next level, is actually what they would normally be sitting in a classroom doing in a workbook.
Leah Hanes: So ultimately, I think we could replace. The way we're currently teaching with games and [00:11:00] activities that help students learn, there's a really fabulous graph that talks about what we know two weeks after an experience. So what we read, we remember 10%. Two weeks later, what we hear, it's 20% two weeks later, and it goes up to if you hear it and see it, maybe you get to 30%.
Leah Hanes: But if you do something. You're 90 percent likely to remember it two weeks later. So project based learning and video games are ideal for that. And yet I think of the iPhone. We have, what, 15 versions of it in 15 years? And we're still using the same educational system. that we have used for a hundred years.
Leah Hanes: We maybe moved from rows to tables in a few places, but really, conceptually, we're still doing it the same. So it's really about making major change, not just tweaking it around the edges.
Ross Romano: Yeah. And, I think that touches on, the idea of pathways to mastery, right? I mean, if you're actually going to [00:12:00] retain the content and know how to use it and do it again in the future. And the fact that we don't know the question comes up a lot. What do kids need to know or what do they need to learn?
Ross Romano: And they need to learn how to learn because we, I mean, you don't know in 20, 30, 40 years, right? When the first. You know, when Pong came out 50 years ago, did we know exactly what games were going to be like today? No, but it's it's an evolution of the technologies. And that was something I was thinking about was you know, Nolan's credo around game design with the game should be easy to learn, difficult to master.
Ross Romano: And it was making me think, are schools... Are we prioritizing, emphasizing, or even making mastery a goal, or is it too often because there's too many different things trying to fit into too limited time that it's get good enough at this subject so that you can kind of pass to the next level and then move on to the next [00:13:00] thing and the next thing.
Ross Romano: And one of the things that I believe leads to so much student frustration is the fact that they'll end up spending the most time on the subjects. where they're doing they're struggling the most, or maybe enjoying the least because the ones where they're quote unquote good enough are, well, you don't really need to spend more time on that.
Ross Romano: Well, maybe they would like to, right? There's no limit to mastery.
Leah Hanes: you know, two things that came out of what you just said that really strike me as important. The idea of mastery, like why do we batch kids by age rather than interest? Because, You could have like beginner, intermediate, and master students who have a similar interest or theme or area of interest that we could batch them in rather than by age.
Leah Hanes: And and I think keeping kids engaged in the things that they're good at instead of [00:14:00] making kids feel like you have to be good at everything. You need a base understanding of everything. But the other thing that you said is like what are we trying to do with them in school? We are trying to get them to learn how to learn.
Leah Hanes: How do we evaluate things? So what we teach really should build on that as opposed to facts. Because you can pick up your phone and ask Siri or Alexa or Google or whoever for the facts and then find ways to check those facts. You don't need to cram the kids full of the You know, we're not banking the information anymore.
Leah Hanes: Now we're trying to get kids to be critical thinkers and creative thinkers and problem solvers.
Ross Romano: Right. Yeah. And it's like this question, I feel like I've used this example before on the show, but it's okay between if we have a student that has two A's and two C's and a student that has four B's, which student is more prepared for success? [00:15:00] They have the same GPA. The real answer is who knows, because that's not really a good metric, right, for being able to tell.
Ross Romano: But it's to also understand that, what is an A? An A is the highest grade you can get in the classroom, but it doesn't mean that you've... Reach the absolute capacity of your understanding in a subject area and we should encourage to continue diving into that. That's the way we get innovation and entrepreneurship and just continuous learning in general.
Ross Romano: And one thing I wanted to touch on, and this was a story, uh, that you told Nolan about conversations that you had with Steve Jobs. And I think it kind of illustrates. The depth of thought that goes into considering what this looks like and you had said that the question he asked you was what if you're in a room and everybody thinks you're wrong, but you think you're right and you've thought more deeply about it than anybody.
Ross Romano: And it's that last part. [00:16:00] That's so important because so many times in these conversations around education, I think we have a lot of shouting and disagreement and arguing from a lot of people who haven't thought very deeply about it, or haven't engaged with the realities of the system as it is.
Ross Romano: The people that are working within it and also outside ideas and tried to bridge those and say, okay, how do we build? Right? And clearly there's a lot of depth of thought going into here. How did that lead to you laid out these goals of the school of the future. There's a lot of them, so we don't have to cover all of them here, but if you could touch on some of those and kind of the thought and how you came to some of those conclusions about what we should be working toward.
Nolan Bushnell: I start, I try to start foundationally, if you would. And If I were to categorize Steve Jobs core foundation, he was about [00:17:00] simplicity. Making something simple is a lot harder than you think, and you see it in the Apple products of having clean designs ease and intuitive interfaces, and that created Apple.
Nolan Bushnell: So, my touchstone, my foundation is focused on outcomes, and I feel like one of the things that Atari did early on is we didn't care how you dressed when you came to work. Outcomes were the things that mattered, and we found that we could teach whatever we needed as long as people had passion and enthusiasm. And so, I think... If we could take one factor, can we create [00:18:00] enthusiasm across the board for all the students? And so how does that happen? First of all, I think everybody needs to be a Steltz Scholar. Having an A, B, C, D, I think is actually wrong. I think that I like to say, we'll know we have the school of the future when we have no grades and no grades. That is third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade, by whatever criterion, is Batch processing. The individual is the important thing. ABCD leads to a thing where you're not really having mastery. What you want is mastery. Even and some kids, it takes a little longer. Do we care? We shouldn't care.
Nolan Bushnell: You know, because [00:19:00] some kids just take a little bit longer than others. So, think of the poor teacher who's trying to deal with 30 kids. You know, it's close to an impossible task as ever, and based on the lecture, homework, test model, that teacher first of all, has a problem with discipline, you gotta get the class quieted down, and these kids are high energy and just came in from recess or change, and, and they're wound up so, By having everybody working as an individual, working against the game, working against themselves, not knowing that Little Johnny is going faster or Little Mary is going slower, I think that we can do rewards, scores, [00:20:00] badges, trophies, synthetics in the game, and, and and, make it so that it's very hard for the kid to feel like they're the dumbbell. And I think that can move a long way. I also believe that there's a real problem that there are kids, the kids who are not being served by the school. who are graduating from high school not being able to read or write at that level they're not, that, the school has failed them, absolutely.
Nolan Bushnell: So, by using games, by using software, we can now take a class of 30 and have three quarters of the kids working on their computer, doing games, and give the teacher a chance to mentor, and encourage, and have... Some one on one time with kids [00:21:00] that are not that maybe need some extra help. We can even put flags in the games so that the teacher is alerted when a student is having trouble with a particular thing.
Nolan Bushnell: And then, just to go big and crazy, is we can have AI tutoring. So as soon as a kid is struggling, they can click on a tutor and get extra help on that particular subject. So I think that AI may be the most important thing that's going to happen to education. And I think that the individual Student, learning at their own pace, being encouraged, not discouraged, a lot of learning is added. If you have the prequel, then what you're, the new stuff is easy. If you don't have the prequel, think of it as laying a level of [00:22:00] bricks. If the underlying brick isn't there, the wall it's hard to get that over brick to fit. So, I think that the individual The more we know about the individual, the more we can adapt the software to teach them something at the right time in the right way.
Nolan Bushnell: And we also know there are kids David Gardner's different ways, different kinds of intelligence. All these things can be woven together using software. Whereas a classroom, by its nature, has to be one size fits all. So that's kind of my rant, I'm sorry.
Ross Romano: Yeah, well, since you referenced AI, I think that's a good point to continue on because you know, the crux of the issue with AI and education in a lot of ways, and what we need to be thinking about it as, to me, is an equity [00:23:00] issue, right? If schools try to prevent that technology from coming into the classroom all they're going to really do is prevent the less privileged students from getting to have access to it because the other kids are going to get it.
Ross Romano: They'll get it outside of school. They'll get it at home. They'll be the kids in the the private schools and that have more resources that are really diving into it. Right. And it takes that understanding of, look, some of this stuff right now, it's still undetermined. It's a little scary.
Ross Romano: We don't totally understand it all. However, It's only going to grow, and if we don't figure out a way to embrace it and to let students get hands on with it and feel like it's not something to be fearful of, right, that we're first looking at it as, well, this is just a cheating tool, right? Well, if it's that easy to cheat, then the assignments probably aren't that great in the first place, right?
Ross Romano: [00:24:00] But how do you look at that, Leo the AI piece, but just in general the. equity goals behind this work that you're doing and realizing that, yeah there's far too much variance in the access to quality you know, educational environments.
Leah Hanes: Such a huge issue, Ross, and I think this, I first started hearing about it early last winter, and then by January, February, schools were in a full on panic because students figured it out early on, and they they, so there are things to be careful of. There are things that our government needs to pay attention to keep everybody safe with it, but where school is concerned.
Leah Hanes: You know, your point is such a good one that we can't afford to leave those kids behind. The wealthy kids will find a way to access it. They won't they won't be struggling. And they're, this generation of kids are going to have this for the rest of their lives. So learn, teaching them as early as [00:25:00] possible.
Leah Hanes: The. ethical use of it and how to how to present. And for teachers okay, we used to have kids hand in their paper and the teacher spent the whole weekend reading all the papers and grading all the papers. Well, instead of having them hand in a paper that you're grading, you have them present their paper to the class and do a Q and A.
Leah Hanes: And if they don't know what they're presenting, then you know that some at GPT or some other open source, wrote the paper for them. If they present it and you do a Q and A, If they learned the material, why do we care how they gained that material? And it's sort of like when I did my PhD, I could sit at my computer at night and order a host of research papers to be delivered to me online for the morning.
Leah Hanes: I didn't have to spend the week in the basement of the library. So, maybe to some people who got their PhD 50 years ago, they think mine isn't as effective because I got my research. And then it was easier for me. And [00:26:00] indeed it was. I'm not sure I could have done the old school PhD and spent that many hours in the library basement searching for research.
Leah Hanes: This is a really elevated version of that. And these kids, the kids who will lose out are the ones who won't know how to use it effectively.
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Ross Romano: You know, that's part of learning. It can be part of creativity, curiosity, entrepreneurship, right, and entrepreneurship doesn't need to meet capital E Entrepreneurship necessarily, but it's a set of skills around creating new things. And if ever. There was a golden age of entrepreneurship. It's this digital age where everybody has opportunities that they could create any number of different things if they want to, and it doesn't even necessarily need to be.
Ross Romano: A business, it can be, but it could be any types of creative endeavors, right, that these skills that [00:27:00] students can be learning in the classroom, Nolan, to you know, to really get a taste of what that can be all about.
Nolan Bushnell: Yeah, the gig economy is a real thing, and I actually believe it's going to be the fastest growing segment of the workforce, because when you have think about AI, but also think about robotics and various things, and a lot of the jobs. Quite frankly, they're going to go away, and so the niches are the places where the jobs will be, and that's the gig economy.
Nolan Bushnell: But I want to challenge you. I don't believe that we have a difference in access based on money, that we should not, I should say. I mean, a Chromebook is so cheap and so good, and I don't, and you know, you can say, well, maybe some houses don't have Wi Fi, but I actually don't think we need [00:28:00] homework if we have a good school system. I think homework is a crutch, you know. Learning X number of hours a day. It's enough and hey, when you talk about something that really discriminates, um, homework is one of those. I mean, if you live in a one bedroom house with. With your mother, and the TV's blaring, and there's, and what have you, it's not a homework conducive environment, and and kids that have to have a part time job, that takes it away, so if we want to really be fair, let's make the six, eight hours of school time, and in our school of the future, we actually think That school should be nine to five or eight to five because the it [00:29:00] needs to match the workday.
Nolan Bushnell: And and when you have that much time, and it doesn't have to all be tough but on premise, and but if you have a job, you can get off, but I think that we need to rethink how we serve our students, and the teacher doesn't need to be there all the time, because we can have them have game time, and, and game with learning.
Nolan Bushnell: And physical ed, and those things. I mean, our book sort of lays out our vision of the manifesto of what the school of the future and I actually think we can make it so efficient that if I were to say every kid who graduates from high school should be able to type at 50 words a minute, should know basic Should be able to do a P& L and a balance sheet and know the difference maybe a little bit of plumbing, a little bit of electrician [00:30:00] work some programming, I mean, in a week you can learn enough unity to program an app on your cell phone why not have everybody be able to do that? What about kids knowing how to write a short story and publish it on Amazon?
Ross Romano: Right.
Nolan Bushnell: You know, these are all things that are skill sets that I think make sense today that are not being done. And I think STEM needs to be expanded to life skills. And this other thing that's going on. One of our board members is a principal.
Nolan Bushnell: And she asserts that a lot of kids in rough parts of rough neighborhoods and with difficult home lives actually are suffering a form of PTSD of bullying and [00:31:00] you know, having their being shaken down for their lunch money and what have you. And, are we serving those kids by giving them some remediation, some people to talk to about some of these fears and problems?
Nolan Bushnell: I think we can, using the tools of the, of games, , a lot of hospitals are using games to teach good health outcomes. So when we redesign the school from the ground up, we're gonna have a problem. Some of the teachers, some of the administrators or recipe players. And you move away from the recipe and they say, Oh my God I've spent the last 20 years learning this recipe.
Nolan Bushnell: What am I going to do? Well, move them aside, because this has to change and it has to change for the better. And and once you [00:32:00] prove efficacy, then people who stand in the way need to be woodshedded a little bit. I mean, we know some school systems that are working well, Finland. Always comes out really high and they have charter schools, they have Private funded, private voucher systems for private education, and it makes the public system more competitive, but they also focus on letting the kids to learn, focus on what they like to know, and so I think that there are a lot of examples of things that work, we just have to pick them up and use them.
Ross Romano: Yeah. And there's, I definitely want to talk about this the structure and design of that school day of the future and what you read about it. It starts with that foundation of that. It should be designed around students 1st that currently it's not. And [00:33:00] that even if you ask, why is it the way that it is?
Ross Romano: We've lost track of that because a lot of the why is a century plus old or you know, I think in some places like where I grew up, I would say probably the best answer for, why is the high school day go from 7. 30 to 2. 30, and middle school goes from 8. 45 to 3. 30, and elementary is from 9.
Ross Romano: 00? It's because, well we only have so many school buses, and they need to they need to be able to alter it. Things like that, that have nothing to do with what's appropriate for learning, what's appropriate for... The developing brain, right, and the times at which students would be alert or be able to get enough rest or or be able to have time for, yeah, exploration with less pressure or you know, we talked about certainly the problems with homework and of course there's been a temp set at, [00:34:00] Flipped models and other ways of doing it, where, okay, now I'm doing my work and exploration in school, so my teacher can kind of help me, instead of you know, just getting a lecture and now I'm doing that at home where there's nobody to really ask a question to if I run into a problem, right, unless my parent happens to know the subject but yeah, there's this design around students first piece, Leah, I want I would love it to be made clear.
Ross Romano: Number one what does this mean? Because it probably sounds like something that everybody would say, oh yeah, of course, but it's not happening.
Leah Hanes: No, it's something people think is happening, but it's really not the way it's set up. And we have so much research now, you think about what we know when a teenage brain is best equipped to take in new information and learn. And that's generally like we have maybe two hours of that in the system we have currently, and then they're off doing whatever.
Leah Hanes: I think and something when Nolan was talking about with homework we're training kids to be [00:35:00] workaholics. They're leaving school. They're going home. They're doing hours of homework. We need people to really embrace living a life. So, and allowing kids to explore entrepreneurial ideas while they're still in school, that's something else we worked on in the book is just like, why not let them start their own little business and have a little incubator where we can raise money for them to try their, because if you, if it all goes sour for you and you're in high school.
Leah Hanes: you've got your whole life ahead of you and you learned a lot of lessons there. And so the school day, having the school day from like seven or eight in the morning until five or six in the afternoon, then you have like athletic experiences of maybe dance classes or whatever in that early morning time when the kid's brain is not really ready to take in information.
Leah Hanes: And then you do the serious part of the games later.
Nolan Bushnell: I wanted to [00:36:00] point out, and if you haven't read it, you should. It's called Spark. It's a it's by John Ratty, and he basically talks a lot about, and this is research that came out of NASA, and that essentially, you really should start the day with 20 minutes of vigorous exercise. that your brain actually secretes BDNF, brain derived neurotrophic factor, which is a precursor protein for dendrite growth.
Nolan Bushnell: And so if you really want to look at the student and fine tune them, you, and here's another little thing, some students really need a high protein breakfast. Other students need a high carb breakfast. Your brain burns a lot of carbs, but you don't want too many carbs in certain times. [00:37:00] It actually tracks blood type a little bit, and you know, so one of the things that we, that I would do in my school in the future is I would identify which and supply breakfast. You know, and and then 20 minutes of exercise, then what you want is you want them to have a 20 to half an hour nap after lunch, and then another 20 minutes of vigorous exercise. And all of a sudden you've actually fine tuned the body to create this super learner and, and ADHD goes away with the 20 minutes of vigorous exercise a lot of disruption goes away.
Nolan Bushnell: With 20 minutes of vigorous exercise and and I think that know these things, it's been tested, and John Ratty is a medical doctor, PhD, and he has it [00:38:00] well documented that he's changed outcomes just through having exercise in school.
Ross Romano: Yeah. What are the challenges, I mean, to implementing this? I mean, you laid out a very different structure, right? And it's like, it's right. It's that vigorous exercise, the breakfast, three hours of gaming time, lunch, nap, a lot of things that are not, it doesn't look like the typical schedule today,
Leah Hanes: well a lot of schools have like early drop off care for the parent and after school. So I think what we're talking about is similar to that in terms of structure. You have the teachers there for those middle hours, the high learning hours, and you have graduate students who are studying education, or you have a different community of people who are taking the early hours and the late hours.
Leah Hanes: But also there are a lot of kids who hate physical education. So you have alternatives some kids are going to play basketball, some kids are going to dance, some kids are going to run the track. There's, there are a variety of things that they could be [00:39:00] doing that early morning rigorous exercise.
Leah Hanes: You, and, but you want to track heart rate. You want to know that during that time, you're doing something that you enjoy. that gets your heart rate going. And
Nolan Bushnell: you know, and Pelotron having that screen in front of you, all of a sudden you can do some things. I designed a game several years ago in which you were actually competing with other people in a rowing machine.
Leah Hanes: are so many ways of getting kids active and helping. And I think the biggest challenge is change. Like people are afraid of change and it's you're getting a lot less trouble if you do nothing new because, Oh, it was like that before I got here. And it's like that now, but I think some of the obstacles.
Leah Hanes: left during the pandemic. Some of the obstacles were the teachers who didn't really had been doing it this way for many years. And then suddenly the pandemic, they had to move to Zoom and they weren't technically inclined. So we lost a lot of teachers in the last three years. [00:40:00] And there are a lot of younger teachers who have left because They are digital natives, and when we bring them into the school system as teachers, we ask them to step back 20 years in what you know about technology, and teach this way, whereas I think a lot of those younger teachers, I think the younger, and I don't mean just in terms of age, I think the younger thinkers, the teachers who have been keeping up with the digital world, Are going to embrace what we're talking about because their job, I mean, first of all, from the students perspective, there's no more humiliation in class.
Leah Hanes: Nobody knows where you are in your studies except you, the teacher, and the software. And then for teachers, you've got all these kids who are busy learning on their own, engaged, and so you have this smaller group. that need your help. And you can wander around from desk to desk and talk to students.
Leah Hanes: And the other kids have all got headsets on, so they don't care what you're talking to that student about, [00:41:00] because they're busy in the game doing what they're doing. And so there will be there will be challenges and pushback for sure. There is any time there's a major change going on, but I think it's major change that's needed.
Leah Hanes: If we just go back to business as usual after the pandemic it's a lost opportunity.
Ross Romano: right? Yeah. I mean, you referenced the pandemic and I think some of the things that changed over the course of that time in schools and whatnot. Otherwise, workforce and remote work and those kind of things shows that we just typically tend to underestimate our adaptability and plasticity to do things differently to say, once we make a decision to go with it and do it a different way.
Ross Romano: That's just the way it is. We're no longer worried about what happened before. We've just figured out a new solution. But there's so, so many each sentence I think that's that we're saying has three [00:42:00] different things in it, right? You talked about that. That's such a big thing about students.
Ross Romano: Being incentivized and motivated strictly to improve their on their own and not worry about the comparison to others because what's the biggest. factor in long term I would say student struggle. It's when kids are five, six years old and they look around and they feel like they're not doing as well as their classmates and they develop a concrete view of themselves as not as smart and not as good.
Ross Romano: And then all that leads to over time, it just diminishes and diminishes where One it's not, there's no truth to it, right? And you know, that's a big thing like with reading, right? Nolan mentioned Finland, right? The way they teach reading there, the way they teach here, very different. You know, kids there are much less likely [00:43:00] to feel that they're behind because they're not having the same pressure on them at those young ages, where, who, what's the difference if you learn at four or six?
Ross Romano: Once you know it. But if you believe that you can't do it, You're, it's hard to regain that.
Leah Hanes: You know, I like to say to that Nolan changed the world when he introduced video games. Like we, there was a world before video games and after, and I think Nolan is in a position to do the same thing again. Now in education
Nolan Bushnell: Well, no, Lee is. Well, no the, one of the things that I want to ask your audience to do is, I want them to read the book and then they want, I want them to email me anything they disagree with because I believe, do I believe that I have my truth right now, but I'm not sure it's the truth and I believe that steel sharpens steel, [00:44:00] and I'm sure that there are many of your listeners who are engaged and smart as hell, and I'd like to thank you.
Nolan Bushnell: have some pushback and understand where I might because I'm looking for the truth. And and I don't want to be too wishy washy on it, but I believe that what we've written, Lee and I, is grounded in both the tech, best practices, smart people, smarter than us, you know. I consider myself a scientist, but I'm also... I don't do primary research, but we will be doing it with our software. And we're going to be constantly improving and getting better and you know, I'm really excited about AI. My son, who is a software programmer, [00:45:00] says that AI has increased his productivity by three times. He's getting three times as much coming out.
Nolan Bushnell: Because of ChatGPT. And, I just think that kids who learn that tool are going to be really well equipped for the future.
Ross Romano: Yeah. And yet there's this one one other thing I wanted to ask you about because, and this is interesting to me for two reasons. This comes from the calls to action at the end of the book, like you said reading the book and critiquing it is part of that, sharing it with others.
Ross Romano: But you also have this call to action around reading or rereading the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry, the v the two. There's two things about it that's interesting. The one is. That's what the speech is about. And that call to we, we may start out smaller in numbers right but if we believe in what we're fighting for we can work together to get there.
Ross Romano: The other thing is somebody might not expect. to [00:46:00] see encouragement to read Shakespeare in a book about the future of education, this tells you all these things. But the point is that there's room for all of it, right? There's room. It's not just about, well, we just need to throw out everything and just do everything brand new.
Ross Romano: It's understanding what are the things that are valuable. What are What are the reasons why we learn certain things and beneficial to students. So, and if you wanted to say any more about that speech and kind of, it's that message that you're driving home around kind of joint joining this cause right to, to innovate in schools.
Nolan Bushnell: Well I came across the St. Christmas Day speech 30 years ago. You know, so I was an adult and somehow it was very uplifting to me. You know, the band of brothers, the, that you are my brothers and I've [00:47:00] Kind of used it as a crutch, because a lot of people know me for my successes, but they know less about some of the times that life has kind of whacked me in the side of the head, and and I found that re reading that speech, and there's actually a wonderful you know, enactment of it on YouTube that you can just pull down, and And I found that was something that helped me, I don't, I'm not a depressive person, but sometimes you need to have just a little bit of There's a fire in your belly that needs to be stoked when life is kind of being mean to you.
Ross Romano: Excellent. So, Yeah, it's been so great to chat with you both. And you know, we'll put the link to the book below. You can find it on Amazon. It's now a bestseller on Amazon or wherever you get your books. And also more information to ExoDexa. Leah is you know, what should Listeners, check out to learn more [00:48:00] about Exodexa, what you have coming up, are there current opportunities to get engaged and involved?
Leah Hanes: Oh, there sure are. We're actually putting together a founder circle right now that is Our beta team, basically. We'll, um, as we release portions of the game, we'll do it with this community first and get their feedback. We're also doing a fundraise, as every startup is always doing, so, we have that, and it's an exciting time.
Leah Hanes: I think we're probably, in Q1, going to be bringing the game out to the public.
Nolan Bushnell: And we're probably in a year and a half, we're actually going to start a school that is chapter and verse architected on the book. So that we and we're going to try to document. I really believe in what I call existence proofs. You know, it's one thing to do all these pronouncements and ideas and that, but if we can [00:49:00] show that we can take a school of a couple of hundred kids and have them all be superstars, and have it be cheap, easy, so that any school system that wanted to adopt this can do it.
Nolan Bushnell: You know, it's one thing to have a 50, 000 a year budget to do magic things, but if you can do it for 8, 000, it fits every school system in the nation. And so I think that we, If we can have the existence proof, that will catalyze a lot of people who are on the fence, particularly if it's well documented.
Ross Romano: Absolutely, yeah, so everybody, check that out, we'll put the links there below to find the book, read that, you'll get a really good idea of what this is all about. If you go to Exodexa. com, you can learn more about the game that's in [00:50:00] development and reach out there and find out. how you can get involved.
Ross Romano: Please do also subscribe to the authority for more author interviews like this one or visit bpodcast. network to learn about all of our shows. Leah and Nolan, thanks so much for being on the show.
Leah Hanes: Thank you, Ross.
Nolan Bushnell: great, and thank you. Great questions, and you're one of us, my friend. You're part of our band of brothers and sisters.
Ross Romano: And I have to pull out the Wolf of Wall Street meme, one of us.