Is Roblox making the internet better or worse? We asked the CEO

- If Roblox someday has 200 million concurrent users and some of them are in art studios and our perfection is there is never a screenshot of someone spray painting something on the wall that's weird, I don't think we'll ever get to 100% perfection. - Is Roblox safe for kids? For years, the company has faced challenges with content moderation and whether or not it's actually age appropriate. In this episode of Access, we're talking to Roblox CEO, Dave Bazzucchi. Out on the heels of his interview on the Hard Fork podcast, which got spicy. - 'Cause you're asking me about this. I'm curious if you've done your own research. - I have done some research about it. - And what's your take on that? - Well, I'm asking you. - We're going through it all from the challenges of content moderation, age gating the internet, how Dave is thinking about AI and its impact on Roblox and more. - Welcome to Access, the tech industry's inside conversation I'm Ellis Hamburger here with my co-host, Alex Heath. What's going on, my friend? - What's up, Ellis? We're trying something new with the show format this week. Let's see how it does. - Stick around after the interview, we will break down exactly how we thought it went and have a few more thoughts on what's going on in tech and in our lives more broadly. - All right, well, without further ado, let's get into this convo with Dave Bazzucchi. - This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result, less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at accenture.com/spotify. - This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup required, compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. - Dave, thank you for doing this. We scheduled this many weeks ago, but you've been in the news recently, and just up top, I wanted to get it out of the way and ask you what that has been like being in a bit of some pod controversy yourself. The Hard Fork duo are friends. I consider Casey and Kevin friends, and we certainly don't want to re-litigate the conversation without them here. But I'm curious, since. since it happened, if you've been reflecting on it at all and how you've been thinking about it. - Well, hey, take a big step back. At the highest level, we like being in the news, right? We're, it's a big world out there, and we're constantly trying to innovate on a wide range of things, including something super important to us, which is safety and civility, something we started on 20 years ago when we got started. And it's such a big thing to us and such a top priority. I think I wouldn't want there to be any confusion that it's something we want to talk about all day long. And so I would say in the night, in really the midst of any news, if it's about making kids safer, we like to be a part of it. - If you could go back though and redo any of that conversation, would you? Do you think that there was anything lost in kind of how, how that went? - If I could redo that conversation, I think I would have even leaned in harder in trying to share how much of a focus we put on safety and civility, and really fill in a lot of the cracks, go deeper on some of the things. But all in all, I read the transcript and we had a great focus on that. I do think tone is super important, and I think, tone, my tone could have optimally been slightly, probably more patient in that. But all in all, I think talking about safety and civility, which is a, you know, I think the house is going to be talking about it tomorrow with 20 new bills about keeping kids safe. It's really a universal way. When we look at all the topics in the news, a lot of topics in the news have one side or the other to the topic, keeping kids safe is like the universal. It's like a magnetic monopole. Instead of like there's positive and negative, everyone wants the same thing. And I think as a society, society's starting to grapple with how do we all want the same thing? You know, it's pretty interesting, over the last 20 or 30 years, the arc of technology, and what we've seen with a lot of technology, 30 years ago, we didn't have phones, we didn't have nine-year-olds, with phones, computers were a new thing. I grew up with computers that weren't connected, that like no one can imagine a non-connected computer, there used to be non-connected. And in the last 30 or 40 years, we're in a whole new era, a wide range of apps. Everyone's spending a lot of time on screen time, a lot of options and society, I think working together to figure out what's the best way forward in this, we wanna play a big role in that. - It's a charged topic, right? I mean, and rightfully so, it's incredibly important. And I think that came through in the hard fork conversation is that there's just a lot of emotion about this. And it is difficult, I think, with a topic like this, isn't it, to try to find the nuance and try to understand where progress is being made and how it's actually being made. I wonder, do you feel like that conversation has been getting more difficult for you in the last couple of years? Or do you feel like it's kind of been trending the same as always? How would you characterize how that conversation broadly has been going for you and the company? - Yeah, I would say behind the scenes, we're very much, a couple things, like taking a step back and thinking about Roblox, arguably what a fortunate position we're in. You know, we started with this huge vision of bringing together people optimistically and creatively. We saw what we thought was, and I believe is a brand new category, whether it's UGC gaming or self-service creation or the metaverse or Snow Crash or whatever. But this really a new category that hundreds of thousands of people can create experiences. Along the way, something fortunate I feel happened for us. And that is rather than, not to throw advertising under the bus, but-- - No, let's please throw advertising under the bus. - We made a move from what I would call a cheesy club membership model, where we actually had some rough spots because our user growth was going up and our revenue was flat to going down. And in the back of our heads, we knew along the way there was this thing out there called a virtual economy that would have a very small percentage of the people on the platform buying some Robux and creators moving from hobbyists to build a business or follow your dreams or maybe build a studio and ultimately what became self-service gaming. And in the back of our heads, we knew along the way, there was this thing out there called a virtual economy that would have a very small percentage of the people on the platform. But the short end of that story is what a fortunate thing, because that economy we built to some extent scaled pretty linearly with hours and users. And it's gotten better. And it's been more of a perpetual motion machine that in a way took away some of the pressure of ad sales. And who do we target? Do we you know, we didn't have that. Do we go after young people? And in a way, gave us the ability to take the long view in the company rather than maybe the, you know, analytical view. Part of that news came from us really taking a unique position of we're going to estimate the age of everyone on the platform. No one else is doing that. Social media companies aren't doing it. Gaming companies aren't doing it. One could say, oh, my gosh, that might be a little concerning on the metrics. We think long term it's going to pay off in a big way. I definitely empathize with you, Dave, as I listen to that podcast and I read some of your recent announcements. I was at Snapchat for several years and I had to spend half my day trying to convince my former reporter friends that Snapchat was actually real. It's a pretty funny thing when you have 400 million DAU and if media isn't using your product, you're always going to face an uphill battle. And that was always a bias I thought was seriously challenging. And I mean, these days you could put plenty of stuff on the platform, but if media or regulators aren't aware, don't have kids in their daily lives, I don't even know if it's even possible to perfectly convey what you're doing. perfectly convey what you're doing. I feel like More so people are just like looking maybe for some sign that there's good faith stuff going on. But the exceptions always make more news. I don't know. Would you disagree? Well, first, I'm a huge Snap fan and I just saw a billion MAU number today. I don't know if that's real or not. I think they're about to hit it unless they just announced it. Yeah, this should be. Which is what a testament to the size of that platform. I mean, and they've done a lot of really, really good work there. You know, I'm not I'm pretty pragmatic about it. But I do think that one positive of all of this is it does create an opportunity for a company to strive for perfection, even if perfection is not possible. And perfection means for us not a single weird screenshot, even if someone by themselves hacking it up. Sometimes. Sometimes that's the metric, right? Did a bad screenshot go viral this week? That's right. And so I am optimistic like that quest, which is for Roblox. What it means is not using AI to examine every new 3D experience, but where this is going to go is using AI in real time with 45 million people at the same time, where some of those people. Want to be creative. Some of those people want to pull out a can of spray paint and do some art. Some of those people want to build with Play-Doh. Some of them want to use AI commands. And so it's not just the 3D experiences. It's every single user who might be being creative. And at what point could a creation become also a bad screenshot? And so we we actually are kind of excited because we think with AI, we're going to in real time, ultimately be able to do that. We're going to be able to do it. We're going to be scanning 45 million people in a privacy safe way, freedom of speech safe way, but in a way that can give a nudge like, hey, that creation is starting to get a little out of policy or that. Hey, we know that creation. If someone captures a screenshot like people are going to get the wrong impression. If you're 18 and up and in the privacy of a small group, probably a lot more latitude. So in a way, it drives innovation. And at the same time, we we know there's a lot more work to do. You talked about striving for perfection, even if it's not attainable. Do you feel like because of the way that the platform is architected, you're never going to be able to fully get rid of the bad use cases because it's such a scaled platform and it's people interacting? Do you think you can ever get to zero? Or is that I don't think any platforms ever done that. Imagine, imagine that. Like, I think it's fair to say that if the definition. If Roblox someday has 200 million concurrent users and some of them are in art studios and some of them are in clothing studios and our perfection is there is never a screenshot, even for five seconds of someone spray painting something on the wall that's weird. I don't think we'll ever get to 100% perfection. We might get to some number of nines, which is how we would think about it. And we can get more and more of those nines all the time. But I think setting that as the challenge. And so then and then admitting like we are going to need real time AI in a privacy and legally compliant way to scan all this like that drives positive innovation. Yeah, in covering platforms for so long, I've come to this thing where I think a lot of people have this POV that I call poop in the water, which is this idea that if there's anything bad in. The thing, the whole thing is polluted and it's not worth continuing to make better. It's worth getting off of. It's worth ridiculing. And then there's people in tech. There's people building these platforms who understand the trade offs and they view it more, I think, holistically and statistically and about bringing prevalence down all the things you've talked about with AI. And I just have like such a right. I have such a bigger issue with like the optimizing for the wrong thing. Like, let's say if you if Dave was optimizing for. Like a very bad, you know, like selfish behavior that, you know, let's say like something like just loosely engagement where there's a drive to the bottom. I have more issue with that than like teenagers being stupid and stupid and some of these things that have always happened. I don't know if you were at Snap in the 2016 election cycle. I was so I won't name any platforms, but I can name myself. I could feel the optimization of the feeds on various platforms and I could tell they were optimized. For short term engagement rather than long term enterprise health, because I was getting flooded with news clips from friends in high school who I hadn't seen in a long time. I was getting so pissed off that I was using those platforms every day. Like the the outrageousness was sucking me in on a short term basis, even though it was even a long term. I don't use any of those platforms anymore. Yep. And so I think there's always. The question of like, could we be doing more? And I mean, part of it, too, is that I think it's inherently a tough space. Once again, going back to the idea, especially on Snap, where people like adults can't see the messages that their kids are sending. It's always going to be scary, I think, as a parent. And one of the things Evan always said that I thought broke through to adult audiences whenever he would travel around was that like your kids are going to do dumb shit. They're going to make mistakes, as kids always do. Would you rather be on the ephemeral platform or on the platform? And where their employers are looking and parents are like, oh, yeah, interesting. And I think to some extent, a lot of these platforms, you know, do get flack for the type of controls that parents wish they had over their own kids. I would say the other thing that is unique about Roblox is we we face the reality that I feel when younger kids get phones saying your platform is 13 and up isn't the full solution. Because a lot of a lot of 10 and 11 and 12 year olds, when they get a phone and a phone number, they can get on platforms where there's free text, unfiltered text, image sharing, video sharing, communities, all of that stuff. There is a little benefit to accepting that reality and then kind of doubling down on that. So I do feel there's a huge benefit for us long term to think about safety for nine year olds. 14 year olds and 25 year olds. I guess what I was getting to earlier with that comment before Alice cut me off, but it's OK, Alice, was like, I don't know, Dave, do you do you see this tension where people, especially I think in the media, feel this way? You look at something, if there's anything wrong with it, it's kind of zero sum. And it's like, you know, I feel I feel over time that there is some hope that the statistical nature of society starts to. Reflect in the media and one can imagine, you know, it's interesting on Roblox right now. There are thousands, if not tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people making their living on Roblox. And there are arguably in the millions, although we can't validate it, possible kids who said, I want to learn STEM and study computer science or maybe art or maybe production. Those stories are. Starting to get out as well. And so as the statistical cross section of all the experiences gets reflected on, I'm kind of optimistic. And I think there have been other platforms. I think YouTube went through quite a bit a few years ago when just video was a new thing. And I think they've they've more and more we societies learn to understand what a platform like that is. So I'm I both would say forever more safety will be. Top priority for us and we'll always be focused on it, even if at the same time, I'm optimistic about progress in a way. One of the funny things as you grow is that I feel like once people start figuring out what's going on, that you guys perhaps have the world's biggest active metaverse on a daily basis. Is that true? Yeah. You know, define metaverse. I would say, yeah, having a character, being able to form a group with friends. And being able to transport yourself and all your stuff in between different experiences, be they games or this or that. It's so funny how the metaverse has been around in sci-fi forever. Some of the things in sci-fi we've always hoped and predicted are already here with the web. Some are just in process, AI and bots. The metaverse, Snow Crash, Holodeck, all of that. The Matrix has been talked about. I do. I do feel we have uniquely thought of the metaverse not as hardware, but as more the 3D platform and more had the vision that this 3D digital immersive multiplayer stuff that is created by the users should be accessible. Phone, tablet, computer, console, VR headset, all of that. That's been a good decision for us. And I feel. It's gonna keep getting better and better. It's gonna get AI supercharged. It's going to get photorealistic, what we thought of as the holodeck. My takeaway from sci-fi is if you can see it in a sci-fi movie and kind of imagine the physics maybe being possible, you are going to see it someday. So that Star Trek holodeck, we're going to see it someday. And so I do, in a way, that whole collection of things, I do think we've been very focused on and gotten to a good critical mass. But are people actually using these headsets to use Roblox? They are. I have a chart right next to me of MetaQuest live active users. Oh, you should share that. I can't share that. We can see it in the reflection of his glasses, Alex. I just think it's so fascinating. You know, I'm always interested in Silicon Valley's idea of what a great product is. And I'm not sure many of them have a strong taste for the aesthetic. At least as it stands of a lot of toys, including Snapchat or Roblox. But when you look at it, this is the vision that they were describing, I think, for whatever you want to call it. And I guess my next question is, do you feel like you're prepared for being seen as something like that, especially as things get more photo real, people importing images and things, putting them on the sides of their cars, let's say? Are you ready to see all those images and talk to the world about what you think is acceptable? What do you feel like is your latest and greatest thinking on that with regard to free speech and censorship and all that? Well, I'm glad you asked that. I feel we've been preparing for four or five years on the AI front. And it's another area we've been fortunate. So with all of the pressure and a lot of that internal for image moderation, text moderation, audio moderation, the move from human. And sometimes not just one, but multiple human to AI moderation is something we've been undergoing for quite a while. And it's why we say we have over 400 models working. We built them all ourselves. They run on our own infrastructure. So we've been like a boring AI company before it was cool to be AI. And arguably, that was a very utilitarian form of AI. We're now getting into 3D generation and NPCs and all of that. That's a lot more consumer facing. So I do feel we've been doing that work. And then where that leads is not just do we have the AI that's available to scan every single image? We already do. Do we have the AI to categorize every image, analyze the text? We do. I liked where you were going with that on the free speech side, because as much as possible, we don't want to be a company where. You call me at three in the morning and say, Dave, what's your call on that user or that piece of content? Because that that can be a very arbitrary thing. It's much better if it's systemic. We we have been thinking about this. And I think where we think this will go ultimately is to what extent can we look at the laws of the physical world? I'm in California. What is the state law in California? For what someone can say on stage at an amphitheater, for example. OK, so we figured that out in the physical world. How much can we use that to make decisions? And so I think we would like to be much more in that type of a mode where if if maybe you need an ID, maybe you need to be 18 and up or something to go in that auditorium. But then someone can go on stage and do a comedy show or a political rally. We would probably want that to be OK on Roblox as well. So that's one direction we're going. I think as we go younger and younger on the platform. That's where we start making our own policy decisions. And, you know, we we have to be more of the policymakers for what's OK under 13 on the platform because there's not a lot of case law in that area. So we we go on in. In that direction with, I think, a lot of our own policy that's very transparent and people can read about it on our Web site is is the end state of all this, Dave, that the Internet is completely age gated and you have to verify your identity. Thank you for asking. So so given the current reality and the current reality, I think we have to face it is 10 year old wants an iPhone for Christmas. They get the iPhone and off they go. And that is just a reality out there in the world. When that 10 year old gets the iPhone today, there's 30 interesting apps they can install. They get a Web browser in the majority of states when that 10 year old gets their iPhone or their Android phone or their computer. I'm not singling out Apple in the majority of states. They can crack their browser. And you and I know what kids can find when they're 10 in a browser. Probably some porn sites. Meanwhile, they can't walk into cheetahs when they see it on the street, right? That's right. Going going back to the real world analogs. That's right. So they probably get that. They probably get a bunch of apps. And so I feel where we're going with it is we think there is a what you might call a gold standard for communication safety, which is no, everyone's age to the best extent possible, really double down. really double down on text filtering, which specifically means watching for personal So I think that's a good point. information and blocking it. And for certain ages, absolutely no image sharing, no video sharing, ultimately no communication with minors and adults, critical harm monitoring and law enforcement. So that's where we're going. And I think we'll probably see more and more of that. Was it you guys who were saying the other day that maybe the OSs should be doing the age verification themselves? We're careful with that because we think there's more resiliency above and beyond the OS with signals, facial age estimation, and all of that. And so if it incorporates maybe a lot of thought, so we don't end up with a parent handing kid phone, which may not be resilient or may, depending on how it's unlocked and all of that. But we basically said we're not waiting for that. You know, we're going to go do it ourselves. You know, the founder of a popular VR app that we would all know once told me, Dave, that one of the tricks they found to age verification was in VR, having someone hold their arms up, that that was a very simple way, almost foolproof. I like that. But you can't do that, obviously, in a phone. Well, the mathematical way we thought about it is the more mathematical signals you get with a center and a standard deviation, you can convolute more and more of those signals. So, yeah, we would love to have that signal. We would love to have behavioral signals. We'd love to have a facial age signal. The more of those signals, the more accurate your age estimation can be. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. this episode is brought to you by google chrome you think you know a browser but gemini and chrome that's new it can help you with practically anything on the web like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks gemini and chrome is here for it ready to make anything online make sense there's no place like chrome check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus so i think uh amidst all of this people are definitely worried about their kids right now a lot of things that are out of sight that they can't control obviously even the adults are being affected by the social algorithms and short form video with regard to our attention um would you would do you feel like the kids are all right and if so why okay well there's a it's interesting because i feel most it's interesting in society the wide range of things that are out there we have social networking apps we have short form video apps we have ai chat bots we have multiplayer gaming apps we have dating apps and for many people i do think it's a big cloud is just like "Oh my gosh, social networking stuff "that goes into a big cloud." I think when we dive in deeper into that cloud of apps, I think each one of these apps has its potential benefits well as things to be careful of at the same time. Short form video, super interesting, right? I watch them all. I'm on Shorts Reels, TikTok, Spotlight. I'm watching all of them. I have a different- Hear that? Spotlight. I think that's the first and only time it'll be mentioned on this podcast. That is the first time, yeah. That'll be the first and last Spotlight mentioned on this podcast. They were early with Spotlight, weren't they? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just amazing. It hasn't culturally broken through, I guess. Yeah, so I can tell all of those are personalized. They're all optimized for my own whatever. I see different things on each one. And so some positives I would say that people are trying to balance is what's the future of the news for 16-year-olds? They're not in the card catalog. They're not in the news rack in the library. They're not watching network TV. They're not watching TV. They're not listening to the radio. How are 16-year-olds going to get the news? I hope it's newsletters, Dave. Sources.news, Substack. Let's go. Well, you're onto something because I think the future of the news could be Substack, podcast, short-form video, more than other things. And so I think there has to be some thought in whether we, how we legislate that. And at the same time, short-form video, you know, the research arguably, you know, shows some addiction issues and dopamine issues and all of those kind of things. So there's a balance there. I think if you had one of those products, I mean, it seems like you're definitely skeptical of the incentives that are created with an advertising model. I wonder how you would think about that. I've been thinking about it. When I was young, I used to watch for 30 minutes or 15 minutes, the electric company in Sesame Street. And those were fun, interesting, you know, 30 second to two minute educational things around learning your alphabet. So I'm not going to make the advocation for youth short-form video here, but I do think certain formats could be, are interesting to think about. I'm with you on what are we, what's being optimized for. If the pure optimization is raw engagement in this one day, that may, you know, that's an, you know, not sure that's the right optimization. Do you not goal everyone at Roblox on DAUs or MAUs? We, I think long-term we, it's interesting. We've had a set of different higher order constructs. I think we're more and more leaning towards being a DAU company, not an hour company. And that is because we, we think there's, there's fun, spontaneous uses for something like Roblox, you know, five minute check-in with your friends, that kind of thing. So we do track hours. We do track DAUs. I would say whenever we're doing search discovery or optimization, we are really tracking ecosystem health, user health, and long-term system health all together. And we are, we are constantly trying to optimize for long-term platforming. And I think that's, I think that's, I think that's, I think that's a really important thing. And I think that's, I think that's, I think that's a really important thing. on Roblox versus, you know, some of the conventional stuff we older folks might be familiar with. I would go step back again and think about the whole new thing in the last 30 to 40 years of people of all ages on devices versus television and think through screen time relative to where it was. And then, and then start looking at the various qualities in the various macro categories in addition to the, you know, the individual things on Roblox. I do see, you know, the research out there for what is called gaming or multiplayer being together. There's a lot of positive research out there around not being isolated about building teamwork, leadership, you name it. You know, a lot of people that's, we saw it in COVID. We saw in the midst of COVID, what does everyone do for a year? And we saw it in the midst of COVID. And we saw it when they have kids at home, you know, and in that sense, it was a little bit of a validation of the, the thesis around multiplayer gaming, that it can be a way to communicate and stay in touch, even though we call it gaming. That is different than the short form video category we were talking about, which is a little bit more of a solo thing. It's a little different than the social networking category, which is arguably can be slightly asynchronous. But it's a little bit more of a synchronous multiplayer, but also has a lot of sharing pictures and comparison, and kind of that type of competition. And then, you know, we're entering the new era of AI chatbots. And those are arguably, you know, multiplayer human NPC, you know, non player character bot. But at the same time, I don't know if that's the same as being with a human. So I would say the category of gaming, I think, has some benefits akin to being on the phone when I was young, and it was a rainy day. I think being, you know, there's some benefits, I think, to not as much trying to preach the benefit of some of the experiences on Roblox, but there can be something in hyper competitive first person shooter gaming, like some anxiety creation things, competing in a fashion or something like that. And I think that's one of the things that we've learned over the years, is that the content on Roblox, arguably, is less anxiety, creating and fun or growing a garden. So I do I do think in a lovely way, the the content on Roblox has been kind of creative and broad in a way, when you have these, these games and Roblox that are 10s of millions of concurrent players, which I think you've had multiple now, which they break all records of concurrent people in a game like environment, grow a garden, steal a brain rot. I mean, I think that's one of the things that we've learned over the years. I think that's one of the things that we've learned over the years. When you have 10s of millions of people in experience, can you even know how those people are interacting at scale? We can know. One of the, if we talk about AI, like one of the opportunities here is, is once again, in a privacy safe way, with not sharing that data out of the company. You know, that has been tempting to other companies in doing that. And there's a lot of there are some really interesting things for creators as well as users ultimately to use that data. So we can know, you know, who's chatting, what people are doing more and more, where they're going. This starts to intersect with safety because knowing what is going on can be used for real time safety scanning of user generated content and things like that. And it runs the gamut. But I do think there's a notion on Roblox that even though you're playing hide and go seek, you are also, you know, sometimes designing your own game in that environment or using it as a place to get together. So it's, it's a mix, I think of hardcore playing as well as communicating. I was going to say, yeah. I mean, when you look at what's happening on there, sometimes as a grownup, it can, it can look pretty impenetrable. I would say like compared to some of the games of the past, but I was with my nephew the other night for a dinner and he was playing a game called 99 with his friends. And his parents were like, he goes AFK all night. They were like, why is his screen time for this game at seven hours? And it turns out, I looked this up on YouTube. He's building a base so that the monsters can't get him and his friends overnight. And I'm like, all right, that sounds pretty fun and pretty cool. But then you hear about the loot boxy games or the other games and maybe not so cool. What do you think of the most popular games you're seeing? Just you're, you're a parent, right? I am a parent. I got, four kids. So, um, I'll first, there's always that tendency as a parent to want to smack that hand at the same time. Sometimes you look deeper, you know, like maybe it's all right. It's interesting. We used to have some incentives, uh, for creators for raw time. And we went, whenever there's a weird incentive, you can see weird things happen. Um, you know, we used to, a long time ago, we had a second currency called tickets that the Roblox community loves and is very upset that we removed. And in the old days of gaming, the people had these multi-currency systems. You'd have one currency that you buy and the other you earn by engagement. We're proud to say we threw away the engagement based currency. Like we just threw it in the garbage. Um, and it was a currency that I rewarded people for, um, every day they logged into the that was a bad incentive, like trying to do that. Recently, the away from keyboard games as well, when we rewarded creators for that, we could see a lot of away from keyboard stuff. And creators, rather than making it a good game, just be like, come up with some cheesy way to get people to be away from keyboards. So I think in this case, it's probably a little bit more interesting. But in general, we don't want the incentives to be the wrong incentives. I would say what we see generally is the creators of these top experiences are extremely capable individuals. They are. It's a little bit like taking a million people and obviously not pure skill. There's a lot of luck and things and ending up with 100 CEOs of 100 top studios. And that came from a million down to 100. It's like the ultimate Mr. Beast game. And like, who are these hundred out of the million? That's like one out of every 10,000. And they're extremely creative, extremely empathetic, extremely thinking about their users, wanting to build quality. And when I meet them, I'm actually quite fascinated comparing them to public company CEOs, because I think they're more in touch, arguably, with their users. And quality and good gaming than many studio execs. You ever thought about swapping one for yourself on the earnings call even? It's in a crazy world. It's fun to imagine if someday I were to retire, like, how are we going to find the new CEO? Like, would we, in addition to the deep bench we have on our executive team, we say, plus there's like one bonus. We're going to interview someone from the community kind of thing. But. But I do think there are CEO capable creators out there. So I do think they're very focused on making good quality. Are you hinting at retirement, Dave? Are you giving us a hint? Listen, quote me, if I ever. OK. Dave said on the podcast, if he were to ever. Interesting. Are there any Roblox auteur platform creators yet? Darren Aronofsky for Roblox. What does auteur mean? Oh, just. It's like typically used for like a movie director, like, let's say, Martin Scorsese, who has their defining motifs and there's so much authorial intent and every detail is looked after. I feel we're going to get there, like we're trying to do something really difficult and arguably in video, there is a hundred years of development from film all the way up to the digital camera. And now we're 4K. And it's kind of a solved problem on the video and the playback and in immersive 3D multiplayer with a lot of people at photorealism in real time with instantaneous joining from everywhere in the world with low latency. That's there's still a lot of invention going on here like this. This is not fully invented. We will get to that point. We will get to the point where 100000 people. People all around the world go to a concert all together. It's photoreal. You hear the audio. You can wave at your friend. We will get to the point where that 100000 player stadium, whoever wants to be the dungeon master or all of them can flip the stadium like in an inception upside down and wrap it upside down or turn it into a coliseum in real time with generative. So I think that's like the spec of what we're going to get. And it's still a ways away. We got to park this conversation in AI, Dave. But before we do that, you cannot come on here without. So there's a couple of companies, I think, two in particular that have major Roblox FOMO. There's Meta with Horizon and there's Epic with what they've been trying to do with Fortnite and the UGC side. You're not allowed to immediately turn it back on and how well you're doing. I want you to actually answer. What do you make of those two companies and their efforts? What do you think is working for each one of them as they're trying to go more in Roblox's direction? At a high level, I mean, those are both amazing companies and they're both very valuable companies. Meta has just this incredible history of iterating, analyzing, making things better and better and better. So that would be a positive thing to say about them. I think they would agree their roadmap is very broad. There are a lot of things going on over there. And so. The broader the roadmap, you know, that that's harder than just having absolutely one product that you're focused on. And then I would say same for Epic. Amazing company. So visionary. Battle Royale. Fortnite. All of that. A lot of their tech around photorealism. The breadth of the tech going out of gaming into utility uses. Super cool as well. But once again, I would argue. A somewhat broad roadmap, C++ game engine, a game called Fortnite, modules inside Fortnite built with C++, like some of their partnership deals and then a creative mode built within the game. And so that starts to be multiple things working together. So one of the I think one of the dreams of Roblox, even when we started, was literally it was the dream to have the same name for the product and the company and just have one product. And I think in a way we so far we've almost been able to stick with that. Oh, boy, this is Ellis Katnip. You started bringing up naming. I'm a little tired of naming at the moment. I mean, you come up with a name for an AI company and not only is there an AI company already by that name, but there's an AI podcast already by that name as well. Things have gotten very challenging. When we did Roblox, we had every domain, every trademark, just all in one. One fell swoop within a week. That's a vision. So speaking of speaking of Meta, I mean, I know you've talked about Roblox as being the future of communication. I think in some ways that seems like kind of the apex of everything that Zuck would have ever wanted is to try and create this new medium for communication. And I feel like a lot of this conversation has been about social communication as opposed to how we might typically think of, let's say, gaming or very like it's a well-crafted game. I love this game. I mean, how do you think about that? I mean, how much of the Roblox benefit is about social? Yeah, I think we learned our lesson a year or two ago, our focus lesson, because back at the IPO, our mission was connect a billion people every day with optimism and civility and jumping from 50 million DAU to a billion. Like that 20x can be a pretty fuzzy product spec. And it's just like, OK, like, what are we going to do? So about a year and a half ago, we analyzed what we think a product like Roblox could be useful for. And yes, gaming, gaming, gaming, probably at 300 million daily actives, the majority gaming. But with that technology starting to support a lot of the visionary stuff, future avatar chat, future shopping, future co-working together. Future immersive concerts, concerts, all of that. So we made the call at our developer conference a year and a quarter ago. We threw out this intermediate thing. 10% of gaming content bookings is the focus. And we said that's probably around 300 million DAUs. Our creators, I think our community, everyone got it, that the technology that we would work on for gaming, it's really very similar. It's really very similar. To all those other markets, the creator platform, the safety technology, the economy, all of it. And so it was it essentially winnowed that billion spec down to 300 million in a really elegant way. That's given us a lot of focus. And I would say now we're deep into for this year. What is the economy? What is the search and discovery? What is the tech needed to support a broadening of genre? On the platform, I think people will think of Roblox as a whole new platform when more and more of the experiences, you can't quite tell that's a Roblox experience. You're like, whoa, is that a Pixar Incredibles game or is that a new RPG game? I think that when we start to see that, people will start to realize, you know, this opportunity. Your team mentioned that you were on a sabbatical recently, and you've also been thinking. A lot about AI, and I'm curious what that was like. I don't know if you've done that before, but what it was like to take a little bit of a step back. I'm sure you didn't fully step. It was very, very humbling. I feel humbling. Yeah, the humbling for me, I felt, you know, a while back when we started Roblox, I used to read all the research, physics, simulation, rendering technology up and down the stack. people were thinking about all of these new ways of doing gaming. And generally I could understand all of it, like the math in these papers and all of it. But the horizontal wave of research everywhere in the world, you know, coming out and the whole gambit of AI is so massive and so fast. It's very humbling. Like it is hard to get to a position where you can understand all of those research papers. You know, transformers, diffusion, world models, blah, blah. Like it's a lot going on. Did it give you new clarity about AI as it relates to the company and the strategy you guys need to have? I'm sure you spent a lot of time looking at world models, video models. That's moving very quickly. I think it clarified for me that we're still very early in the three days. We're still very early in the three days. space. You know, the AI space is arguably a very physically unnatural space right now. This thing called text and this thing called images, you know, there's these things we all made up and we're now training AI models on this thing we made up rather than not necessarily on the 3D raw material of the world itself. And I think I came away feeling we're going to see multiple versions of these types of products. We're going to see arguably everyone at Snap and Facebook and TikTok is probably thinking what happens instead of swiping. Does that turn into continuous video? Is it generated in real time? What's the UX for it? Is it a swipe? Is it a camera angle? Is it the way I'm looking? How do I signal what direction to take that potential real time video rather than a swipe video? So I think there's a whole category of these types of things. I think one could imagine the AI command line that we're like, you know, everyone's got their chat GPT, Google, you name it command line, turning in multimodal to the point of having a video option as well as a chat option. And, you know, if you're learning a language, you could imagine that starting from the beginning, you're starting to stream video and to say, walk down the street and go into the French cafe and start talking to someone. So I think that's possible. That said, I'm still a huge optimist that communication between people or people and AI bots is going to be a big thing. And that's more and more going to take some very sophisticated technology to synchronize many people in 3D to make them photorealistic. To support many, many NPCs at the same time. And to put all of that together in a natural way. So I'm actually very optimistic, we're gonna see multiple classes of products stemming from some of this early video gen work. I spend a lot of time, especially recently with founders working on a lot of these world models and video models and trying to understand where they think things are going. And to be honest, I think several of them think they're going to be able to make something that can be Roblox, but with a prompt, they think it all collides. And there's a lot more complexity to what you do, especially on the economy side, all the safety stuff we talked about, but the sheer asset creation, the 3D of it, the hanging out in it. What is that? How, as a company that's what 20 years old, you have a lot of revenue and users to protect, you have a stable, you know, you have an infrastructure to protect all these things, like, how do you adapt quick enough to what is coming with this? And do you agree that that is coming? Yeah, I mean, there's like, look at the gamut of the reaction of various big companies and then map it downward, right? Arguably Google, which five or six years ago looks sleepy and whatever, and they got some alpha chess stuff, whatever. But thinking ahead around the corners and the potential to link what used to be search with AI, with TPUs, with a cloud facility, with their own research, all of a sudden turns into like a formidable stack. And you can name a lot of other companies that 30 years ago were the biggest startups in Silicon Valley and what happened to them, right? They're gone. So I think the only way to keep building a successful company is being, trying to get 10X bigger, having a vision for that, and knowing you have to be innovating towards that future with your own unique future. So I think on what you've said, I think that's a logical thing. I think that's a logical thing. I think that's a logical thing for many founders to say. We've, we've seen it before. Like it's a compliment that five years ago, it was the Roblox for high-end gaming or six years ago, it was the Roblox for this. So that, that is a compliment. I do feel we internally, given the 400 models we built, really have to be knowing how to build all of these, knowing how to build single player video streaming, highly coordinated photorealistic multiplayer. And one of the advantages we have in the company, which is we always treat carefully and privately is the data of our users. We, we have 10 billion hours of data every month, not a video, but a 3D immersive human interaction, people deciding whether to open a door, people chatting with each other, people jumping into cars and driving them around. It's a crazy stat. I mean, is that, is that like YouTube level yet in terms of hours? I'm pretty sure YouTube is showing to users much more than 10 or 11 billion hours a month of video. I don't know their latest stat and I haven't compared it to the amount of video coming into YouTube. Someone can probably do that, but it is like, I think Tesla published something like, look, our fleet is generating X amount. Video data per day. I think we're orders of magnitude above that. And it's, it's not from the viewport of the cameras on a vehicle. It's true 3D data that can be re-rendered from any camera angle that could be possibly reviewed at some point. So that data, I think one of the futures of AI companies is the mixing of more and more of what's publicly available data, all the text in the world, maybe that, with what is proprietary data and doing uniquely vertical things with that data. So I know we're almost out of time and thank you for, for coming on with us. If we could take it even farther into the future, you know, I think there's reason to believe that someday, whether it's, you know, 10 or 20 years from now, it will be possible to inhabit, you know, a photorealistic world with friends, with games, with school, whether it's ready player one-esque or it's more utopian or more dystopian. How do you feel about that? Would that excite you or is there some, some point where we should say, let's keep half our day in the real world? Do you have any more specific thoughts about that? Yeah, once again, you know, staying within context as a parent and a believer in our Roblox values, which is we are responsible and we're trying to take the long view. I'm a huge advocate for parents being thoughtful about screen time, especially screen time. You know, at night where we're not used to blue light, you know, so circadian rhythm. So I think I'm an advocate of being thoughtful about that. And then I would say I'm also an advocate of outdoor time. I think the opportunity for Roblox and hopefully you'll see us do it over time is the raw potential of invention is somewhat of a neutral thing. Like there's this neutral, inexorable marching forward. Of invention that, you know, in certain cases, society can't stop. It's just going to happen. It does create an opportunity for certain companies to try to be thoughtful about the introduction of new invention and to try to do them in a balanced way. So I would say that would be the the thoughtful way we'd approach it in thinking broader than just the raw invention itself. Dave, we appreciate your time. We'll let you get out of here. Good chatting with you, guys. Thank you. Thank you. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations. More time spent on technology. More time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture dot com slash Spotify. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think, you know, a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the Web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies. 18 plus. All right, Ellis, how'd you feel about that? Your first time meeting Bazooki, Builderman. Yeah, I mean, I'm just fascinated by everything happening on this platform and how much I don't see it as someone who reads tech news every day. And I mean, it really does remind me as we discussed in the pod of my years at Snapchat and feeling like, man, I wish people could just see what's happening on this platform. But if you're not 13, you're just kind of not seeing it. Yeah, do you feel like we were too soft on them? I mean, as these public company CEOs show us time and time again, they're only gonna answer what they wanna answer. And you can make it awkward if you want, but not usually by style. How about yours? Yeah, I think it's a really tricky balance. I mean, you're right. There's nothing we're gonna ask on the obvious questions of a CEO like Dave that he hasn't been asked a million times and that hard fork covered in depth for like an hour just for a second. Just recently. So I thought we got him to open up in ways that I hadn't really heard him open up before and actually talk about the incentives of the platform, which I think are upstream of a lot of the things that people are worried about. I think rightfully so on Roblox. Yeah, maybe. I always wish interviews like this, I wish I would have pushed harder a little bit here or a little bit there. But you're right. You're only gonna get so much in an environment like that. And this is also just not a, I don't know, it's not an environment where you can just snipe someone repeatedly. I don't know. It just doesn't work. Yeah, this isn't exactly a congressional hearing. But I mean, the hard fork thing, I mean, I don't know. Did they get any quote unquote news out of him successfully or was the only news that it was very awkward? I want to give it more credit than that. I mean, I said it to Dave. I consider Casey and Kevin, the co-hosts of Hard Fork. I don't actually know. I was asking you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think they got him flustered about this stuff. And that was the news. And that's fine. And that's their prerogative. And it was a very interesting thing to watch. Yeah, I do think we got stuff from him that I haven't heard. I mean, the fact that he's talking about retirement on a podcast, I think is interesting. But yeah, man, I don't know. It's these conversations are tricky. I feel like we walked the line pretty well. And I feel like we also tried to talk through the nuance of this stuff in a way that is hopefully interesting and has more depth for people. I've interviewed Dave a bunch of times. And it was nice having you here because you are a parent. And I think you just have that perspective that I don't. And I always felt kind of weird. I remember I interviewed him at the Code Conference the last year of the Code Conference. And I felt weird kind of being the guy grilling the CEO of Roblox who is not a parent. And I just feel like that probably brings more perspective. Although you didn't really talk about it. But I think it just naturally infuses how you would ask someone like that questions, right? Yeah, I think the one thing that I kind of wish we would have gotten more of is just some opinions from him. And I kind of asked it a couple times. Some opinions from him on like, is this quality entertainment? Or is this just kind of kids kicking the can in the parking lot? Is that what a lot of these games are? Some of the ones. Certainly look like that. Though I don't want to pass judgment. Though as I shared, I kind of like the idea of that 99 Nights survival game. But I do think it's incumbent. I mean, he's talking about parents being thoughtful. But I mean, if I'm being a thoughtful parent, I may rather have friends over for my kids to play Mario Kart on the couch than do whatever online. That is an important conversation. Which of these is a better experience for your kids? You know? And so. But without more knowledge, I'm not even sure that we're there yet. Yeah. To make that comparison. Yeah. I mean, it's eye of the beholder. You know, it resonates with me a lot that you can use a platform like Roblox as a young person and build things and also meet people. I mean, so much of my career and what I'm doing and honestly getting out of the Midwest and moving to interesting big cities was the result of being on forums as a kid and playing video games and meeting people. And so I think that's one of the things that I've learned over the years that I've learned over the years is that I've learned a lot of things online that I would have never met otherwise, right? And like relationships that I still have to this day that were super, you know, formative for me. And that stuff is happening on Roblox. It's hard to weigh, yes, there is awful, there are awful things happening too. There are predators. You know, there's been lawsuits over that. And there's also like, you know, teenagers learning how to like build things and communicate and even build businesses and become developers. And like, a platform that contains all those things is I think inherently very messy to talk about. And I think a lot of the way that the media talks about these platforms can get very reductive because it's hard to parse through all that. And I thought we did a pretty good job of that. Yeah. And I mean, there's definitely that, you know, puritanical streak with modern helicopter parents that, well, if you're not going to let your kids go out and play and bike down the street, what exactly do you expect them to do? Like build a castle made of blocks every day after school? Like there's got to be an outlet. There's got to be a social outlet. And that's what we were always saying with Snapchat as well, is that kids desperately do want to hang out with their friends. But if you look at the numbers, it's declining in terms of those after school or even weekend play dates, even just with the rise in, you know, extracurricular activities, harder to get into college. You want to get more out of college, like the playtime, the unstructured playtime, I feel like is maybe what this could represent at its best. Yeah. So I am happy that Dave said he still appreciates some outdoor time once in a while. That is good to know. That is very good to know. I'm curious even, so after, you know, reading all the horror stories, the prep that we did for this episode, interviewing the CEO, would you let your girls on Roblox when the time comes? How do you feel about it these days? Yeah, I would. I think you have to try this stuff if you want to understand if there is a safe, fun way to use it. I think, what's important to me is not being immediately skeptical of the new rock music. I mean, maybe I am too extreme about that where like I try to like everything, like whatever's on the radio, I've got to really try to like it even if I kind of hate it. Like that's my worst fear is being an out of touch, being an out of touch, you know, dad or granddad or something like that. That's why you were so excited to show me Geese a couple weeks ago. Yes. But I'm also like, I'm also kind of butthurt from all those years at Snapchat of people telling me that these real relationships people were having on there were frivolous because it was sharing selfies. And it's like, well, I snap with my grandma all the time because that's all she wants to see is my face, not whatever coffee I'm posting on Instagram. I'll tell you that much. You still do that? I'm not sure if that, no, not anymore. The streak died. Yeah. I'm not saying that's the majority of use cases on Snap, but when you look at something like ephemerality that now a lot of people take for granted especially in, you know, places and under governments where things are more heavily surveilled, there are a lot of reasons that ephemerality is nice, just like in the real world. And so I guess I always, I always, you know, try and see things for myself if I can. Yeah. Anything else going on with you? Are you going to let your dog use roadblocks? My two dogs? I'm sure they would if they could. Yeah. Man, I don't know. I need a vacation from the vacation after five days of babysitting over Thanksgiving. So yeah, I'm going to, after this, I'm just going to sit in peace and turn around my little desk chair and stare at the wall for a little while. I feel that. I'm in New York this week for the Dealbook Summit. Andrew Ross Sorkin, who I consider to be the goat of business financial journalism, is obviously very well versed in tech as well, does this one day thing that I'm very fortunate to get to go to that is, is kind of this Masters of the Universe event that is also great inspiration for me as I'm thinking about events on my own with sources. And he's got Dario Amadei from Anthropic and Mr. Beast and a bunch of Brian Armstrong from Coinbase. It's going to be a lot of interesting people. Are you a Master of the Universe yet or just a mere Padawan? I'm a Padawan. Not yet in the Jedi Council. I'm maybe entering like Jedi, but definitely not Master. Do you have a leather jacket? That's what's in there. I do. And I just got a trench. So you're well on your way. Of course. It's a cool conference, man. It's very succession-y, like down to the music that they play when the person comes on stage. It's very like you are in the show and it's like at the Javits Center overlooking Central Park. It's very cool. So shout out Sorkin, the goat. And I do actually wish though that I was in San Diego of all places this week, a sentence I have never said. Do you know what's happening in San Diego? What? You like San Diego? No. Oh, okay. Yeah. I mean, it's. I told you I'm a contrarian. Look, it's fine. It's a lot of retired, you know, army people and Republicans. But what's going to happen is that that concentration of people is going to also have the highest concentration of AI researchers in the world for one week only in the beautiful city of San Diego, just a few hours south of us. It's called Neuralips. It's this academic conference that is not a conference. now kind of of where i would say the next year gets set in the ai community and these are the people actually building the models and it's become this like world job fair where as the money in ai gets bigger and bigger all the big companies show up they throw crazy parties and they try to you know it's it's like a juiced up version of your high school job fair with like trillions of dollars at stake and the candidates are you know the smartest ai minds in the world that are all in san diego next week if there was ever an opportunity for god to be like all right bye bye you know to this whole thing let's get the coastal erosion going just a one fell swoop this whole coastal shelf goes into the ocean i guess we're not gonna have ai though if that happens yeah i guess not you're not gonna have clients okay don't do it god anyway uh maybe next year for neural lips i'm sure it'll be in like switzerland or something um they always move it around but uh neural ips it's really got a ring to it yeah i'm hopefully i'm probably not saying it right i'm sure an ai researcher will will correct me so alex let's talk about your scoop i read it over lunch today while eating hand rolls here in little tokyo and uh i was having a lot of fun reading it can you tell us a little bit more about it oh yeah the back to work uh mandate is is coming instagram back to five days a week baby remote work uh it was only what it was two or three years ago when zuck was saying we're going to be the most remote friendly big tech company uh and now i think they're one of the first to do mandated five days a week back it's not for the whole company it's instagram it's still a lot of people uh but yeah i published this internal memo from adam oseri the head of instagram basically outlining why they're doing this the culture reset they want to do it's a lot of like you bureaucracy creep that happens and every once in a while you have a senior manager be like okay like we're resetting no more reoccurring meetings uh unblocking sessions or whatever which is like you know it's just these big tech things that if you're in big tech you totally get it and if not you're probably like what the hell is this well i just love that it's like all this stuff that you know you think oh this is the upper echelon of uh corporations they're so innovative they've got the best software they've got the best talent they've got everybody going to neural ips and then you read the memo and it's like everybody please make sure that meetings have a goal yeah and it's like yeah uh they're all just like us they're just ivy leaguers yeah we're all humans man yeah we should all cancel our one-on-ones and we need dris you know directly responsible individuals and if somebody over schedules your focus block please try and decline it and i will take the you know hate for that and i mean every company i've ever been at has kind of had the same problems and it's just it's just ironic to me you know we spend all of our days trying to build this new technology all these new productivity tools and i don't know a single company that seems to have resolved some of these core issues around recurring one-on-ones and meeting agendas i mean of all the companies you've talked to is there one that you feel like is kind of like the most organized i mean i feel like that base camp company was talking about how uh they had all these different rhythms they do or don't use email they have wednesdays blocked off you know some companies are kind of known for their culture but i'm not sure how true any of it actually yeah nothing apparent comes to mind i don't think anyone's figured it out it's like you're either fully remote or you're some weird hybrid that's a disaster or you're five days a week those are those are the three options and instagram's kind of trying to have both like if you actually read the memo that i put on sources.news like there's a lot of wiggle room but uh the headline that the manager wants to communicate is five days a week um which is also like quiet layoffs right that's that's gonna force certain people to not come back and that's okay um and yeah man i don't know i just uh i'm actually surprised you didn't mention the thing i thought you would mention up first which is like that he was saying uh no more decks uh i don't know if you ever had to experience a deck overload inside of a thousand percent but uh thousand percent i don't know if the decks are necessarily any different from like static strategy docs or whatever but like that's one of the things missary called out is that like we can't spend half our time doing decks and strategy docs part of the problem though is that i think like as is the case with pretty much every company it's like when you're presenting uh something like a product or you know piece of marketing or brand creative it is a story right and sometimes the vp may not deeply understand the audience that you're trying to serve which is their fault of course but this is what happens when you become vp and you get a bit more out of touch with certain things and so we'll see maybe the pendulum will swing back toward decks eventually i mean i do believe work culture is is very cyclical with all this stuff but the other thing that comes to mind is just you know on the tail end of the roblox convo uh it is kind of ironic you know there's that point where like uh this was actually a casey newton tweet from a long time ago where casey was like zuck is in this weird place of trying to convince congressmen that uh facebook can't really change any voting behavior but convince every advertiser that that is what facebook is best at is changing buying behavior and it's the same thing maybe with roblox which is which is that like all right all these companies are let's let's just keep it to meta for a second with their vr stuff like horizon worlds they're talking about how unbelievable all these companies are doing whatever they're making these days but then they're telling all their employees to come to work because collaboration is better there i mean i feel like it's fairly obvious at this point that just about everything is better in person if we have the luxury of being able to do that obviously not everybody has that luxury whether it's with you know flexibility with kids or disabilities or otherwise but uh yeah it's a funny dance uh that that tech is forced forced to dance when all these trends go back and forth yeah the metaverse may be in roblox but it's uh not in uh quest headsets right now it's not the metaverse we wanted to build well on that note uh thanks to dave for coming on the show especially sticking in uh and still coming after the hard fork thing uh appreciated him doing that uh yeah send us out here ellis we're a new show so please follow like subscribe everywhere you get podcasts you can also find us in video via access pod on youtube if you like this episode leave a five-star review or thumbs up and please share it with a friend you can find me at hamburger on twitter and yes i will continue to call it twitter and at meaning.company you can find my newsletter at sources.news access is part of the vox media podcast network and is produced by hooked creators bye-bye easiest way from a day surrounded by noise to a state surrounded by nature that's nice go on book it it's easy booking.com booking.yeah yeah fall is the perfect time to refresh and reorganize your space at the home depot find power tools and tool sets starting at fifty dollars to help tackle diy projects home updates and more whether you're drilling brackets to support new shelving or sharpening your hedge trimmer blade with an angle grinder the home depot has the tools you need to check projects off your list shop labor day savings at the home depot and gear up for fall projects with the right tools to keep your projects moving you