The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish - Roblox CEO: How to Make Better Decisions by Fixing Yourself First

Starting point is 00:00:00 If one is not reducing bureaucracy, there's no neutral ground. If one is not trying to improve things, it is going backwards. I want to start in an unexpected place before we get into a bunch of other things. But I want to talk about how keto changed your family's life. So it's super interesting. I had dabbled with keto maybe 10 or 12 years ago. Then this really, this thing happened with my son, where he got super bad bipolar. polar probably eight to 10 years ago. We tried every medication, we tried every solution to get him

Starting point is 00:00:43 off medication. And here we were four, five or six years later, doctors had told him, they're going to be on five medications for the rest of your life. He wasn't quite himself, lots of hospitalizations, all kind of stuff. And then out of the blue, someone I knew in the metabolic health community just said, hey, by the way, keto solve my bipolar. And so you can imagine after trying every resource in the world, right, just all these doctors and all of that, we said, let's give it a shot.

Starting point is 00:01:18 So we found a super smart keto doctor, super smart keto dietician. And the fact that he said, I will try it. Oh, my gosh. What a leaf. Huge. And then the next step, kind of three weeks. in on the keto thing was him saying, whoa, I feel a little different. And kind of picking up just a little bit more of him, still heavily medicated,

Starting point is 00:01:47 but like the real him starting to poke through. That must have been so hard on you and your wife as well. So hard on us. What's really freaky is the number of families that it's that hard on. Like we walk around the world and we see, you know, go to a football game and there's 60,000 people, there's probably many people in that stadium going through that same thing.

Starting point is 00:02:13 Was there ever a moment where you just felt like you were breaking? Luckily not. Either through some combination of, as you can imagine, here's this patient, we got to be there for him. So it's just like, okay. And luckily, I don't have what he has. So how do I, in a way, take care of myself so I can be there for him? And how do you think about the relationship between mental health and our body, I guess, in that sense?

Starting point is 00:02:46 If I roll back the clock and think about my mind and how I thought about mental health 10 years ago, I use that as a template for how everyone, without someone in their family, must think about it. It's just, oh, people go crazy. Oh, they're having a mental health thing. I never thought of it as a super physical thing, because now I think of it as the same as a broken arm. It's just part of your body is physically not working. It just happens to be your brain. With this keto thing, I think I've developed a theory

Starting point is 00:03:18 that in some cases, mental health things are very physical. Is your brain getting enough energy? The theory behind keto is that arguably we were eating some, you know, maybe more primeval foods up till 10,000 years ago. We hit the agricultural revolution. That was wonderful in many ways. Our population flourished. But in certain ways, we might not be fully adapted.

Starting point is 00:03:45 There may be certain people who just are not fully adapted to that many carbs in their diet. And so for my son, he may be one of those people. And that launched the family foundation, I'd say, for the last four or five years, doing research on this. What's your current metabolic routine? I do think I'm doing pretty well on not eating a lot of complex carbs that like spike my glucose. So I'm wearing a CGM right now. So I have like a little app on my phone and I can see my glucose level whenever I want to see it. But you're not tracking your ketones.

Starting point is 00:04:19 I'm not tracking my ketones, although I have in the past. And so I kind of know what's going to spike me. But generally, I eat a fair amount of protein, fair amount of fat, not too many carbs. And I don't eat any sugar. I basically don't eat any starch, like anything that's going to give me a glucose spike. How does your metabolic state affect your decision-making? I do think eating a lot of food or even a lot of carbs, we can all feel that kind of slow-down, kind of hibernate sleepy mode.

Starting point is 00:04:56 I think in a more fasted state, you can feel that more alert, like I want to go do stuff kind of thing. And I do think it's good to make decisions in that if you can tell the difference in that I want to go do stuff mode, I think those end up being longer-term decisions. They can be decisions that in a less optimistic mode

Starting point is 00:05:19 seem that's impossible. Like, that's so hard. I do feel I have learned to tell When I'm in an on mood, when I'm in an off mood, when I'm a little more of an optimistic mode, which I think is general, I do try to observe that from the outside in and say all big decisions making the optimistic mode. So I do try to, like, say, is the decision-making machinery

Starting point is 00:05:47 in the optimal state? Outside of Roblox, how do you think about great products? I like the notion of less is more. So I like the notion of telling everyone it's very easy to add knobs and stuff. It's very hard to remove all of the knobs and sliders. It's fun when we think about products, like in a kitchen, for example, when we think about great products, I definitely would not like a dedicated appliance to cook hot dogs as opposed to a beautiful knife and a beautiful frying pan.

Starting point is 00:06:26 So I think I like simpler things of higher quality rather than complicated things. How do you think of removing when it comes to the company? I mean, there seems to be sediment builds up inside the company. And bureaucracy is the natural sort of like entropy of an organization. And then there has to be a counterforce almost to get rid of that. We do use the term destroy bureaucracy inside the company at times. Like, I would say that if one is not reducing bureaucracy, there's no neutral ground.

Starting point is 00:07:01 Like, I think in a lot of situations where one thinks, we're pretty good. Like, we're just going to let it be in this steady state. That's actually things are imploding in a way. If one is not trying to improve things, it is going backwards. How do you give feedback to people? What I have tried to do is move to more frequency, more in the moment, relaxed, not a big deal. Rather than, let's have a feedback session. So trying to be in the moment, oh, what do you think about that?

Starting point is 00:07:43 I think is much better than blocking or waiting or trying to organize it. How would you think that people receive that feedback? I think the feedback is hyper-tone-related. I actually think if delivered in a neutral positive tone where people can sense my blood pressure's not going up, where I'm just like, I got your back no matter what, it's all cool. even if the feedback's pretty harsh, it's like, whoa, that was okay.

Starting point is 00:08:16 So whereas I do feel if feedback is delivered aggressively, or it's just like, oh, it's traumatic, I think that can actually influence it more than the feedback. I like the idea of tonal because so often, you know, when you distribute a workforce or people working from home, a lot of feedback is written or text or slack, and then you don't have that tone or softness that goes with it.

Starting point is 00:08:40 I support that. Also, if I get riled up, like, don't touch text or email. Like, just walk away. Do you recognize it? Oh, yeah, just red alert. Do not send that email. To you or the one that you're about to say? No, just imagine writing an email where you're thinking,

Starting point is 00:09:00 I'm so pissed off, it's going to feel so good to send this email. Don't send that. Because then, like, the next morning, you're like, oh my God, Thank goodness I didn't send that. I can call this person. I can have a lot more impact in delivering that same message without being all worked up about it. Plus, also, what is one trying to optimize?

Starting point is 00:09:24 When someone's trying to send that email, I'm optimizing for myself. Whereas when the next morning comes around, you can say, well, actually, I should optimize for the learning and excitement of this employee. I like that a lot. I think of it in terms of like outcome over ego. Absolutely. We're just constantly trying to make it a better experience for the employee. Who cares about me being pissed off?

Starting point is 00:09:54 When you see people make mistakes, what are the patterns of mistakes that people make when it comes to seeing reality, ego, decision-making in that vein? Oh, no. I don't think there's a lot of mistakes. I think the typical pattern is, hey, can we make this simpler? Hey, can we look a couple years out and think about what's going to happen with that? That looks a little short-term. Hey, that looks a little complicated.

Starting point is 00:10:23 You have two things doing the same thing. Hey, can we take that from a appliance that heats up hot dogs into two separate appliances, a pan and a knife that are both the best in the world? Can you spend a few beats and explain the principles of good decision-making and good thinking as you see them? There is something, I think, inside of an organization where for many decisions, it's actually more important just to let's identify the person who's going to make the decision and let them be somewhat free and creative to make the decision,

Starting point is 00:11:01 then in many cases a group decision or a confused decision, or we're trying to do all of that. So I think you'll see more and more us at Roblox. It's just like, can we identify the decision maker? And having them have a little freedom to make their own decision, I think, is super powerful. Aside from systems thinking, what are some of the mental models that you use to think through problems? I think one mental model that we've had in thinking through problems is kind of an irreverence in a way. to the problem.

Starting point is 00:11:38 You know, one of the decisions, I think back to the early founding of Roblox, and I would call this a set of irreverence, is the very earliest version of Roblox had what we would call a classic Roblox character. We were saying, OK, we're building a user-generated gaming platform. We're going to have an avatar. The very first Roblox avatar was a very fast programmer art

Starting point is 00:12:01 avatar to get something working. Its proportions are ridiculously simple. The legs are one by one by two, the body's two by one. The face of the early Roblox avatar was just programmer art that we put together. Universally, all of the gaming industry people we would talk to, whoa, whoa, whoa, do not ship that. Like you need a full avatar, you know,

Starting point is 00:12:31 you need a meshed avatar. It's got to be high-res. Your objects need to look. better. So we got that universally. I would say even within our team we got that, but we decided it's better to ship that early and start getting feedback on it. I thought that was a great decision. And we found out actually that a lot of the input we had been getting, thank God we didn't listen to that, basically. How do you deal with a situation where your instinct and the data disagree? We get that quite often. It's interesting to think of the whole role.

Starting point is 00:13:06 Roblox community and how smart and creative they are and how passionate they are. There's a really gentle line that needs to be worked on as we both drive the product forward, as well as listen to that community. And that creates many conditions where our instincts are different than the community's vibe. There have been situations where our instincts have been different. The community's been right. There's many other cases where our instincts have been right, and the community then follows along and says that's an absolutely great idea.

Starting point is 00:13:49 How do you resolve that? So much of getting to good decisions and good outcomes is seeing reality and adapting to reality. I think a lot of decisions that can be made incrementally that aren't one way. Those are a lot easier. We try to make faster decisions. in the right direction, we can adjust. I think realizing when we need to adjust is super powerful. It's interesting because two of our values

Starting point is 00:14:14 are take the long view and get stuff done. We kind of like to say there's a magic decision-making quadrant where the magic quadrant is, it's both a long-view decision with hyper-iteration to get there. And that's kind of a magic safe quadrant. all of the other quadrants have a little weirdness to them. When things aren't working the way you want them to, what's your inner modelogue in those moments?

Starting point is 00:14:42 Interestingly, I think when we're running companies, we have all the evolutionary biology of being out there in the wilderness trying to survive and having battles and all of that. So I think CEOs can get that feeling like, oh my gosh, do I have enough firewood for the next three winters and it's like oh it's not feeling to write that has been for me an intuitive early thinking thing what's great is it leads to typically a refinement in strategy or a little bit where you're

Starting point is 00:15:18 like uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh then all of a sudden the light goes on it's just like oh we got the plan we know exactly what to do we're going to send four people out they're all going to have axes we're going to put in three months, three years of firewood. We think we can do it in three weeks. Everything's great. Do you manufacture threats as a way to motivate or focus yourself? And I think of Michael Jordan playing for the Bulls. He used to manufacture things that other players said about it.

Starting point is 00:15:48 We are running right now. I'm not going to say what the company looks like. It's not an existing company. In my own mind, I'm imagining the company across the street. That is like our, you know, could call it a threat. Like, what's it look like? Who are the people? How many people?

Starting point is 00:16:07 What are they building? Do you analyze your mistakes? Yeah. How do you do that? What's your process? I would just say my process, I would say typically my mistakes have come, I think, from being maybe overly logical and less intuitive. Say more about that.

Starting point is 00:16:28 One can fall into. the trap of just saying, I don't, I have to go down this path in a way and not popping out of the box and kind of thinking of the more outside of the box solutions. So trying to think of mistakes I have made have been typically where I've hung on to a concept too long. When I actually was very free to change my course. I think we have a lot more optionality than we imagine. when I look backwards in time. Every few years, a new platform earns its place at the top of every smart advertisers media plan.

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Starting point is 00:18:47 As far as an interactive multiplayer universe where people can go together and do things together, I mean, it might be. So through this virtual world, what have you learned about human desire? in psychology. What I think I have learned is that we need to have enormous respect for all the people in this virtual world. I think it's surprising how much people can attach to their digital identity. I mean, it has to be very carefully respected. Like, this is real stuff, right? There are real emotions happening, real interactions happening. And I think I've also learned, that I feel it's still very, very early in this. Say more about attaching to your virtual identity. Once again, this is an area that I love the Roblox community on, and I think they're very sensitive to this, and that we're migrating all of our avatars to a position

Starting point is 00:19:48 where, rather than just being a monolithic block, for those users who choose, the head may smile, if they want it to smile, or something like that. But in the migration of this process, the Roblox community has just been absolute sticklers for perfection in the migration. And it's because people have been familiar with their avatar for such a long time. It's like, you can't take my head and adjust a few. Like, what are you doing? So, and I think they're right.

Starting point is 00:20:20 How do you think about things like capital allocation? You guys just announced your first buyback recently? Super thoughtful. knock on wood, we've made a lot of cash in our history, like a lot of positive free cash flow. A lot of the decisions we make have come from not necessarily capital allocation, but what are we trying to do?

Starting point is 00:20:42 You know, what is the big picture of the opportunity and what we're trying to grow for them? I would say we've refined that many times throughout our history. Go deeper on that. You know, it's almost like we're in Roblox version 5.0 right now. in that when we started the company, the vision we had, I think, was spot on. We were imagining a new category, human co-experience category,

Starting point is 00:21:07 the Metaverse category, the holodeck category, the Snow Crash category. We really could see that coming, but we were very moderate and modest in the very first thing we were going for. When we started, for those of us who could remember, there was like Club Penguin was a really popular kids game, And we just thought that was, oh, that's huge. Like, Club Penguin, like they've got, you know,

Starting point is 00:21:33 X many people. We like what they're doing. We started with arguably a much bigger, deeper, deeper technical foundation. I would say, though, along the way we've refined our aspiration and what we're trying to do, when we went public, we were talking about, you know, connecting the world.

Starting point is 00:21:53 Two years ago, we talked about getting 10% of global gaming on our platform. That continues to refine as we have a bigger percentage of global gaming on our platform. I think you'll continue to hear us kind of expand our ambition. What percent are you now? Well, you can look at where we're tracking on our bookings, and I think if you divide our bookings by 200 billion,

Starting point is 00:22:16 we're in the 3 to 4%. That's amazing. That's incredible. It's incredible. And at the same time, it actually seems like it's exciting to me because there's a lot of beyond three or four percent. What about incentives for people?

Starting point is 00:22:29 What have you gotten right and gotten wrong over the years? I think we got really lucky in being really fascinated with incentives. And I think very early on when we started building Roblox, some of the early founders, John and Eric and Matt and myself, we were just really into economics and incentives and what makes people do things in a nice, appropriate way and drives it. At the very start of Roblox,

Starting point is 00:23:01 we thought just the incentive of user-generated content, like, whoa, everyone can make their own game and they can come and play it and show it to their friends. We thought that would be an amazing incentive, and we thought that would give us amazing amounts of content. That did prove to be really true. You know, along the way, we had a lot of questions around economic incentives.

Starting point is 00:23:27 And Roblox got pretty big without a developer, a way for developers to earn money on the platform. It was a hobby for everyone. We had people who were working 24 hours a day, just they loved their Roblox creation. They were struggling, like, wow, I gotta make a living. I just wanna build on Roblox. So we had a lot of board level discussion.

Starting point is 00:23:51 Should we turn this into something where someone could make a living? We actually, in retrospect, it's crazy. We went back and forth a lot, like, well, I'm not so sure we should do that. But we did come up with a notion, okay, we're going to build a really elegant system. Creators can make whatever, you know, wide range of experiences. They can have users participate economically. It's going to be free for most people.

Starting point is 00:24:18 Some of these creators who are working 24-7 might be able to make a living on that. I mean, we thought, I think we thought about that very systemic because that system has just been the engine behind us ever since then. One of the things that you and Eric disagreed on was the API. So Eric Castle, co-founder, started Roblox with me, passed away from cancer like eight years ago, rest in peace. But in a way, a values template for the company. And when we started Roblox, Eric and I were the first two.

Starting point is 00:24:55 engineers. We wrote the whole system. We had some false starts, too, by the way. There's a really fun story that I would say we both knew what we wanted Roblox to be. And we knew we want user-generated multiplayer, build your own thing, go play it with your friends. Like, that's what we want. along the way we tried to ship early a subset of that and just blew it did not work it was a non-avitar-based more puzzle thing and it's just like whoa back to the drawing board i was in a way um saying okay we're making this game creation platform let's try to hardwire all these types of games you could make and have all of this extra cruft on the system i remember actually like we, in our core C++ code for the techie people that are out there, we actually like mocked up a capture the flag game, and we had a flag as part of our core API. In retrospect, it's an absolute disaster because the flag is such a, you know, user-generated, complex, specific game thing. For me to have put that deep into our core stuff was just like terrible engineering. Eric was very

Starting point is 00:26:19 different. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, don't do that. Like, we need a interface of language with this thing. We need an API. We need to have this thing be very generalizable. There's a game creation language called Lua. Let's connect that up and don't do any of this stuff. And it's weird that I was initially like, whoa, I don't know if I trust that. But we started doing that. The power was just absolutely enormous. Rather than my hard-coded stuff, the power of this generalizable thing, that was kind of like a core engineering foundation that gave Roblox a lot of its UGC boost in a way. You mentioned a couple of false starts. What are some of those false starts where you guys went down the wrong path? And how did you realize you were going down the wrong path?

Starting point is 00:27:05 Along the way to building an economy on the platform, we started with a very different economic model. It was a membership model. You got a few extra places to build on Roblox. In retrospect, that was a really bad idea because building should be unlimited. But along the way, that economic model started to fail, actually. And we had a situation where our user growth was going up, up, up, up, up, but less people wanted to buy this membership.

Starting point is 00:27:38 And so this is really interesting, right? Our users are growing. It's all great. but money is flat to going down. And so what we did on that, I would say, is a very typical tactical response. Okay, something's up. Let's fix the current system.

Starting point is 00:27:57 Let's make a list of 50 things that might be broken, 50 small tune-ups that we can do towards this system. Okay, let's do that. So as you would imagine, we made that list of 50 things, did like 30 of them. Oh, we still have the problem. Now what? But in the back of our head, we had been thinking about the economy,

Starting point is 00:28:19 about virtual currency, about how this was like a whole outside-of-the-box game changer. This wasn't just tuning up something that was arguably broken. This was like, this could be 100 times bigger than what we're doing. And so then all of a sudden, like maybe in a disparaging moment, like just, oh my gosh, all of us in the company who said, we just have to do this, like this big heart thing. But then we had absolute clarity, like we're just betting it all on this new economy system.

Starting point is 00:28:49 We were very thoughtful that the economy system was a bunch of complex parts. It needed virtual currency. Users needed to be able to buy virtual currency. Like some of the early things were like in some of the games, you could buy a flashlight if you wanted it. Some of the games, if you wanted to be an eagle instead of a sparrow, you could buy an upgrade for that. And then finally, we said, you know what? In addition, we're going to show which of the games on Roblox are making the most Robux. Like, where are people spending it? And so launching all of those things at the same time, there's virtual currency, people can buy it,

Starting point is 00:29:29 creators can incorporate it, you can see what's earning. It created like a loop or a system that within eight hours, we just said, yep, we got it. Like, boom. Because we could see, like within eight hours, creators are, like, like, oh, I got to add this. I got to do this. There's the top grossing game on Roblox. People are actually interested in that. You invented a world where people can do whatever they want.

Starting point is 00:29:53 That's right. And so we knew, like, okay, we finally got it. And after all those months of fixing those 50 little small things, the right system just all done. That's awesome. Yeah. I built an AI version of myself with Hey Jen. Today I'll have a dig up an old prediction I made, and we'll eat. grade it. Let's give it a shot.

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Starting point is 00:31:44 How does the virtual currency work, specifically, how do you value it? Does it get tethered to outside forces? Like, how do you think about that? We have generally thought it's better not to inflate it, to have it be a somewhat consistent value. If you were or I were to go buy some robucks, we would see it's generally somewhat like a penny per row buck. It's generally been that way for about 20 years.

Starting point is 00:32:13 So I would say that's no promise long term. It's directly tied to the dollar. But I think we would try to keep it stable and not inflating or deflating. Do you ever see a world where you can use that currency outside and I can go buy a Starbucks or something with it? I do see that world. No future plans. We haven't announced anything. It's interesting to think that many, many 8 through 12-year-olds, their first exposure to money.

Starting point is 00:32:40 is Robux. So I do think for many young people learning how to use a virtual currency, not to spend it all at once, maybe to divvy it out a bit can be a lot of learning. And so it's interesting to think over time if young people get sophisticated enough to, you know, use that to go to a 7-Eleven or something. What would have to be true technologically for that to be possible, or is it possible today? I don't want to go into too much details. We've thought about a lot of that. I think it's a little bit more of a what's the focus of the company right now.

Starting point is 00:33:19 And it's a little bit more. Should the focus of our company be, you know, young kids are doing a lot, or we have an increasingly larger percentage of what is play in the world. We say we're pretty focused on just what is play in the world. What does focus mean to you? I think one way to think about focus is is like, is there one statement in your head that everyone in the company can just understand?

Starting point is 00:33:47 And is the focus, human understandable, we are just doing this? And everyone just says, oh, I got it. Like, I can rally around that. So I think that's a little bit, how easy is it to present it or share it? Double-click on that understanding and how important words are in communication, not only for the sender, but the receiver, and how you spread messages throughout the company.

Starting point is 00:34:14 I'll use an example very early on in the formation of the company. We, when we're very small, we use the tagline, you make the game. That was an idea that anyone could make very simple games in Roblox. I think as we think about that notion and we think about AI and what's going to become possible with AI in the future, it's actually been fun to go back to those words and think are they now possibly even more true than they've ever been?

Starting point is 00:34:46 And the more we have the ability to use AI for anyone to make a game they think about, those words can have really big meaning. So I think, you know, going after, say, our vision is 10% of the gaming market, that's a pretty good focus. A lot of people understand it, but I think that's constantly,

Starting point is 00:35:08 should be re-evaluated a bit as we think about where we're going in the future. Do you use AI internally to help make decisions or help expand your context window in the company? I would say we have all kinds of AI. We have a bunch of internal systems that we have built. So, you know, we have a thing called the Roblox operating system that we use for tracking the work in the company more and more, helping people see. how they fit into the organization. Those are all like MCP enabled. So anyone can take their AI system

Starting point is 00:35:45 and run it on top of those. In a way, we think of all of our Roblox systems as things that either people or AI can look at and run things against. So we have all kinds of people building custom little things that are looking at the work tracker or doing some things. Some people auto-generate

Starting point is 00:36:06 like our one-on-one discussion topics. So I would say, yeah. I want to get into talking about a lot of the policy that's coming out of governments all around the world in terms of age bands. How do you think, without commenting maybe on whether they should or should not exist, who do you think should implement those? Should those be at the company level specifically? Or should they be at a platform level like Apple? I mean, when I talk to senators in the United States, I say, please, how can we have? help you take a look at what we've done on our own without any laws requiring it we're now using AI to check the age of every single person on our platform we've open sourced our voice um safety filter

Starting point is 00:36:52 we've done this this and this so i do say look at what private industry can do um so that's one thing and then of course i think there has to be a lot of thought and caution and i think universally um legislators I've met with, they do have a balancing act. They are trying to enact great legislation, but they're trying not to have the tragedy of good intentions. They're trying not to craft laws as it's like, oh my gosh, I wish we wouldn't have done that. You know, one could say, for example, well, on a mobile phone, whoever makes the mobile phone should check the age of everyone on the mobile phone. We said we're not waiting for that. We're going to do it ourselves in a way. But do you think that that is a better solution from an industry point of view, or do you think

Starting point is 00:37:46 it's better for you're not waiting, that's great, but do you think it's more elegant to have it at a device level or at an individual company and you're responsible for that? This is makes it so tricky in that I would say both, and that knowing what we do, given that we're doing age check for all of our users, for comms, for example, We know, for example, a lot of parents don't have the time to configure their device, or a lot of parents to say, yeah, take my iPad and go do that. And so if that iPad is configured, for example, as a parent, it's handed off to a kid, that can be a little tricky.

Starting point is 00:38:23 So I would say even when devices maybe have an age and then we'll still keep doing our own thing. But that's had a cost on you. I was listening to your last journey's call this morning, and it's, slowed down growth. I would say the opportunity to build a global platform that has more and more people playing together, which is amazing and all around the world, not just quote over 13, but of all ages, I mean, this is foundational to our growth. Like, we're very optimistic. I think where I was going with that is you're able to take a longer view, in part because you're a majority shareholder, you're the founder, you carry a lot of weight in that,

Starting point is 00:39:06 you can make these decisions. Not every company is going to feel that they can take an immediate short-term pain for longer-term gain. Yeah, I would say this is, once again, where our aspirations are, like, we think digital play is just amazing. We shared we're in the 3 to 4% of the world right now. Imagining what the future is going to be for the types of interactions, interactions we're going to have,

Starting point is 00:39:34 it's pretty amazing. So I do just feel the work we've done safety, civility, platform-wide is foundational for platforms like this. If you close your eyes, I want you to tell me what Roblox looks like in five years from now. I'll share

Starting point is 00:39:50 a couple examples. One, we've shared the other side of that, which is the technology we're building for Roblox reality. It's surprising that it's actually hard to imagine what a photorealistic multiplayer game would feel like.

Starting point is 00:40:10 Like we're not used to it. We're used to looking at gaming footage and saying, that is an amazing game. That looks so good. But I do think when we look at it, we say, but that is a game, by the way. That is not like born identity, you know? And whereas if we ran born identity,

Starting point is 00:40:29 born identity on a 2K screen, that looks different than that. So I do think there's going to be a future world where we have all the aspects of the multiplayer gaming, interesting, but it feels like that. And I think that's going to be pretty mind-blowing. It's going to be a little bit like going from black and white to color or going from 512 to 2K. Like, people don't quite realize how big that can be. So I think that's one aspect of it.

Starting point is 00:41:03 I think there's another aspect where the notion of you make the game is really going to come full circle because games are much more complicated than code. They have images and assets, and they have environments, and they have stories, and they have all of that. But getting to the point where you or I make a beautiful thing, share it with our family, play it just by talking about it, I think is going to come true as well.

Starting point is 00:41:34 I think that that's incredible. What do you think will be the second and third-order consequences of that? I think the positive thing to think about is actually the fun parts around connection and digital play will, in a way, become very, they're already quite meaningful. I think the consequences will be more fluidity in digital play. The feeling that it's not me as a user and them as a creator,

Starting point is 00:42:07 the notion, it'll almost be like in the old days only, you know, one percent of us were oil painters documenting the king's portraiture, whereas now I think we all feel like we're oil painters. We have our phone, we have digital, you know, image tools, and we're all kind of feeling like we're part of it. And in a way, rather than a digital technology, like reducing the job market for oil painters, it's probably increased the job market. There's a lot more people doing digital imagery.

Starting point is 00:42:41 I'm actually thinking the same thing will happen for gaming, and that both the hardcore creator market and all of us will be more involved in the creation of immersive experiences. What was your reaction to watching Ready Player 1? Ready Player 1, the book I loved, the movie V1, I loved, but I do like less intrusive, you know, far out VR. I'd say like Black Mirror, when they do VR, like you just put a little white dot on you

Starting point is 00:43:08 and like takes over their eyes and your body and all of that. It's less intrusive. I think that's probably more where it's gonna go, probably, than just goggles and stuff like that. A huge fan of Ready Player 1, but I think there's a wide range of, like, technical coverage of how this is going to be to work. I'm a stickler, I would say, on sci-fi movies, like the more real and the less comedy

Starting point is 00:43:37 or clitchy or whatever, the more I like it. And I think it's really hard to find sci-fi movies that are just trying to be real. I want to get this right, so I'm going to read this, but my 16-year-old submitted a question for you. I'm 16-year-old. If you were starting out at 16 today with no money, no contacts, no network of people that you could rely on, how would you spend the next five years to maximize your chances of building a company that matters? Oh, my gosh. I would, well, I'll tell them what worked for me is that was the last thing on my mind when I was 16. I was into, in a way, hang out with people I liked.

Starting point is 00:44:29 I was into what naturally I was good at and interested in, whether it was building model rockets or go-karts. So I think if one is 16 and actually that's like what you're into, there is a notion to like, can one, as one goes through the normal course of life, you're going to go to high school, you're going to maybe go to college. In parallel, can that be your fun little hobby in a way? Can you warm up on that in an authentic way? We always end these interviews with the same question, which is, what is success for you?

Starting point is 00:45:09 I feel every day I'm already feeling very successful. So I feel like I'm in a way... What goes into that feeling? I feel waking up every day just saying I'm so fortunate. So I actually feel that way.

The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish - Roblox CEO: How to Make Better Decisions by Fixing Yourself First

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