Roblox CEO: How to Make Better Decisions by Fixing Yourself First

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/a40a42e22d71338c

If one is not reducing bureaucracy, there's no neutral ground. If one is not trying to improve things, it is going backwards.
I wanna start in an unexpected place before we get into
A whole bunch of other things.
Talk about how Keto changed your family's life.
So the super interesting I had dabbled with keto maybe ten or twelve years ago, then
This really and this thing happened with my son where he got super bad bipolar probably eight to ten years ago. We tried every medication, we tried every solution to get him off medication.
And here we were four, five, or six years later, doctors had told him you're gonna 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
Yeah, just said, hey, by the way, keto solved 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.
So we found a super um smart keto doctor, super smart keto dietitian. And the fact that he said I will try it.
Oh my gosh.
What a relief. Huge.
And then the next step kind of three weeks in on the keto thing.
Was him saying
Well
I I feel a little
Different.
And and kind of picking up just a little bit more of him, still heavily medicated, 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 sixty thousand people.
There's probably many people in that stadium
Going through that same thing.
Was there ever a moment where you just
Felt like you were breaking.
Luckily not.
Either through um
Some combination of
as as you can imagine.
Shears
this patient, we gotta 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 our our
Body, I guess, in that sense.
If I if I roll back the clock and think about my mind and how I thought about mental health um ten 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.
'Cause now I think of it it's the same as a broken arm. It's just part of a your body is physically not working. Just happens to be your brain. With this keto thing, I think I've developed a theory
that in some cases mental health things are very physical. It's is your brain getting enough energy
Um, the theory behind keto is that arguably we were eating some, you know, maybe more primeval foods up till ten thousand 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. 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 a
like a little app on my phone and I can see my um glucose level whenever I want to see it. But you're not tracking your ketones. I'm not tracking my ketones, although I have in the past. And so I kinda know
What's gonna spike me?
But generally I eat fair amount of protein, fair amount of fat, not too many carbs. And
I don't need any sugar, I basically don't need any starch, like anything that's gonna give me a glucose spike.
How does your metabolic state affect your decision making?
I do think eating a lot of food or even even a l a lot of carbs.
We can all feel that kind of slow down kind of
Hibernate.
Sleepy mode, I think in a more fasted state.
You can feel that more alert, like I wanna go do stuff kind of thing.
And I do think it's good to make decisions.
in that um if you can tell the difference in that I wanna go do stuff mode
I think those end up being longer term decisions.
They can be decisions that in a less optimistic mode
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.
Make in the optimistic mode.
So I d I do try to like say is the decision making machinery
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. 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
Like sediment builds up inside the company. 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 I would say that
If you are n if one is not
reducing bureaucracy.
There's no neutral ground. Like I think in a lot of situations where
one thinks we're pretty good and like we're just gonna 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.
Um oh, what do you think about that? I think is much better than
blocking or waiting or
Um 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, so like whoa.
That was okay. 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 we give
you know, in your distributed workforce or people working from home, a lot of feedback is written or text or Slack or
And then you don't have that.
Tone.
Or softness that goes with it. I support that.
Also, um, if I get riled up, like don't touch text or email. Like just walk away.
Do you recognize it? Oh yeah, just read alert. Do not send that email.
To you or the one that you're about to send? No, just imagine writing an email where you're thinking
I'm so pissed off. It's gonna feel so good to send this email. Don't send that.
'Cause then like the next morning you're like, Oh my gosh, 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 one what uh what is one trying to optimize? 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?

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
Um, hey, can we make this simpler?
Hey
Can we look a couple years out?
And think about what's gonna happen.
With that.
That looks a little short term. Hey, that looks a little complicated. You have two things doing the same thing.
Hey, can we take that from a
appliance that heats up hot dogs.
And to
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 gonna make the decision.
And let them be somewhat free and creative to make the decision.
than 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
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.
You know, one of the decisions I think back to the early founding of Roblox, and I would call this a set of an irreverence, is the very earliest version of Roblox had a what we would call the classic Roblox character. We were saying, Okay, we're building a user generated gaming platform, we're gonna have an avatar.
The very first Roblox Avatar was was a very fast program or art
Avatar.
Um
To get something working.
Its proportions are ridiculously simple. You know, the legs are one by one by two, the body's two by 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.
You need a mesh avatar, it's gotta be high res, y 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 the
quite often. It's interesting to think of the whole 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 m 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 um vibe.
There have been situations where
Um our instincts have been different.
The community's been right.
But there's many other instes where instincts have been right and the community then follows along and says that's an absolutely great idea. But how do you resolve that? Like 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 are take the long view and get stuff done.
We kinda like to say there's um
A magic decision making quadrant.
Where the magic quadrant is
It's both a long view decision
And that's kind of a
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 monologue in those moments?
Interestingly, I think when we're running companies
We have all the evolutionary biology.
Of being like
out there in the wilderness trying to survive and you know having battles and all of that.
So I think um CEOs can get that feeling like, Oh my gosh, do I have enough firewood for the next three winters? And it's like, Well, it's not feeling
To right.
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 like uh
Then all of a sudden the light goes on as just like, Oh, we got the plan. We know exactly what to do. We're gonna send four people out. They're all gonna have axes, we're gonna 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 I think of Michael Jordan playing for the Bulls, he used to manufacture things that other players said about it. It's not an existing company.
In my own mind, I have like I'm
Imagining the company across the street.
That's it.
Is like our you know, could call it a threat.
Like what's it look like? Who are the people, how many people, 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.
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.
think of the more outside of the box solution. So
Trying to think of
Mistakes I have made have been typically where
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.
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Is it fair to say that Roblox is the biggest
Generated
human
universe in the world.
It's worth thinking about that because it would be worth thinking what's the definition of a human generated
universe, like there's universes in books and in movies, 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 and psychology?
What what I 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.

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.
And the say more about attaching to the 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 where
Rather than just being a monolithic block.
Um 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. Like
It's like you can't take my head and
You know, adjust a few pit like what are you doing?
So and I think they're right.
How do you think about things like capital allocation?
You guys just announced your first buyback recently.
super thoughtful, um
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? Yeah, what is the big picture?
of the opportunity and what we're trying to grow for'em.
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 five point oh 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, 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, X many people. We like what they're doing.
We started with arguably a much bigger, 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're talking about um, you know, connecting the world. Two years ago, we talked about getting ten percent 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 um our bookings by two hundred billion, we're in the three to four percent. That's amazing. That's incredible.
It's incredible and at the same time it actually seems like
It's exciting to me'cause there's a lot of room beyond three or four percent.
What about incentives for people? 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 um very early on when we started building Roblox, some of the early founders, you know, John and Eric and Matt and myself
We were just really into economics and incentives and what me makes people um
do things in a nice, appropriate way and drives it.
The at the very start
Of Roblox.
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. Um
Along the way, we we had a lot of questions around economic incentives, and we Roblox got pretty big without a developer.
a way for developers to earn money on the platform. Uh it was a hobby for everyone. We had people who were working twenty-four hours a day, just they love their Roblox creation.
They're struggling like well, I gotta make a living. I just wanna build on roadblocks. So there we had a lot of um board level discussion. 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 the notion, okay, we're gonna build a really elegant system.
Creators can make
Whatever you know, wide range of experiences.
They can have users participate economically. It's gonna be free for most people. Some of these creators who are working 247 might be able to make a living on that.
I mean we thought I think we thought about that very systemically'cause that
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.
Um, so Eric Castle co-founder started Roblox with me.
Um, passed away from cancer like eight years ago. Rest in peace, but
In a way a
Values template.
For the company.
And the and when we started Roblox, Eric and I were the first two engineers. We wrote
the whole system.
Um, we had some false starts too, by the way.
is 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 it early.
A subset of that
And just blue did not work. It was a non avatar based, more puzzle thing.
It's just like whoa, back to the drawing board.
I was in a way um
Say, 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 cross on the system.
I remember actually like we in our core C plus plus 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 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 different.
It's like whoa, whoa, whoa, don't do that. Like we need uh 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, Well, I don't know if I trust that.
But we started doing that.
The power was just
absolutely enormous. You know, rather my hard coded stuff, the power of this generalizable thing that that that was kind of like a core engineering foundation that gave Roblox a lot of its uh 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?
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'cause 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, up.
But less people wanted to buy this membership. 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.
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 fifty things, did like thirty of them
Oh, we still have the problem. Now what?
But in the back of our head we had been thinking about the
the economy, 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 a hundred times bigger than what we're doing.
And so then all of a sudden, like maybe in the
in a disparaging moment like just oh my gosh.
Yeah, all of us in the company said.
We just have to do this, like this big hard thing.
But then we had absolute clarity, like we're just betting it all on this new economy system.
We were very thoughtful that the economy system
was a bunch of complex parts. It needed virtual currency.
Um 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 and st if you wanted to be a eagle instead of a sparrow, you could buy an upgrade for that.
And then finally we said, you know what, in in addition, we're gonna 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, creators can incorporate it, you can see what's earning.
It created like a
A loop or a system that
Within eight hours, we just said, Yep, we got it.
Like boom. Cause we could see like within eight hours, creators are like, Oh, I gotta add this, I gotta 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.
That's right. And so we knew like okay, we finally got it. And after all those
months of fixing those fifty little small things.
The right system just
All done. That's awesome. Yeah.
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How does the virtual currency work specifically
How do you value it? Uh does it get tethered to outside forces? Like how do you think about that?
We um 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 Robux, um, we would see it's generally
Somewhat like a penny per row buck. It's generally been that way for about twenty years. So I would say that's no 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 like that?
I do see that world. Uh no future plans. Uh we haven't announced anything
It's interesting to think that many, many
eight through twelve year olds, their first exposure to money
is robots. So I do think for many young people um learning how to use a virtual currency, not to spend it all at once, maybe to
You know, divvy it out a bit can be a lot of learning.
And so it it's interesting to think over time if young people get sophisticated enough to
You know, use that to go to a seven eleven or something. What would have to be true technologically for that to be possible, or is it possible today?
Don't wanna 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.
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.
So we're pretty focused on just what is play in the world. What does focus mean to you?
I think one way uh to think about focus is
Like
Is there one statement in your head
That everyone in the company can just understand.
And is the is the focus
human understandable
We are just
Doing this.
Yeah. And everyone just says, Oh, I got it.
Like I can rally around that.
So I think it's um 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.
I'll use an example very early on in the formation of the company, we
Um, when we're very small we use the tagline you make the game.
That was a
an 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 gonna 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.
the more we have the ability to use AI for anyone to make a game.

those words can have really big meaning. So I think
Um
Yeah, going after say our vision is ten percent of the gaming market.
That's a pretty good focus. A lot of people understand it, but I think that's constantly should be
re evaluate it 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 on the company.
I would say I we we have all kinds of AI. We have a bunch of internal systems.
That we have built. So
Yeah, we have a thing called the Roblox operating system.
that we use for tracking the work in the company more and more
I'm helping people see how they fit into the organization.
Those are all like MCP enabled, so anyone can take their AI system 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. Um, some people auto generate and like our one on one discussion topics.
Um so
I would say yeah.
I wanna 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 m when I talk to senators in the United States.
I say please, how can we 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. 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 they're trying not to
craft laws that's just like oh my gosh.
Wish we wouldn't have done that.
Yeah, 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 gonna do it ourselves in a way. Do you think that that is a better solution
From an industry point of view.
Or do you think 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 for that? This is what makes it so tricky, and 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 would 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. 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 earnings call this morning.
And it 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 thirteen, 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 you a majority shareholder, you're the founder, you carry a lot of weight in that, and 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 um once again where our aspirations are like we think
digital play is just amazing.
We shared we're in the three to four percent of the world right now.
the imagining what the future is gonna be for
the types of dig interactions we're gonna have, it's pretty amazing. So I 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 a couple examples.
One, we we've shared the other side of that, which is the technology we're building for Roblox reality.
It's surprising um
That it's it's actually hard to imagine.
What a photo realistic multiplayer game.
would feel like
Like we're 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
That's not like born identity, you know? And whereas if we ran born identity on a f two K screen
That looks different than that. So I do think there's gonna 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 gonna be a little bit like going from
black and white to color or or going from five twelve to two K. Like
People don't quite realize how big that can be. So I think that's one aspect of it.
I think there's another aspect where
The notion of
You make the game.
is really going to come full circle because um games are much more complicated than code.
They had
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 gonna come true as well.
I think that that's like credible.
What do you think will be the second and third order consequences of that?
I think the the positive thing to think about
is actually um
the fun parts around connection and digital play.
Will
in a way become very
They're already quite
meaningful I think the the consequences will be
more fluidity in digital play, the feeling that it's not um me as a user and them as a creator.
the notion it it'll almost be like
Um 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 we're all kind of feeling like we're part of it.
Yeah, and in a way, rather than a digital technology like
reducing the job market for oil painters has probably increased the job market. There's a lot more people doing digital imagery. I'm actually thinking the same thing will happen for gaming and that the the 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 One?
Ready Player One, the book I loved. The movie V one I love, 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 and it like takes over
Your 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. Huge fan of Ready Player One, but I think there's a wide range of
like technical coverage of how this is gonna work.
I'm a stickler I I would say on sci fi movies.
Like the more real
And the less comedy or clichy
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 wanna get this right, so I'm gonna read this, but my sixteen year old submitted a question for you.
Hi, sixteen year old.
If you were starting out at sixteen 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
A building
A company that matters.
Oh my gosh.
I would um well I'll tell them what worked for me.
Is
That was the last thing on my mind when I was sixteen. Like I was into
in a way hang out with people I liked.
Um, I was into
what naturally I was good at and interested in, whether it's building model rockets or go karts. So I think
If one is sixteen and actually that's like what you're into
Um
There is a notion to like
Can one
As one goes through the normal course of life, you're gonna go to high school, you're gonna 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?
I feel every day I'm already feeling very successful.
So I feel like I'm in a way.
I I feel um
Waking up.
Every day just saying I'm so fortunate.
So I actually feel that way.