But could you just talk about your confidence to, to bring AI into the creation of games on the platform in that environment when, when Americans are worried about the safety of AI?

Yeah, a, a couple things.

We believe on the Roblox platform, and, and po- you know, arguably we're discussing, uh, this worldwide, we're gonna see more creators, not fewer, more people making games, not fewer.

And just as we've gone from analog to digital and that opened up a wide range of creation, going from digital to AI accelerated is gonna add even more creation to our platform.

So we're, we're very optimistic.

What we've seen in the coding space with harnesses, iterative loops, uh, building apps and services and websites, um, with AI acceleration, we're doing the same for gaming.

It's, it's much more complicated.

Was that a part of it?

One of the things that you and Erik disagreed on was the API.

Um, so Erik Cassel, 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, Erik and I were the first two engineers.

We wrote the whole system.

Um, 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.

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?

Yeah.

We've been all playing games for ten or twenty years.

We know what they look like, and, and we have an expectation of what we look like.

I don't think any of us have the expectation that a game should be photorealistic at four K sixty hertz like a movie.

Like w- like that is something that's the province of movies right now, offline video models that create super high res.

And, and in our minds, we haven't disconnected, like what could that be like? Our, our vision and our dream and our hope is multiplayer gaming at photorealism four K sixty hertz, and we believe the best strategy for this is not pure three-D traditional gaming, not pure video world model, you know, action systems and all of that, but a hybrid system that is, is both optimizing the coordination of the thousand people in the multiplayer world with local super up-resing for each user.

And so that's, you know, that's what we published a blog post on.

... sort of?

Yes, yes, yes.

That, um, that equinox we've learned is, is really a big time and actually has some evolutionary and biological connection to spring and coming out of hibernation and all of that.

So, um, no, that was, that was once again probably a few weeks before that journey we made that one night where, um, you were starting to text in an irregular way.

Uh, some of your friends at school said Matt is, is acting, you know, in a kind of a strange way.

We came and brought you home, and that's what kind of kicked off that journey over several years.

Um, you know, incredible work by your mom, Jan, to, um, really just try everything.

Um, many in and outs of the hospital system, learning what a fifty-one fifty is, um, getting familiar with all of the different crazy medications, um, probably twenty-plus types of medications.

Did you, um, when you were going on a ketogenic diet or when you first heard about a ketogenic diet, David, did-- were you kind of quite skeptical of this? Because obviously, it's completely outside the paradigm of how we think about treatment.

What will you be able to do that you cannot economically do now?

We're right in the middle so far.

I think all of our listeners right now who are curious, what are token costs? The exciting place where people are talking about token costs right now is in software development.

And listener could think of a token cost as how much money I'm spending every day on Codex or Cloud Code or Cursor or you name it to help me write my software.

And there's a lot of debate right now on the ratio between the cost of people and the cost of tokens.

Some companies are probably spending for every $100 on their people, a dollar on tokens.

Other companies may be spending $50 in tokens for every $100 of people.

Do you think there's today a mental health crisis? amongst American teenagers, or it's more or less at a normal level?

So what did you decide to do, and critically what not to do, as each competitor emerged?

Yeah, I can remember, um...

So the good news is when Minecraft came out, for example, we had in the pipeline and behind the scenes arguably five to eight really big technical innovations.

Like we were thinking out of the box on this.

We were thinking auto sharding in the cloud.

We were thinking multi-device.

We were thinking super stable APIs.

So how do you balance competing for attention with this societal concern around screen time, in particular for young kids?

Could you just explain the pathway to that?

I want to highlight two separate levels of this.

We have continued to release over the last quarter and will continue functionality that is very unique to Roblox.

Roblox is a game engine, a client, a cloud, and together we're committed to publishing once and having whatever you publish work both super high quality on a gaming PC, but also perform very well online.

on a two gigabyte Android phone.

Those are very different configurations.

We want to support both with the same build as well as when our creators build on Roblox, they go around the world.

But how do you think about the pricing structure, briefly, Dave?

Could you just explain the pathway to that?

Well, I wanna highlight two separate levels of this.

We have continued to release over the last quarter, and will continue, functionality that is very unique to Roblox.

Roblox is a game engine, a client, a cloud, and together we're committed to publishing once and having whatever you publish work both super high quality on a gaming PC, but also perform very well on a two gigabyte Android phone.

Those are very different configurations.

We wanna support both with the same build, as well as when our creators build on Roblox, they go around the world.

The future for us, uh, is a hybrid architecture, and what we wanna do is make it easy for creators to create experiences that are ultimately multiplayer and photorealistic and do it very easily by powering it with AI.

But how, how do you think about the pricing structure, briefly, Dave?

You told me the age, and then you said, "Oh, there's actually an interesting story and a metaphor there." What did you mean by that?

So first off, super interesting story, 'cause arguably one could say I started Roblox when I was two years old, 'cause a lot of this shit really fascinates me.

But there's an interesting story 'cause before Roblox, I had started a company called Knowledge Revolution, physics enter, you know, educational software, simulator, how to learn physics, very early getting into motion and simulation and all of that.

We were in this very unique position with Knowledge Revolution way back in the early days of the Mac in that we had all of these kids, instead of using it to do their physics experiments, they were, like, starting to build stuff.

It was 2D at that time.

Um, it was, um, just in the pre-internet time, and so we could see them all trying to build and share their stuff.

And so we'd see the, "Oh my gosh, there's gonna be a whole new market here," immersive, 3D, multiplayer, playing, working, learning, listening to music, all of that stuff.

This is going to work," what's your next thought?

Just talk us through what changes you make.

Hey, thanks for having me on.

And, you know, when we've talked in the past, we've shared our commitment to setting what we believe is the global gold standard for healthy, safe, age-appropriate digital engagement.

We've been innovating on this for years and years.

We started with age check in January for communication.

What we're rolling out today is the next phase in that implementation of that global gold standard.

That, of course, includes all the other things we've done in the past, including innovating on text filtering and non-sharing of images.

What was the rationale, and, and how do you see it playing out?

Yeah.

And so we do have that business plan slide, and, and what we had always imagined is if this high-fidelity space was backed by physics simulation and reality simulation, you'd be able to do stuff.

You'd be able to build a car, put wheels on it, drive it around.

You'd be able to go to a birthday party and blow out the candles.

You'd be able to chop trees down and make a, a house of it.

So that, that was literally the genesis of Roblox, and here we are, twenty years later, there's so much more to do.

But one vision of AI is how do you superpower the creation of that Holodeck, and how do you get it photorealistic as soon as possible? How do you get ten thousand people in it instead of a hundred? How do you do acoustic simulation that sounds realistic with ten thousand people? So in that sense, AI is super interesting about just trying to get a vision that's been around for twenty years and has arguably been in sci-fi, once again, Snow Crash, Holodeck, forever.

Uh, what are you seeing from the perspective of AI coding there?

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? Um, what do you feel like is your latest and greatest thinking on that with regard to free speech and censorship and- and all that?

Uh, well, I'm glad you asked that.

I- I feel we've been preparing for four or five years on the AI front, and it's- 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, um, and- and sometimes not just one, but multiple human to AI moderation,... was, is something we've been undergoing for quite a while, and it, it's why we, we say we have over 400 models working.

We built them all ourselves.

They run on our own infrastructure.

Um, so we, 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.

How do you think about the quality of the games that are popular on Roblox versus, you know, some of the conventional stuff we older folks might be familiar with?

Why is this so core to the way that Roblox works?

Well, well, I would highlight that, um, a couple things.

First, there's enormous benefits for having people be able to communicate, and, um, we think we see those benefits.

Uh, there's a lot of kids who find their peeps on Roblox.

There's a lot of kids, when they're lonely or isolated, actually, um, I'm, I'm not gonna use it as an excuse or anything, but I get a lot of calls from famous parents who said, "Look, my kid would be dead if it were not for finding a community on a platform like Roblox to stay connected with." And I would also say, we do take it as an enormous responsibility to design for not the sophisticated parent who goes in and says, "Look, I'm gonna turn off, um, who you can chat to," and all of that.

We have to design for all parents and think through that.

But we do believe we have enormously great technology up and down the stack.

Is it fair to say that you think that any platform of Roblox's size with the number of young users Roblox has would be experiencing similar safety challenges?

What do you say to the parents who argued this safety effort is too little too late?

Hey, thank you for having me on.

And I do want to share, ever since we started, we've had safety and civility as our top priority, and we've been innovating constantly.

What we're here sharing today is we're really introducing what we believe will be the new gold standard for safety and civility on the internet.

We're the first major gaming platform and really major social platform to lean into knowing the estimated age of everyone on our platform we're going to use ai to do a facial age check for everyone on roblox who uses communication and i want to highlight that this goes hand in hand with a lot of other things we do on roblox we filter all the text We don't allow image sharing.

We monitor everything for critical harms.

So we continue really to believe we want to innovate and lead into the future of safety on the internet.

So I want to get your response to that and also what you would say to those who might be concerned about workarounds of this age verification feature.

How is this going to be rolling out?

Hey, great to be here.

And what an enormous responsibility with 150 million users every day coming to the platform.

We're rolling out what we believe will be the gold standard for the future of Internet safety.

We're the first really major gaming platform to use AI to estimate the age of everyone on the platform who wants to use chat and communicate online.

We're going to start rolling this out in December, and then it should be all rolled out by January.

Basically, on whatever device you're on, take a quick image.

But how are you going to be internally thinking this has worked, people are satisfied, and they're safe?

In, of the future, will just be kind of defaulting to Roblox? Is that a goal of like if I want to build a game, it's like, "Why, why go through the effort of like trying to build this, build my own kind of like community and player base when I can go to where an existing player base is and have a much higher likelihood of, of success?"

Yeah, I think we don't rest on our laurels, um, obviously, but I do think the gaming market is a bit different than, for example, the video market.

A- and in the video market, whether it's Short, um, UGC, you know, TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, you name it, that's relatively mature technology.

The, the cameras are relatively mature.

Video distribution playback is relatively mature.

But the, the spec I shared with you, 100,000 people in a, you know, multiplayer immersive, uh, world with AI is far from technically figured out.

A- and that kinda goes to our vision that the next future of gaming is much more client-server, cloud-integrated.

Yeah.

And if we flash forward then a bit to December of 2017, why was December so significant?

We were now into a bit of a situation where our son had run away, had flushed all his meds, literally streaming on social media, uh, streaming as he had run away.

Had subsequently caught a bus, had made his way down to San Diego, had lived in, I think, a lifeguard shack in San Diego.

We had some monitoring of him.

I knew he was full-blown manic at that time.

I tried my first try to come down and pluck him off the street with the help of some police and get him into a hospital, and given the laws of our situation, I, I got to San Diego near some of our relatives, called in the cops, but he was pretty convincing.

He said, "Hey, I'm free.

And then could you elaborate on The Future (laughs) as I teed it up?

How do you start to monetize to make up for some of those costs?

Yeah, thanks for noting the amazing quarter we just had.

Both bookings growth was up 70% year-on-year at $1.9 billion.

And as you noted, our daily active users passed 150 million, which is up 70% year-on-year.

In addition to those three games you mentioned, we had seven games on Roblox in the last quarter, passed 10 million daily active users.

and a really healthy content ecosystem.

Five of those seven experiences were created in the last year.

React with your interpretation of what that signals for the market you're trying to grow in.

Silicon Valley guy, tech dude.

Y- e- exactly.

Like, it's just gonna be right there in front of me.

And, um, it was interesting over about a course of six months or a year, it's just like, "Man, I'm just not finding much," and, l- or, "that aligns with what I'm doing and what is out there." And so I, I did have an interesting career moment where instead of going straight, I almost felt, you know, I have to ignore all of that and go on a more meandering, curvy path, which is like, "Yeah, I'm gonna get together with Eric, and we're gonna start coding, and we're gonna hack up this cool thing," that, that, in retrospect, was exactly what we were passionate about.

Like, we were passionate about 3D simulation, interactive environment, and the, the initial spec for Roblox, pure passion project.

New category, 3D simulation, use GC content, all of that.

The, um...

What's your view on TikTok?

I'm wondering, has your thinking about the issue of kids on your platform changed, or has it been consistent since you started it?

I think in retrospect when we think about starting the company for all ages 18 years ago, in retrospect we're very glad we did that.

It was a really hard thing to do.

It, it's, it's much easier to build a gaming platform that's 13 and up, which is where many social media apps are today, and when something's built for 13 and up, it can create a situation where you don't go straight after the real big challenges.

For us when we got started 18 years ago, literally in the first few months of being live we started building our first safety systems, and, and made it a top priority.

So there, there were a time when the four of us who were the Roblox founders were in the room moderating.

Each one of us took a day.

Are you surprised to hear that 16-year-old girls are playing Roblox?

So talk a little bit about how you envision generative AI coming into your creation process and where things stand today.

You know, it's, it's pretty interesting if we go back 20 or 30 years, and so many of the things, um, maybe we would imagine 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, and we'd read them in sci-fi books, some of them have started to come true.

The, you know, the Dick Tracy watch has started to come true, and what we would think of as the web has started to come true.

And when we started the company 20 years ago, we had the notion of this, um, 3D digital platform in the cloud, and if we gave people this 3D platform, we would see interesting stuff.

To zero in on your question, I think the fun answer is we don't even know, and I feel the, the reason we don't even know is there's a nuanced angle to AI which accelerates all of us as humans.

Whether we're an artist or a 3D designer or just someone with an idea, um, we accelerate that.

It, it helps us be a better creator, ar- arguably just like Photoshop helped people who used to paint with oil be better creators.

What would your response be?