Kevin Roose
You're confident that the technology has gotten good enough that you can use it to do moderation on a platform of Roblox's scale.
Speaker 1
The scale we're at is absolutely mind-boggling.
Kevin Roose
You don't think you have a problem with predators on the platform?
Speaker 1
I think we're doing an incredible job at innovating relative to the number of people on our platform and the hours, while really leaning into the future of how this is going to work.
Kevin Roose
Casey?
Casey Newton
Yeah.
Kevin Roose
You were in my dream last night.
Casey Newton
I was?
Kevin Roose
Yes.
Casey Newton
What did I say in your dream?
Kevin Roose
Normally, I don't have lucid, vivid dreams, but I've been taking melatonin, which will mess you right up. Last night, I had a dream that starred you in a central role. I'm not sure whether it was because we talked about space data centers last week, but for some reason, this dream involved you and me deciding to go in a rocket together into outer space.
Casey Newton
Sure. For whatever reason, this was a big national event, and all of the living presidents had gathered to watch it. Were Katy Perry and Lauren Sanchez on the rocket with us?
Kevin Roose
No, it was just the 2 of us. Then, at the last minute, I chickened out. So you went up on the rocket by yourself, and I was sitting there with George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton, watching the livestream of you going up in this rocket. Then here comes the sad part: The rocket exploded.
Casey Newton
Oh, no.
Kevin Roose
I kid you not, I was sitting there in my dream watching this exploding rocket and falling into deep sorrow and grief about your death. The TV news anchor who was reading your obituary was talking about how you were the founder of Platformer and co-host of Hard Fork. The punchline of this dream, right before I woke up, was that George W. Bush turned to me and said, “Hard Fork? Now, that’s a weird name for a tech podcast.”
Kevin Roose
And that's when I woke up. I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at The New York Times.
Casey Newton
I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.
And this is Hard Fork. This week, Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki on how the company's responding to widespread allegations that it has become unsafe for children and what level of responsibility the gaming platform has to protect them.
All right, Kevin. Now we'd like to turn our attention to a really serious topic, and that is what has been happening on Roblox, the very popular online gaming platform. Before we get into that, though, how much would you say you know about Roblox?
Kevin Roose
I know that it is a very popular gaming platform for young people, for children. I know that it is breaking all kinds of records in terms of how many people are using it. Every time I see a number about how many users it has, it makes my head spin a little bit. I think, “Wow, that seems really big. We should pay attention to it.”
Casey Newton
This is an interesting one because Roblox was around for a long time before it got big. This is a company that was founded 20 years ago. The original product launched in February 2006, but its growth really accelerated during the pandemic, when millions and millions of kids were stuck at home and turned to Roblox to find things to do.
That growth has continued since then. They've had a couple of viral hit games recently. Just in the past few months, they had one, Steel a Brain Rot, that broke a record for the largest number of concurrent players: 25.4 million. They had another hit game called Grow a Garden, and there was one day when 47.3 million people were concurrently playing games on the platform.
That's just a huge number of young people. I think we should underline that. This is becoming a de facto gathering place for young people, especially in this country.
Kevin Roose
Today, they have more than 150 million daily active users. One thing that makes Roblox really unique, and this factors into the conversation we're about to have, is that unlike Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Discord, which require you to be at least 13 to join, anyone of any age can join Roblox for free. If you're a preteen, Kevin, there's a strong likelihood you're on Roblox. In fact, just shy of 40% of the platform's users are under 13.
Casey Newton
That brings me to the second thing I know about Roblox, which is that recently they've been in the news a lot for a number of pretty troubling child-safety problems. I've read stories and seen segments on the news about predators who are using Roblox to link up with young children, perhaps lure them to another platform where they can ask them for pictures or engage them in manipulative grooming behavior. There have been a lot of very upsetting stories about things like that happening on Roblox.
Kevin Roose
Often, these same predators are paying children in Robux, the currency of the platform, to entice them into compromising positions. It's really upsetting, and regulators and lawmakers are starting to take notice.
3 states have filed lawsuits against Roblox over child-safety issues this year: Louisiana, Kentucky, and Texas. Florida's attorney general launched an investigation into the company. Right now, there are more than 20 lawsuits accusing Roblox of enabling sexual exploitation filed in federal court this year. That was according to a story by your colleague Eli Tan in The New York Times.
How has Roblox responded? They've rolled out a number of safety features in response. They have parental controls, and this week they announced their latest feature, which requires users to undergo age estimation if they want to chat. If you want to chat with somebody, you're going to have to scan your face.
Prior to this, though, for many, many years, any adult had been able to contact any child on Roblox. That seems like it has been the start of so many of these problems. It has raised the question: Why has it taken the company this long to get this problem under control?
To talk about that change and the company's broader approach to child safety, we invited Roblox co-founder and CEO Dave Baszucki. Dave has been at the company since the beginning. You'll hear him say in this interview that he was also one of the original moderators of the platform. That's something he did when the company was quite small. Now, of course, his portfolio is a lot bigger, and there is a lot more pressure on him.
Casey Newton
I would say the stakes of what happens at Roblox are higher than just what happens to the children who use Roblox. This is a story that has a lot of bigger implications for the rest of the internet.
Right now, we're at a time when child safety online has become a huge topic for regulators and parents around the world. We've talked about a number of laws and bills that have been introduced to try to protect children, and a number of features, like age verification, that states and companies have been rolling out or mandating to try to get a handle on some of these problems. All of this is swirling around Roblox right now, so I think it's a really important time to talk to its CEO about how they are dealing with these challenges.
Kevin Roose
This wound up being a pretty tense conversation. I think you'll hear that in the interview, but we thought it was important to try to ask these questions of the CEO directly. We also ranged a bit further afield, including what he thinks about prediction markets on Roblox.
Casey Newton
Just a little bit of context about that: This was something we were talking about in the hallway before we started the interview. Dave said that he is a fan of Polymarket, the prediction markets. When he brings that up toward the end of this interview, just know that it did not come out of nowhere. That was an attempt to continue a conversation we'd been having before the mics were on.
All right. When we come back, we'll be joined by Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki.
Dave Baszucki, welcome to Hard Fork.
Speaker 1
It is great to be here. Thank you.
Casey Newton
You have joined us today to talk about this new age-gating policy that Roblox is rolling out to protect kids. I think we should start by talking about the scope of the problem here. What has led you to this point, and how do you think about the problem of predators on Roblox?
Speaker 1
We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but as an opportunity as well. How do we allow young people to build, communicate, and hang out together? How do we build the future of communication at the same time?
We've been, I think, in a good way, working on this ever since we started. When we first launched the company almost 18 or 19 years ago, we had just 4 of us sitting in a room. We were literally the moderators. We would rotate all the time.
Fast-forward to where we are today. Every week, it's: What is the latest technology at the scale we're at? 150 million daily actives, 11 billion hours a month. What is the best way to keep pushing this forward?
As you correctly know, we've just started adding that we're going to be using facial age estimation with AI to complement that.
Casey Newton
Right. Tell us a little bit about how this works. All users of Roblox, if they want to communicate with others, are going to have to submit to a face scan?
Speaker 1
That's correct. I think, long term, a face scan isn't the only signal. Mathematically, the more signals that are combined, the better the accuracy we can get.
We already have signals. We have behavioral signals, photo ID upload signals, and user-suggested age.
But we're complementing that with a facial age-estimation signal that literally, in an ephemeral way, uses your phone or your PC to scan an image and do a good AI estimation. The image isn't stored, and we start using that to complement all the other things we do.
We already do a pile of stuff. We have very, very good text filters. There's no image sharing. We're doing a bunch of monitoring, but adding one more signal to that can really help us make cool decisions.
Kevin Roose
I want to learn more about this face-scanning technology, but first I'm struggling to understand exactly how many of your users are which ages. My impression from the outside, as a non-daily active user of Roblox, is that a lot of kids who are 9, 10, 11, and 12 are on the app. What is the most popular age band of active users on Roblox?
Speaker 1
This is really interesting, and I think this goes to what we've been saying for a while: maybe for the last 5 to 10 years, people have looked at Roblox and said, “These are kind of primitive games, and everyone on the platform is pretty young.”
We've seen that migrate over the last 5 years from predominantly under 13 to now, I believe we recently said, self-reported, almost two-thirds over 13. We can see those numbers growing and growing. The fastest-growing segments on Roblox are 21 and up right now—or at least people who say they're 21 and up.
I think those numbers have a fair amount of current efficacy. We're obviously balancing them with the age estimation because we want a tighter estimation, but just looking at the size of the cohorts and the growth rates, there's a fair amount of accuracy to that.
Kevin Roose
You know, when the EU rolled out some age-assurance technology earlier this year, we saw a lot of kids who just took a photo of a video game character and used that to pass the age checks. How confident are you that your systems can avoid that kind of thing?
Speaker 1
We have a lot of opportunity here in that we already have other signals that are maybe not as reliable, but when combined are very reliable. We also have the opportunity—this isn't just a one-time thing. Roblox experiences are, in many cases, something where you're holding a phone. We can use signals from your phone or the camera to animate your face, for example.
This isn't a one-stop-shop thing. This is possibly checking as we go. If we see weird signals, we do another age check as we go. I'm pretty optimistic. The more naive approach—like taking a picture of that—we're going to go way beyond that, and it's going to get harder and harder to fingerprint in that way.
Kevin Roose
After you roll out these changes, you're going to sort users into bands, and depending on your age—for example, if you're 13—you're only going to be able to talk to people within a few years of your age. For most of Roblox's history, though, that has not been the case, and an anonymous adult could talk to any anonymous minor. Why was that the case?
Speaker 1
I think we've always, from day 1, really focused very heavily on the quality of text filtering. If anything, we've historically had very, very restrictive text filtering over time.
One of the biggest complaints on Roblox—and arguably a trade-off between safety and growth—has been complaints about communication on the platform. There are a lot of Roblox memes and themes if you go back and dig into them. Everyone's just saying, “Hashtag, hashtag, hashtag,” because that's how you blur out words that aren't supposed to be there.
Kevin Roose
So there's a lot of historical memes about hashtag, hashtag, hashtag.
Speaker 1
With AI, these filters have gotten better and better. The state of where we are now is primarily getting into blocking adversarial attempts to approach the filter and adversarial attempts to try to share PII, which we're getting better and better at as well.
On age estimation, it's just recently, I would say, come of age to the point where we would complement it. But our strategy is always to complement whatever technology is out there and put that together.
Kevin Roose
I don't know. When I read these lawsuits and these investigations into the company, it does not seem like predators are having that hard of a time getting around your filters. You read the allegations, and people change a few keywords or a few letters here and there. They're able to get what they need. So I'm curious: What's made you so confident that these are working?
Speaker 1
I don't want to comment on it. We do see the chat logs from those, and we can see interesting ways people are trying to do that—many times, people who are fairly sophisticated. I'm not going to say all of them.
Many times, kids who are over 13, and who in any other app are not operating in a filtered situation, unfortunately figure out how to jump to some other platform where they can communicate unfiltered, where they can share images—all of it. One of the primary things we're doing is trying to keep people on our platform.
It's an interesting industry situation. We're not waiting for the rest of the industry. We're always trying to stay ahead of it. On the California Age-Appropriate Design Code, for example, we're already doing all of that stuff, and the same thing with age estimation. We're not doing this because of any laws that are coming. We think it's the right thing to do.
Kevin Roose
You mentioned kids leaving the platform, and it does become clear in these lawsuits that Roblox is kind of where predators go to find kids.
Speaker 1
I would say, in the lawsuit or the press, yes, I would categorically reject the actual description of what you're saying. But what you might read in the news would portray it that way.
Kevin Roose
You don't think you have a problem with predators on the platform?
Speaker 1
I think we're doing an incredible job at innovating relative to the number of people on our platform and the hours, really leaning into the future of how this is going to work.
Kevin Roose
Let me ask a question about the other platforms, though, because I agree with you that this is not a story about one company. What we see is that predators will come to a place like Roblox, and they try to get a child somewhere else. Discord is a platform that comes up a lot.
It seems to me like you could probably stop a lot of abuse if you prevented those platform shifts from happening. What can you do in that regard? In my mind, if you see somebody chatting, “What's your Discord username?” and it's an adult talking to a minor, that seems like a red flag. Maybe you're doing some of that kind of detection already.
Speaker 1
That is a very simple red flag. That sounds like a text filter from many prior generations. The techniques are much more sophisticated than that. We're constantly getting better than that, and sometimes it's adversarial.
We're getting into situations where people will cryptographically try to exchange how to share their Snap handle or whatever handle. We see some of that starting, and those are things we'll have to essentially prevent in the future.
Kevin Roose
I don't understand. What do you mean by a cryptographic exchange to share a Snap handle?
Speaker 1
Imagine you and I were trying to share the name of an airport somewhere in the world, and we were getting blocked by all of the filters. We might start getting really creative: use the third letter of every fifth word to spell out the airport. Those are the kinds of things we get into right now.
Kevin Roose
I have a basic question, and forgive me if this betrays my naivete about Roblox and how the platform works, but why have an open-ended text-communication feature at all on a game that is very popular with young people?
I have a son. He's too young to play Roblox or any other game, but I can imagine saying, as a parent of a slightly older child, “I just don't want my kid playing games that allow them to chat with other people in this way.” There are lots of games out there that don't have that kind of feature. Why is this so core to the way that Roblox works?
Speaker 1
I would highlight a couple of things. First, there's enormous benefit to having people be able to communicate, and we think we see those benefits. There are a lot of kids who find their peeps on Roblox. There are a lot of kids who, when they're lonely or isolated, actually—I’m not going to use it as an excuse or anything—but I get a lot of calls from famous parents who say, “Look, my kid would be dead if it were not for finding a community on a platform like Roblox to stay connected with.”
I would also say we take it as an enormous responsibility to design not just for the sophisticated parent who goes in and says, “I'm going to turn off 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. We think it's part of building an experience like this. If you go out there in the gaming space, I think it's very common to support communication. I'm not going to list any other games, but typically we are way beyond them in our innovation level and our responsibility level, both on filtering and on image sharing—all of these things.
Kevin Roose
Is it fair to say that you think any platform of Roblox's size, with the number of young users Roblox has, would be experiencing similar safety challenges?
Speaker 1
I wouldn't categorize any of that. I would say we're at a scale that is somewhat mind-boggling. I'm not going to run any excuse numbers for Roblox relative to any other platform, but a scale of 11 billion hours is very different from a scale of 10 million hours. It's a thousand times that size.
And I would say the scale we're at is quite enormous. It's 150 million people every day. It's many more than that every month. And relative to an individual game, the scale's enormous. We have experiences on our platform right now which have 25 million people playing at the same time. Traditionally in the gaming market, the record prior to that, I think, was 11 or 12 for Fortnite. And prior to that, big numbers were considered 1 million for a single game. I remember when Minecraft hit 1 million users.
So think about that: a whole platform at some point in time like Minecraft hitting 1 million users, and a single game on Roblox hitting 25 million users.
Casey Newton
But you guys want that scale, right? You court it. You send push notifications. You get people daily login rewards. It's like you want the millions and millions to show up.
Speaker 1
I think we actually see there being an incredible opportunity. If that scale is going through platforms with good systems, it's actually a big thing. And that scale already exists. The gaming space, in a way, is $190 billion. So we now have about 3 or 4 percent of that—I guess 3 percent coming through Roblox.
I would say we like the scale. It creates an opportunity for individual game creators who might be making their game by themselves, without being part of systems like that, to make it as part of a more overall system.
Kevin Roose
Here's the dynamic that I think people will find frustrating. We have many large tech platforms right now. They seek this enormous scale. They reach previously unseen heights, and then they notice they have a problem. They go in and try to solve it to some degree, and then they keep growing further, and then there's another problem. I think to some degree that dynamic is probably inevitable.
But I think what a lot of people want, what a lot of parents want, is some sense that people have a plan for what is going to happen when the 25 million people show up, right? I think they're looking to people like you to see around these corners and not wait 20 years into existence to say, “Maybe we should sort these people into age bands before they start communicating with each other.”
Speaker 1
Yeah, I would push back on that a bit. I can hear what you're saying, but I would actually say, for people inside our company, the way we think about it and the way we do look ahead of it, we're constantly looking ahead. It goes back to the very first thing we did, probably a month into the company.
So, a month into the company, there's about 200 people on Roblox. What should we do? Should we keep growing it, or should we go build the safety system? So, 200 people in, let's stop everything, let's go build a safety system, and let's let the 4 of us go and become moderators. Behind the scenes, I do agree with you: enormous responsibility, enormously important to preempt this.
It's why a lot of the architectural decisions we've been making have been made. And we're going to keep doing them, right? You could imagine Roblox at 20 times the scale, having 50 percent of the gaming market space all in a single place. We'll keep innovating on top of that.
Casey Newton
Last year, activist fund and short seller Hindenburg Research came out with a report arguing, among other things, that Roblox was, quote, “compromising child safety in order to report growth to investors.” One of the things they pointed to was that there had been a decline in your spending on trust and safety. You have denied that. Why? What do they have wrong?
Speaker 1
So, fun. Let's keep going down this. First off, Hindenburg's no longer in existence, correct? So you should report on that. They went out of business for some reason. The other thing is, have you researched that information?
Casey Newton
Because you're asking me about this, I'm curious if you've done your own research. I have done some research about
Speaker 1
Your take on that? I want to ask you.
So, this is really interesting because I think we're diving into a situation where we're getting better, better, better. But would you ask the same question of someone who converted from maybe hyper-manual labor, making cars by hand, to an assembly line? The assembly line might be infinitely better and, at the same time, not have so many people.
So I think what they're referring to is moving more and more and more to AI. Arguably, is it better to have AI systems reviewing every image, every piece of text, all of that, or to keep doing that manually? I think that was a misnomer. And I think if you interview anyone on our safety team or safety systems, that would just be part of making our systems better.
Casey Newton
So, just so I have the clear response: the argument is that the shift has been from a more manual safety team and system to a more automated review process that may do a better job, even if it costs less to operate, because—
Speaker 1
Yeah, I would actually lean in harder. The shift would be constantly moving to higher-quality, more accurate, and more diligent systems. Can we review more? Can we do more, better? Say you and I were a system: what is the best way to review every single image going into Roblox at higher and higher quality? Say we figured out the best way to do that is to do it with better and better AI models. Would you pick that?
Casey Newton
Yeah. Good.
Speaker 1
So, you're aligning with what we did. High five.
Kevin Roose
But I've also been covering social networks—
Speaker 1
Thank you for supporting the Roblox decision matrix.
Kevin Roose
I also remember 15 years ago, when Mark Zuckerberg was saying—
Speaker 1
You guys are aligned with the way we run Roblox, right?
Kevin Roose
Right. I also remember 15 years ago, when Mark Zuckerberg was saying—
Speaker 1
Is this a stealth interview where you actually love everything we're doing and you're here to stealthily support it?
Kevin Roose
We were told you wanted to come in and talk about your new age-gating technology, so we thought we'd get into it. I totally buy what you're saying about using the best technology on the market to keep people safe.
Speaker 1
I want to highlight: I came here because I love your podcast and came to talk about everything. So, if our PR people said, “Let's talk about age gating for an hour,” I'm up for it. But I love your podcast. I thought I came here to talk about everything. Got it.
Kevin Roose
Oh, yeah, we're going to talk about stealing brain rot, too. That's part of my plan here, too. But just to finish the thought, Casey and I both covered social networks back in the 2010s, when it was very popular for people like Mark Zuckerberg to say, “Oh, we're going to use AI to solve all of our content moderation. It's going to take down everything that's scammy or false, and we won't need these people anymore.”
And investors loved that. Then they tried to do that, and they found that, actually, the systems weren't that reliable yet. Maybe they were taking down too much content, or maybe they were missing stuff that was bad.
Speaker 1
I mean, look at all these social networking companies. Go to 2016, for example, which is a reliance on automation and whatever. We've seen a lot of things where not being on top of what's going on in your company and these algorithms leads to a lot of weird dystopianness as well.
So, I think we saw in 2016 those algorithms got a little into an optimization loop on weird things as well. Anyway, yeah. I love your questions. I'm glad you guys are supporting how we're running Roblox on our AI technology.
Kevin Roose
You're confident that the technology has gotten good enough that you can use it to do moderation at a platform of Roblox's scale?
Speaker 1
The scale we're at is absolutely mind-boggling right now, like absolutely mind-boggling. And every system—image review, text review, all of that—is constantly getting better and better.
I can tell you're getting a little bit frustrated here.
Kevin Roose
I'm actually not frustrated. I'm just so excited to talk. I thought we were going to be talking about fun, funny things in the industry and all of that. So I'm not frustrated. I'm just kind of figuring out how much fun time I have with you guys and how much fun time we have versus this super-focus.
Speaker 1
Got it. But I'm happy to talk about whatever you guys want.
Kevin Roose
Well, let me just maybe try one last thing here, because this is what I really want to understand. It is very difficult to do content moderation at scale. We have learned that from every single company. And I think that platforms provide various benefits to society. I'm on a lot of them every day, okay? So I feel like we're kind of on the same page there.
And I think being a CEO of one of these companies can sort of feel like being the head of the Department of Homeland Security, where the best thing that happens during your tenure is that nothing happens, right? Nothing explodes.
Speaker 1
I want to push back on that. And the reason I want to push back on that is that implies kind of a looking-over-your-shoulder, defensive posture.
That's actually not the optimal posture to build an amazing company. The optimal posture to build an amazing company is, “Oh my gosh, we are uniquely responsible for a lot of people 12 and under.” There's so much constant learning, constant innovation that, if we can do this right, the future really continues to be big and bright.
I feel we're uniquely in an opportunity to do excellent work in this 6-through-12 zone, where many, many other platforms bounce off of it because they just can't do it. And they're just not doing it right.
Kevin Roose
Right.
Speaker 1
So, that's not how we run the company. We view it as a high-responsibility situation, but an incredible opportunity if we can do it right.
Casey Newton
So then my question is: How do you measure success? How do you, as the CEO, look at everything you're doing and feel like we're applying the right number of resources, that they have the right error rates, and that we're at a place where I'm comfortable telling parents, “Bring your kids to Roblox”?
Speaker 1
I see all of those metrics internally all the time. They're not publicly shared. We're watching filter rates, we're watching this rate, we're watching all of that rate. Those metrics constantly get better as we add more and more AI on top of it. As you said, we're constantly running at a higher, higher scale as well.
My kids are on Roblox. We have thousands of people in the company. Their kids are all on Roblox. But I would say—and I've said it on other things—if a parent is the ultimate arbiter of responsibility, and if a parent out there, for any reason, is not comfortable with their kid going to the park, not comfortable with their kid playing with a certain toy, not comfortable with their kid being on Roblox, who am I to say? Right? And so I do leave that to the parents' responsibility. I just operate as an example. What would I do with my own kids?
Casey Newton
When we come back, more of our interview with Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki.
Do you think that screen time for children is getting a bad rap? This is a constant thread of conversation among the parents I know. Everyone's constantly worrying: “Oh, am I giving my kid too much screen time? Are they doing enough offline activities with their friends? Are they getting sucked into these addictive online experiences with these AI companions?” What is your view on screen time for children?
Speaker 1
When my son was really young, we had pretty radical screen-time limits. And you can imagine, as a parent, when you have your second, third, and fourth kid, you loosen up on that. I'm actually kind of supportive of it in a way. And I do think there's a bunch of contributing factors. What is the ratio of blue light to non-blue light? How much of the screen time is solo consumption versus group consumption? What time of the day is the screen time?
I would say 2:00 a.m. heavy blue-light, solo consumption, short-form video—that's arguably a different type of screen time than noon with your friends for a while, playing hide-and-go-seek. But I do think this is something worth thinking about.
Casey Newton
Is there anything that we did not get to today that you want to make sure that we talk about? Any project that you're working on that's exciting for you at the moment?
Speaker 1
Oh, wow. I thought we were going to talk about Polymarket and dropping things into Roblox, like earnings calls.
Kevin Roose
Wait, where are you on Polymarket? So, I assume you're both big fans. We've talked a lot about prediction markets on the show.
Speaker 1
Yep. Yep. I had a real-time science experiment on election night, independent of political party or anything. I had 4 screens with all the journalists—how do I quickly go from journalist to journalist? And with my family, we were watching Polymarket as well, and we were comparing Polymarket to the comments of all the journalists.
I do think Polymarket was coming through 30 to 45 minutes ahead of them. And it was an interesting thought experiment to see, okay, we're at 86% here, whether you like or dislike the way it was going, and then see various journalists say different things.
Kevin Roose
Yeah. So, you think this is becoming a really interesting signal for understanding what's happening in the world right now?
Speaker 1
I think mathematically there's a notion that prediction markets, if they're liquid and transparent, capture, in a way, all of the world's information and every signal. If there is one election counter way out in the corner in some weird county that knows it's going to go this way, if they could go bet $10,000, that's going to nudge the thing and make the information more perfect. So, I'm a huge fan of that.
Casey Newton
Would you ever put a prediction market inside Roblox, like let kids bet with their Robux and say, “I bet he's going to steal that tung tung tung sa hurr”?
Kevin Roose
Or, “I bet he's not going to Dress to Impress.”
Speaker 1
Yeah, we would—I think we would have to do that. Once again, I'll share some of the complexity. Every single country in the world has different legislation around loot boxes and kid gambling, and so we would have to be— It sounds very fun and obvious. I love that—
Casey Newton
To be clear, I think this is a horrible idea.
Speaker 1
I was just interested in whether you were thinking about it. Well, I actually think it's a brilliant idea if it can be done in an educational way that's legal. And so I imagine a—no, no free Robux, no free prizes, just a game called the Dress to Impress Predictor, where it's not trying to get kids' money or anything like that. I would be a big fan of it.
Casey Newton
Interesting. Yeah. Start them young. That's what I always say when it comes to gambling.
Kevin Roose
You're never too young. When I was in elementary school, we did do a straw poll on who would win the 1988 presidential election.
Casey Newton
Oh, yeah?
Kevin Roose
Yeah. So, some of these old ideas come back eventually. And we bet on pods.
Casey Newton
But the straw poll was not a prediction market.
Kevin Roose
Right. And if you gave every kid 10 cents of lunch money—
Casey Newton
Yeah.
Kevin Roose
—and some of them got to buy an extra snack and some lost it, you could get a completely different result than the straw poll you would get in any 5th-grade classroom. Interesting to think about.
Casey Newton
Okay. We're out of time, but Dave, can I just make one selfish request of you? My kid right now is about 3½ years old. Presumably, sometime, maybe 4, 5, 6 years from now, he's going to ask me, “Can I play Roblox?”
Speaker 1
It's going to be about a year from now. Probably a year from now.
Casey Newton
Will you fix the problems with safety on your platform by the time that my kid is old enough to ask me that question?
Speaker 1
I'm going to go more out of the box in that we are—Roblox is an amazing platform right now for your kid. And I'm happy to go deep with you, possibly put you under nondisclosure, show you metrics, all of that, to do whatever it takes to get you over the hump.
Casey Newton
Okay.
Kevin Roose
All right.
Casey Newton
There it is. There it is. Thanks, Dave.
Kevin Roose
Thank you, Dave.