Roblox Co-Founder & CEO David Baszucki: The Future of Everything
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Hey, everybody. Welcome to Literally. Today is a special one. We're going into the world of tech and gaming with one of the geniuses in that world, my good friend, Dave Buzuki, who is the CEO of Roblox. And if you have kids, you know exactly what Roblox is because Roblox has, I want to get the stat right. Well, first of all,

an average of 85.3 million daily users. And the monthly player base includes half of all American children. Let me say it again. Half of all American children under the age of 16 are playing Roblox. And he's also just on the vanguard of everything that our world is about to be in terms of communication, online, AI, everything. Let's get Dave in here.

We are, no, we're on, we're on. Are we using good, like we're using good material right now? I know we are using. Record this. It is, we're recording it. Okay, good. It's all good. There are no beginning, middles and ends, as you know. There are multiple timelines and we're just overlapping. I like that your show just flows. Do you? Good. Yeah, like it's flowing straight from reality into the show. Tell me this, Dave.

What is deja vu? What do you think it is? Because the reason I ask you this is because you and I have had many conversations about the universe and about science fiction. And the notion that there are multiple realities happening potentially at the same time. And I've come to believe because I had a really, really, really, really intense deja vu last night. And is it a good one?

It was, but they're always the same. They're been all, it's always the more, it's never like, I don't know. I'm just making this up. You've moved into a new house and you're excited and you have deja vu about that. Or my question is, did it feel good? Yes. Yeah. It didn't feel bad. It was literally somebody talking about passing the food and this, this plate is over on the kitchen table. And, oh, it was like really been all, it meant nothing. Okay. But it was 100%. I have,

lived this moment before and then i think it's just i'm living it now in a slightly different time frame and it overlapped what do you make of that i'm glad we're starting light rob wow look we got the head we got the brain trust in there i'm glad we're sorry we're just jumping in light well because that's what i love about you is we're just gonna go big right off the bat yeah we can talk great

I mean, you know, we can talk great shit together. Okay, so let's jump into the universe thing. Yeah, let's talk about the universe for a minute. I mean, isn't that the big discussion right now, whether qubits are actually accessing other parallel universes? I tend to, you know, the notion that—

I've asked very smart people about who is going to really create the metaverse and who is going to, when AI is fully assimilated into our practical lives, a lot of people are, not to put undue pressure on you, Dave, but a lot of people are betting on you. That's why I asked you about this. Oh, thank you, Rob. So, yeah, stepping back on your deja vu question. Yes, yes.

So there are a lot of people, there's this thing called the qubits, right? Everyone's trying to build these qubits. And there's one theory that the only way you can imagine these quantum computers really working is the qubits themselves are the same qubits in a bunch of different universes. And that they're all superimposed. And those qubits themselves are a place of super imposition where all these universes line up.

I almost feel it's too big to even imagine. And if you imagine that, we can only stretch our brains so far, right? We can barely imagine how far the sun is or how far the next galaxy is. We can remotely imagine how many stars are in the universe. There are as many stars in our galaxy as if you filled a refrigerator with grains of sand.

Now, for every one of those, there's another galaxy as well. So stretch your mind. There's a lot of stars out there. And so we can barely get our head around that, right? There are definitely more stars than grains of sand on all the beaches in all of the Earth.

And now what you're talking about with deja vu is for our whole universe, it's all happening infinitely for every different thing we can imagine in time. Literally, that happened to you in a different universe. I almost want to say I can't imagine that big. Yeah. Like I can't stretch my brain that big. It hurts. My brain is hurting.

My brain hurts when you talk about those concepts, but somehow when it's deja vu, maybe because it's so personal and you're experiencing it, I can go, I can believe. I mean, it's something. Everybody's at it. I like the idea of believing in some level of deja vu without knowing how it could possibly work. Right. What a fun feeling. Right? How fun. And you want to try to write it. It's like,

You want to ride it, but the minute you kind of really, the more aware you're experiencing it, you're falling out of it. I was going to say the second you try to ride it, does it go away? It goes away. Yeah. That happens to me in my dreams. Do you vivid dream? I vivid dream and I used to lucid dream. Like you have to work at it. Did you train to do it? Back in Stanford, there was a professor named Stephen LaBerge.

And this was in the 80s when lucid dreaming was all the rage. For the audience, lucid dreaming is where you, oh, I'm dreaming.

I can affect the dream. This is really cool. Should I drive a race car? Should I fly? Whatever. So in the 80s in Stanford, there's this big thing about lucid dreaming. They made a device that you would wear. I'm serious. They made a device you would wear at night that flashed red lights everywhere.

When you were REM sleeping. I have one of those. The only one you're REM sleeping. Yes, they make them. I got them one of those as a gift. They make them now. So you have to train for this. What you have to do is when you go around your life. Did you do the training? I didn't. They just gave me the damn thing. Okay, you need to train. You go around your life training.

Whenever you see flashing red lights in our real life, you ask, am I dreaming? And you build up that instinct. So when you see those flashing police sirens, am I dreaming? If you build up that instinct enough, when that light starts flashing in your dream, you'll see red flashing lights in your dream. You'll ask, am I dreaming? I just, I am dreaming.

And then you'll get into your lucid dream where you can control the dream. Wait a second. So I, without doing any training at all, often in my dream go, am I dreaming? Guess you're dreaming. Oh, you're very advanced. You're an advanced student. But I'm already there. Oh, you're already lucid. Okay, but then what? And I know I'm lucid dreaming, but I can't affect the dream.

Yeah. The dream just plays out. And I know I'm dreaming it and I know I'm in it. It's very hard when you're aware of lucid dreaming. It's like what you were saying with deja vu. Yep. To stay in the dream without popping out of the dream. Yes. Yes. You have to maybe almost know in advance what you'd want to do. I've tried that and nothing's happened yet. What do you want to do in your dream, Rob?

Be an actor. I leave it. No, I leave it. Maybe that's the problem. I haven't done that. I haven't been specific because I want it. I don't. Because one thing I know about life is that the reality can be even better than my dreams. Yeah. So I don't want to limit it. But maybe I need to do that. Maybe when you're lucid dreaming, you could just see what happens in the dream, but be aware you're dreaming. I do that now. Oh, that's fun. It's super fun. It doesn't happen all the time, but it happens. I bet it happens.

I'd say it happens, you know, maybe 10 times a year. I think you're an advanced student. Well, do you know what remote viewing is? Technical remote viewing. Project Ultra, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, right. Yes. Did you ever listen to Art Bell? Yes, I did. Yeah, dude, Art Bell. Look, we got a lot of nods in the control room. Art Bell. Oh, my gosh. But remote viewing, I did train in that because I did an episode...

With my sons called the thing called the low files where we investigated stuff and I trained with there's only two surviving people from the original CIA funded remote viewing process. I trained with them and I'll Google I forget the name. Patrick or Colonel something. Something. They were a colonel, right?

I don't know. I don't know if he was actually in the military. I feel like he was, I feel like he was academic. Maybe some background on what technical remote viewing is. So technical remote viewing is, um, you are given, someone goes, I want to see what Beirut, Lebanon, this neighborhood looks like right now because we're looking for hostages, for example. Or it could be, I want to see what, um, Mars looks like right now. Or,

I want to see what London looked like in 1577. It can be literally anything, anywhere, anytime. So someone has that conscious as they decide they want to do that. They then imbue that with a series of numbers. The numbers are meaningless. They're absolutely meaningless. But they write down the numbers. The numbers are then sealed and they're given to the remote viewer. The remote viewer knows nothing. They're merely handed an envelope and told to remote view it, which is basically to, it's a psychic thing. They look at the number.

The way I was taught is you have a pen, a pencil in your hand. And when you look at the number, your hand will move into like a seismograph type. Do you know that I ordered the video educational program for technical remote viewing? No way. Yeah. But I was unable to make it work for me. But I was curious about it. I personally, Rob, don't believe in it. But...

That said, who knows? Well, I can tell you my experience with it. Yeah, did it work for you? 100%. Here's the reason why I'm somewhat not so sure about it. There would have to be some new physical laws in the universe. There would have to be a whole substrate of new physics that we don't understand. I am open to that. Also, if it worked...

I would imagine people would be using it on the stock market or something. Like they would be technically remote viewing inside the Roblox executive staff meeting and getting like a read on what our quarter is going to be like. Well, you know that there... So I know that there is... What's it like? What's it...

When you're stealing corporate secrets, what is that called? Material non-public information. There are people doing that all the time using remote viewing. No. Oh, yeah, because these two people, there are two companies you can hire to do that. No. Yes. Remember up in San Francisco when there was that barge that nobody knew what was going on, and it was, I think, Sergei's barge. Do you remember this? Not exactly. There was a barge-covered

And I want to say it was Google. And nobody knew what it was. And they hired remote viewers to see what. I'm willing to put $100,000 on the line for a technical remote viewing AB scientific test.

Okay, remote viewers. Not with you. With a remote viewer, we'd call in a magician like the amazing Randy or someone like that to evaluate the test. You know who we need to bring in? It's one of my favorite guests, Penn from Penn & Teller. Penn would be a partner. Penn needs to be a partner. Okay, listen. We're going to do $100,000 technical remote viewing test.

I will pay $100,000 to any technical remote viewer who can pass a pen test. Because here's why. For $100,000, we would validate some new physical construct that

that we don't understand. Like, there's a whole new physics here. It's not quarks. It's not atoms. There's then some new connected fiber of the universe, which I would love to find that out. ♪

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For more information, visit kellybluebookskbb.com. Kelly Blue Book is a registered trademark of Kelly Blue Book Company Incorporated. Toyota, let's go places. Wasn't there just headlines in the last four days of that? That there's a guy, they think he's going to win the Nobel this year, where it would restructure everything we know about. Which would be so cool to validate that.

It's just like everyone. Can we own some of it? No, we don't. I want some of that Roblox money. We don't need to. We don't need to own that. Can I? We just want to know about it. Dude, I'm a schmuck fucking podcaster. I want, I want Roblox money. I want to figure out how to like, you know. No, you're, Rob, you're someone who loves their work and just wants to work all the time. It's true. You just love your work. It is true. I'm not going to lie. Thank goodness, right? I know. Are we, we were sitting here. Do you know, do you know actors and actresses who don't love their work? Yeah. Oh my God. I,

I do. What is that like? Well, here's what I really don't understand. Actors and actresses who don't love the, who don't understand that people are going to want to come up to them and talk to them and, and share that they've been moved by what they do or whatever, and that they spend their life in fear of that and avoiding that. And I, I, I just don't get that at all. Cause that's, that's, you're in it to communicate with people. You're in it to, to, um, to be, to share, um,

your human experience with people. You know, your acting may overlap with some Roblox values. Tell me how. Respect the community. We are responsible. Sounds like you feel responsible for the output of your craft. How do you... And one of the great things about Roblox is that it is a place that people can find community and we're living in a world, as you know, where we're getting siloed off more and more and more and that there are actual...

entities out there trying to sow discord 100% online. And I always take the position that we're way more in line with one another than you would ever know by going online or going on TikTok. Online is a weird place, man. It is. I mean, it's a huge responsibility. Respect the community and we are responsible is a huge responsibility.

You know, there's a theory out there that in ancient cultures, you know, there's some unit size, 200, 300, 400. You know, there's some number around that. That's the number of people you naturally know. And arguably in every collection of those two or three or 400, there might just be one or two people that everyone says, look, like, you know, get your head on straight. You can't go that far.

And the society itself would control that and react to it. But when you go online and you have anonymous things, all of a sudden you have that same kind of thing where you need kind of those primitive things as well. So, yeah, Roblox is...

As opposed to previously in history, you saw one person go, oh, this one person's crazy. It's anonymous. But online, it's like, well, this one person, I don't know, there's a hundred behind him? That's right. It's anonymous. So, yeah, I think it goes to why a couple cool things about Roblox. First is much more around connecting. You know, we like to say we used to use, I used to call my friends on the phone and

on a rainy day communication type technology. And a lot of what's happening on Roblox is communication with real friends. There's a lot of people in the world who maybe get a little disconnected in the physical world actually and find their peeps on Roblox. It's interesting that when people think about social media, they put a bunch of things together

In their head, they think about like, well, I'm watching a lot of videos. Or I'm sharing. You can share your cool pictures on some social media, but other people share their pictures as well. And that sometimes creates FOMO and stuff. But on Roblox, it's much more of a communication connection platform. And I would say also this notion of thinking through we have to create a civil society has been with us from day one.

Yeah, you're the perfect company at the perfect time. Do you feel it? Tell me about the live events, how those are working out and what the future is with that. I think there's a couple types of events we've started doing where it's pretty cool because there's so much content on our platform. Some of the events we can do right now bring all of those individual experiences together together.

The future, though, I think, for artists, for example, there's been a little bit of this notion that entertainment used to be live. Music 200 years ago was live music. We had vinyl discs and CD-ROMs, and all of a sudden this huge music industry popped up. And then as we got into streaming,

It's almost like live got good again, right? Yeah. My understanding is that's where a lot of performers need to go to support their career. And so we're back to a lot of live. I do think in the future, we're going to start seeing a hybrid type live performance where there's 50,000 people at the live event and there can be another million at the 3D simulcast event.

of the live event and you can be in the 3D simulcast with your friends and you can be dancing and you can be watching. The performer, I would imagine, is going to see the crowd and maybe some snapshot of the digital people participating in the simulcast at the same time. And so I do think there's an opportunity for actually more live over time. And that's an idea that

that's been around for years. It's a function of we need the computing power to get to the point that we can do that. What's really interesting is how many ideas have been around for so long. Sci-fi writers, all of that. And then we go through the checklist. Star Trek. Tricorder. Tricorder. Communicator. Sensor. GPS. Dick Tracy. Tricorder.

TV screen, the web, digital payments. The metaverse, for sure. Snow Crash, not quite there yet. Getting there. AI, robots, just in the middle. I think AI and robots will be inevitable. And then a couple things faster than like travel, like

faster than light communication. Oh, wait, wait. I like the way you bury the lead. Like in the middle of that, you're like, oh, and by the way, there'll be faster than light. No, I didn't say that. Those are the two that I'm not sure. Oh, not sure. Okay. Those are going into double black diamond. I think robots, AI, all the metaverse, we're going to see all of that. The faster than light travel, who knows? Right. So what is, how long do you think

Before you can wear an Oculus that doesn't give you nausea, weigh 1,000 pounds, break your nose, hurt your head, and go to the Coldplay concert that's happening live in Barcelona. But you're up in your house. I'm down in Santa Barbara, and we're going to meet there.

So we were both there and like, Hey dude, I'm going to meet you over at the Starbucks stand. And then we want, we're in the metaverse and we grab our Starbucks and we catch up and we talk and then we realize, Oh shit, they're playing yellow. So we run back to our seats and we watch that. How long till we can do that? Good. You put a lot of good specs in there, Rob. Like you're like, you sound like a product manager. It was really good. Right. And you mentioned a weight. Yeah.

You mentioned motion sickness. Right. You mentioned fidelity. You mentioned like all the specs, like stealth technologists here. So first, a shout out to all the companies that are trying to push this technology as fast as they can. This is super difficult. And especially registering the inner ear with the eye is very tricky. It's called vestibular confusion, where what you see is

is different than what your ear feels. And when those things don't line up, your brain goes... Crash the plane. Your brain goes vertigo. Yeah, you get vertigo. I'm super sensitive to it. Same. Like, what is up at Universal Studios with these motion rides? Like... Dude. I just cannot tolerate them. Yeah. Like, who designed this?

they don't have the technology. As opposed to Pirates of the Caribbean at

Disney, right? Yeah. You're seeing the real 3D stuff. When you take Pirates of the Caribbean or Caribbean, like it's all lining up. It's real 3D stuff. At Universal Studios, they put you in this little thing and they flip you all around. And what you are seeing is very different than what you're feeling. And it makes me super sick. So this is for AR goggles. This is VR goggles. This is super tricky.

There are a lot of companies now starting to poke around on what's going on in the inner ear and see if they can re-register with your eyes.

And so that'll take care of the motion sickness. I think the device you wear super hard, right? Block out all the eyes, give you full vision, but it's getting better and better and better. Definitely leaps and leaps and leaps and bounce from the first time I've done it. Yeah. I think we may see...

that the product spec that will say we're there is you invite 100 people in to watch a movie. They have two options, a beautiful home theater or a device to put on their head. And

At some point, more than half of those people are going to say, I want to put that device on my head. It's clearer. It's better. I prefer to watch the movie with the device than the home theater. That will be the Turing test, I think, of VR goggles. And when that passes...

Where, you know, you're going to see everyone in a coffee shop, you know, multiple monitors, all of that. So I think companies see that. And I think we're nudging that way for the gaming part. We're going to have to solve the interior part too. Does Roblox, you've been very disciplined about that it's content creators get to

get to make their own stuff. You are the platform, but is there a world where you guys could pivot into you guys getting into that? Like, is there a Roblox Oculus? Is there hardware, hardware, Roblox hardware? I say right now, red alert, no way. Red alerts going off the bazooki red alert. No, like no, we, and because it's so much work just to build the software, um,

And because we want to be partners with every hardware device, iOS, Android, PC, Mac, Meta. You know, we just announced we're going to be on the new Microsoft handheld, one or two more platforms to come. That's already an enormous amount of work for us. So I don't see us getting on hardware anytime soon. Why were kids the early adapters and still your biggest audience?

That goes to the foundation story of the whole company. And actually a pretty interesting career story because before Roblox...

I had started an educational software company. It was about learning physics and simulating physics. And we expanded that company into physics simulation for engineering and education. What does that mean? I saw that. What is a physics simulation? Way back in the early days of the Macintosh, all of the educational software was boring and pre-canned. So it's like,

Ball on rope. Swing the ball on rope. What Roblox was much more like one of those early paint or the prior company was Interactive Physics and

Build whatever you want. Balls, springs, whatever. See what it's going to do. And when we launched that a long time ago, educational product, we saw all these kids trying to build cars and houses. Like, ignore physics. We want to build stuff. Wow. And we don't want to just build graphical stuff. We want to build cars that roll. And we want to build, you know, things that blow up.

and all of that. So that was an initial idea of Roblox is this isn't just a graphical, this is a physically simulated thing. The 3D cars on Roblox, when a wheel falls off, the car will skid along the ground. It's kind of inherently built that way. So the very, you know, I sold that company was acquired. I took a couple years off and

And I had an interesting career deviation because I just thought, okay, we sold the company. I'm going to go get a CEO job somewhere. You know, just plug into that. Yeah, yeah. Just going to be right. Silicon Valley guy, tech dude. Exactly. Like, it's just going to be right there in front of me. And it was interesting over about a course of six months or a year. It's just like...

man, I'm just not finding much that aligns with what I'm doing and what is out there. And so 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 was like, yeah, I'm going to get together with Eric and we're going to start coding and we're going to 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 initial spec for Roblox, pure passion projects, new category, 3D simulation, use GC content, all of that. We had a business plan slide literally 18 years ago that was

New category. You know, like this intersection of all these things. And when we started the company, it was just like, man, it'd be cool if we could have a four-person lifestyle company. Just write code all day long. And like, that'd be really fun. That's where my head was at for several years. And that became an obsession over time. That is...

That's like, I remember interviewing Ringo Starr. He goes, I remember just thinking if I could ever play drums around Liverpool, I'd be super happy. He ended up in the Beatles. Yeah. So there is a little bit of a learning there that if you happen to be really, if you are lucky enough to be reasonably good at something and really interested in it and those things line up,

go that way rather than what I was trying to do, just grab some CEO slot somewhere. Rob, I had one question for you. Yeah. Because I remember we were talking about acting. I want to ask before I ask it is if it's sensitive. Nothing is sensitive. Is James Bond sensitive?

It's sensitive because I'll never get to play him. Is it okay if I were to share? I feel you should have been James Bond. Please. Can you tell the powers that be? Yeah. Like what the, I guess I can't. Here's the thing. They will never let a non-Brit play it. Okay. How's your British accent? I can do that. I can do any, and I go, wait a minute. So there have been plenty of

I mean, it's a British icon and I get it, but plenty of Americans have played British, plenty of British have played American. Why is James Bond the sacrosanct thing that you can't do, but they have been... I mean, look, they could break that, but that was always the rule because I would have loved to be Bond. Yeah, I think you just would have been great. I mean, I've always tried to find what's my...

Develop an American Bond. But Bond is so sick. Is that because they think your accent would never pass muster? I don't think it can be that. I think it's a brand thing. It's so tied into the cultural. It's like the Big Ben clock. Right. And to not have it be a Brit is kind of an affront. I actually get it.

I actually get it in a way, but it bummed. And also, it's just a great excuse I can always fall back on. That's why I didn't get Bond. Here's another Bond question, Rob. If 10 is a movie that seems 100% realistic in real life, like just super continuity, no fake fighting, like no random stuff,

And then one is just fantasy. Yeah. Right? Like just anything happens. Like you can drive a car out of an airplane and it lands on a road and you can drive it. Right. Kind of thing. What do you think is the optimal Bond movie, 1 to 10? Jeez. I love all the Daniel Craig ones. I mean, probably Casino Royale. Where would you put that on a 1 to 10?

On realism? That's right. Well, it's a 10 out of 10 for Bond, but on realism, let's say it's an eight. That's where I'm going with it. Eight feels like the right spot. Yeah. It feels like- Pretty close to real, a little fantasy. Yeah. That's where I'm- What's your take on modern movies that start more like a seven or eight and over time become like a one or a two or a three? Well, let's look at Mission Impossible.

Is it okay to talk about it? I was just talking. I deeply respect Tom Cruise, and at the same time, this series seems like it's drifted a little bit more improbable over time.

Well, you always, the problem is you always have to top yourself. That's, that's the issue. So you hit that eight, right? Which is the sweet spot. That's right. You know, where it's, it's larger than life, but it's, there's plausible deniability, as I always say. That's right. You go, I, clearly that could never happen, but you know, it could happen. And you, you're invested. It doesn't take you out of the movie going experience. Then it's a huge hit. So you can't repeat yourself. You have to figure what's the next step.

and it's very, very hard to continue to build on, and you just begin to lose reality over time. That's right. That's the thing. It's hard. It's super hard. Do you ever see Sicario 1 and 2? Oh, yeah. They're amazing. Do you know if the 3 is going to get done? I haven't heard that. Okay. I hope they can stick with it. Those two feel like 10s to me. Yeah. But also, they're not predicated on... I mean, that's character, drama...

There's, there, it's not predicated on, there's no spectacle involved. No, no, no. It feels like spectacle because they do it so well. But it's the spectacle of reality. That's right. But it's not spectacle for spectacle's sake. That's right. And that's, that's baked in to all those other things. Same. They're hard. I crave that. They don't. Roblox, Roblox Studio. Yeah.

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You know what else we need to do? Yes. We're obsessed with the green lines. You know what I'm obsessed with? Body language. Let's take it higher level. Let's go higher level. So let's talk about, okay, let's talk about. Let's talk about what Rob, I sent you a picture this morning. I actually wasn't thinking about it. You have incredible body language when you take photos. Interesting. You stand up straight.

You don't cross your hands in front of you. You put them at your side like you do a really nice job. No. So let's just roll this back. Right. So really into body language. Yes. There is arguably a bunch of very controversial people out there who one of the things they touch on is this green line theory.

Picking Green Line Theory out of all the other controversy about that and just focusing on its valid validity, I think is very, very interesting. And there's a little bit when you see pictures of nine leaders of the world or G2 Summit or whatever, you will see some of the people standing with their arms by their side. And in Green Line Theory, Tom Cruise,

Always perfect. Arms at his side. But I do think... Look what we got going on here. We have some exhibits on the screen. Oh, yeah. So let's analyze this. Are these yours or where'd you get these? Hey, man, I've prepared for this. Okay, this is good. So let's analyze the couple on the left first, just from an analysis standpoint. Okay.

Both standing up straight, very positive. The gentleman is crossing his hands, though, which I think is taking away from a little bit of his personal power right there. And he's leaning into. Very slight, but there is a slight lean in. And that's a submissive move? It's a little submissive. When you take your pictures, Rob, you are straight up.

Okay. And so it's very faint though. By the taken to the ultimate degree, that move becomes the sorority squat. Oh, really? What's a sorority squat? Oh, you've never done that? So whenever you're, it's a huge group. Let's say you have 10, 12, 30, 40, 50. It's a huge group photo and inevitably people don't know where to be. And some people are happy to go in and squat in the front row.

That's this taken to the nth degree. I'm never doing that. Yeah, you intuitively, I think you intuitively knew all of this prior to the discovery of Green Line Theory. No, I did. I did intuitively. So just like with your lucid dreaming, you had some deep intuitive capability. Now the couple on the right. By the way, that picture obviously taken after one of the most

iconic cultural moments in history. That's after Will slapped Chris Rock in defending her. In the couple on the right, the woman would be seen as the leader of that relationship for

And the man would be seen as leaning in kind of as a supporter of the leader in that case. Don't get any more supportive than slapping the shit out of somebody for badmouthing. You'd also the shoulders of the woman are more squared to the camera where he's angled in. So that's how I would analyze that using green line theory. What else we got here?

So this is... Is that early Justin Timberlake? Once again, if one were to, without passing judgment, use green line analysis of this photo, in this case, some people, when there's a lot of leaning in, they make it a dotted line rather than a solid line. Because that's showing really leaning in, whereas the solid line is straight. Yeah.

Thanks for the research, Rob. This is good. Yeah. We have a couple more, though, I think. Oh, this is super interesting. Travis Kelsey and Tay Tay.

So they're both leaning. What does that mean? Now, once they need that Oculus goggle, cause I'm getting seasick just looking at that. Now this, now Rob, there may be hundreds of pictures out there. That's right. And there is a chance your team hand picked this picture. I don't know if they did. Just to make this more exciting. We're making a professional podcast. I know that if I say Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift. I think if we analyze all of their pictures. Now what about that couple? Solid. Solid.

Straight up. Nice. Straight up. There's no lean. There's no lines. Yeah, you're looking good. Cheryl and I just... I got a slight lean. See, I disagree. I think I'm standing straight up. I disagree with the green line. Who did that green line on you? I don't believe that's a green line. Your team is out of control, Rob. They're out of control. They're making me submissive. Come on. I mean... And I want to just...

There's nothing wrong with being submissive, by the way. And I think in the analysis of this... Now what are we talking about? Okay, my team is out of control. I would say in the analysis of this...

Rob, you and I are so enlightened that we wouldn't pass any judgment on submissive, dominant, anything. None. We are open to all types of lean. All of that is we're more, I would say, educating the theory behind that. Well, I mean, I look at it in terms of like if you're working for the CIA, like what does it say about the relationship you're looking at? That's the only. That's right. That's really what it is. And I'm like. That's right. So here's a young punk.

Um, trying to like literally flex on his dad is like, he's like, Hey, Hey, old man, fucking move out. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm taking over this industry and I'm, and then there's the old man who's like, yo bitch, you want to come look at my fucking Emmys and shit? You want to, you want a piece of this? That's what I get when I look at it. If you were, if you had to wrestle your son, who and when?

I'd murder him just because I'm just— No way. He would wipe you out. You think he would wipe me out? Totally, man. You're losing track of youth power, man. Oh, it is a thing. It's just a youth power. Several years ago, I went on a road bike ride with my son. He just grabbed a bike, and I thought I was in good shape, and I discovered youth power, man.

The explosiveness of him. Yeah. So I just, you know. Yeah, you know what you're like. You know, you may be surprised if you started wrestling with him. Looks are deceiving. Yeah. God damn it. Yeah. So, now you've depressed me. What? You've depressed me now. Why are you worried about whether you can beat your son in wrestling, Rob? I know. I should go to the psychiatrist over that, right? That's not. It's okay. That's okay. It's a passing of the torch. Like, be excited. Yeah.

Your son can finally beat you in wrestling. I'm trying to beat him in golf. Golf is okay. It never ends. Golf is okay, man. It never ends. What else do I want to ask you about? There's so much good stuff. Tell me this. What's the vision next five years?

Roblox is killing it. You guys are just murdering. What's the next five years like? Like, what do you when you come into the office such as there is? I can only come up and visit you in the office. I know I have an open invitation. I just need to take you up on that. It's pretty fun. I bet it's sick. It's pretty creative and a lot of amazing people.

Um, very creative doing all kinds of stuff. So yeah, come and check it out. What, what is the, without revealing trade sequence was I'm just going to remote view anyway. We've shared. I'm going to share it with your competitors for $100,000 by the way. This is a real thing guys. We're doing this.

100,000. Proving A-B test with a magician with pen. So now, if you came to the Roblox office, well, first off, our five-year plan is we've shared it.

It's already out there. So there's no advantage with technical remote viewing. We said that we believe there's going to be technical innovations in the way people interact with games and consume games that will allow them to join instantly, to publish a game on any device, to have games auto-translate, etc.

to have the same game on a low-end Android device in a difficult environment as you would have on a console or a big PC. Right now, those markets are very fragmented. To have AI available in any game, we believe there's still huge technical innovation for the gaming space. And right now, that's $190 billion market. And literally about 2.5% of it is on Roblox.

We think that could be 10%. So the game plan is just get more and more great content on Roblox through technical innovation. We've shared that there's some genres that are just...

doing really well on the platform. Avatar Simulation, Dressed to Impress, now Grow a Garden is going crazy. Have you named them? Have you named those genres? Like, I mean, their first shooter genres? These are all classics, like role-playing games, sports and racing, battle, those types. And so we are analyzing all those genres and

Thinking about what kind of technology is needed to have amazing products in those genres. Thinking about what kind of economics are there. This is very much an innovation play and creating a better ecosystem for creators to create games. And forgive me if this is happening and I don't know about it, but why, if you were, I don't know, pick your movie studio and you had, let's say Mission Impossible. Why...

Why wouldn't you let people create their own Mission Impossible universes? You would. You would.

And people are starting to do that. You know, there's a SpongeBob universe, NFL. There's actually a game called NFL Universe that's doing really well on our platform. There are more and more brands starting to create stuff. There'll be more of that. And the Roblox play is to be the infrastructure for that, to be a place to make a game very effectively and, you know, have it available everywhere.

Who, if anybody is... You guys are like Netflix. There's nobody... I mean, people say they're competitors to Netflix. Nobody's a competitor of Netflix. It's like you guys are that way. You could say Amazon is a competitor. You could say, you know, some Disney paramount to be who... You know, there's other things. But they're...

It's like not even close. The competitor is YouTube for Netflix. Yeah, there's a lot of... But like, what is yours? There's a lot of great platforms out there. What would be the real... Minecraft is still a great platform. Fortnite is still a great platform. There's other experimental things. I think there's also... Everyone is looking at the AI discontinuity right now and saying, is this...

reconfigure the way gaming works when it's powered by AI. So there's that. So there's a... What do you think would be the greatest change that AI could bring to gaming and what's the thing you're worried about? We've shared what we think is the ultimate product spec, just like you shared your headset spec. Right. The ultimate product spec we think would be 100,000 people all together in the same place, photorealistic,

people connecting on their device all around the world. You're in India on your two gigabyte Android phone. I'm here on my TV. Someone else is over there all in a, in the same place. It feels 4k really good. And the environment we're in is,

because you're such a good dream master, because you're good at lucid dreaming, you're sitting there redefining the environment in real time based on whatever you want. And AI is redefining the environment. So there's 100,000 people there at the Taylor Swift concert. And then you're saying,

Turn it into a medieval battle. Okay. And that all happens automatically with 100,000 people. Give everyone a shining armor knight costume. You've created, we've gone full circle. So in the universe where the other people are experiencing it, they're still experiencing the Taylor Swift concert that they were at. You as the dream master could reconfigure the whole thing. And so that's an extremely...

difficult technical specification. Like that is pushing all areas of AI, networking, 3D graphics, everything. It kind of makes it fun, right? Because we have that technical spec to go forward on. What's going to be the...

Do you guys have all the computing power that you need to do the things you want to do or is some of it contingent on... We would take any power we could get for computing power. If your phone could be a thousand times more powerful... You'll take it. We'll take it. But you don't need it.

We are very good at pushing as far as we can with today's technology. Yeah, that's my sense of it. But to have that 100,000 people photorealistic, all connected around the world, there's probably going to have to be a little more compute power over time. What's your view on TikTok? So...

exciting, right? It's officially been banned. It's been extended several times. I would put it in a product category with shorts, with reels, with spotlight, with TikTok. There's three or four of these products that everyone's using all the time. And we have to be very thoughtful here because

There's a lot of scary stuff, addiction, doom scrolling at 3 a.m. But there's also this interesting thing where young people no longer go to the library and look through the card catalog to find stuff that they're interested in or want to learn about. They don't go to the newspaper rack in the library anymore.

automatically what they're curious about gets pushed to them as 15 to second to three minute videos. And so there is both the things to be careful of as well as this actually the new way younger people get information. And if this is a new way that younger people get information, then

We have to be super thoughtful in how we balance legislation and all of those things. Because if we do it wrong, we might

cut off some of the information that young people are actually curious about. And it's information that follows what you're interested in and you get it. And I would say of all of the products, they're all competing on how good they are at personalizing the information. And these products have converged and they're a lot more similar in

TikTok led the way in being a very hyper-responsive algorithm. Just like, some news is going on. You know, we're in LA right now. Probably, if we go on TikTok Shorts, Reels, or Spotlight, we're going to start seeing live footage maybe even before what we're used to on TV. So I think...

I think it's actually a really interesting product category and we have to be very thoughtful about it. And who's lobbying on it? Well, there's got to be so much lobbying going on. I think there's a lot of great people in D.C. thoughtfully trying to protect kids.

And at the same time, there's a lot of people in D.C. thinking about free speech and how do kids get information. And I think we're seeing kind of a nice discussion around how do we try to do both of these at the same time. Do you think that the horses left the barn?

What horse, what barn? Well, there's a lot of barns and a lot of horses. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. But I'm thinking the barn and horse I'm thinking about is TikTok exists. It is what it is. It can definitely be made better because, you know, in China, you know, it's pushing math and it's pushing history and it's pushing a lot of what we would call STEM. That's right. And here it's pushing God only knows what. That's right. And we like it. Yeah. Yeah.

So it has the horse left the barn over a, a, a version of Tik TOK.

That's teaching, that's not so doom-scrolly and doing all the things that we don't like TikTok for. I've seen some of these products. So there are, there's a lot of companies out there trying to build an educational TikTok or a good TikTok. What kid's going to want that? Exactly. This exact same thing happened yesterday.

in the virtual world space 15 years ago. You know, there's a lot of attempts to make Educational Club Penguin and Educational This and the bigger platforms ultimately get educational content on top of them. And yeah, we saw how difficult that was. So,

I think these products are here to stay. I think we'll hopefully see intelligent maybe usage or, you know, intelligent legislation about them. But I also think one could make the argument that today's youth, even though they seem like they have all kinds of issues and whatever, could arguably be more informed in certain ways than youth ever have been before. What is...

What is it about the addiction? And I, as an addict, as somebody who's in... Fellow addict. That's right. I'm on all three, Shorts, Reels, TikTok. They each have figured out a separate life of me. So how is it? So what is the...

What's the stickiness? What is addicting about it? What actually is it? We know it's addicting, but what is it? Is it that you're chasing the next? It's like, I like this. I didn't like that. Oh, it's going to be great if I keep swiping. Yeah, it's a little like one of those experiments, the Skinner box or the whatever, where there's a reward. Yes. And you just keep coming for that reward.

Just that simple. Yeah, whatever it is, dopamine, whatever type reward. So yeah, I very much try to put my phone, like not touch it at night because it's very addictive. But I get a lot of good information as well.

See, I take a lot of shit for... Our mutual good friend Yuri got me on TikTok. He was like, he says, it's going to change. It's going to... Because I was laughing at it. I was like, it's 12-year-old girls doing stupid dances. And now it's where I'm... I got to tell you a fun TikTok. Is it okay to tell you a fun TikTok? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm on TikTok and there's this...

history professor Roy Casagrande. I got to make sure I'm spelling his name right. He lives in Dubai right now. And I'm getting these 15 second, 30 second, just amazing historical out of the box lectures. I started watching his stuff like on YouTube over in Dubai. And there he is. And he's like my idol.

And now we're friends. Amazing. And so I'm friends with some, one of the most genius history professors, I think, in the world. Okay, you're going to give me his info. From TikTok.

But that's what I'm saying. I get that stuff. That's the stuff that I love about it. Yeah. And so I think that's good. And as you allude to, live coverage of breaking events. That's right. Ukraine, you know, if there's civil unrest, whatever it is, you're getting it. It's right there. I'm a big fan. I recommend you try all three or four and get, you know, four Rob Lowe short form video personas going at the same time. Oh, boy. Barely able to do one. Yeah.

Jesus. Dave, this is great. David, you're the... Do people call you Dave too or is it just me? No, they call me Dave and David. Right?

Rob, Robbie. Rob, this is one of the, this is so fun. We need to do more. Cause I feel like there's, there's a lot of material here. Yeah. I have more questions. There's a lot of material. We need to, we need to come. We need to do more. We, we, you have, there's so many, there's so much to go into, but I think this was. Hey Rob, when we do more. Yes. Like this felt pretty real, right? Yeah. Like this felt like a nine five. Yes. Let's always do a nine five show. I, I, well, I always do nine five shows. Yeah.

Like my, my, don't let me drift. Drift. Yeah. You don't drift. Okay. You're like me. You're just, you're interesting on multiple levels. That's what I think. Lucid dreaming, Rob. Oh my gosh. Fucking A dude. And, and we're going to do this. We're going to, we're going to do this. A hundred grand. A hundred grand. I just made that up. I would. Oh, there's a book.

The Light of Other Days, it talks about a new physics where technical remote viewing becomes technically possible.

The light of other days. Yeah, where you can basically pop a little pinhole camera anywhere in the world, even back in time, and check it out. That's what that is. That's what it is. So this is a book about what that would be like. In fairness, when I did all the remote viewing, it was all real time. And by the way, I was great at it and got it. Like, they took my sons and hid them in Santa Barbara. And I remote viewed...

I remote viewed where they were. Now, did I say, oh, they're in the basement of such and such division? No, but, but I did go, I go, they're inside, but they're not outside.

And I'm seeing they're surrounded by concentric circles. And they were standing in an indoor-outdoor plaza. And on the floor of it were two concentric circles. So it's like anything. It's never exactly right, but it's enough right. It's interesting. In the light of other days, they first start real time. And then there's another invention that goes back in time.

Just like what you did. All right. All right. I'm expecting a lot of lowdown lines on this one. People come, come at me. This is great. Thanks brother. Thank you, Rob. Okay. I could have talked today for another hour or another two hours. Um, it's fun when it's not just stupid actors in here, I think I'm just saying, um, so we'll do more. Thanks for, for listening. We'll see you next week. Right, right here on literally.

You've been listening to Literally with Rob Lowe, produced by me, Sean Doherty, with help from associate producer Sarah Begar and research by Alyssa Grau. Engineering and mixing by Joanna Samuel. Our executive producers are Rob Lowe for Low Profile, Nick Liao, Adam Sachs, and Jeff Ross for Team Coco, and Colin Anderson for Stitcher. Booking by Deirdre Dodd. Music by Devin Bryant.

Special thanks to Hidden City Studios. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time on Literally.

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