We Asked Roblox’s C.E.O About Child Safety. It Got Tense.

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Speaker 3 Casey,

Speaker 3 you were in my dream last night.

Speaker 4 I was. Yes.
What are I doing?

Speaker 3 Now, normally I don't have sort of lucid, vivid dreams, but I've been taking melatonin, which will mess you right up. And last night, I had a dream that starred you in a central role.

Speaker 3 So 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. Sure.

Speaker 3 And for whatever reason, this was like a big national event and like all of the living presidents had like gathered to watch it.

Speaker 4 Were Katy Perry and Lauren Sanchez on the rocket with us?

Speaker 3 No, it was just the two of us. And then at the last minute, I chickened out.
And so you went up on the rocket by yourself. And I was sitting there like with like George W.

Speaker 3 Bush and Barack Obama and Bill Clinton like watching the like sort of live stream of you going up this rocket. And then here comes the sad part.
The rocket exploded.

Speaker 3 Oh no!

Speaker 3 And I kid you not,

Speaker 3 I was sitting there in my dream watching this exploding rocket and like falling into like deep sorrow and grief about your death.

Speaker 3 And the TV news anchor who was like reading your obituary was sort of talking about, you know, how you were like the, you know, founder of Platformer and co-host of Hard Fork.

Speaker 3 And 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.

Speaker 3 And that's when I woke up.

Speaker 3 I'm Kevin Roos. I'm a tech columnist at the New York Times.
I'm Casey Newton from Platformer, and you're listening to Hard Fork.

Speaker 4 This week, Roblox CEO Dave Buzuki on how the company is responding to widespread allegations that it has become unsafe for children and what level of responsibility the gaming platform has to protect them.

Speaker 4 All right, Kevin. Well, 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.

Speaker 4 Before we get into that, though, how much would you say you know about Roblox?

Speaker 3 I know that it is a very popular gaming platform for

Speaker 3 young people, for children.

Speaker 3 know that it is breaking all kinds of records in terms of how many people are using it. And every time I see a number about how many users it has, it makes my head spin a little bit.

Speaker 3 And I think, wow, that seems really big. We should pay attention to it.

Speaker 4 Yeah, you know, and 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.

Speaker 4 The original product launched in February 2006, but its growth really accelerated during the pandemic when millions and millions of kids are stuck at home and they they turn to roadblocks to find things to do.

Speaker 4 That growth has continued since then. They've had a couple of viral hit games recently.

Speaker 4 Just in the past few months, they had one steal a brain rot that broke a record for the largest number of concurrent players at 25.4 million.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 3 And that's just like a huge number of kids. Like I think we should just underline that.
This is becoming kind of a de facto gathering place for young people, especially in this country.

Speaker 4 Yes, today they have more than 150 million daily active users.

Speaker 4 And one thing that makes Roblox really unique, and this factors into the conversation that we're about to have, is that unlike an Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Discord, which required you to be at least 13 to join, anyone of any age can join Roblox for free.

Speaker 4 And so that is why, Kevin, if you are a preteen, there is a strong likelihood you're on Roblox. In fact, just shy of 40% of the platform's users are under 13.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and that brings me to the second thing I know about Roblox, which is that recently they have been in the news a lot for a number of pretty troubling child safety problems that they've been having.

Speaker 3 I've read stories and seen segments on the news about predators who are using Roblox to link up with young children, maybe lure them to another platform where they can ask them for pictures or engage them in sort of manipulative grooming behavior.

Speaker 3 There have been a lot of very upsetting stories about things like that happening on Roblox.

Speaker 4 That's right. Often these same predators, Kevin, are paying children in Robux the currency of the platform to entice them into compromising positions.
It's really, really upsetting.

Speaker 4 Regulators and lawmakers are starting to take notice. So three states have filed lawsuits against Roblox over child safety issues this year: Louisiana, Kentucky, and Texas.

Speaker 4 Florida's attorney general launched an investigation into the company. And right now, there are more than 20 lawsuits accusing Roblox of enabling sexual exploitation filed in federal court this year.

Speaker 4 That was according to a story by your colleague Eli Tan in the New York Times. So, how has Roblox responded? They've rolled out a number of safety features in response.
They have parental controls.

Speaker 4 And this week, they announced their latest feature, which is requiring users to undergo age estimation if they want to chat.

Speaker 4 So if you want to chat with somebody, you're going to have to scan your face. Now, prior to this, though, Kevin, for many, many years, any adult has been able to contact any child on Roblox.

Speaker 4 And that seems like that has been the start of so many of these problems. And it has just raised the question, why has it taken the company this long to get this problem under control?

Speaker 4 So to talk about that change and the company's broader approach to child safety, we invited on Roblox co-founder and ceo dave buzzuki dave has been at the company since the beginning you'll hear him say in this interview he was also one of the original moderators of the platform that is something that 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 yes and i would say the stakes of what happens at roblox are higher than just what happens to the children who use roblox i would say this is a story that has a lot of bigger implications for the rest of the internet.

Speaker 3 Right now, we're at a time where child safety online has become a huge topic for regulators and parents around the world.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 All of this is swirling around Roblox right now. And so I think it's a really important time to talk to its CEO about how they are dealing with these challenges.

Speaker 4 Yeah, 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.

Speaker 4 We also range a bit further afield from child safety, including what he thinks about prediction markets on Roblox.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and just a little bit of context about that. This was something that we were talking about in the hallway before we started the interview.

Speaker 3 Dave said that he is a fan of Polymarket, the prediction markets. And so just know that when he brings that up toward the end of this interview.
interview, that did not come out of nowhere.

Speaker 3 That was sort of an attempt to continue a conversation that we've been having before the mics were on. All right.

Speaker 4 When we come back, we'll be joined by Roblox CEO Dave Buzuki.

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Speaker 4 David Zuki, welcome to Hard Fork.

Speaker 3 It is great to be here. Thank you.

Speaker 4 You have joined us today to talk about this new age gating policy that Roblox is rolling out to protect kids. And I think we should start by just talking about the scope of the problem here.

Speaker 4 What has led you to this point? And how do you think of the problem of predators on Roblox?

Speaker 3 We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but 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?

Speaker 3 at the same time. So we, you know, we've been, I think, in a good way working on this ever since we started.

Speaker 3 And when we were, this was almost 18 or 19 years ago, when we first launched the company, we had just four of us sitting in a room. We were literally the moderators.
Like we would rotate all the time.

Speaker 3 And so fast forward to where we are today, it's just like every week. What is the latest tech at the scale we're at? 150 million daily actives, 11 billion hours a month.

Speaker 3 Like, what is the best way to keep pushing this forward? And as you correctly note, we've just started adding that we're going to be using facial age estimation with AI to complement that.

Speaker 4 Right. So tell us a little bit about how this works.
All users of Roblox now, if they want to communicate with others, they're going to have to kind of submit to a face scan.

Speaker 3 That's correct. And I think long-term face scan isn't the only signal.
Like mathematically, the more signals that are convoluted, the better the accuracy and the better we can get.

Speaker 3 So we already have signals. We have behavioral signals.
We have photo ID upload signals.

Speaker 3 We have user suggested age, but we're complementing that with a facial age estimation signal that literally, you know, in an ephemeral way, use your phone, use your PC,

Speaker 3 scan an image, do a good AI estimation, image isn't stored, and start using that to complement all the other things we do. And we already do a pile of stuff.
We have very, very good text filters.

Speaker 3 We have very, very good, 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.

Speaker 3 I want to learn more about this face scanning technology, but first I'm just struggling to understand exactly how

Speaker 3 many of your users are which ages. Like my impression from the outside as a non-daily active user of Roblox is that a lot of kids who are 9, 10, 11, 12 are on the app.

Speaker 3 What is sort of the most popular age band of active users on Roblox? This is really interesting, and think this goes to what we've been saying for a while in that

Speaker 3 maybe for the last five to ten years people look at Roblox and say well these are kind of these primitive games and everyone on the platform is pretty young.

Speaker 3 We've seen that migrate over the last five years from predominantly under 13 to now, I believe we recently said

Speaker 3 self-reported almost two-thirds over 13. And we can see those numbers growing and growing.
Like fastest growing segments on Roblox are 21 and up right now.

Speaker 3 Or at least people who say they're 21 and up. Yeah.
Now, I think those numbers have a fair amount of current efficacy.

Speaker 3 We're obviously balancing those with the age estimation because we want a tighter estimation.

Speaker 3 But just looking at the size of the cohorts and the growth rates, there's a fair amount of accuracy to that.

Speaker 4 You know, when the EU rolled out some age assurance technology earlier this year, we saw a lot of kids that just took a photo of a video game character and used that to pass the age checks.

Speaker 4 How confident are you that your systems can avoid that kind of thing?

Speaker 3 I think 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.

Speaker 3 This isn't just a one-time thing.

Speaker 3 Roblox experiences are you're holding a phone. In many cases, we can use signals from your phone or the camera to animate your face, for example.
So this isn't kind of a one-stop shop thing.

Speaker 3 This is possibly checking as we go. If we see weird signals, do another age check as we go.
So I'm pretty optimistic, kind of the more naive, like take a picture of that.

Speaker 3 We're going to go way beyond that. And it's going to get harder and harder to

Speaker 3 fingerprint in that way.

Speaker 4 So after you roll out these changes, you're going to sort of sort users into bands.

Speaker 4 And depending on, you know, if you're like 13, you know, you're only going to be able to talk to people within a few years of your your age.

Speaker 4 For most of Roblox's history, though, that has not been the case. Any anonymous adult could talk to any anonymous miner.
Why was that the case?

Speaker 3 I think we've always, from day one, really focused very heavily on quality of text filtering. And if anything, we've had very, very historically restrictive text filtering over time.

Speaker 3 One of the biggest complaints on Roblox and arguably trading in a good way safety for growth has been complaints of communication on the platform. Like there's a lot of Roblox memes and themes.

Speaker 3 If you go back and dig into them, everyone's just saying hashtag, hashtag, hashtag. And there's been a lot of because that's how you blur out words that aren't

Speaker 3 correct. So there's a lot of historical memes about historical hashtag, hashtag, hashtag.
With AI, these filters have gotten better and better.

Speaker 3 The state of where we are now is primarily getting into the blocking of adversarial attempts to broach the filter and adversarial attempts to try to share PII, which we're getting better and better at as well.

Speaker 3 On the age estimation, it's just, I would say, recently come of age to the point where we would complement it.

Speaker 3 But I would say our strategy is always complement with whatever technology is out there to put that together. Yeah.

Speaker 4 I mean, 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.

Speaker 4 Like, you know, you read the allegations and it's, you know, people kind of, you know, change a few keywords, a few letters here. They're able to get what they need.

Speaker 4 So I'm curious, like, what's made you so confident about that?

Speaker 3 I don't want to comment on it. We do see the chat logs of those and we can see interesting and many times

Speaker 3 ways of people trying to,

Speaker 3 I'd say.

Speaker 3 Many times people who are fairly sophisticated, and I'm not going to say all of them, many times kids who are over 13, who actually in any other app are not running in a filtered situation, unfortunately, figuring out how to jump to some other platform where they can communicate unfiltered, where they can share images, all of it.

Speaker 3 It's one of the primary things we're doing is trying to keep people on our platform. It's an interesting industry situation.
I would say we're not waiting for the rest of the industry.

Speaker 3 We're like, we're always trying to stay ahead of it. We, on the California Age Appropriate Design Code, for example, we're like, we're already doing all of that stuff.

Speaker 3 And the same thing with age estimation. There's, we're not doing this because of any laws that are coming.
We think it's the right thing to do. Yeah.

Speaker 4 I mean, you mentioned sort of kids leaving the platform, and it does become clear in this lawsuits that Roblox is kind of, you know, where predators go to find kids, but then they do try to kill them.

Speaker 3 I would say in the lawsuit or the press,

Speaker 3 yes, I would. categorically reject the actual description of what you're saying.
But yes, what you might read in the news would portray it that way.

Speaker 4 You don't think you have a problem with predators on the platform?

Speaker 3 I think we're doing an incredible job at innovating relative to the number of people on our platform and the hours in really leaning into the future of how this is going to work.

Speaker 4 So let me ask the question about the other platforms, though, because I mean, I agree with you that this is not a story about one company.

Speaker 4 Like what we see is predators will come to a place like Roblox, then they try to get a child somewhere else. Like Discord is a platform that kind of comes up a lot.

Speaker 4 It seems to me like you could probably stop a lot of abuse if you prevented those platform shifts from happening. So, like, what can you do in that regard?

Speaker 4 Like, you know, in my mind, if you see somebody chatting, like, hey, like, what's your Discord username? You know, and it's an adult talking to a minor, that seems like it's a red flag.

Speaker 4 Maybe you're doing some of that kind of stuff.

Speaker 3 I would say that is a very simple red flag. Yeah.
Like, that sounds like text filter, many prior generations. So

Speaker 3 I would say the techniques are much more sophisticated than that. We're constantly getting better than that.
And sometimes it's adversarial. Like we're getting into,

Speaker 3 you know, if we cryptographically, we're going to try to have an exchange of how to share your snap handle or whatever handle. We see some of that starting, like things we'll have to.

Speaker 3 essentially prevent in the future.

Speaker 4 I don't understand. Like, what do you mean, like a cryptographic exchange?

Speaker 3 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 actually start getting really creative, like use the third letter of every fifth word to spell out the airport.

Speaker 3 And those are the kind of things we get into right now.

Speaker 3 I have sort of a basic question, and forgive me if this betrays my naivete about Roblox and how the platform works, but like why have a sort of open-ended text communication feature at all on a game that is very popular with young people?

Speaker 3 Like I have a son. He's too young to play Roblox or any other game.

Speaker 3 But I can imagine imagine saying as a parent of a slightly older child, like, I just don't want my kid playing games that allow them to chat with other people in this way.

Speaker 3 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? Well, I would highlight that a couple things first.

Speaker 3 There's enormous benefits for having people be able to communicate. And

Speaker 3 we think we see those benefits. There's a lot of kids who find their peeps on Roblox.
There's a a lot of kids when they're lonely or isolated. Actually,

Speaker 3 I'm not going to 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.

Speaker 3 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 going to turn off who you can chat to and all of that.

Speaker 3 We have to design for all parents and think through that.

Speaker 3 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.
You know, if you go out there in the gaming space, I think it is.

Speaker 3 very common to support communication. I'm not going to list any other games.

Speaker 3 And typically, we are way beyond in, I'd say, our innovation level, responsibility level on both the filtering, on the image sharing, on all of these things.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, I don't, I wouldn't categorize any of that. I would say we're at a scale that is somewhat mind-boggling.
So I'm not going to run any

Speaker 3 you know, excuse numbers of Roblox relative to any other platforms. But I would say at a scale of 11 billion hours is very different than a scale of 10 million hours.

Speaker 3 It's a thousand times that size of it. 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.

Speaker 3 And relative to an individual game, the scale is enormous. We have experiences on our platform right now, which have 25 million people playing at the same time.

Speaker 3 And traditionally in the gaming market, the record prior to that, I think, was 11 or 12 for all of Fortnite. And prior to that, big numbers are considered a million for a single game.

Speaker 3 Like I remember when Minecraft hit a million users. So think about that.

Speaker 3 A whole platform at some point in time like Minecraft hitting 1 million users, a single game on Roblox hitting 25 million users.

Speaker 4 But you guys want that scale, right? You court it. You send push notifications.
You give people daily login rewards. Like you want the millions and the millions to show up.

Speaker 3 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 the scale already exists.

Speaker 3 Like the gaming space in a way is $190 billion.

Speaker 3 So we now have about three or four percent of that, I guess 3%

Speaker 3 coming through Roblox. So I would say we

Speaker 3 like the scale. It creates an opportunity for individual game creators who might be making their game by themselves without part of systems like that.

Speaker 3 to make it as part of a more overall overall system.

Speaker 4 Here's the dynamic that I think people find frustrating. We have many large tech platforms right now.
They seek this enormous scale. They reach previously unseen heights.

Speaker 4 And then they notice they have a problem. And they go in and they try to solve it to some degree.
And then they keep growing further. And then there's another problem.

Speaker 4 And I think to some degree, that dynamic is probably inevitable.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 And I think they're looking to people like you you to see around these corners and to not wait till 20 years in existence to say, maybe we should like sort these people into age bands before they start communicating with each other.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I would push back on that a bit. And I can hear what you're saying.

Speaker 3 But I would actually say for people inside of our company, the way we think about it and the way we do look ahead of it, we're constantly looking ahead. And we're not, you know,

Speaker 3 it goes back to the very first thing we did, probably a month into the company. So a month into the company, fun little story, there's about 200

Speaker 3 people on Roblox. And what should we do? Should we keep growing it? Or should we go build a safety system? And so

Speaker 3 200 people in. Let's stop everything.
Let's go build a safety system and let's let the four of us go and become moderators.

Speaker 3 So behind the scenes, I do agree with you, enormous responsibility, enormously important to preempt this.

Speaker 3 It's why a lot of the architectural and decisions we've been making have been made, but we're going to keep doing them, right?

Speaker 3 And you could imagine Roblox at 20x the scale, having 50% of the gaming market space all in a single place. Like we'll keep innovating on top of that.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 did they have wrong?

Speaker 3 So, fun. Let's keep going down this.
And

Speaker 3 so, first off, Hindenburg is no longer in existence, correct? So, you should report on that.

Speaker 3 They went out of business for some reason.

Speaker 3 The other thing is: have you researched that information?

Speaker 3 Because you're asking me about this. I'm curious if you've done your own research.

Speaker 3 I have done some research about it. And what's your take on that? Well, I'm asking you.

Speaker 3 So it's really interesting because

Speaker 3 I think we're diving into a situation.

Speaker 3 where we're getting better, better, better. But would you ask the same situation of someone who converted from maybe hyper manual labor making cars by hand to an assembly line?

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 is it better to have AI systems reviewing any every image, every piece of text, all of that, or to keep doing that manually? So I think that was a misnomer.

Speaker 3 And I think if you interview anyone in our safety team or safety systems, that would be just part of making our systems better.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 and say you and i we were a system what is the best way to review every single image going into roblox at higher and higher quality and say we figured out the the best way to do that is to do it with better and better ai models would you pick that

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 good. So you're aligning with what we did.
High five.

Speaker 3 But I've also been covering social networks.

Speaker 3 Thank you for supporting. Thank you for supporting our Roblox decision matrix.

Speaker 3 I also remember 15 years ago when I'm glad you guys are aligned with the way we won Roblox. Right.
I also remember 15 years ago when Ms. Zuckerberg.

Speaker 3 Is this a stealth

Speaker 3 interview where actually you love everything we're doing and you're here to stealthily support it?

Speaker 4 We were told you wanted to come in and talk about your new age game technology. So we thought we'd be able to do it.

Speaker 3 Let me just finish this.

Speaker 3 I totally buy what you're saying about using the best technology on the market to keep you.

Speaker 3 And 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.

Speaker 3 But I love your podcast. I thought I came here to talk about everything.
Got it. Oh, yeah.
We're going to talk about steal a brain rot too. That's part of my plan here, too.

Speaker 3 But just to finish the thought, like I, I, you know, 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.

Speaker 3 It's going to take down everything that's scammy or false. And we won't need these people anymore.
And investors loved that.

Speaker 3 And then they tried to do that and they found that actually, oh, the systems weren't that reliable yet. And maybe they were taking down too much content or maybe they were missing stuff that was bad.

Speaker 3 I mean, look at all these social networking companies, like go to 2016, for example, which is

Speaker 3 a reliance on automation and whatever.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So I think we saw in 2016, those algorithms got a little kind of into an optimization loop on, you know,

Speaker 3 weird things as well. So I think, anyways, yeah, I love your questions.
I'm glad you guys are supporting how we're running Roblox on our AI technology.

Speaker 3 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. The scale we're at is absolutely mind-boggling right now.

Speaker 3 Like absolutely mind-boggling. And every system, image review, text review, all of that, constantly getting better and better.
So.

Speaker 4 I mean, look, I can tell you're getting a little bit frustrated here.

Speaker 3 I'm actually not frustrated. I just, I'm 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.

Speaker 3 I'm just kind of figuring out how much fun time I have with you guys and how much fun time we have versus kind of this super focus. Got it.
But I'm happy to talk about whatever you guys want.

Speaker 4 Well, let me just maybe just try one last thing here. Because this is what I really want to understand.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Okay. So I feel like we're kind of on the same page there.

Speaker 4 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 it's like the best thing that happens during your tenure is that nothing happens, right?

Speaker 3 Nothing explodes.

Speaker 3 I want to push back on that.

Speaker 3 And the reason I want to push back on that is that implies kind of a looking over your shoulder, defensive, oh shit posture. That's actually not the optimal posture to build an amazing company.

Speaker 3 The optimal posture to build an amazing company is, oh my gosh, we are uniquely responsible for a lot of people 12 and under.

Speaker 3 There's so much constant learning, constant innovation that if we can do this right,

Speaker 3 like the future is really continues to be big and bright.

Speaker 3 And I feel we're uniquely in an opportunity to do excellent work in this six through 12 zone where many, many other platforms, you know, bounce off of it because they just can't do it.

Speaker 3 And they're not, they're just not doing it right. So that is not how we run the company.
We view it as a high responsibility situation, but an incredible opportunity if we can do it right.

Speaker 4 So then my question is, how do you measure success?

Speaker 4 Like, how do you as the CEO, as you, you know, look at everything everything you're doing, feel like we're applying the right number of resources and they have the right error rates and we're at a place where I'm comfortable telling parents, bring your kids to Roblox.

Speaker 3 We see all of those metrics internally all the time. They're not publicly shared.

Speaker 3 We're watching filter rates. We're watching this rate.
We're watching all of that rate. Those metrics

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 if a parent is the ultimate arbiter of responsibility, and if a parent out there

Speaker 3 for any reason is not comfortable their kid going to the park, not comfortable their kid playing with a certain toy, not comfortable being on Roblox. Who am I to say, right? And so

Speaker 3 I do leave that to the parents' responsibility.

Speaker 3 I just

Speaker 3 operate as an example. Like what would I do with my own kids?

Speaker 3 When we come back, more of our interview with Roblox CEO Dave Buzuki.

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Speaker 9 As a small business owner, you don't have the luxury of clocking out early. Your business is on your mind 24-7.
So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do.

Speaker 9 That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in.

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Speaker 9 Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com/slash hard fork.
That's linkedin.com/slash hard fork to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

Speaker 3 Do you think that screen time for children is getting a bad rap? I mean, this is a constant thread of conversation among the parents.

Speaker 3 I know everyone's constantly worrying about, oh, am I giving my kid too much screen time? Are they doing, you know, enough offline activities with their friends?

Speaker 3 Are they getting sucked into these like addictive online experiences or these AI companions? What is your view on screen time for children?

Speaker 3 So when my

Speaker 3 son

Speaker 3 was really young, we had pretty radical screen time limits. And you can imagine as your parent, you have your second, third, and fourth kid, you loosen up on that.

Speaker 3 I'm actually kind of supportive of it in a way. And

Speaker 3 I do think there's a bunch of contributing factors, like what is the ratio of

Speaker 3 blue light to non-blue light?

Speaker 3 How much of the screen time is solo consumption versus group consumption what time of the day is the screen time so i would say 2 a.m heavy blue light solo consumption short form video that's arguably a different type of screen time than you know noon with your friends for a while playing hide and go seek but i i do think this is something worth thinking about.

Speaker 4 Well, 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 is exciting for you at the moment.

Speaker 3 Oh, wow. I thought we were going to talk about polymarket and like dropping like things into Roblox like earnings calls.

Speaker 4 Wait, where are you on polymarket?

Speaker 3 So I assume you are both big fans.

Speaker 4 We've talked a lot about prediction markets on the show.

Speaker 3 Yep. Yep.

Speaker 3 So I had to really, I don't know if you had the experience

Speaker 3 independent of political party or anything, just a real-time science experiment.

Speaker 3 On election night, I had four screens, like journalists of all journalists, and like, how do I quickly go from journalist to journalist? And then with my family, we were watching Polymarket as well.

Speaker 3 And we were comparing Polymarket to the comments of all the journalists. And I do think Polymarket was coming through like 30 to 45 minutes ahead of them.

Speaker 3 And like, it was an interesting thought experiment to see, like, okay, we're at 86% here, whether you like or dislike the way it was going. And then see various journalists like

Speaker 3 say different things.

Speaker 4 Yeah. So you think this is becoming a really interesting signal to understanding what's happening in the world right now.

Speaker 3 I think mathematically,

Speaker 3 there's the notion that prediction markets, if they're liquid and transparent, capture in a way all of the world's information and every signal, you know, and

Speaker 3 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, like that's going to nudge the thing and make the information more perfect.

Speaker 3 So I'm a huge fan of that. Would you ever put a prediction market inside Roblox? Like let kids bet with their Robux and

Speaker 3 say, I bet he's going to steal a tung tung tung sahur.

Speaker 4 Or I bet he's not going to dress to impress.

Speaker 3 I think we would have to do that.

Speaker 3 Once again, I'll share some of the complexity. Every single country in the world has different legislation around loot boxes and kid gambling.

Speaker 3 And so we would have to be, it sounds very fun and obvious. Like, I love this.
Oh, to be clear, I think this is a horrible idea.

Speaker 3 I was just interested if 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.

Speaker 3 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 like trying to get kids money or anything like that. I would be a big fan of it.

Speaker 4 Interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Start them young. That's what I always say when it comes to gambling.
When I was in Never Too Young.

Speaker 4 When I was in elementary school, we did do a straw poll on who would win the 1988 presidential election. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. So some of these old ideas come back eventually.

Speaker 3 And we bet on pause.

Speaker 3 But the straw poll was not a prediction market. Right.
And if you gave every kid 10 cents of lunch money

Speaker 3 and who had like 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 fifth grade classroom.

Speaker 4 Interesting to think about.

Speaker 3 Okay. We're out of time, but Dave, can I just make one selfish selfish request of you? Yes.
So my kid right now is about three and a half years old.

Speaker 3 Presumably sometime, maybe four or five, six years from now, he's going to ask me, can I play Roblox?

Speaker 4 It's going to be about a year from now.

Speaker 3 Probably a year from now.

Speaker 3 Will you fix the problems with safety on your platform by the time that my kid is old enough to ask me that question? I'm going to go more out of the box in that.

Speaker 3 Roblox is an amazing platform right now for your kid and I'm happy to go deep with you possibly non-disclose you show you metrics all of that to do whatever it takes to get you over the hump okay all right there it is there it is thanks bye thank you thank you guys

Speaker 9 As a small business owner, you don't have the luxury of clocking out early. Your business is on your mind 24-7.
So, when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do.

Speaker 9 That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in.

Speaker 9 LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. Post your job.

Speaker 9 LinkedIn's new feature can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote.

Speaker 9 Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates.

Speaker 9 And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today.
Find your next great hire on LinkedIn.

Speaker 9 Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash hard fork. That's linkedin.com slash hard fork to post your job for free.
Terms and conditions apply.

Speaker 6 Painters don't limit themselves to just one brush, so why limit yourself to one model when creating with AI? Meet Adobe Firefly, Adobe's all-in-one app app for AI-powered creation.

Speaker 6 Firefly gives you access to industry-leading models from Adobe, Google, OpenAI, Runway, Luma AI, Black Forest Labs, and more.

Speaker 6 Generate an image, turn it into a video, and create custom sounds, all in the Firefly app. Each model brings its own unique strengths, and Firefly puts them all at your fingertips for one price.

Speaker 6 Try it today at adobe.com/slash Firefly.

Speaker 4 Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Winnie Jones. We're edited by Jen Poyan.
Today's show is engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Diane Wong, Rowan Nimasto, Alyssa Moxley, and Dan Powell.

Speaker 4 Video production by Sawyer Roquet, Pat Gunther, Jake Nicol, and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at youtube.com/slash hard fork.

Speaker 4 Special thanks to Paul Schumann, Hui Wing Tam, Dahlia Haddad, and Jeffrey Miranda.

Speaker 3 As always, you can email us at hardfork at nytimes.com.

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