July 9, 2025 • 31 mins
David Baszucki is the co-founder and CEO of Roblox, the gaming platform that’s become a digital playground for millions of kids around the world. Baszucki sits down with Oz to talk about how Roblox became one of the most beloved tech platforms for the younger generations, and why he believes gaming is still in its “prehistoric era.” They also dive into one of the platform’s biggest challenges—safety—and what Roblox is doing to protect its users.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:13):
Welcome to tech stuff. This is the story. And I
want to start today's episode with a story that my
friend told me about a big family drama over the holidays.
You see, his daughter got locked out of her Roadblocks
account and it threatened to derail the whole family's Christmas.
This level of emotional attachment to a tech platform, it
(00:36):
got me pretty fascinated. Why does Roadblocks mean so much
to my friend's daughter and many many others like her.
Roadblocks has become one of the most popular gaming platforms
in the world. It has over ninety five million users,
and players can also create their own games. The majority
of users are under sixteen, and if you have kids
(00:57):
in your life, there's a very good chance that they
use Roblocks and that they're fanatical about it. Today we're
talking to the man behind it all, David Bozuki, the
co founder and CEO of Roadblocks, who recently said that
gaming is still in its quote prehistoric era. If you
care about how technology is driving culture and how culture
(01:19):
is driving technology, you simply have to understand Roadblocks because
it's this space where kids can play make believe but
also explore real world situations. Virtually, just this month, users
engaged in political activism on the platform by staging protests
when some players created avatars of ice agents, others took
(01:41):
to the suburban streets of one Roadblocks universe to protest.
And then there are scenarios playing out on the platform
that are all too real. As Bloomberg put it, quote,
the Internet's biggest recreation zone for kids is fighting to
keep predators away. So we'll also talk about what Roadblocks
is doing to keep its huge user base of children
(02:02):
safe and to address some criticisms that it should be
doing more. David BAZOOKI, welcome to take stuff.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Hey, thank you so much. It's great to be on
the show with you.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Thank you for being here. If you had to explain
Roadblocks to someone who's never used it before, where do
you begin.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
We've used so many terminologies of how we've talked about
Roadblocks in the past, all the way from in the
early days it was you make the game. We talked
about an imagination platform. We've talked about a human co
experience platform. But in reality it's an amazingly large, mostly
gaming platform. Today almost one hundred million daily active users
(02:43):
are on the site. Roadblocks doesn't make any of the
games on our platform, and over time, the developers on
the platform have gone from hobbyists to really entrepreneurs, some
of whom are running studios making over fifty million dollars
a year. So it is a user generated gaming platform
(03:05):
or a human co experience platform.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
One of the things that's very interesting is we've seen
this kind of phenomenon of the gamification of everything, right,
I mean, do you have an operating definition of what
a game is?
Speaker 2 (03:17):
When you say the gamification of everything? It's fun to
think that we've actually gamified the creation of the games
on Roadblocks, and in a sense, being a Roadblocks creator
is an amazingly interesting game. A lot of our creators
grew up on Roadblocks. They played Roadblocks, and when they
(03:38):
were young they got interested in computer science or production
or art or graphics or writing, and before you know it,
many of the top one hundred creators on Roadblocks grew
up on the platform and are now CEOs of amazingly
large companies. There's also a lot of gamification and then
(04:00):
a lot of other things we see in our pop culture. So,
for example, when something gets interesting in pop culture, like
whether it's squid game or something else, a lot of
people want to interact with that content, not just by
consuming it, but by doing it and jumping into it.
And so gamification could be thought of as taking a
(04:24):
topic or subject that's interesting and allowing people to jump
in and experience the adrenaline rush or the boredom or
whatever other part of that content, whether it's you know,
Stranger Things or the NFL universe or being part of
a SpongeBob universe, you know, experience that rather than consume
it linearly.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
I mean, it's funny how games have evolved, right, Like
first games for kids, I mean computer games for kids,
and then computer games were considered to be like drivers
of violence, and then just for geeks. And now if
you you know, exist in our culture. You see, you
know Minecraft, the biggest movie of the year. Well you
see that Muga, Robbie's follow up project to Bobby is
(05:07):
going to be a movie based on the sims, Like,
can you talk about it? Kind of your role as
a participant observer in how games have come to dominate
entertainment culture and beyond.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
I believe early on games were highly limited by the technology,
and even the very first game that I might have played,
which was Pong, in a sense was a reality simulation.
It was a very crude, crude simulation. I didn't have
an avatar, it wasn't in two D. I had a
(05:40):
white you know, line on the screen. But I still
playing Ping pong right in a way, and a lot
of I believe what's interesting in games is literally a
fantasy reality simulation that can be very connected with other people,
can be very entertaining. You know, one of the top
experiences on our platform right now is grow a Garden.
(06:03):
This exploded on our platform last summer. Dressed to Impress
exploded on the platform. What's really been fun for me
is there not Neither one of those is a traditional game.
They're definitely reality simulators. Several members of my family are
very interested in farming, and me as a dad, gets
(06:26):
to say the top experience right now in Roadblocks is
about growing stuff in a garden.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Talk a bit about that game, you know, how did
it go viral and what does it say about the
platform you've built?
Speaker 2 (06:38):
Yeah, so a couple things about how that thing went viral.
Which is really kind of interesting. Really is we've worked
really hard over the last I'd say year and a
half to make our discovery system very fair, very organic
and a just discovery system that if someone creates something
(07:03):
that is retaining well causing viral growth, people are spending
a lot of time in it, that experience will get
more exposure and grow. Garden is a great example that
creator created this idea of something that was new and interesting.
It's asynchronous. Things happen when you're not playing. You can
(07:25):
come back, which is really cool. They launched it with
in the same way we launched Roadblocks with a little
bit of paid traffic to get some initial users playing,
but it got picked up by our discovery algorithms and
over time went viral to the point where a couple
weeks ago, I believe it hit eleven million concurrent players,
(07:47):
which is close to the all time concurrent records for
games anywhere around the world. So great idea, new idea.
There's a lot of social media pick up influencers are
playing and sharing on shorts or reels or TikTok, so
you know, it's what we're hoping the environment could support.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
I've heard so many parents talking about how that kids
are just obsessed with Roadblocks. What do you think it
is about the platform that makes it so engaging for kids?
Speaker 2 (08:16):
I feel what makes roadblocks interesting is what universally, when
I was young and we were running around outside fantasizing
about being King Arthur and the Knights, that same level
of collaborative being with your friends playing in some fantasy
(08:38):
that may be somewhat real, maybe somewhat fantasy, but behind
the scenes it's not solo. A lot of people are
arguably just hanging out and chatting while they're playing the
game in the background. So I do feel what really
pulls in is being with friends and doing things together.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
In that respect, that what distinguishes it from social media.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
When I think of social media, social media has become
a arguably a pretty broad term for various product features.
There is definitely a class of products shorts, reels, TikTok, spotlight,
other's short form video which is more solo. I'm interested
(09:22):
in all of those products, and both has some of
the questions, is it to addictive, some concern over people
scrolling in the middle of the night, but also has
some benefits in that I do think it is a
way we get a lot of new information. And I
obviously read the newspaper and go on x and other
(09:45):
social media platforms, but I do get new information from
there as well. There's a second what I would call
class of social media, starting with Facebook or even friends there,
which is sharing about my life, sharing pictures, celebrities sharing pictures.
And then I would put Roadblocks in a third category,
which is the connection category, being together in a virtual environment,
(10:07):
initially pioneered by gaming and online gaming. And I think
this category is a natural extension of the telegraph system
and the phone system and the video system. The next
extension of it is the three D connection system. And
(10:30):
someday when we're doing another podcast, we maybe will be
doing it in Roadblocks, and we'll be going for a
walk in a city somewhere and having a chat and
looking at the scenery. And I think that's just part
of the inevitable march of how we communicate at a
distance with technology. So I think there's benefits from all
(10:51):
different types of social media. Roadblocks is very much in
the gaming connection zone.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
There, so the platform for interaction and the interaction drives communication.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Pulls people in and the notion of seeing the developer community,
seeing both very experienced game creators as well as sixteen
year olds, eighteen year olds, twenty two year old and
in a way it gives an optimism that maybe I
could do this as well. And also the way the
(11:24):
Roadblocks developer community has panned out, we have seen not
just the top developers, but the thousandth developer or the
ten thousandth developer start to make meaningful wages. Actually, so
it's something people feel that's accessible to them, and I
(11:46):
do believe because of this, there's a lot of excitement
around STEM learning. It's cool to learn computer science. We
see a lot of people get pulled into computer science
and production because they believe if they can do it.
These are real educational experiences on Roadblocks now. So it's
(12:06):
in that sense it's working out like we planned. There's
a lot of education in the experiences themselves. But even
more so, I think if we had gone on to
say we want to make a educational experience around either
art or design or computer science, arguably Roadblocks is very
(12:26):
good at that in that it pulls in millions of
people to learn computer science or art or design.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
How did it become such a huge success. I mean,
you started in the two thousands and it's doing good,
and you raise the money, and then I think fifteen
years later you took it to an IPO, but there
was a moment when it went from a successful private
company to arguably one of the most influential tech companies
in the world. Like, what do you attribute that sort
(12:56):
of shift in penetration to.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
We've been at it for over sixteen or seventeen years,
and along the way, one thing is we started very small.
The very first few years of roadblocks, we were talking
one thousand concurrent users rather than twenty one million concurrent
So we are now at least twenty one thousand times larger.
(13:24):
I would say on many occasions along the way, whether
it's it's a board meeting or a staff meeting, what
has led to this acceleration of growth in the last
three months or what is the magic sauce we keep
coming back to. It's thousands of things done right. It
(13:44):
is a real well balanced mix of a lot of
complex things. It is how good our game engine works,
it's our infrastructure. How good is a tooling, How good
is search and discovery? How good is the economy? Do
we have enough servers? Are people connecting with their friends?
So a platform like this is pretty broad technically, and
(14:09):
whenever we've tried to do a statistical analysis or what
is the one magic thing. It's always been a thousand
small things.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
But in terms of an innovation that drove the platform,
Roebucks were pretty important, right. I think I understand that
the key to Roebucks was that they gave developers and
creators are written incentive, but can you just take a
step back and kind of explain what they are and
how they impact your platform?
Speaker 2 (14:38):
So we wanted we wanted to create a perpetual motion
machine or a closed loop system with feedback. And the
way a closed loop system with feedback would be. I'm
a developer, maybe I'm dude one I made work at
a pizza place, and I say, what could I do
(14:58):
where users could spend a currency we'll call it roebucks.
I don't remember if I work at a pizza place,
or someone had the ability to buy a scooter so
instead of walking from place to place in their game,
you could ride the scooter.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
You know.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
So okay, So that has to happen. Creators have to
have interesting things to sell. The creators need to have
a wallet where if a user spends roebucks on that scooter,
it goes into their wallet. A creator needs to be
able to translate those roebucks into money. You know, fill
(15:35):
out your ten ninety nine, you're going to get some cash.
You're going to get taxed on it. That's like real earnings.
Users need to be able to buy roebucks, either through iOS,
through the app store, through a credit card, now through
a gift card, and there's got to be maybe a
little feedback to reward those developers who are bootstrapping the system.
(15:58):
So we had to experiences that we're starting to bring
in the most roebucks, so there's a little bit of
a feedback loop, and developers said, whoa, if I'm earning roebucks,
I might get some discovery. So all of those things
have to launch at the same time. Users purchasing roebucks,
some discovery, closed loop feedback, developers cashing them out. That's
(16:21):
all that we did. But we launched with all of
those components, and on day one users were buying roebucks,
Users started spending roebucks in some of the games. At
the end of day one we had the top grossing
roebucks game right there on the Discovery charts. Creators could say, oh,
this is another interesting thing to do, and that launched
(16:43):
that whole virtual economy that has been a big part
of us ever since.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
After the break. How Roadblocks is responding to what Bloomberg
is called it's pedophile problem. Stay with us. When I
was reading my introduction to the one point where you
(17:13):
were really nodding along was when I used that word prehistoric.
Oh now you're giving me two thumbs up. Tell me why.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
In three D immersion, there's an amazing amount of technology
still to be built. If we wanted to host a
concert with a real time performer for one hundred thousand people,
and we all wanted to be in that exact same stadium,
dancing together, hearing everyone participating on a phone or a
(17:45):
home theater or in VR, have it look photo realistic,
like just like video, and have it sound great. That's
a lot of technology. There's still some way to go,
so and that's sense. The whole gaming market, Roadblocks included,
is still in the Stone age. The spec is really
(18:07):
one hundred thousand people, photorealistic, real time, high quality, and
add AI on top of that, possibly regenerating the environment
based on your or my prompts like turn this from
a stadium into a medieval fortress. So we're ways away
from that technology. I would say even today where we
(18:28):
are with Roadblocks, what we're doing is somewhat innovative in
that a lot of the video game market is still
downloading things not being able to play immediately. So I
think what we're going to see and what we're really
pushing on is the notion of immediate play no matter
what we're looking at. Another thing that's very prevalent in
(18:49):
the video game industry is different games on mobile than
on PC or console mobile tending to be lighter, high performance,
but I do think over time we're going to see
the same game run on both, which is going to
require a lot of cloud technology. And so having AI
available in any game, whether it's for NPCs or creation,
(19:12):
that's a whole area that we don't even know what
that's going to be.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
One of the most popular terms right now is vibe coding,
basically describing to an AI what you want in natural
language and then having it write code for you to
make your wish come true. What role does vibe coding
play on Roadblocks?
Speaker 2 (19:30):
We already have vibe coding in the extent that Roadblocks
Studio has an AI assistant. You can go talk to
studio and start building stuff. Our studio architecture will more
and more become MCP client and server, So if you
want to use your own AI command line and generate
(19:50):
in studio, you'll be able to do that, So stay
tuned on that. What I think we're going to ultimately see, though,
is vibe coding inside Roadblocks games themselves, and ultimately the
ability to vibe code not just the code in a
Roadblocks game, but the whole Roadblocks game. What will be
really a big day for Roadblocks is where one of
(20:14):
the top one hundred games, rather than been written with
luau and with three D graphics tools, is vibe coded.
Just like I don't know how to code, I'm not
an artist. I just talked about this game I wanted
to imagine. I uploaded some clips of some hand drawings
and a few ideas, and I got this game. But
(20:35):
the other thing I think we'll see on the social
side is collaborative vibe coding, people walking around together creating things.
You'd say, make a castle, I might say, make it
more green, more overgrowth on it. So I can see
vibe coding collaboratively being something we'll see in Roadblocks.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
You have tens of millions of other people's children on
your platform. How do you think about that responsibility and
how do you deal with it?
Speaker 2 (21:04):
It's an enormous responsibility. We sometimes try to imagine what
close to one hundred million peoples looks like. That's about
a thousand soccer stadiums with one hundred thousand people in it.
We had the early experience that even one bad situation
(21:25):
is one too many.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
Obviously, you have to ask you about the Bloomberg story
as well, which had the headline Roadblocks's pedophile Problem and
mentioned that there were two dozen people who have been
arrested based on interacting with children in harmful ways, in
some cases even abducting them they met on roadblocks.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
How do you address this on roadblocks? We build safety
in from day one. We don't allow the sharing of images,
we don't allow unfiltered texts. We have access to all
texts and all of those things. It creates a world
where we have to try to keep people on roadblocks.
(22:02):
We don't want them going to any other device or
any other platform where. Unfortunately, if a young person has
access to a phone, there's many other areas where they
can start sharing pictures of themselves, or start trying to
share their phone number or address. So over the years
(22:23):
we've accepted that challenge. I would say there's never an
excuse even for one bad incident. There are many things
that get reported that were unfortunately not able to comment
on where they were initially meeting. But I do feel
over time we're going to show the leadership that for
young people, they stay on roadblocks no matter what. For
(22:45):
thirteen through seventeen year olds, you're going to see some
very innovative things where, unlike on other platforms, most fourteen
year olds can talk to anyone else on the platform,
and that's a very vulnerable age. You're going to see
us start to be thoughtful about how they communicate with others.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Can you just describe how the actual social interaction works?
And I guess my second question would be, is it
an aspiration to make it all but impossible for adults
to speak to children ultimately on the platform?
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Yeah? You know how Tesla weimo has to be twenty
to you know, ten times safer than the real world.
I'm optimistic that we will be multiples and multiples of
that relative to the real world. And it's not inconceivable
to build AI both for text or for voice that
(23:40):
no matter who I'm talking to. There's no way to
share personal information, and so I do feel we're going
to make this more and more just a solve problem.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Because a paradigm today is like two avatars might interact
and one maybe a grown up, one maybe a child,
and a grown up maybe able to say to the
child avatar, hey meet me on discord or something. That's
why the.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Kere we would Actually it's very The good news is
it's very very hard to meet on discord today, So
we filter use their names, we filter addresses. What we
do find is in certain age range. Even though that's
very very hard to share a snap name or a
Discord handle, some kids who are in a vulnerable state
(24:27):
try to figure out how to share, some way to
get off of roadblocks. And I think over time, even
when two people are trying to find out how to connect,
you'll see us making that very difficult, if not impossible.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
But the way the interaction paradigm is like two adveratars
or in a virtual world and they have like a
chat box, or how do they actually practically talk to
each other?
Speaker 2 (24:49):
For younger people only text in a full three D space.
We don't support one on one or private chat so
it's all out in the town square in a sense,
and other people can see that. And on top of that,
all of that text is running through a very deep
(25:09):
set of filtering at the same time. And it's one
of the biggest complaints really of our platform for younger people.
They see a lot of hashes, basically because it's us
being very conservative in how we filter.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
As you look at what's going on more broadly in
society and culture, you feel like parents are waking up
to and getting very concerned about real world harms happening
to their children based on virtual environments. Do you see
that as as a longer term risk to Roadblocks.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Well, we see it in a way as an opportunity,
and I would say we're thankful that we started with
younger people on the platform because it arguably is a
much more difficult area to challenge. Improving our work with
law enforcement and I believe over time getting the reputation
(26:05):
that roadblocks is a dangerous place for bad actors. We
do a lot of work with all the three letter
agencies and want to make roadblocks that kind of dangerous
place for anyone who's thinking about that. We're moving more
and more proactive so we now nudge people on our
platform when they're maybe not being so nice or bullying
(26:27):
a little or whatever, and those nudges do give people
an early indication of what we just won't tolerate on
the platform.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
There was a BBC interview you gave and I think
you know you suggested if parents are worried about the
children roadblocks, maybe they just shouldn't have their children roadblocks,
and you've got some pushback for that.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
I love that question. It was part of a bigger
conversation track. We were talking about how hard I believe
it is to be a parent and what does a
parent do when they're intuitively not comfortable with something. I
was hoping my answer would get construed as any time
a parent is uncomfortable with anything, like if I'm looking
(27:09):
outside at a lake right now, and if i saw
my two year old, like I'm not comfortable having them
at the end of the dock right now without a
life jacket on. I'm a parent, I have four kids.
I would always want parents to if they're not comfortable,
follow their intuition.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
You've described Roadblocks as a wellness platform, even more so
than it is a gaming platform. What do you mean
by roadblocks as a wellness platform.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
Young people who've gotten disconnected at school, young people going
through a mental health crisis, young people who are going
through something finding people on roadblocks to connect with. I mean,
it sounds gratuitous for me to say it, but parents
saying like, my kid is alive because they found people
(27:53):
on roadblocks. So I think there's a loneliness epidemic going
on in the world. I think. I mean, I'll go
out on a limb and I'll say four like in
quotes twenty one and up id verified opted in someday
we'll have dating on roadblocks, And I think a lot
(28:14):
of people who might be afraid to go on a
real life date might find it easier to have a
virtual date to start, and then if they connect, move
to the physical world. So I think, you know, in
a wellness platform, I think of as a platform to
help loneliness and help bring connection.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Yeah, because part of your job is continuing to attract
new thirteen year olds. The other part of your job
is retaining thirteen year olds who becoming seventeen year olds
who are becoming twenty four year olds. Right, So how
do you balance those two things?
Speaker 2 (28:49):
You know, my job at a higher level is driven
by a certain level of morality and ethics. So I
don't literally consider my job the use count on roadblocks,
but I do consider this is an inevitable form of technology,
and we've been given this opportunity to shepherd it in
(29:10):
with civility and with optimism, and that's an exciting job. Like, Okay,
this type of technology is coming, AI is coming. Can
we do this in a way that's more civil and
higher quality than any other company could? Like that gets
us all up in the morning. So I would say,
if we do that and we build this technical vision,
(29:33):
we are going to see more of those users doing
that stuff, almost as a byproduct.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
I remember second life from back in the day, but
it's almost like a third life. We can call it
maybe second life.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
I'm personally not that hot on the term second life
because I think, you know, we only have one life,
and it's it can both be a physical life and
it can have a phone. Part of your life is
on the phone, and part of it's a digital life.
But I like the notion that we have one life.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
David, thank you so much for taking the time today.
It was great to have you on tech stuff.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Really enjoy this conversation, really enjoyed it. I appreciate it
being here.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
For tech Stuff. I'm Os Valoschin. This episode was produced
by Eliza Dennis and Adriana Tapia. It was executive produced
by me, Karen Price and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and
Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcast. Jack Insley mixed this episode
and Kyle Murdoch Rodolphine Song join us on Friday for
the weekend tech Caroen and I will run through all
(30:55):
the headlines you may have missed, and please do rate
and review the show and shout to us with your
feedback at tech Stuff Podcast at gmail dot com. Hm
Welcome to tech stuff. This is the story. And I
want to start today's episode with a story that my
friend told me about a big family drama over the holidays.
You see, his daughter got locked out of her Roadblocks
account and it threatened to derail the whole family's Christmas.
This level of emotional attachment to a tech platform, it
(00:36):
got me pretty fascinated. Why does Roadblocks mean so much
to my friend's daughter and many many others like her.
Roadblocks has become one of the most popular gaming platforms
in the world. It has over ninety five million users,
and players can also create their own games. The majority
of users are under sixteen, and if you have kids
(00:57):
in your life, there's a very good chance that they
use Roblocks and that they're fanatical about it. Today we're
talking to the man behind it all, David Bozuki, the
co founder and CEO of Roadblocks, who recently said that
gaming is still in its quote prehistoric era. If you
care about how technology is driving culture and how culture
(01:19):
is driving technology, you simply have to understand Roadblocks because
it's this space where kids can play make believe but
also explore real world situations. Virtually, just this month, users
engaged in political activism on the platform by staging protests
when some players created avatars of ice agents, others took
(01:41):
to the suburban streets of one Roadblocks universe to protest.
And then there are scenarios playing out on the platform
that are all too real. As Bloomberg put it, quote,
the Internet's biggest recreation zone for kids is fighting to
keep predators away. So we'll also talk about what Roadblocks
is doing to keep its huge user base of children
(02:02):
safe and to address some criticisms that it should be
doing more. David BAZOOKI, welcome to take stuff.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Hey, thank you so much. It's great to be on
the show with you.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Thank you for being here. If you had to explain
Roadblocks to someone who's never used it before, where do
you begin.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
We've used so many terminologies of how we've talked about
Roadblocks in the past, all the way from in the
early days it was you make the game. We talked
about an imagination platform. We've talked about a human co
experience platform. But in reality it's an amazingly large, mostly
gaming platform. Today almost one hundred million daily active users
(02:43):
are on the site. Roadblocks doesn't make any of the
games on our platform, and over time, the developers on
the platform have gone from hobbyists to really entrepreneurs, some
of whom are running studios making over fifty million dollars
a year. So it is a user generated gaming platform
(03:05):
or a human co experience platform.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
One of the things that's very interesting is we've seen
this kind of phenomenon of the gamification of everything, right,
I mean, do you have an operating definition of what
a game is?
Speaker 2 (03:17):
When you say the gamification of everything? It's fun to
think that we've actually gamified the creation of the games
on Roadblocks, and in a sense, being a Roadblocks creator
is an amazingly interesting game. A lot of our creators
grew up on Roadblocks. They played Roadblocks, and when they
(03:38):
were young they got interested in computer science or production
or art or graphics or writing, and before you know it,
many of the top one hundred creators on Roadblocks grew
up on the platform and are now CEOs of amazingly
large companies. There's also a lot of gamification and then
(04:00):
a lot of other things we see in our pop culture. So,
for example, when something gets interesting in pop culture, like
whether it's squid game or something else, a lot of
people want to interact with that content, not just by
consuming it, but by doing it and jumping into it.
And so gamification could be thought of as taking a
(04:24):
topic or subject that's interesting and allowing people to jump
in and experience the adrenaline rush or the boredom or
whatever other part of that content, whether it's you know,
Stranger Things or the NFL universe or being part of
a SpongeBob universe, you know, experience that rather than consume
it linearly.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
I mean, it's funny how games have evolved, right, Like
first games for kids, I mean computer games for kids,
and then computer games were considered to be like drivers
of violence, and then just for geeks. And now if
you you know, exist in our culture. You see, you
know Minecraft, the biggest movie of the year. Well you
see that Muga, Robbie's follow up project to Bobby is
(05:07):
going to be a movie based on the sims, Like,
can you talk about it? Kind of your role as
a participant observer in how games have come to dominate
entertainment culture and beyond.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
I believe early on games were highly limited by the technology,
and even the very first game that I might have played,
which was Pong, in a sense was a reality simulation.
It was a very crude, crude simulation. I didn't have
an avatar, it wasn't in two D. I had a
(05:40):
white you know, line on the screen. But I still
playing Ping pong right in a way, and a lot
of I believe what's interesting in games is literally a
fantasy reality simulation that can be very connected with other people,
can be very entertaining. You know, one of the top
experiences on our platform right now is grow a Garden.
(06:03):
This exploded on our platform last summer. Dressed to Impress
exploded on the platform. What's really been fun for me
is there not Neither one of those is a traditional game.
They're definitely reality simulators. Several members of my family are
very interested in farming, and me as a dad, gets
(06:26):
to say the top experience right now in Roadblocks is
about growing stuff in a garden.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Talk a bit about that game, you know, how did
it go viral and what does it say about the
platform you've built?
Speaker 2 (06:38):
Yeah, so a couple things about how that thing went viral.
Which is really kind of interesting. Really is we've worked
really hard over the last I'd say year and a
half to make our discovery system very fair, very organic
and a just discovery system that if someone creates something
(07:03):
that is retaining well causing viral growth, people are spending
a lot of time in it, that experience will get
more exposure and grow. Garden is a great example that
creator created this idea of something that was new and interesting.
It's asynchronous. Things happen when you're not playing. You can
(07:25):
come back, which is really cool. They launched it with
in the same way we launched Roadblocks with a little
bit of paid traffic to get some initial users playing,
but it got picked up by our discovery algorithms and
over time went viral to the point where a couple
weeks ago, I believe it hit eleven million concurrent players,
(07:47):
which is close to the all time concurrent records for
games anywhere around the world. So great idea, new idea.
There's a lot of social media pick up influencers are
playing and sharing on shorts or reels or TikTok, so
you know, it's what we're hoping the environment could support.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
I've heard so many parents talking about how that kids
are just obsessed with Roadblocks. What do you think it
is about the platform that makes it so engaging for kids?
Speaker 2 (08:16):
I feel what makes roadblocks interesting is what universally, when
I was young and we were running around outside fantasizing
about being King Arthur and the Knights, that same level
of collaborative being with your friends playing in some fantasy
(08:38):
that may be somewhat real, maybe somewhat fantasy, but behind
the scenes it's not solo. A lot of people are
arguably just hanging out and chatting while they're playing the
game in the background. So I do feel what really
pulls in is being with friends and doing things together.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
In that respect, that what distinguishes it from social media.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
When I think of social media, social media has become
a arguably a pretty broad term for various product features.
There is definitely a class of products shorts, reels, TikTok, spotlight,
other's short form video which is more solo. I'm interested
(09:22):
in all of those products, and both has some of
the questions, is it to addictive, some concern over people
scrolling in the middle of the night, but also has
some benefits in that I do think it is a
way we get a lot of new information. And I
obviously read the newspaper and go on x and other
(09:45):
social media platforms, but I do get new information from
there as well. There's a second what I would call
class of social media, starting with Facebook or even friends there,
which is sharing about my life, sharing pictures, celebrities sharing pictures.
And then I would put Roadblocks in a third category,
which is the connection category, being together in a virtual environment,
(10:07):
initially pioneered by gaming and online gaming. And I think
this category is a natural extension of the telegraph system
and the phone system and the video system. The next
extension of it is the three D connection system. And
(10:30):
someday when we're doing another podcast, we maybe will be
doing it in Roadblocks, and we'll be going for a
walk in a city somewhere and having a chat and
looking at the scenery. And I think that's just part
of the inevitable march of how we communicate at a
distance with technology. So I think there's benefits from all
(10:51):
different types of social media. Roadblocks is very much in
the gaming connection zone.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
There, so the platform for interaction and the interaction drives communication.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Pulls people in and the notion of seeing the developer community,
seeing both very experienced game creators as well as sixteen
year olds, eighteen year olds, twenty two year old and
in a way it gives an optimism that maybe I
could do this as well. And also the way the
(11:24):
Roadblocks developer community has panned out, we have seen not
just the top developers, but the thousandth developer or the
ten thousandth developer start to make meaningful wages. Actually, so
it's something people feel that's accessible to them, and I
(11:46):
do believe because of this, there's a lot of excitement
around STEM learning. It's cool to learn computer science. We
see a lot of people get pulled into computer science
and production because they believe if they can do it.
These are real educational experiences on Roadblocks now. So it's
(12:06):
in that sense it's working out like we planned. There's
a lot of education in the experiences themselves. But even
more so, I think if we had gone on to
say we want to make a educational experience around either
art or design or computer science, arguably Roadblocks is very
(12:26):
good at that in that it pulls in millions of
people to learn computer science or art or design.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
How did it become such a huge success. I mean,
you started in the two thousands and it's doing good,
and you raise the money, and then I think fifteen
years later you took it to an IPO, but there
was a moment when it went from a successful private
company to arguably one of the most influential tech companies
in the world. Like, what do you attribute that sort
(12:56):
of shift in penetration to.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
We've been at it for over sixteen or seventeen years,
and along the way, one thing is we started very small.
The very first few years of roadblocks, we were talking
one thousand concurrent users rather than twenty one million concurrent
So we are now at least twenty one thousand times larger.
(13:24):
I would say on many occasions along the way, whether
it's it's a board meeting or a staff meeting, what
has led to this acceleration of growth in the last
three months or what is the magic sauce we keep
coming back to. It's thousands of things done right. It
(13:44):
is a real well balanced mix of a lot of
complex things. It is how good our game engine works,
it's our infrastructure. How good is a tooling, How good
is search and discovery? How good is the economy? Do
we have enough servers? Are people connecting with their friends?
So a platform like this is pretty broad technically, and
(14:09):
whenever we've tried to do a statistical analysis or what
is the one magic thing. It's always been a thousand
small things.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
But in terms of an innovation that drove the platform,
Roebucks were pretty important, right. I think I understand that
the key to Roebucks was that they gave developers and
creators are written incentive, but can you just take a
step back and kind of explain what they are and
how they impact your platform?
Speaker 2 (14:38):
So we wanted we wanted to create a perpetual motion
machine or a closed loop system with feedback. And the
way a closed loop system with feedback would be. I'm
a developer, maybe I'm dude one I made work at
a pizza place, and I say, what could I do
(14:58):
where users could spend a currency we'll call it roebucks.
I don't remember if I work at a pizza place,
or someone had the ability to buy a scooter so
instead of walking from place to place in their game,
you could ride the scooter.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
You know.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
So okay, So that has to happen. Creators have to
have interesting things to sell. The creators need to have
a wallet where if a user spends roebucks on that scooter,
it goes into their wallet. A creator needs to be
able to translate those roebucks into money. You know, fill
(15:35):
out your ten ninety nine, you're going to get some cash.
You're going to get taxed on it. That's like real earnings.
Users need to be able to buy roebucks, either through iOS,
through the app store, through a credit card, now through
a gift card, and there's got to be maybe a
little feedback to reward those developers who are bootstrapping the system.
(15:58):
So we had to experiences that we're starting to bring
in the most roebucks, so there's a little bit of
a feedback loop, and developers said, whoa, if I'm earning roebucks,
I might get some discovery. So all of those things
have to launch at the same time. Users purchasing roebucks,
some discovery, closed loop feedback, developers cashing them out. That's
(16:21):
all that we did. But we launched with all of
those components, and on day one users were buying roebucks,
Users started spending roebucks in some of the games. At
the end of day one we had the top grossing
roebucks game right there on the Discovery charts. Creators could say, oh,
this is another interesting thing to do, and that launched
(16:43):
that whole virtual economy that has been a big part
of us ever since.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
After the break. How Roadblocks is responding to what Bloomberg
is called it's pedophile problem. Stay with us. When I
was reading my introduction to the one point where you
(17:13):
were really nodding along was when I used that word prehistoric.
Oh now you're giving me two thumbs up. Tell me why.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
In three D immersion, there's an amazing amount of technology
still to be built. If we wanted to host a
concert with a real time performer for one hundred thousand people,
and we all wanted to be in that exact same stadium,
dancing together, hearing everyone participating on a phone or a
(17:45):
home theater or in VR, have it look photo realistic,
like just like video, and have it sound great. That's
a lot of technology. There's still some way to go,
so and that's sense. The whole gaming market, Roadblocks included,
is still in the Stone age. The spec is really
(18:07):
one hundred thousand people, photorealistic, real time, high quality, and
add AI on top of that, possibly regenerating the environment
based on your or my prompts like turn this from
a stadium into a medieval fortress. So we're ways away
from that technology. I would say even today where we
(18:28):
are with Roadblocks, what we're doing is somewhat innovative in
that a lot of the video game market is still
downloading things not being able to play immediately. So I
think what we're going to see and what we're really
pushing on is the notion of immediate play no matter
what we're looking at. Another thing that's very prevalent in
(18:49):
the video game industry is different games on mobile than
on PC or console mobile tending to be lighter, high performance,
but I do think over time we're going to see
the same game run on both, which is going to
require a lot of cloud technology. And so having AI
available in any game, whether it's for NPCs or creation,
(19:12):
that's a whole area that we don't even know what
that's going to be.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
One of the most popular terms right now is vibe coding,
basically describing to an AI what you want in natural
language and then having it write code for you to
make your wish come true. What role does vibe coding
play on Roadblocks?
Speaker 2 (19:30):
We already have vibe coding in the extent that Roadblocks
Studio has an AI assistant. You can go talk to
studio and start building stuff. Our studio architecture will more
and more become MCP client and server, So if you
want to use your own AI command line and generate
(19:50):
in studio, you'll be able to do that, So stay
tuned on that. What I think we're going to ultimately see, though,
is vibe coding inside Roadblocks games themselves, and ultimately the
ability to vibe code not just the code in a
Roadblocks game, but the whole Roadblocks game. What will be
really a big day for Roadblocks is where one of
(20:14):
the top one hundred games, rather than been written with
luau and with three D graphics tools, is vibe coded.
Just like I don't know how to code, I'm not
an artist. I just talked about this game I wanted
to imagine. I uploaded some clips of some hand drawings
and a few ideas, and I got this game. But
(20:35):
the other thing I think we'll see on the social
side is collaborative vibe coding, people walking around together creating things.
You'd say, make a castle, I might say, make it
more green, more overgrowth on it. So I can see
vibe coding collaboratively being something we'll see in Roadblocks.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
You have tens of millions of other people's children on
your platform. How do you think about that responsibility and
how do you deal with it?
Speaker 2 (21:04):
It's an enormous responsibility. We sometimes try to imagine what
close to one hundred million peoples looks like. That's about
a thousand soccer stadiums with one hundred thousand people in it.
We had the early experience that even one bad situation
(21:25):
is one too many.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
Obviously, you have to ask you about the Bloomberg story
as well, which had the headline Roadblocks's pedophile Problem and
mentioned that there were two dozen people who have been
arrested based on interacting with children in harmful ways, in
some cases even abducting them they met on roadblocks.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
How do you address this on roadblocks? We build safety
in from day one. We don't allow the sharing of images,
we don't allow unfiltered texts. We have access to all
texts and all of those things. It creates a world
where we have to try to keep people on roadblocks.
(22:02):
We don't want them going to any other device or
any other platform where. Unfortunately, if a young person has
access to a phone, there's many other areas where they
can start sharing pictures of themselves, or start trying to
share their phone number or address. So over the years
(22:23):
we've accepted that challenge. I would say there's never an
excuse even for one bad incident. There are many things
that get reported that were unfortunately not able to comment
on where they were initially meeting. But I do feel
over time we're going to show the leadership that for
young people, they stay on roadblocks no matter what. For
(22:45):
thirteen through seventeen year olds, you're going to see some
very innovative things where, unlike on other platforms, most fourteen
year olds can talk to anyone else on the platform,
and that's a very vulnerable age. You're going to see
us start to be thoughtful about how they communicate with others.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Can you just describe how the actual social interaction works?
And I guess my second question would be, is it
an aspiration to make it all but impossible for adults
to speak to children ultimately on the platform?
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Yeah? You know how Tesla weimo has to be twenty
to you know, ten times safer than the real world.
I'm optimistic that we will be multiples and multiples of
that relative to the real world. And it's not inconceivable
to build AI both for text or for voice that
(23:40):
no matter who I'm talking to. There's no way to
share personal information, and so I do feel we're going
to make this more and more just a solve problem.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Because a paradigm today is like two avatars might interact
and one maybe a grown up, one maybe a child,
and a grown up maybe able to say to the
child avatar, hey meet me on discord or something. That's
why the.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Kere we would Actually it's very The good news is
it's very very hard to meet on discord today, So
we filter use their names, we filter addresses. What we
do find is in certain age range. Even though that's
very very hard to share a snap name or a
Discord handle, some kids who are in a vulnerable state
(24:27):
try to figure out how to share, some way to
get off of roadblocks. And I think over time, even
when two people are trying to find out how to connect,
you'll see us making that very difficult, if not impossible.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
But the way the interaction paradigm is like two adveratars
or in a virtual world and they have like a
chat box, or how do they actually practically talk to
each other?
Speaker 2 (24:49):
For younger people only text in a full three D space.
We don't support one on one or private chat so
it's all out in the town square in a sense,
and other people can see that. And on top of that,
all of that text is running through a very deep
(25:09):
set of filtering at the same time. And it's one
of the biggest complaints really of our platform for younger people.
They see a lot of hashes, basically because it's us
being very conservative in how we filter.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
As you look at what's going on more broadly in
society and culture, you feel like parents are waking up
to and getting very concerned about real world harms happening
to their children based on virtual environments. Do you see
that as as a longer term risk to Roadblocks.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Well, we see it in a way as an opportunity,
and I would say we're thankful that we started with
younger people on the platform because it arguably is a
much more difficult area to challenge. Improving our work with
law enforcement and I believe over time getting the reputation
(26:05):
that roadblocks is a dangerous place for bad actors. We
do a lot of work with all the three letter
agencies and want to make roadblocks that kind of dangerous
place for anyone who's thinking about that. We're moving more
and more proactive so we now nudge people on our
platform when they're maybe not being so nice or bullying
(26:27):
a little or whatever, and those nudges do give people
an early indication of what we just won't tolerate on
the platform.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
There was a BBC interview you gave and I think
you know you suggested if parents are worried about the
children roadblocks, maybe they just shouldn't have their children roadblocks,
and you've got some pushback for that.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
I love that question. It was part of a bigger
conversation track. We were talking about how hard I believe
it is to be a parent and what does a
parent do when they're intuitively not comfortable with something. I
was hoping my answer would get construed as any time
a parent is uncomfortable with anything, like if I'm looking
(27:09):
outside at a lake right now, and if i saw
my two year old, like I'm not comfortable having them
at the end of the dock right now without a
life jacket on. I'm a parent, I have four kids.
I would always want parents to if they're not comfortable,
follow their intuition.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
You've described Roadblocks as a wellness platform, even more so
than it is a gaming platform. What do you mean
by roadblocks as a wellness platform.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
Young people who've gotten disconnected at school, young people going
through a mental health crisis, young people who are going
through something finding people on roadblocks to connect with. I mean,
it sounds gratuitous for me to say it, but parents
saying like, my kid is alive because they found people
(27:53):
on roadblocks. So I think there's a loneliness epidemic going
on in the world. I think. I mean, I'll go
out on a limb and I'll say four like in
quotes twenty one and up id verified opted in someday
we'll have dating on roadblocks, And I think a lot
(28:14):
of people who might be afraid to go on a
real life date might find it easier to have a
virtual date to start, and then if they connect, move
to the physical world. So I think, you know, in
a wellness platform, I think of as a platform to
help loneliness and help bring connection.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Yeah, because part of your job is continuing to attract
new thirteen year olds. The other part of your job
is retaining thirteen year olds who becoming seventeen year olds
who are becoming twenty four year olds. Right, So how
do you balance those two things?
Speaker 2 (28:49):
You know, my job at a higher level is driven
by a certain level of morality and ethics. So I
don't literally consider my job the use count on roadblocks,
but I do consider this is an inevitable form of technology,
and we've been given this opportunity to shepherd it in
(29:10):
with civility and with optimism, and that's an exciting job. Like, Okay,
this type of technology is coming, AI is coming. Can
we do this in a way that's more civil and
higher quality than any other company could? Like that gets
us all up in the morning. So I would say,
if we do that and we build this technical vision,
(29:33):
we are going to see more of those users doing
that stuff, almost as a byproduct.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
I remember second life from back in the day, but
it's almost like a third life. We can call it
maybe second life.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
I'm personally not that hot on the term second life
because I think, you know, we only have one life,
and it's it can both be a physical life and
it can have a phone. Part of your life is
on the phone, and part of it's a digital life.
But I like the notion that we have one life.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
David, thank you so much for taking the time today.
It was great to have you on tech stuff.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Really enjoy this conversation, really enjoyed it. I appreciate it
being here.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
For tech Stuff. I'm Os Valoschin. This episode was produced
by Eliza Dennis and Adriana Tapia. It was executive produced
by me, Karen Price and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and
Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcast. Jack Insley mixed this episode
and Kyle Murdoch Rodolphine Song join us on Friday for
the weekend tech Caroen and I will run through all
(30:55):
the headlines you may have missed, and please do rate
and review the show and shout to us with your
feedback at tech Stuff Podcast at gmail dot com. Hm
TechStuff News
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Oz Woloshyn
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