Is Roblox making the internet better or worse? We asked the CEO

27:10That that was a very simple way, almost foolproof to react. I like that. But you can't do that obviously in a phone, right? Well, the mathematical way we thought about it is the more mathematical signals you get with a center and a standard deviation, you can convolute more and more of those signals. So yeah, we would love to have that signal. We would love to have behavioral signals. We'd love to have a facial age signal. The more of those signals, the more accurate your age estimation can be.

27:48Ellis:Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI was supposed to handle the parts of the job you hate. Instead, it just describes them, suggests what to do about them, and then leaves you to do it. That's not help, that's homework. ServiceNow's AI specialists are different. They're not a tool. Think of them as digital teammates who actually do the work from start to finish. Cases get resolved, requests get processed, loops get closed, and most importantly, no extra work for you. Because when you can truly delegate to AI, you can get back to the work only you can do. The work that requires a person with ideas and judgment and, you know, a pulse.

28:25Ellis:To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. When I scraped my car in that parking garage, I was worried that it could be a long process to take care of it. Like a landscaper's first day trimming a hedgeman. I have definitely already been here now was it left right or right left well maybe i'll cut a path out and find my way back later but it wasn't like that i filed a claim in under two minutes on the geico app and they handled it from there it was taken care of almost as quickly as it happened it feels good to get help quick it feels good to geico

29:04Ellis:So I think amidst all of this, people are definitely worried about their kids right now. A lot of things that are out of sight that they can't control. Obviously, even the adults are being affected by the social algorithms and short form video with regard to our attention. Do you feel like the kids are all right? And if so, why? Okay, well, it's interesting because I feel most, it's interesting in society, the wide range of things that are out there. We have social networking apps. We have short form video apps. We have AI chat bots. We have multiplayer gaming apps. We have dating apps. And for many people, I do think it's a big cloud.

29:53is just like, oh my gosh, social networking stuff that goes into a big cloud. I think when we dive in deeper into that cloud of apps, I think each one of these apps has its potential benefits as well as things to be careful of at the same time. Short form video, super interesting, right? I watch them all. I'm on Shorts Reels, TikTok, Spotlight. I'm watching all of them. I have a different -

30:23Ellis:That spotlight, I think that's the first and only time it'll be mentioned on this podcast. That'll be the first and last spotlight mentioned on this podcast. Like they were early with spotlight, weren't they? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just amazing. Like it hasn't culturally broken through, I guess. Yeah. So I can tell all of those are personalized. They're all optimized for my own whatever. I see different things on each one. And so some positives, I would say, that people are trying to balance is what's the future of the news for 16-year-olds? Like they're not in the card catalog. They're not in the news rack in the library.

31:03They're not watching network TV. They're not listening to the radio. How are 16-year-olds going to get the news? I hope it's newsletters, Dave. Sources.news. Substack. Let's go. Well, you're on to something because I think the future of the news could be sub-stack, podcast, short-form video more than other things. And so I think there has to be some thought in how we legislate that. And at the same time, short-form video, the research arguably shows some addiction issues and dopamine issues and all of those kind of things. So there's a balance there.

31:45Ellis:I think if you had one of those products, I mean, it seems like you're definitely skeptical of the incentives that are created with an advertising model. I wonder how you would think about that. I've been thinking about it. When I was young, I used to watch for 30 minutes or 15 minutes the electric company on Sesame Street. And those were fun, interesting, you know, 30-second to 2-minute educational things around learning your alphabet. So I'm not going to make the advocation for youth short-form video here, but I do think certain formats could be, are interesting to think about. I'm with you on what are we, what's being optimized for.

32:28if the pure optimization is raw engagement in this one day, that may, you know, that's, you know, not sure that's the right optimization. Do you not goal everyone at Roblox on DAUs or MAUs? We, I think long-term, we, it's interesting. We've had a set of different higher order constructs. I think we're more and more leaning towards being a DAU company, not an hour company. And that is because we think there's fun, spontaneous uses for something like Roblox, you know, five minute check in with your friends, that kind of thing. So we do track hours. We do track DAUs. I would say whenever we're doing search discovery or optimization, we are really tracking ecosystem health, user health, and long-term system health all together.

33:28And we are constantly trying to optimize for long-term platform health and long-term user happiness, not what happens today or tomorrow. So people at Roblox aren't getting bonuses based on like time spent went up X amount this year. That's not an overarching? No. No, no, no.

33:48Ellis:So I think one of the things we're kind of talking around here is the quality of the time we're spending on any of these platforms. I grew up doing couch co-op with Halo, with Mario Kart, all this stuff. How do you think about the quality of the games that are popular on Roblox versus some of the conventional stuff we older folks might be familiar with? I would go step back again and think about the whole new thing in the last 30 to 40 years of people of all ages on devices versus television and think through screen time relative to where it was. And then start looking at the various qualities in the various macro categories in addition to the individual things on Roblox.

34:36I do see, you know, the research out there for what is called gaming or multiplayer being together. There's a lot of positive research out there around not being isolated about building teamwork, leadership, you name it. You know, a lot of people that's we saw it in COVID. We saw in the midst of COVID, what does everyone do for a year when they have kids at home? You know, and in that sense, it was a little bit of a validation of the thesis around multiplayer gaming that it can be a way to communicate and stay in touch, even though we call it gaming. That is different than the short form video category we were talking about, which is a little bit more of a solo thing.

35:26it's a little different than the social networking category which is arguably can be slightly asynchronous multiplayer but also has a lot of sharing pictures and comparison and kind of that type of competition and then you know we're entering the new era of AI chatbots and those are

35:53arguably, you know, multiplayer human NPC, you know, non-player character bot. But at the same time, I don't know if that's the same as being with a human. So I would say the category of gaming, I think, has some benefits akin to being on the phone when I was young and it was a rainy day. I think being, you know, there's some benefits, I think, to not as much trying to preach the benefit of some of the experiences on Roblox, but there can be something in hyper-competitive first-person shooter gaming, like some anxiety creation things. Competing in a fashion show arguably is less anxiety creating and fun or growing a garden.

36:40So I do think in a lovely way, the content on Roblox has been kind of creative and broad in a way. When you have these games in Roblox that are tens of millions of concurrent players, which I think you've had multiple now, which they break all records of concurrent people in a game-like environment, grow a garden, steal a brain rot. What are these people doing? Are they all actually playing together or are they all sitting around and talking? When you have tens of millions of people and experience, can you even know how those people are interacting at scale? We can know. one of the if we talk about AI like one of the opportunities here is is once again in a privacy safe way with not sharing that data out of the company you know that has been tempting to other companies in doing that there are some really interesting things for creators as well as users ultimately to use that data so so we can know you know who's chatting what people are doing more and more where they're going.

37:45This starts to intersect with safety because knowing what is going on can be used for real-time safety scanning of user-generated content and things like that. And it runs the gamut, but I do think there's a notion on Roblox that even though you're playing Hide and Go Seek, you are also sometimes designing your own game in that environment or using it as a place to get together. So it's a mix, I think, of hardcore playing as well as communicating.

38:18Ellis:I was going to say, yeah, I mean, when you look at what's happening on there, sometimes as a grown up, it can look pretty impenetrable, I would say, like compared to some of the games of the past. But I was with my nephew the other night for a dinner and he was playing a game called 99 Nights with his friends. And his parents were like, he goes AFK all night. They were like, why is his screen time for this game at seven hours? And it turns out, I looked this up on YouTube, he's building a base so that the monsters can't get him and his friends overnight. And I'm like, all right, that sounds pretty fun and pretty cool.

38:51Ellis:But then you hear about the loot boxy games or the other games and maybe not so cool. What do you think of the most popular games you're seeing? You're a parent, right? I'm a parent. I got four kids. Yes. So first, there's always that tendency as a parent to want to smack that hand at the same time. Sometimes you look deeper, you know, like maybe it's all right. It's interesting. We used to have some incentives for creators for raw time. And we went whenever there's a weird incentive, you can see weird things happen. um you know we used to a long time ago we had a second currency called tickets that the roblox community loves and is very upset that we removed and in the old days of gaming people had these multi-currency systems you'd have one currency that you buy and the other you earn by engagement we're proud to say we threw away the engagement-based currency like we just threw it in the garbage.

39:53And it was a currency that rewarded people for every day they logged into the platform. So we thought it was dystopian. We thought it was a bad incentive, like trying to do that. And so recently, the away from keyboard games as well, when we rewarded creators for that, we could see a lot of away from keyboard stuff. And creators, rather than making it a good game, just be like come up with some cheesy way to like get people to be away from keyboard so I think in this case it's probably a little bit more interesting but in general we don't we don't want the incentives to be the wrong incentives I would say what we see generally is the creators of these top experiences are extremely capable individuals.

40:49It's a little bit like taking a million people and obviously not pure skill. There's a lot of luck and things and ending up with 100 CEOs of 100 top studios that came from a million down to 100. It's like the ultimate Mr. Beast game and like who are these hundred out of the million that's like one out of every 10 ,000 and they're extremely creative extremely empathetic extremely thinking about their users wanting to build quality and when I meet them I'm actually quite fascinated comparing them to public company CEOs because I think they're more they're more in touch arguably with their users and quality and good gaming than many studio execs.

41:42You ever thought about swapping one for yourself on the earnings call even? It's in a crazy world. It's fun to imagine if someday I were to retire, like how are we going to find the new CEO? Like would we, in addition to the deep bench we have on our executive team, we say plus there's like one bonus. We're going to interview someone from the community kind of thing. But I do think there are CEO-capable creators out there. So I do think they're very focused on making good quality. Are you hinting at retirement, Dave? Are you giving us a statement? Listen, quote me, if I ever. Okay. Dave said on the podcast, if he were to ever.

42:24Interesting.

42:25Ellis:Are there any Roblox auteur platform creators yet? Darren Aronofsky for Roblox. What does auteur mean? a just like typically used for like a movie director like let's say martin scorsese who has their defining motifs and there's so much authorial intent and i don't every detail is looked after i feel we're gonna get there like we're trying to do something really difficult and arguably in video there is a hundred years of development from film all the way up to the digital camera and now we're 4k and it's kind of a solved problem on the video and the playback and in immersive 3d multiplayer with a lot of people at photorealism in real time with instantaneous joining from everywhere in the world with low latency that's what there's still a lot of invention going on here like this this is not fully invented we will get to that point we will get to the point where 100 ,000 people all around the world go to a concert all together.

43:42It's photoreal. You hear the audio. You can wave at your friend. We'll get to the point where that 100 ,000-player stadium, whoever wants to be the dungeon master or all of them, can flip the stadium like in Inception upside down and wrap it upside down or turn it into a coliseum in real time with generative. So I think that's like the spec of what we're going for. And it's still a ways away. We got to park this conversation in AI, Dave. But before we do that, you cannot come on here without. So there's a couple companies, I think, two in particular that have major Roblox FOMO. There's Meta with Horizon and there's Epic with what they've been trying to do with Fortnite and the UGC side.

44:25You're not allowed to immediately turn it back on and how well you're doing. I want you make of those two companies and their efforts? What do you think is working for each one of them as they're trying to go more in Roblox's direction? At a high level, I mean, those are both amazing companies and they're both very valuable companies. Meta has just this incredible history of iterating, analyzing, making things better and better and better. So that would be a positive of thing to say about them. I think they would agree their roadmap is very broad. There are a lot of things going on over there.

45:06And so the broader the roadmap, you know, that's harder than just having absolutely one product that you're focused on. And then I would say same for epic amazing company so visionary battle royale fortnite all of that a lot of their tech around photorealism the breadth of the tech going out of gaming into utility uses super cool as well but once again i would argue a somewhat broad roadmap c++ game engine a game called fortnite modules inside Fortnite built with C++, like some of their partnership deals, and then a creative mode built within the game. And so that starts to be multiple things working together.

45:58So one of the, I think one of the dreams of Roblox, even when we started, was literally it was the dream to have the same name for the product and the company and just have one product. And I think in a way we, So far, we've almost been able to stick with that. Oh, boy, this is Ellis Catnip. You started bringing up naming. I'm a little tired of naming at the moment.

46:21Ellis:I mean, you come up with a name for an AI company, and not only is there an AI company already by that name, but there's an AI podcast already by that name as well. Things have gotten very challenging. When we did Roblox, we had every domain, every trademark, just all in one fell swoop within a week. That's a vision. So speaking of meta, I mean, I know you've talked about Roblox as being the future of communication. I think in some ways that seems like kind of the apex of everything that Zuck would have ever wanted is to try and create this new medium for communication. And I feel like a lot of this conversation has been about social communication as opposed to how we might typically think of, let's say, gaming or very like, it's a well-crafted game.

47:05Ellis:I love this game. I mean, how much of the Roblox benefit is about social? Yeah, I think we learned our lesson a year or two ago, our focus lesson, because back at the IPO, our mission was connect a billion people every day with optimism and civility. And jumping from 50 million DAU to a billion, like that 20x can be a pretty fuzzy product spec. And it's just like, OK, like, what are we going to do? So about a year and a half ago, we analyzed what we think a product like Roblox could be useful for. And yes, gaming, gaming, gaming. Probably at 300 million daily actives, the majority gaming. But with that technology starting to support a lot of the visionary stuff.

47:59future avatar chat, future shopping, future co-working together, future immersive concerts, all of that. So we made the call at our developer conference a year and a quarter ago. We threw out this intermediate thing, 10 % of gaming content bookings is the focus. And we said that's probably around 300 million DAUs. Our creators, I think our community, everyone got it that the technology that we would work on for gaming, it's really very similar to all those other markets. The creator platform, the safety technology, the economy, all of it. And so it essentially winnowed that billion spec down to 300 million in a really elegant way that's given us a lot of focus and I would say now we're deep into for this year what is the economy what is the search and discovery what is the tech needed to support a broadening of genres on the platform I think people will think of Roblox as a whole new platform when more and more of the experiences you can't quite tell that's a Roblox experience.

49:16You're like, whoa, is that a Pixar Incredibles game? Or is that a new RPG game? I think that when we start to see that, people will start to realize this opportunity. Your team mentioned that you were on a sabbatical recently, and you've also been thinking a lot about AI. And I'm curious what that was like. I don't know if you've done that before, but what it was like to take a little bit of a step back. I'm sure you didn't fully step back. It was very humbling, I feel. Humbling? Yeah. The humbling for me, I felt, you know, a while back when we started Roblox, I used to read all the research, physics simulation, rendering technology, up and down the stack.

50:05People were thinking about all of these new ways of doing gaming, and generally I could understand all of it, like the math in these papers and all of it, but the horizontal wave of research everywhere in the world, you know, coming out, and the whole gambit of AI is so massive and so fast, it's very humbling. Like, it is hard to to get to a position where you can understand all of those research papers. Transformers, diffusion, world models, blah, blah. Like, it's a lot going on. Did it give you new clarity about AI as it relates to the company and the strategy you guys need to have? I'm sure you spent a lot of time looking at world models, video models.

50:53That's moving very quickly. I think it clarified for me that we're still very early in the 3D space. The AI space is arguably a very physically unnatural space right now. This thing called text and this thing called images, there's these things we all made up. And we're now training AI models on this thing we made up rather than not necessarily on the 3D raw material of the world itself. And I think I came away feeling we're going to see multiple versions of these types of products. We're going to see arguably everyone at Snap and Facebook and TikTok is probably thinking what happens instead of swiping.

51:44does that turn into continuous video is it generated in real time what's the ux for it is it a swipe is it a camera angle is it the way i'm looking how do i signal what direction to take that potential real-time video rather than a you know swiped video um so i think there there's a whole category of these types of things. I think one could imagine the AI command line that were like, you know, everyone's got their chat GPT, Google, you name it, command line turning multimodal to the point of having a video option as well as a chat option. And, you know, if you're learning a language, you could imagine that starting to stream video and to say walk down the street and go into the French cafe and start talking to someone.

52:38So I think that's possible. That said, I'm still a huge optimist that communication between people or people and AI bots is going to be a big thing. And that's more and more going to take some very sophisticated technology to synchronize many people in 3D to make them photorealistic, to support many, many NPCs at the same time, and to put all of that together in a natural way. So I'm actually very optimistic we're going to see multiple classes of products stemming from some of this early video gen work. I spend a lot of time, especially recently, with founders working on a lot of these world models and video models and trying to understand where they think things are going.

53:26And to be honest, I think several of them think they're going to be able to make something that can be roadblocks, but with a prompt. They think it all collides. And there's a lot more complexity to what you do, especially on the economy side, all the safety stuff we talked about. But the sheer asset creation, the 3D of it, the hanging out in it. What is that? How, as a company that's, what, 20 years old, you have a lot of revenue and users to protect. You have a stable, you know, you have an infrastructure to protect, all these things. How do you adapt quick enough to what is coming with this?

53:57And do you agree that that is coming? Yeah, I mean, look at the gamut of the reaction of various big companies and then map it downward, right? Arguably, Google, which five or six years ago looked sleepy and whatever, and they got some alpha chess stuff, whatever. But thinking ahead around the corners and the potential to link what used to be search with AI, with TPUs, with a cloud facility, with their own research, all of a sudden turns into like a formidable stack. And then we can name a lot of other companies that 30 years ago were the biggest startups in Silicon Valley and what happened to them, right?

54:39They're gone. So I think the only way to keep building a successful company is being trying to get 10x bigger, having a vision for that, and knowing you have to be innovating towards that future with your own unique future. So I think on what you've said, I think that's a logical thing for many founders to say. We've seen it before. It's a compliment that five years ago it was the Roblox for high-end gaming, or six years ago it was the Roblox for this. So that is a compliment. I do feel we internally, given the 400 models we built, really have to be knowing how to build all of these, knowing how to build single player video streaming, highly coordinated photorealistic multiplayer.

55:34And one of the advantages we have in the company, which is we always treat carefully and privately, is the data of our users. We have 10 billion hours of data every month, not a video, but a 3D immersive human interaction. People deciding whether to open a door, people chatting with each other, people jumping into cars and driving them around. It's a crazy stat. Is that like YouTube level yet in terms of hours? I'm pretty sure YouTube is showing to users much more than 10 or 11 billion hours a month of video. I don't know their latest stat. And I haven't compared it to the amount of video coming into YouTube.

56:22Someone can probably do that. But it is like, I think Tesla published something like, look our fleet is generating x amount of video data per day I think we're orders of magnitude above that and it's it's not from the viewport of the cameras on a vehicle it's true 3D data that could be re-rendered from any camera angle that could be possibly reviewed at some point so that data I think one of the futures of AI companies is the mixing of more and more of what's publicly available data, all the text in the world, maybe that with what is proprietary data and doing uniquely vertical things with that data.

57:07Ellis:So I know we're almost out of time. And thank you for coming on with us. If we could take it even farther into the future, you know, I think there's reason to believe that someday, whether it's, you know, 10 or 20 years from now, it will be possible to inhabit, you know, a photorealistic world with friends, with games, with school, whether it's Ready Player One-esque or it's more utopian or more dystopian. How do you feel about that? Would that excite you? Or is there some point where we should say, let's keep half our day in the real world? Do you have any more specific thoughts about that? Yeah.

57:41Once again, staying within context as a parent and a believer in our Roblox values, which is we are responsible and we're trying to take the long view. I'm a huge advocate for parents being thoughtful about screen time, especially screen time, you know, at night where we're not used to blue light, you know, so circadian rhythm. So I think I'm an advocate of being thoughtful about that. And then I would say I'm also an advocate of outdoor time. I think the opportunity for Roblox, and hopefully you'll see us do it over time, is the raw potential of invention is somewhat of a neutral thing. Like there's this neutral, inexorable marching forward of invention that, you know, in certain cases, society can't stop.

58:36It's just going to happen. it does create an opportunity for certain companies to try to be thoughtful about the introduction of new invention and to try to do them in a balanced way. So I would say that would be the thoughtful way we'd approach it in thinking broader than just the raw invention itself. Dave, we appreciate your time. We'll let you get out of here. Thanks for joining us. Good chatting with you guys. Take care. Thank you.

59:08Ellis:Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI is moving fast across the enterprise. But without visibility, it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. ServiceNow turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place. What it's doing, what it's done, and what it's about to do. So you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other?

59:47Ellis:Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

1:00:23All right, Ellis, how'd you feel about that? Your first time meeting Bazuki, Builderman. Yeah.

1:00:29Ellis:Yeah. I mean, I'm just fascinated by everything happening on this platform and how much I don't see it as someone who reads tech news every day. And I mean, it really does remind me as we discussed in the pod of my years at Snapchat and feeling like, man, I wish people could just see what's happening on this platform. But if you're not 13, you're just kind of not seeing it. Yeah. Do you feel like we were too soft on him? I mean, as these public company CEOs show us time and time again, they're only going to answer what they want to answer and you can make it awkward if you want, but not usually by style.

1:01:05Ellis:How about yours? I think it's a really tricky balance. I mean, you're right. Like there's nothing we're going to ask on the obvious questions of a CEO like Dave that he hasn't been asked a million times and that, you know, hard fork covered in depth for like an hour just recently. So I thought we got him to open up in ways that I hadn't really heard him open up before and actually talk about the incentives of the platform which i think are you know upstream of a lot of the things that people are worried about i think rightfully so on roblox um yeah maybe i always wish interviews like this maybe i wish i would have pushed harder a little bit here a little bit there um but you're right like you're only going to get so much uh in an environment like that and like this is also just not a i don't know it's not an environment where like you can just like uh and snipe someone repeatedly.

1:01:57I don't know. It just doesn't work.

1:01:58Ellis:Yeah, this isn't exactly a congressional hearing. Yeah. But, I mean, the hard fork thing, I mean, I don't know. Did they, like, get any quote-unquote news out of him, like, successfully? Or was the only news that it was very awkward? I don't want to give it more credit than that. I mean, I said it to Dave, like, I consider Casey and Kevin, you know, the co-host of hard fork. I don't actually know. I was asking you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think they got him flustered about this stuff, and that was the news. And that's fine, and that's their prerogative. It was a very interesting thing to watch. Yeah, I do think we got stuff from him that I haven't heard.

1:02:42I mean, the fact that he's talking about retirement on a podcast I think is interesting. But yeah, man, I don't know. these conversations are tricky. I feel like we walked the line pretty well, and I feel like we also tried to talk through the nuance of this stuff in a way that is hopefully interesting and has more depth for people. I've interviewed Dave a bunch of times, and it was nice having you here because you are a parent, and I think you just have that perspective that I don't, and I always felt kind of weird. I remember I interviewed him at the Code Conference the last year of the Code Conference, and I felt weird kind of being the guy grilling the CEO of Roblox who is not a parent you know um and i just feel like that probably brings like more perspective although you didn't really talk about it but i think it just i think it just naturally infuses like how you would ask

1:03:30Ellis:someone like that questions right yeah i think the one thing that i kind of wish we would have gotten more of is just some opinions from him and i kind of asked it a couple times you know some opinions from him on like is this you know quality entertainment or is this just kind of kids kicking the can in the parking lot you know is that what a lot of these games are some of the ones certainly look like that though i don't want to pass judgment though as i shared i kind of like the idea of that 99 night survival game but um i do think it's income i mean you know he's talking about parents being thoughtful but i mean if i'm being a thoughtful parent i may rather have friends over for my kids to play mario kart on the couch than do whatever online like that is an important conversation which of these is a better experience for your kids you know yeah and so but without more knowledge i'm not even sure that we're there yet yeah to make that comparison yeah i mean it's eye of the beholder you know it resonates with me a lot like that um you can use a platform like roblox as a young person and like build things and also meet people i mean so much of my career and what i'm doing and like honestly like getting out of the midwest and like moving to interesting big cities was the result of being on forums as a kid and playing video games and meeting people online that I would have never met otherwise, right?

1:04:54And like relationships that I still have to this day that were super, you know, formative for me. And that stuff is happening on Roblox. It's hard to weigh, yes, there is awful, there are awful things happening too. There are predators, you know, there's been lawsuits over that. And there's also like, you know, teenagers learning how to like build things and communicate and even build businesses and become developers. And like a platform that contains all those things is, I think, inherently very messy to talk about. And I think a lot of the way that the media talks about these platforms can get very reductive because it's hard to parse through all that.

1:05:32And I thought we did a pretty good job of that.

1:05:34Ellis:Yeah. And I mean, there's definitely that, you know, puritanical streak with modern helicopter parents that, well, if you're not going to let your kids go out and play and bike down the street what exactly do you expect them to do like build a castle made of blocks every day after school like there's got to be an outlet there's got to be a social outlet and that's what we were always saying with snapchat as well is that kids desperately do want to hang out with their friends but if you look at the numbers it's declining in terms of those after school or even weekend play dates even just with the rise and you know extracurricular activities harder to get into college, you want to get more out of college, like the playtime, the unstructured playtime, I feel like, uh, uh, is maybe what this could represent at its best.

1:06:21Ellis:Yeah. So, uh, I am happy that Dave said he's, he still appreciates some outdoor time once in a while. That is good to know. Um, that was very good to know. I'm curious even, so after, you know, reading all the horror stories, the prep that we did for this episode, interviewing the CEO, would you let your girls on Roblox when the time comes? How do you feel about it these days? Yeah, I would. I think you have to try this stuff if you want to understand if there is a safe, fun way to use it. I think what's important to me is not being immediately skeptical of the new rock music. I mean, maybe I am too extreme about that where like I try to like everything, like whatever's on the radio.

1:07:03Ellis:I've got to really try to like it, even if I kind of hate it. Like that's my worst fear is being an out of touch, being an out of touch, you know, dad or granddad or something. Hence why you were so excited to show me geese a couple of weeks ago. Yes. But I'm also like I'm also kind of butthurt from all those years at Snapchat of people telling me that these real relationships people are having on there were frivolous because it was sharing selfies. And it's like, well, I snap with my grandma all the time because that's all she wants to see is my face. Not whatever coffee I'm posting on Instagram.

1:07:37Ellis:I'll tell you that much. You still do that? I'm not sure if that – no, not anymore. The streak died. Yeah, I'm not saying that's the majority of use cases on Snap. But when you look at something like ephemerality that now a lot of people take for granted, especially in places and under governments where things are more heavily surveilled, there are a lot of reasons that ephemerality is nice, just like in the real world. And so I guess I always try and see things for myself if I can. Yeah. Anything else going on with you? Are you going to let your dog use roadblocks? My two dogs? I'm sure they would if they could.

1:08:17Yeah. Anything else going on with you?

1:08:19Ellis:Man, I don't know. I need a vacation from the vacation after five days of babysitting over Thanksgiving. So, yeah, I mean, after this, I'm just going to sit in peace and turn around my little desk chair and stare at the wall for a little while. I feel that. I'm in New York this week for the Dealbook Summit. Andrew Ross Sorkin, who I consider to be the goat of business, financial journalism, is obviously very well versed in tech as well. Does this one day thing that I'm very fortunate to get to go to that is kind of this Masters of the Universe event. That is also great inspiration for me as I'm thinking about events on my own with sources.

1:09:00And he's got Dario Amadei from Anthropic and Mr. Beast and a bunch of Brian Armstrong from Coinbase. It's going to be a lot of interesting people.

1:09:08Ellis:Are you a master of the universe yet or just a mere Padawan? I'm a Padawan. Not yet in the Jedi Council. Maybe entering like Jedi, but definitely not master. Do you have a leather jacket? That's what's important. And I just got a trench for you. Okay, so you're well on your way. Of course. It's a cool conference, man. It's very succession-y, like down to the music that they play when the person comes on stage. It's very like you are in the show and it's like at the Javits Center overlooking Central Park. It's very cool. So shout out Sorkin, the goat. And I do actually wish, though, that I was in San Diego of all places this week.

1:09:46A sentence I have never said. Do you know what's happening in San Diego? What? You like San Diego? No. Oh, OK. Yeah. I mean, it's I told you I'm a contrarian. Look, it's fine. It's a lot of retired Army people and Republicans. But what's going to happen is that that concentration of people is going to also have the highest concentration of AI researchers in the world for one week only in the beautiful city of San Diego, just a few hours south of us. It's called Neuralips. It's this academic conference that is now kind of where I would say the next year gets set in the AI community. And these are the people actually building the models.

1:10:28And it's become this like world job fair where as the money in AI gets bigger and bigger, all the big companies show up, they throw crazy parties and they try to, you know, it's like a juiced up version of your high school job fair with like trillions of dollars at stake. And the candidates are, you know, the smartest AI minds in the world that are all in San Diego next week.

1:10:49Ellis:if there was ever an opportunity for god to be like all right bye bye you know to this whole thing let's get the coastal erosion going just a one fell swoop this whole coastal shelf goes into the ocean uh i guess we're not gonna have that eye though if that happens yeah i guess not you're not gonna have clients

1:11:12okay don't do it god anyway uh maybe next year for neural lips i'm sure we'll be in like switzerland or something. They always move it around. Neural ips. It's really got a ring to it.

1:11:23Ellis:Yeah. I'm probably not saying it right. I'm sure an AI researcher will correct me. So Alex, let's talk about your scoop. I read it over lunch today while eating hand rolls here in Little Tokyo. And I was having a lot of fun reading it. Can you tell us a little bit more about it? Oh yeah. The back to work mandate is coming. Instagram, back to five days a week, baby no more remote work uh it was only what it was two or three years ago when zuck was saying we're going to be the most remote friendly big tech company uh and now i think they're one of the first to do mandated five days a week back it's not for the whole company it's instagram it's still a lot of people uh but yeah i published this internal memo from adam mosseri the head of instagram basically outlining why they're doing this the culture reset they want to do it's a lot of like you know the natural big tech bureaucracy creep that happens and every once in a while you have a senior manager be like okay like we're resetting no more reoccurring meetings uh unblocking sessions or whatever which is like you know it's just these big tech things that if you're in big tech you totally get it and if not you're probably like what the hell is this well i just love that it's like all this stuff that you know you think oh this is the upper echelon of uh corporations they're so innovative they've got the best software they've got the best talent they've got everybody going to neural ips and then you read the memo and it's like everybody please make sure that meetings have a goal yeah and it's like yeah uh they're all just like us they're just ivy leaguers.

1:13:06Ellis:Yeah, we're all humans, man. We should all cancel our one-on-ones and we need DRIs, you know, directly responsible individuals. And if somebody over schedules your focus block, please try and decline it. And I will take the, you know, hate for that. And I mean, every company I've ever been at has kind of had the same problems. And it's just ironic to me, you know, we spend all of our days trying to build this new technology, all these new productivity tools. And I don't know a single company that seems to have resolved some of these core issues around recurring one-on-ones and meeting agendas.

1:13:42Ellis:I mean, of all the companies you've talked to, is there one that you feel like is kind of like the most organized? I mean, I feel like that Basecamp company was talking about how they had all these different rhythms. They do or don't use email. They have Wednesdays blocked off. Some companies are kind of known for their culture, but I'm not sure how true any of it actually is. Yeah, nothing apparent comes to mind. I don't think anyone's figured it out. It's like you're either fully remote or you're some weird hybrid that's a disaster or you're five days a week. Those are the three options. And Instagram's kind of trying to have both.

1:14:16Like if you actually read the memo that I put on sources.news, like there's a lot of wiggle room. But the headline that the manager wants to communicate is five days a week, which is also like quiet layoffs, right? That's going to force certain people to not come back and that's okay. Um, and yeah, man, I don't know. I just, uh, I'm actually surprised you didn't mention the thing I thought you would mention up first, which is like he was saying, uh, no more decks. Uh, I don't know if you ever had to experience a deck overload inside. Oh, a thousand percent, but a thousand percent.

1:14:51Ellis:I don't know if the decks are necessarily any different from like strategy docs or whatever, but like, that's one of the things Maseri called out is that like we can't spend half our time doing decks and strategy docs. Part of the problem though, is that I think like, as is the case with pretty much every company, it's like when you're presenting something like a product or, you know, piece of marketing or brand creative, it is a story, right? And sometimes the VP may not deeply understand the audience that you're trying to serve, which is their fault, of course. But this is what happens when you become VP and you get a bit more out of touch with certain things.

1:15:28Ellis:And so we'll see, maybe the pendulum will swing back toward Dex eventually. I mean, I do believe work culture is very cyclical with all this stuff. But the other thing that comes to mind is just, you know, on the tail end of the Roblox convo, it is kind of ironic, you know, there's that point where like, this was actually a Casey Newton tweet from a long time ago, where Casey was like, Zuck is in this weird place of trying to convince congressman that uh facebook can't really change any voting behavior but convince every advertiser that that is what facebook is best at is changing buying behavior and it's the same thing maybe with roblox which is which is that like all right all these companies are let's let's just keep it to meta for a second with their vr stuff like horizon worlds they're talking about how unbelievable all this you know vr stuff is for socializing or whatever they're making these days but then And they're telling all their employees to come to work because collaboration is better there.

1:16:25Ellis:I mean, I feel like it's fairly obvious at this point that just about everything is better in person if we have the luxury of being able to do that. Obviously, not everybody has that luxury, whether it's with, you know, flexibility with kids or disabilities or otherwise. But, yeah, it's a funny dance that tech is forced to dance when all these trends go back and forth. Yeah, the metaverse may be in Roblox, but it's not in Quest headsets right now. It's not the metaverse we want it to build. Well, on that note, thanks to Dave for coming on the show, especially sticking in and still coming after the Hard Fork thing.

1:17:05I appreciated him doing that. Yeah, send us out here, Ellis.

1:17:08Ellis:We're a new show, so please follow, like, subscribe everywhere you get podcasts. You can also find us in video via AccessPod on YouTube. If you like this episode, leave a five-star review or thumbs up, and please share it with a friend. You can find me at Hamburger on Twitter, and yes, I will continue to call it Twitter, and at Meaning.Company. You can find my newsletter at Sources.News. Access is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and is produced by Hooked Creators. Bye-bye.

1:17:45Ellis:Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI is moving fast across the enterprise, but without visibility, it's just chaos. ServiceNow turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI in one place. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. We all do it. You have a night for yourself, but don't like the sound of the silence. So you turn on the TV just for the ambience. It's a little trick that helps you feel like you've got company and aren't alone. And other insurers, well, they may make you feel alone. But when you switch to GEICO, you've got claims reps available around the clock.

1:18:21Ellis:So whenever you need, you'll have people around to help. And let's turn on the washing machine, just for good measure. Wow, isn't that soothing? It feels good to have support. It feels good to GEICO.