David Baszucki shares a personal story about his son, Matthew, with his family's permission. As a parent, he had high hopes for his son, who was successful in academics and athletics, as he started his freshman year at UC Berkeley. While rushing a fraternity and studying computer science, Matthew experienced his first manic episode. The family received alarming texts, and when David went to get him, he found his son in a state he describes as surprising, weird, and different. This marked the beginning of an eight or nine-year journey filled with hospitalizations, navigating the medical system, and uncertainty about his son's future.

After years of struggle, a fellow CEO mentioned they had seen progress with bipolar disorder using a ketogenic diet. David was skeptical, but they decided to try it. He was astonished by the results.

Literally within three weeks or four weeks, we saw progress that we had never seen with any drug or medication. You know, mind blown, really, and a miracle. And that was really the catalyst of starting our whole adventure down the ketogenic route.

David recounts a particularly terrifying incident from December 2017. His son had run away, flushed his medications, and was streaming on social media. He ended up in a lifeguard shack in San Diego. David's first attempt to get him help failed when his son, despite being manic, convinced the police he was fine and ran away. Later, he hitchhiked to Los Angeles, and communication became sparse. The family felt powerless despite having resources. By a miracle, his son texted him from a Starbucks in LA. David flew down immediately in what he calls a "SWAT team"-like operation. He found his son looking like a street person, with only a laptop and a cell phone in a plastic bag.

I get to this Starbucks and there is my son. Just a street person of your son. Nothing except a plastic Safeway bag with his laptop and a cell phone and a charger that he's sleeping in a Starbucks with. And I'm just like, oh my gosh.

Knowing he couldn't call the police again, David carefully convinced his son to get in the car with him to visit relatives in San Diego. During the drive, he coordinated with his wife and his son's uncle, who is a psychiatrist. They successfully got him to the uncle's house, where they began to figure out the next step of getting him into a hospital without him running away again.

David shares a pivotal story about his son, Matt. He describes convincing Matt to go to the hospital under the pretense of checking his injured hands after a manic episode. After a tense 30-minute wait, a doctor skillfully handled the situation.

She's just like, 'You know, Matt, this seems like maybe you want to take a rest for a day or two. Just get off the street.'

Matt's willingness to accept this suggestion marked the beginning of his journey toward treatment. David identifies this as a moment of "insight." He defines insight as a small inkling a person with bipolar disorder has that things are not quite right, making them willing to participate in their own treatment. This valuable sliver of self-awareness is critical; without it, individuals often refuse help. This first step ultimately led Matt through various interventions and eventually to ketogenic therapy.

The discussion opens with a deeply personal story from David Baszucki's wife about their son, Matt's, struggle with bipolar disorder. It describes a terrifying period when Matt, after multiple hospitalizations and trying ten different medications, left home and was wandering the streets of Southern California. The family feared for his life when he went silent on social media for 18 hours. This harrowing experience highlights the failure of conventional treatments and sets the stage for a different kind of intervention: metabolic psychiatry.

David explains the rationale behind using a ketogenic diet for mental health. Most people run on glucose for energy, which can lead to spikes and crashes. The body has a second, more primitive energy system that uses ketones, which are produced when fasting or eating a very low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet. This state, called ketosis, is arguably closer to how early humans were fueled before the agricultural revolution introduced a high-carb diet. The central idea is that some people, particularly those with bipolar disorder, may have brains that struggle with inconsistent energy delivery from glucose.

One might argue that what people see in bipolar is actually just a little bit of a symptom of not having enough brain energy to their brain.

A ketogenic diet provides the brain with a very consistent and clear energy source. After more than 20 medications and treatments failed, Matt was put on a strict ketogenic diet with less than 20 grams of carbs per day. The results were described as an "absolute miracle."

However, maintaining such a diet is challenging due to its strict requirements. David shared a story from a family trip to Mexico where they thought they were managing Matt's diet correctly. A few days in, Matt began showing manic symptoms again, like trouble sleeping and agitation. They discovered that avocados, while high in fat, had more carbohydrates than they realized, which had pushed him out of his therapeutic ketone zone. The solution was drastic but effective. For the next two days, Matt ate only small amounts of fish with large amounts of butter and olive oil. He quickly stabilized, demonstrating the tight correlation between his diet and his mental state.

Living this way requires practice and knowledge, especially when eating out. It involves simple but disciplined choices, like pushing away the bread basket and ordering a burger without the bun and fries, opting for extra mayo or butter instead. Matt's diet is even stricter, leaning towards a carnivore style. The host adds his own strategy for maintaining ketosis: intermittent fasting with two large salads topped with olive oil and a sliced ribeye during his eating window.

When following a ketogenic diet, one must be careful about protein to fat ratios. Consuming a large amount of protein in a single sitting can knock you out of ketosis. This happens because the liver, through a process called gluconeogenesis, converts some of the amino acids from the protein back into glucose. Both the speaker and his son have experienced this, learning that protein is not a 'complete free lunch' on this diet due to its potential glucose effect.

While it is possible to eventually learn to feel your ketone levels, new technology offers more precise measurement. Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs) provide an early sign of ketosis by showing stable blood sugar, but the full picture comes from Continuous Ketone Monitors (CKMs). David Baszucki notes that CKMs, though not yet available in the US, can be acquired from Canada and allow for 24/7 tracking, similar to a CGM.

Beyond measurement, the subjective experience of ketosis is significant. David describes how his diet can influence his mood, allowing him to simulate different mental states.

I can either do an optimism simulation or a very minor... depression simulator by how far I go into ketosis or how far I glucose crash. I feel I can set both of those moods a little with my diet.

For him, ketosis brings a feeling of calm optimism, making challenges that might seem impossible during a 'glucose crash' feel solvable and even exciting. This state transforms daunting problems into manageable tasks.

This is impossible to solve. In a moderate level of ketosis, it's like, hey, man, it's chill. You've got food, you've got shelter. You're not gonna die. You can solve this thing. Let's go do it. It's gonna be exciting to solve this challenge.

David also shared other long-term effects he has observed since he started practicing ketosis in 1998. One major benefit is needing less sleep. He reports needing two to three fewer hours in bed and waking up feeling fully refreshed and immediately alert. Another surprising effect is a dramatic increase in his breath-hold times, which at least double. Despite having a compromised lung, he recounted holding his breath for 2 minutes and 50 seconds while in ketosis. In a more extreme experiment on day nine of a water fast, inside a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, he held his breath for nine minutes and only stopped because he grew scared, not from an impulse to breathe.

I stopped at nine minutes because I was terrified myself. I thought I was gonna cause an aneurysm or something. Felt totally fine. So I stopped because I was like, you know what? I've never gone anywhere close to this long without breathing. And I'm not getting paid for this. So let me just stop.

Sleep is a significant problem for some people. One speaker described his sleep as terrible and fractured, spending nine hours in bed but taking up to an hour to fall asleep and waking multiple times. He identified several factors that dramatically improve his sleep quality: zero caffeine, at least 45 minutes of sun exposure, and particularly, ketosis.

He has clinically diagnosed OCD and experiences a lot of ruminative looping. When he is in ketosis, the intensity of these thoughts is significantly reduced.

When I am in ketosis, the volume on that goes from a 10 to a 2.

This quieting of the mind also helps him fall asleep much faster. He emphasizes that if you have fundamental physiological issues, like problems with fuel utilization, talk therapy alone is unlikely to fix them. He shares an example involving three relatives with Alzheimer's disease. After giving them a drink with exogenous ketones, their cognitive function improves noticeably within 30 minutes.

Give this to a relative with Alzheimer's and within 20 to 30 minutes, longer sentences, verbal acuity noticeably, very noticeably improved. They're telling stories instead of giving one word answers.

He also shares his experience with Lyme disease. After two verified cases, he suffered from long-term symptoms which he believes were related to neuroinflammation. A three-week period of strict ketosis resolved these symptoms. He has since recommended this to four or five friends with documented Lyme disease, and all of them have successfully eliminated their cognitive and joint pain symptoms.

Another speaker builds on this, suggesting a focus on what he calls "mechanical therapy" before talk therapy. This means first addressing the physiological machinery of the brain. He believes if the machinery is not functioning correctly, talk therapy will not be effective. The main speaker agrees, adding that relying solely on talk therapy in such cases can be precarious. It can lead to learned helplessness and self-blame when progress isn't made.

If you're doing a lot of talk therapy but making no progress, you can develop almost a learned helplessness... You can end up in this very dangerous situation where you feel like you cannot fix things because you're unable to use the talk therapy to fix whatever the underlying issue is. Whereas in reality it could be a purely physiological issue.

Roblox is part of the long history of humans finding new ways to connect and communicate. This evolution began with language around a campfire, progressed through writing, the mail system, the telegraph, the telephone, and video calls. Technology will continue this trend towards more immersive connection. For example, instead of a video call, you might one day virtually walk through ancient Rome with a family member who is in a different city.

Behind Roblox is this unstoppable wave of technology. While it may initially seem like a gaming platform, it's evolving into something more. David Baszucki sees it as a platform for work, communication, and connection. It can help a lonely child with cancer connect with others, or help someone find their community digitally. It could even be a venue for music or political rallies.

Today, Roblox is a 3D platform with about 120 million daily users, representing about 3% of all global gaming. All of the experiences on the platform are created by its users. These creators range from 12-year-old hobbyists to teams of 50 people earning millions of dollars a year. This user-generated model leads to emergent and non-traditional games. Popular experiences include "Dress to Impress," a fashion competition game, and "Grow a Garden," where users passively cultivate a virtual garden.

With 9 billion hours of engagement per month and over 40 million concurrent users at peak times, the company has an enormous responsibility for safety and civility. From its inception, Roblox has been built for all ages, including children under 13.

Unlike almost every other social platform, you name it, it's 13 and up. We've accepted that we have young people on the platform from day one and really built infrastructure around that rather than denying that.

This approach involves filtering communications and not allowing image sharing for its youngest users, ensuring they can safely play games like hide and go seek.

The future will likely involve people doing virtual 3D work. As platforms like Roblox become more photorealistic and real-time, they will offer a compelling alternative to traditional video calls. While a video call with 20 people shows 20 separate windows and makes it difficult for more than one person to speak, a 3D world allows everyone to occupy the same space and hear each other simultaneously, much like in the real world. This could lead to some video calls being replaced by 3D calls.

Beyond work, this technology could host music concerts, where attendees experience a "3D holodeck type version" with their friends. It could also extend to political rallies, which might have a physical, video, and a 3D version for people to attend virtually with their friends. Just as video calls have become common after phone calls, 3D interaction is poised to be the next significant medium.

Reflecting on this, one perspective is that the best way to predict the future is to create it. However, David Baszucki suggests another view: many future developments are simply inevitable. He explains that with enough smart people working on problems, certain inventions like the wheel were bound to happen, regardless of who gets the credit. He sees Roblox in a similar light, stating they are working on something that feels inevitable and are participating in building it, rather than claiming to be its sole inventors. The hosts note the Incan empire as a counterexample, an advanced civilization that never developed the wheel, though David suggests they might have if they had more time.

Roblox's open development community is a key driver of its growth, with creators earning over $1 billion in the past year. The platform has always been based on user-generated content, but its economic model has evolved significantly. Continuous innovation is essential for a company like Roblox.

In the beginning, the platform ran on the excitement of creation itself. The motivation for young developers was not financial but social. David Baszucki notes the power of peer validation:

Even the ego burst of having three friends play a game can really motivate a young person to get into computer science.

The initial economic system was a more primitive club membership model, similar to older virtual worlds for young people. The company reached a pivotal moment where user and engagement growth were strong, but revenue was not keeping pace. This disparity signaled the need for a change in their economic approach.

The early membership model at Roblox was a $5 a month subscription. This gave users cosmetic items, like skins for their website, and more virtual space to build. However, this was a dangerous revenue model because it placed a barrier on building and creating, which should be unlimited and free. The model was becoming stale.

When faced with a revenue problem, the team first tried to diagnose it forensically, looking for small things they might have broken. This led to a period of trying to fix the issue with minor tweaks.

We need to forensically diagnose this. Let's look at the 50 things. What did we change? What did we break? Oh, we can't find anything we broke. Okay, let's spend three more months making a list of all the small little tweaks we can do to improve revenue... and then in the back of our heads, we had been saying, there's one thing that's really difficult, which is we need a digital economy virtual currency.

The team realized that sometimes the intuitive, big-picture, and difficult solution is the right one. They decided to build a digital economy with a virtual currency, Robux. This would allow players to buy Robux and spend them in any game. More importantly, it empowered creators to sell virtual items for Robux, trusting them to invent monetization methods unique to their games. For example, a creator of a pizza delivery game could sell a scooter for faster deliveries, or a creator of a bird simulator could sell the ability to transform into an eagle more quickly.

The inspiration for Roblox's digital economy, Robux, came directly from the real-world economy. David Baszucki explains the thinking was to create a microcosm of how things work in reality: people have currency, they buy things, and creators are incentivized to make what people want. This led to a major strategic decision. After spending three months trying to fix various smaller issues, the team decided to go all-in on building a digital economy.

The second we committed, like, forget all these fixes, forget all of these little things. We're going all in at what we think is the big strategic fix to this problem. It was very relaxing and fun.

With a team of about 20 people, it was a significant risk that could have wasted three months of work. However, the conviction was that a properly built economy would scale with the platform's growth, allowing the team to get back to making Roblox fun instead of constantly trying to fix economic issues. The goal was to create a direct correlation between user engagement and revenue, essentially making revenue a constant multiple of hours played.

The feature was complex, requiring a digital currency, purchasing systems, in-game sales tools for creators, a cash-out system, and discovery mechanisms. A key component was what David called a "secret afterburner." For the first time, creators could imagine making a living on Roblox. This shifted them from being hobbyists to potential full-time developers, which the team believed would lead to higher-quality games.

If I could make five grand a month with my Roblox game, I might just work on that full time rather than an hour a day. So we felt there would be a secret afterburner here that people would work harder on their Roblox games.

The launch was an immediate success. Within four hours, the team knew it was going to work. The adoption rate was explosive. Of the top 100 creators, 22 had already integrated Robux features. Users were buying and spending Robux almost instantly. This outcome was a clear example of what David calls "doing the hard thing and taking the long view." The team had previously avoided this large project because of its complexity, but once they accepted it was the necessary strategic move, everything else fell into place.

A common issue in digital economies is the rise of copycat creations. Using the popular Roblox game "Grow a Garden" as an example, a question was raised about how the platform handles clones and protects original creators. If a game becomes very successful, many imitators often appear, which can confuse users and disincentivize creators from investing time in new ideas.

David Baszucki explained that from a legal standpoint, typical intellectual property and copyright protections exist on Roblox just as they would on any other platform. This applies to things like the specific name "Grow a Garden" or unique avatars. However, the situation is more complex when it comes to the style of play.

A form of gameplay has traditionally not been protected. And so I'm not a lawyer, so I might not be giving the exact right thing, but if I made an experience on Roblox called 'water your plants a lot and create an amazing garden' and it kind of works like 'grow a garden' that's a little hard to protect.

Instead of blocking imitators, Roblox focuses on managing discovery. The platform recognizes that creators of similar games often try to draft on the success of a popular experience. To counter this, Roblox uses an intelligent search system. When a user searches for a game, the system can differentiate between a game with millions of players and a copy with only a handful. It then prioritizes showing the authentic, popular game in the search results. While Roblox wouldn't block someone from creating a new garden-themed game, it ensures the original is easy to find.

One of the best decisions made at Roblox was to prioritize creator revenue over company profits. When managing the company's finances, after covering operational and employment costs, there is a choice for where the remaining cash goes. It can either be returned to the developers or be taken as profit for the company.

Time and time again I think we've leaned a bit on the direction of let's move back more to the creator community rather than being a ridiculously profitable company.

This philosophy extends to product design. The team managing the in-game economy has a primary goal of making Roblox engaging, interesting, and fun. While their work does generate revenue, that is not the main objective. User engagement is prioritized over simply making money, a decision David Baszucki believes has been a good one.

At Roblox, simply maximizing revenue is not the primary goal. For any new feature, the economy team must ensure it is neutral to positive on fun. A feature that confuses people into spending more money but leaves them less happy would be considered a failure against their metrics. The objective is to simultaneously improve fun, user enjoyment, and revenue.

This philosophy is guided by the company's core mission. David Baszucki clarifies that the goal isn't just to build the largest company possible. Instead, the mission provides crucial guardrails.

Our mission is to connect a billion users with optimism and civility. We would take the billion daily users if the average user on our platform might come away with a higher level of civility than if they hadn't even played. So we are actually trying to teach civility at the same time we're growing the company.

This long-term perspective also extends to developers. The company believes that running efficiently and allowing more money to flow to developers is a better strategy than trying to be a hyper-profitable company. Keeping developers happy is essential for the long-term health of the entire ecosystem.

Missteps often happen from not taking the long view and trying to do too much instead of doing less, but better. David Baszucki shares a classic mistake from Roblox's past. About five to eight years ago, they spent a lot of time building platform-level features for clans, points, and rankings. This was an error because those features are best suited for individual games, not the entire platform. It represented a confusion between being a gaming business and a platform business. The platform should trust developers to build those kinds of features for their specific games. Ultimately, all of that work was thrown away.

In contrast, a major success was betting on mobile. At a time when most people believed phone games were limited to 2D puzzle games, Roblox invested in making its 3D immersive experiences work on phones. David felt this was inevitable. People were already watching movies on their phones, and game technology was approaching movie-like quality. This was a pivotal moment where about 90% of the company disagreed, seeing the effort as a potential distraction. However, seeing a simple game like 'Survive the Natural Disaster' running on an old iPhone provided the confirmation that it would work. Today, phones are the biggest platform for Roblox.

This idea of inevitability is a powerful tool for making decisions. The host shared a similar experience from 2008 when he met Shopify's CEO, Toby. He decided to get involved after realizing the growth of e-commerce was inevitable. By asking simple questions—will there be more e-commerce in 10 years? More phones? More broadband connectivity?—the answer was clearly yes. This made it seem inevitable that a company in that space would succeed. While the team's quality is also critical, training yourself to spot these inevitable trends can help narrow down which ventures to bet on.

David Baszucki is a fan of niche content on Roblox that caters to superfans. He points to a full airline company simulation as a prime example. In this simulation, players can take on various roles, creating an incredibly detailed and immersive experience.

It's a simulation where you go to the airport, you buy tickets, you wait in the lounge, you get on the plane with everyone else, you take your seat, you go on a flight for an hour, you get served with a flight attendant and everyone plays a role. You're either a passenger, you're a flight attendant, you're a pilot, you're an executive in the airline.

This level of role-playing, where there is a place for everyone from a first-class passenger to a baggage handler, is what he finds most compelling. David also enjoys model railroading games, appreciating how hobbies that were once physical, like building train sets in basements, can find a new digital life on a platform like Roblox.

When asked about the total number of games on the platform, David explains the figure is almost meaningless because it's in the millions. He suggests more meaningful metrics revolve around the creator economy: the number of people making over a million dollars, the thousands who can make a living, the tens or hundreds of thousands who make any money at all, and the millions who create things just to share with friends.

Roblox is actively working to keep kids on its platform because it provides a safer, more controlled environment. This may seem counterintuitive, but the platform's design helps protect children from common internet dangers. Features like filtered text, monitoring for critical harms, and the absence of image or video sharing are crucial. David Baszucki contrasts this with other software that children might install on their phones, which often allow unfiltered communication and image sharing. These open platforms can lead to terrible situations, such as blackmail or attempts to meet in the real world.

For parents, Roblox offers controls to limit a child's communication to only approved contacts. However, the company accepts the broader responsibility of protecting all children, especially those who may not be closely supervised by their parents. They aim to build a platform that is as safe as possible for a ten-year-old who gets a phone and starts exploring different apps.

Looking ahead, Roblox is heavily investing in AI to enhance safety. One major initiative is age estimation technology.

By the end of this year, using AI, using age estimation, using the camera on everyone's phone, we're going to know pretty well the age of everyone on our platform. And in addition to filtering all text on our platform and in addition to monitoring for critical harms, we're going to start clustering people by ages. Just so unless you happen to know that person who's a far age away, we're not going to let you communicate at all.

This age-clustering system will be layered on top of existing communication and content filters, with the goal of creating an exceptionally safe system for users.

Roblox is a shop of hundreds of different AI models, all built in-house. These models handle text and voice safety, game recommendations, and even language translation. The company is now debuting more futuristic applications, such as 3D creation using AI. This allows people unfamiliar with 3D tools to create objects just by describing them.

Looking further ahead, the vision is for AI to create an evolving game in real-time as users walk around, similar to a dream world or the holodeck from Star Trek. David Baszucki believes this kind of technology is inevitable. He compares it to past futuristic ideas that once seemed crazy but are now commonplace.

A long time ago, if we read a comic book, we would see Dick Tracy with a TV set on his watch and we would just say, that's completely crazy. We will never see a TV setup. And now we have a smart watch... If we have a crazy vision of some future technology, there's a good chance we're going to figure out how to build it someday.

The pace of AI development often makes the impossible possible very quickly. Not long ago, AI expert Andrej Karpathy considered the idea of generating an image from a text description to be impossible, yet it is now a reality. This rapid progress suggests that seemingly futuristic concepts like a virtual Rome or a shared living room experience with lightweight hardware might be just around the corner.

When asked for a timeline, David offers several predictions. An AI-generated Hollywood movie could be just three to five years away. He also envisions a future where short-form video is replaced by a continuous, dream-like video feed. A significant technical challenge Roblox is working on is a photorealistic music concert with 100,000 people in a single simulated stadium. While he doesn't predict a date, he believes it will happen, along with glasses featuring full AR overlays.

When a company goes from private to public, more voices get involved. This raises the question of how to preserve the original values and constraints. For example, Roblox recently released a beta feature called Roblox Moments, a short-form video format similar to TikTok. This creates a potential conflict with the platform's educational, STEM-focused games that encourage critical thinking. A concern is that a TikTok-like feature creates a battle for attention, and the short-form video format might win out over the more educational content. This leads to the question of how Roblox will approach product development moving forward to balance these different types of engagement.

There is a fundamental separation in user intention between the desire to connect and the desire to consume stories. Consuming content like watching a movie or scrolling through short-form video puts someone in a different emotional headspace than actively wanting to hang out with people and do things together. This enduring desire for people to be with friends and meet new ones provides a strong foundation for building a connection-focused platform.

The feature Roblox Moments was created to help with content discovery. One of the best ways for users to find cool things to do is by seeing what their friends or other people are doing and jumping in. This serves as a gentle way to help people find more interesting experiences on the platform.

Beyond social connection, Roblox has had a significant, if indirect, educational impact. David estimates that millions of people who have entered fields like computer science, graphic arts, or economics were first inspired by their experiences on the platform.

Being a public company CEO involves navigating the balance between long-term and short-term decision-making. The ability to make bigger, more optimistic decisions hinges on whether the company's machinery is functioning smoothly. David Baszucki draws a parallel to metabolic states. When the machinery is running properly, decisions can be more long-term and strategic, as the company is not in a state of crisis. This is similar to being in ketosis. However, if the company is in a 'fight or flight' mode, decisions tend to become more tactical and focused on immediate emergencies, much like a person experiencing a 'glucose crash'. The primary challenge is to maintain the right balance that allows for consistent long-term strategic thinking.

David Baszucki maintains a disciplined health and wellness routine focused on daily movement, sun exposure, and a specific diet. He aims for moderate ketosis, keeps alcohol consumption very low, and practices time-restricted eating, typically within a 1 PM to 6 PM window. His diet is low-carb, consisting of a fair amount of meat, eggs, and butter, balanced with lettuce and other vegetables. For exercise, his non-negotiable activities are CrossFit three times a week and hiking with a weighted vest three or four times a week.

While he uses an Oura ring to track biometrics, he intentionally avoids looking at the data more than once a month. This prevents him from getting 'freaked out' by daily fluctuations in his sleep score. During his monthly review, he scans for long-term trends like his projected stress score, cardio age, lowest sleeping heart rate, and HRV.

David's biggest recommendation for others is to wear a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to dial in their diet. He found it incredibly useful himself and has implemented wellness initiatives at Roblox based on this principle. The company provides a CGM to every employee and labels all office snacks on two axes: whether it's a 'whole food' and whether it provides 'good energy,' which is a metric similar to being keto-friendly. This approach has had a significant impact on employees.

I get all kinds of slacks from engineers saying oh my gosh, my life's been changed. I've been wearing the CGM. We used to eat just giant plates of white rice every dinner. We've read a few books and I'm not eating that. I lost 30 pounds and I feel so sharp and that's amazing.

When asked about influential books, David Baszucki points to the original book on game theory, "Finite and Infinite Games" by James P. Carse. A board member gave him the book, and it resonated deeply. It helped him frame his thinking around fun, play, and the long-term vision for Roblox, which he sees as an infinite game, not a short one.

Interestingly, David admits he has never been a fan of business books. Instead, the books that captivated him in his youth were stories of exploration and adventure.

The books I was obsessed with in my youth were the books about Magellan and Captain Cook and Mutiny on the Bounty and Joshua Slocum and just all of these crazy explorers, Amundsen and Scott and all of that stuff. For some reason, that was my go-to category.

These tales of explorers forging into the unknown and dealing with catastrophe at every turn may be more helpful for entrepreneurs than typical business books. Business books often analyze success with the benefit of complete information in hindsight, whereas stories of exploration offer lessons in navigating uncertainty and preparing for the long game, as exemplified by the contrasting expeditions of Amundsen and Scott to the South Pole.