#834: David Baszucki, Co-Founder of Roblox — The Path to 150M+ Daily Users, Critical Business Decisions, Ketogenic Therapy for Brain Health, Daily Routines, The Roblox Economy, and More

**Tim Ferriss** (0:00)
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show. I'm going to keep this intro short and sweet. My guest today is David Baszucki. He is the founder and CEO of Roblox. Many of you, especially if you have kids, will know of Roblox. It is gigantic. Time named Roblox one of the 100 most influential companies, and it has been recognized by Fast Company for innovation on their most innovative companies and most innovative companies in gaming lists. The accolades and so on go on and on and on. Many of you may not realize that Roblox was started in 2004, same year as Facebook, and Roblox iterated and iterated and iterated its way to where it is today. It is such an amazing story. Previously, David founded Knowledge Revolution where he and his brother Greg created Interactive Physics, a leader in educational physics and mechanical design simulation software. A lot of their observations of how kids were using this and what they were excited about led directly into the development of Roblox. There are a few links. Roblox, roblox.com. You can find David Baszucki at x.com/davidbaszucki, B-A-S-Z-U-C-K-I, YouTube, David Baszucki, Roblox and baszuckigroup.com, which we'll talk about. Without further ado, please enjoy a wide ranging conversation with the one and only David Baszucki.
David, so nice to see you. Thank you for taking the time. I'm excited to have this chat with you.

**David Baszucki** (1:53)
Hey, Tim, it's great to be on the show. And when we started chatting before I came on, I had read one of your books literally 10 or 15 years ago, and it got me inspired to do kettlebells, and I did some this morning.

**Tim Ferriss** (2:08)
And I saw photos of your beautiful kettlebell collection. Could you, just because now I can't not take the bait, how did you jazz up your kettlebells that you ended up sending me a photograph of?

**David Baszucki** (2:23)
Just to frame it, I'm pretty sure in your book you made your own travel portable kettlebell with some pipes that you could screw together, which I think...

**Tim Ferriss** (2:32)
From a plumbing shop or a hardware store. That's right.

**David Baszucki** (2:35)
I have five kettlebells, and we use them a lot at my gym and have fun. They're all made of iron, so we took them over to a auto place where they make low riders and do custom paint jobs of sparkle, cherry, red, sparkle, orange, sparkle, green. They're all these really beautiful automotive sparkle colors, and it just makes them a lot more fun.

**Tim Ferriss** (3:01)
And a lot of folks, perhaps, who are coming into this podcast will assume that we connected because of the amazing business and innovation story of Roblox, but that's not actually how we connected.

**David Baszucki** (3:14)
No.

**Tim Ferriss** (3:15)
We connected because we have a friend in common, Dominic D'Agostino, who some listeners may recognize as effectively Mr. Ketone, master of all things exogenous ketone related, and an amazing scientist in his own right on a number of different levels. And I had also had Chris Palmer of Harvard on the show a while back, related to something called metabolic psychiatry. And your name and your Baszucki group kept coming up over and over again. And that is the thread that I pulled on, which ultimately connected the two of us. And I think I had mentioned your name. I'd sort of invoked your name several times on the show, including on The Random Show. And that's how he got connected. So maybe as a way of just setting the table for a little bit of the metabolic health discussion and everybody listening, we will get to Roblox and all of that, of course. But this, I think, is something that will probably strike a chord with a lot of people listening on a lot of dimensions. So as a way of setting the table, perhaps you could describe early in your son's freshman year at college, what happened.

**David Baszucki** (4:36)
Yeah, thanks, Tim. And I'm going to share that my son and my family are comfortable sharing this story. And so I feel I have some flexibility. But you could imagine, as a parent of a high school student who had just started at UC Berkeley, all of the hopes and dreams of a parent of a new student going off to school. Yeah, a student that's been very successful in math and science and academics and athletics and how much hope a parent has for that student going off to school. And like any other student, my son Matthew had his freshman year at Berkeley, it brought back memories of when I had started school. He hit it pretty hard. He was in computer science. He was rushing a fraternity.