On Friday, the Hard Fork team published our interview with Roblox CEO David Baszucki. In the days since, it has become the most-discussed interview we’ve done in three years on the show. Listeners who wrote in to us said they were shocked to hear the leader of a platform with 151.5 million monthly users, most of them minors, express frustration and annoyance at being asked about the company’s history of failures related to child safety. Journalists described the interview as “bizarre,” “unhinged,” and a “car crash.”
And a case can be made that it was all of those things — even if Baszucki, in the studio afterwards and later on X, insisted to us that he had had a good time. In the moment, though, Baszucki’s dismissive attitude toward discussing child safety struck me as something worse: familiar.
Baszucki, after all, is not the first CEO to have insisted to me that a platform’s problems are smaller than I am making them out to be. Nor is he the first to blame the platform’s enormous scale, or to try to change the subject. (He is the first tech CEO to suggest to me that maybe there should be prediction markets in video games for children, but that’s another story.)
What people found noteworthy about our interview, I think, was the fresh evidence that our most successful tech CEOs really do think and talk this way. Given a chance to display empathy for the victims of crimes his platform enabled, or to convey regret about historical safety lapses, or even just to gesture at some sense of responsibility for the hundreds of millions of children who in various ways are depending on him, the CEO throws up his hands and asks: how long are you guys going to be going on about all this stuff?
Biological and psychological variance is an Internet part of humanity. When you say this I’m immediately reminded of fascist ideals and efforts to ‘normalize’ and ‘conformize’ people, and not just from this side of the spectrum. So I think this is a somewhat dangerous argument to make.
At large, it’s human nature to elevate these kinds of people, that’s why they end up in such high positions. I’m not sure we can change that. And that’s where regulations and requirements by law come in, as well as public record and press, to keep them in check.
I get the sentiment and frustration in your comment though.
I wholeheartedly agree. It does sound dangerously similar. Ultimately, the main difference would be that I don’t want to hurt people(also to be frank it’s straight up impossible and imaginary to change people like this. lol). I just want them to be compassionate. I think ultimately, they need empathy. Maybe if i phrased it that way, it would sound less messed up. But yeah, they need to have empathy and a guilty conscience. If we could make everyone have that, it would be a much better place to live.
Governments don’t seem to want to do enough about them. They’re willing to let millions of people die because of billionaires. It just seems absurdly cruel and we just have to kind of sit and watch or get trampled on too.