Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with David Baszucki (@DavidBaszucki), the founder and CEO of Roblox. 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.

Previously, David founded Knowledge Revolution, where he and his brother Greg created Interactive Physics, a leader in educational physics and mechanical-design-simulation software.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

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

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**Tim Ferriss: **David, so nice to see you. Thank you for taking the time. I’m excited to have this chat with you.

**David Baszucki: **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: **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: **So 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: **From a plumbing shop or a hardware store, that’s right.

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

**Tim Ferriss: **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: **No.

**Tim Ferriss: **We connected because we have a friend in common, Dominic D’Agostino, 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 invoked your name several times on the show including on The Random Show, and that’s how we 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: **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 student going off to school and 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 at 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, and there was a lot of demands I could see from afar it just seemed on him. The studies, the creativity, what a rush would be at a college like Berkeley and all of that.

And that was a time when he entered what I would call his first manic episode. We got some cryptic texts from him that were very alarming. We got some texts from some of his friends in his fraternity and dorm. I went to get him and he had entered what you would call a manic episode.

And for us, a manic episode is something that no parent has ever seen before, and is really something very surprising and weird and different. And he had entered this and what he had started on was really an eight or a nine-year journey with us over eight or nine years that involved some of the wildest stuff you could ever imagine. It involved him going to the hospital several times. It involved us not quite knowing how to really care for him. It involved trying to navigate the medical system. It involved going to Stanford and having him being locked up on the psych ward, and really started this journey that if we rounded out was only solved through ultimately getting him on a ketogenic diet.

Coincidentally, we ran into another CEO founder who said they got progress on their bipolar with a metabolic diet and a ketogenic diet, and that seemed like the craziest thing I had ever heard about. How is it possible after eight years and hospitalizations and very difficult times and complete disruption and I would say possibly concerned, would our son ever go back to school? Would he ever work? Would he ever integrate? We worked with Dr. Palmer and others and he tried a ketogenic diet, and literally within three weeks or four weeks, we saw progress that we had never seen with any drug or medication. Mind blown, really, and a miracle. And that was really the catalyst of starting our whole adventure down the ketogenic route.

Tim Ferriss: And if we flash forward then a bit to December of 2017, why was December so significant?

**David Baszucki: **We were now into a bit of a situation where our son had run away, had flushed all his meds, literally streaming on social media, streaming as he had run away. Had subsequently caught a bus, had made his way down to San Diego, had lived in, I think a lifeguard shack in San Diego. We had some monitoring of him. I knew he was full-blown manic at that time, and I tried my first try to come down and pluck him off the street with the help of some police and get him into a hospital.

Given the laws of our situation, I got to San Diego near some of our relatives, called in the cops, but he was pretty convincing. He said, “Hey, I’m free. I don’t want to go to the hospital.” I knew he was completely out of his mind and he ran away, and the police wouldn’t grab him, he just went running away from his dad. And so that was pretty scary.

Following that, we got a report that he had then hitchhiked to Los Angeles from San Diego. He had a phone and a laptop and that was it. And the communication started getting more sparse with him. In retrospect, it’s really scary because I think in retrospect, what I know now, I would’ve flown down there and hired 200 people, rented a hotel room and started searching all of Los Angeles, just go to every Starbucks in Los Angeles. Let’s find this guy. In the moment that I would say for one or two days, didn’t quite figure out what to do except we have a son who’s gone AWOL in Los Angeles.

This was a terrifying thing, a powerless kind of thing, here we were family with all of the resources in the world. And then by some miracle, he texted me from a Starbucks once again full-blown manic episode. And I was just able to work with him and to say, “Hey man, it’d be fun to buy us a latte together. You want to just chill out there for a couple hours? I’ll come down, we’ll buy a latte, it’ll be fun.”

And surprisingly. He said, “Sure, I’ll just chill out here.”

I’m like, “Oh, shit, he’s going to chill out there.” So flight, rental car, like SWAT team stuff.

I’m on the airplane, I’m sitting next to someone and they’re saying, “Hey, why are you going to L.A.?”

I said, “Oh, my son is AWOL with bipolar. I think I have an hour to get to him and to pick him up.”

So I pop into the rental car, just drive flying over there. 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.”

And so now I’m thinking, okay, I can’t call the cops because I’ve been through this before. I cannot lose this guy. So my son and I got into this, I’m saying, “Hey, we should go see your relatives in San Diego. That’d be fun.”

He’s like, “Yeah, that’s a good idea. Let’s go see the relatives. You don’t mind if I get some smokes, man, do you?”

I said, “No, man, we need some smokes. Let’s get some smokes.” So we buy cigs, we buy Diet Cokes, we get in the rental car, he’s just smoking, completely manic and we’re going to see a relative.

Now I’m driving to San Diego texting 30 people at the same time, texting my wife, texting his uncle who’s a psychiatrist in Carlsbad. And during this 60-minute drive, I’ve got his uncle lined up as a hot stop so, “Yo, hey, we should go see Uncle Alex.”

“Oh, that’s a great idea. Let’s go see Uncle Alex.”

So I’m able to get Uncle Alex warmed up, and so we come in hot to Uncle Alex who’s a psychiatrist, and yeah, let’s just grab a dinner with Uncle Al. Good, so we’re rolling. So then we’re hanging out, and then we got to figure out how do we get my son into a hospital without the cops coming and having him run away? If he runs away, what are we going to do? So he had had a lot of adventures on the street and his hands were really beat up. I don’t know if he was punching a concrete wall or what he was doing, but his hands were really beat up.

So Uncle Alex, who’s pretty savvy, says, “Matt, man, we should go out, get a good steak dinner, what do you think?”

And Matt, thank goodness said, “Oh yeah, I’m really hungry. Let’s get a big steak dinner.”

And then I look at his hands, I say, “Hey, Matt, man, your hands are pretty beat up. We should just stop and get those checked out on the way to the steak dinner. Just, we’ll pull into the hospital, check out your hands.”

And Matt’s like, “Cool, let’s go do it.”

Oh my gosh. We’re texting, we got the hospital lined up and we pull in and just go into the hospital. They know we’re coming, go into this waiting room, but now we’ve got 30 minutes to keep Matt together in this waiting room so he doesn’t run away. “Let’s go have a smoke outside. Let’s do all of this stuff.”

Finally, after what seems like a lifetime, the doctor comes in, “Yeah, we’re ready.” The doctor’s preflighted just like, “Oh yeah, let me see your hands.” And this doctor, I forget their name, but she was a genius. She’s just like, “Matt, it just seems like maybe you want to take a rest for a day or two, just get off the street.” And wow, that was huge.

**Tim Ferriss: **And he was open to it.

**David Baszucki: **Yeah.

**Tim Ferriss: **Wow, man. Yeah.

**David Baszucki: **And he could have ran out of there. I think that started the journey of some, what is called insight in some level of insight where a bipolar person has a small inkling that things are not quite right and they want to participate in treatment. And this thing called insight is this very valuable thing that when someone does not have a sliver of it, they will run, they will sleep outside, they will not participate in the journey. That’s what led to ultimately many drugs, many interventions, and finally us finding ketogenic therapy.

**Tim Ferriss: **Yeah, thank you for the context and the story. I actually read something that your wife wrote or shared on metabolicmind.org and did not know this particular episode, this chapter in your family’s history. And it struck me for a couple of different reasons and I won’t read it all, but if you’d indulge me for a second, I mean, I’ll just read a little portion of this, which complements what you already described, but this is from your wife.

“At 4 a.m. the Friday before Christmas, I lay curled up and crying on my bedroom floor, convinced my son was no longer alive.

“Matt, then 21, had been a star in elementary and high school, but he began experiencing insomnia and panic attacks. After a manic episode led to a hospitalization at age 19, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Two further hospitalizations and 10 different medications failed to provide stability.

“That December of 2017, escalating into mania, Matt had left home, cut off contact, and wandered the streets, eventually taking a bus from the Bay Area to Southern California. From his increasingly alarming Snapchat and Instagram posts, we knew he had no money, and that he’d slept one night behind a dumpster and another in a lifeguard tower. As dawn broke that Friday morning, his social media channels had gone silent and his three sisters hadn’t heard from him in 18 hours.”

This makes me quite emotional as well because I’ve had two or three friends basically follow this exact same pattern with bipolar, and I can only imagine the effect that would have on a family. And for people who also hear you mention metabolic psychiatry or ketogenic therapy or diet, and it might sound like some type of hand wavy panacea because they don’t understand perhaps some of the plausible mechanisms, what is actually happening? Why did this intervention help your son when so many other things had failed, or at least what is your best understanding of that?

**David Baszucki: **I want to take a step back, and your audience may be familiar with what a ketogenic diet is, but in the big picture, almost all of us live our lives day-to-day burning glucose, and we have monitors. Too much glucose can lead to insulin resistance and diabetes. And society I think is just learning about glucose and how it brings energy to the body.

Now, interestingly enough, the body has a second way of generating energy called ketones, and most people never touch their ketones. It’s a more primitive way of generating energy. It’s a way of generating energy that we all go into if we don’t eat for a day or two because there’s no more glucose, we go into ketosis. But it’s also a way of generating energy that people who live far up in the north and eat seal blubber all day long aren’t getting any glucose, they’re not getting any carbs. And so they eat that seal blubber and they go into this thing called ketosis.

It’s arguably something that is closer to the way we lived as primitive people than the way we live today. We arguably live today with more carbohydrates in our diet because about 10,000 years ago, we had this thing called the agricultural revolution and the agricultural revolution in this amazing thing. Humans figured out they could generate a lot of food that was support a lot of people. It was an amazing invention, but it was more carbs than what the traditional diet has. Being in ketosis comes from fasting or eating very low carbs and more fat than we would be used to. What happens when someone is in ketosis is you run on ketones, this alternate energy pathway, and you get very consistent energy and very clear energy, especially to your brain.

The thesis would be, I guess my thesis would be, there are a lot of people around, arguably interestingly enough, with bipolar people who have pretty big brains, people who are trying to process a lot, and if they’re not getting consistent energy to their brain, which could happen from glucose spike, glucose crash, glucose spike, glucose crash, 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. So keto, what we did with Matt and people have been exploring with keto diets for a long time for epilepsy. Also, I like to think when those Aboriginal people would run 300 miles in America a thousand years ago with a bag of pemmican, that was pretty keto food. That was high fat, low-carb food and allows people to go pretty far without crashing.

We put Matt on a keto diet and we worked with a dietician and Dr. Palmer, and this is a diet less than 20 grams of carbs per day, which is almost unfathomable for modern people, right? Because a quarter of a Coke probably has 20 grams of carbs. And also a diet that probably had more fat than protein, which is also something that we’re not used to because I think the last 50 to 100 years, we’ve migrated to less fats in our diet as well, somewhat. So we migrated Matt to what is called a ketogenic diet. And after 20 plus meds and treatments and all of it, we started and he started to see results from this diet, which was an absolute miracle.

**Tim Ferriss: **How do you make it as easy as possible to follow a ketogenic diet? And I say that as someone who’s spent probably upwards of a year in nutritional ketosis, and I always see the benefits, but I typically come off of it at some point because I find it difficult for compliance depending on travel and various things. But still, for instance, over the next month, I’ll probably spend two to three weeks in nutritional ketosis, and there are a lot of reasons to do that. People should also listen to Dominic D’Agostino or Chris Palmer, but activates anti-cancer pathways. It directly, quite aside from the anti-inflammatory effects and just the ability to starve certain types of cancerous cells of glucose, there’s so many upstream benefits. You develop this mitochondrial and metabolic machinery that has some durability if you’re in ketosis even for say four to six weeks, something like that. How do you make it as easy as possible?

**David Baszucki: **So this is, it’s hard, right? And another Matt story that we shared publicly is as we learned about ketosis and how you monitor your diet, and at this point Matt had been on eating primarily food that had been measured made by a cook. We know all of the ingredients so we could measure the carbs, the fat, and the protein. We went on a trip to Mexico as a family for a week, and we thought we had it right in the restaurant, but where we were wrong is possibly me, somewhere in the family, we forgot that avocados, even though they have a lot of fat in them, carry some carbs more than we expected. And so we were a couple of days into the Mexico trip, everything was cool. Matt was eating fish, olive oil, butter and some avocados. Those avocados had more carbs than we expected and nudged him out of this, for him, very strict ketone zone.

I think he arguably is good at a ketone level of two or 2.5. We weren’t measuring at the time, we didn’t have a ketone measuring device, and we can talk about that. And so all of a sudden here we are, day three or day four, and Matt’s starting to get some manic symptoms, more trouble sleeping, which is an early warning sign, a little more agitation and things are starting to get a bit edgy and we didn’t know what’s going on. And then we identified, oh my gosh, we’re a little off on the diet.

The next two days, Matt went to just literally small amounts of fish and butter, asking the chef, “Get more butter, more butter for my fish and more olive oil,” and he popped right back in and I just saw the correlation and how tight it was. So you’re exactly right. It’s very hard, especially if we’re going to restaurants or things like that. I am not as strict as Matt. I feel my life doesn’t quite depend on it, but I am also a huge advocate of some of the things you mentioned, sharpness of focus, just body weight control, consistency, energy in the afternoon, all of these good things that come from it. So when I go into a restaurant, the first thing that comes out in a restaurant is the big thing of bread. You have to push that aside, just get that out of my face.

You have to know how to order specifically. Yeah, I’ll take the burger without a bun and some extra mayo and maybe some extra butter and eat the burger with the mayo and the butter and maybe the lettuce and the tomato and all of that. But the bun and the fries are not fully keto aligned as well. Matt is even more strict. He’s gone pretty keto to the point of carnivore as well, which is very heavily animal type products. So I’d say it does take some practice, but I think once you get used to it and you can figure out how to maneuver in a restaurant, I think you’re in pretty good shape. The hardest thing for me would be, say we were to go to a wedding or something and you’re not fully controlling the menu and you’ve got all these friends around you and it’s all of this special food. Sometime in that case it’s kind of hard to do that unless you just don’t eat anything and sometimes you have to figure that out.

**Tim Ferriss: **And I’ll just speak personally for people who might be curious. I mean, what I’ve ultimately found easiest and Dominic, Dom has some good recommendations related to this because he’s spent a hell of a lot of time in nutritional ketosis, but basically two huge salads a day, intermittent fasting, so I just have two meals somewhere between 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. I have two huge salads, lots of olive oil, with a sliced ribeye on top of it, and it does the trick. You have to be a little careful, like you mentioned, in terms of protein fat ratios. If you consume a ton of protein at one sitting, you can knock yourself out because the liver, through gluconeogenesis, converts all those lovely amino acids or some of them right back into glucose.

**David Baszucki: **My son knows that and I figured that out as well. Protein is not a complete free lunch. You will pick up that glucose effect.

**Tim Ferriss: **Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Where have you landed in terms of measuring ketone levels? So for people who are wondering, I’ve used the Precision Xtra device, but then you end up having to do a million finger pricks, which is fine. Eventually you start to feel the level. I’m sure Matt, at this point, can tell when he’s at two millimolars or 2.5 millimolars, which is pretty high for people who are wondering, it’s actually pretty challenging for me to get there unless I’m fasting, so he must be very tight on the controls to get to two to 2.5. But once I hit, I know what it feels like on a Precision Xtra for me to get to 1.2, 1.3 millimolars. In terms of mental sharpness, I can feel the click over to that mode. What do you use for measurement now, or what would you recommend people use?

**David Baszucki: **Yeah, and we should come back to knowing what it feels like because I do feel, and this might sound a little wacky, I can either do an optimism simulation or a very minor, obviously with all due respect to people who are clinically depressed, a minor depression simulator by how far I go into ketosis or how far I glucose crash and I feel I can set both of those moods a little with my diet. Once again, not obviously the level of depression of people who truly suffer it, but touch on the edges of that.

So I, like you, initially tried some of the finger prick stuff and what’s interesting with fingerprint stuff is best practice would be twice a day check your ketones, kind of stuff. For many of your audience, they’ve probably tried CGM, which are continuous glucose monitors now, which are a complement to ketosis, and those are things where you just slap it on the back of your arm, hook it up to your mobile phone, and you get a graph of your glucose level for two weeks that you can look at. That’s a gentle early sign of ketosis if your glucose is just not spiking, but it’s not the full picture.

What has started coming out now, and it’s surprisingly not available in the United States, are continuous ketone monitors, CKMs, they’re available for sale in Canada. They’ll probably be approved in the next year in the US and, I’ve got to be honest, I’m in a smuggling ring bringing CKMs —

**Tim Ferriss: **“It fell off the back of a truck.”

**David Baszucki: **— into the United States.

**Tim Ferriss: **I might need to join that WhatsApp group.

**David Baszucki: **Yeah, I’ll send you a CKM and, just like a CGM, you can watch your ketones 24/7 throughout the day and then really see where they’re at. They’re very close to probably what you would assume, right? You’re probably one, 1.5. Matt’s two, 2.5.

I also find it hard to really pop up over in that one to 1.5 zone. I’ve got to really push it to get there, but there’s definitely a feeling, there is a feeling. For me the feeling is one of not irrational optimism, but a little bit of a calm optimism that we can do this and things are going to be okay. And I’m excited about challenges that, I would say when I’m glucose crashing, may seem completely untenable and challenges that seem completely untenable, 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 going to die. You can solve this thing. Let’s go do it. It’s going to be exciting to solve this challenge.” And so I can feel that feeling.

**Tim Ferriss: **Yeah, I’ll just mention a couple of other things that people might find interesting. Having done a lot of ketosis since 1998 or so, that’s when I first started. I was actually doing a weird, for some people weird, approach to it, a variant called the cyclical ketogenic diet because I was training in athletics, so I would do about 18 hours of, after a glycogen depletion workout, of carbohydrate loading so that you could take advantage of insulin and so on for packing on a little muscle while you’re doing the ketogenic diet.

But the point of that is a few things that I’ve seen repeatedly and it’s N of one, but you do see some of this reported in the literature as well. Number one, I need less sleep. I, actually on average, I would say spend two to three hours less time in bed and I wake up feeling fully refreshed. I wake up and I am awake versus waking up and needing 60 minutes to get up to speed. That is a clear benefit. A weird one that people shouldn’t screw around with too much, but my breath hold times double at least.

**David Baszucki: **Can I ask, because this scares the crap out of me? What’s your breath hold time?

**Tim Ferriss: **Oh, my breath hold time. If I did it right now, my breath hold time would probably be 45 seconds. I have a really compromised left lung from being born prematurely. I have something analogous to emphysema in my left lung, but when I did, I’ll give you two examples of breath holds. So one was after doing 10, and these are not breathing exercises that put me at risk of a shallow water blackout, but breathing exercises for 10 to 15 breaths along the lines of Wim Hof and then doing a breath hold on the exhale when at about three millimolars in terms of ketone or BHB concentration. That was like two minutes, 50 seconds. So I went from basically 45 seconds to two minutes 50 and had a friend right next to me who is a witness to this, and I’ve done it many times since.

I don’t think extended breath holds are great for your brain. I did another experiment when I was on day nine of a 10-day water fast and I was probably around five, I want to say four to five millimolars. I was really deep and there’s a point at which you could argue the really high concentrations are perhaps not great for you, but I was on day nine of a 10-day water fast and I did a hard shell hypobaric oxygen treatment where you can get up to 2.4 atmospheres, 2.5 atmospheres of pressure. And I was doing that for other reasons, but I thought to myself, well, let’s see what we could do in this type of environment. So I did a bunch of, let’s just call it Wim Hof breathing, breath hold on an exhale and I stopped at nine minutes because I was just terrified myself. I thought I was going to cause an aneurysm or something. Felt totally fine.

**David Baszucki: **So heavy ketosis, arguably a little lower metabolic rate. If you’ve just gone nine or 10 days without food, you’re probably a little skinnier, like less stuffed.

**Tim Ferriss: **A little bit.

**David Baszucki: **And then you’re saying in that hyperbaric chamber you pushed two or two and a half times as much oxygen into your body? Damn.

**Tim Ferriss: **Yeah, nine minutes. And that was without feeling any impulse to breathe. 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 and call nine minutes a good breath hold. Yeah.

**David Baszucki: **Can I ask what you think your average sleep is per night?

**Tim Ferriss: **Oh, my sleep is terrible. It’s really fractured. Sleep for my entire life has been a problem. So I would say that generally I’m spending probably nine hours in bed. I have a latency, so the onset to sleep I would say, and I wear an Oura ring, so I’m able to track some of this. You could debate maybe the accuracy of the algorithms and so on, but around, yeah — there you go. Showing me an aura rig. So I would say 47 minutes to an hour plus for me to get to sleep, that would be an average night. It could be much longer. I probably wake up two to three times per night. And overall, if you look at my sleep score, like the absolute maximum would be around 90. It’s much more frequently. This is on the kind of aura rating scale, but 90 would be an absolutely best night of sleep for me.

It is more typically in this 60 to 70 range. So sleep is a real problem more than almost anything else. I mean there are a few things that contribute to dramatically improved sleep quality. One is zero caffeine, not a little caffeine, zero caffeine, even at very small quantities, I find that my sleep is interrupted. That is a pretty tough pill to swallow or not swallow for me, to be frank. But in addition to exercise and all the levers you would expect, sun exposure, a huge one for me for improving sleep quality, if I get at least 45 minutes of sun exposure. But ketosis just does a lot of heavy lifting on the sleep side of things. And it’s not possible for me to isolate variables here, but I have clinically diagnosed OCD and a lot of ruminative looping. When I am in ketosis, the volume on that goes from a 10 to a two.

So although I haven’t tracked it with an Oura ring, I would suspect my sleep latency is dramatically improved, right? I’m falling asleep a lot faster because my brain isn’t basically saying, oh, finally I have been waiting all day to tell you so much. It’s not that kind of situation quite as much. And then there’s a lot of other things going on, and I would say to folks, not to devalue therapy because I have therapists, I engage with therapy, but if you have some of these fundamental physiological issues, let’s just say with fuel utilization, talk therapy in and of itself is probably not going to fix those things.

And whether that’s looking at, for instance, I have three relatives with Alzheimer’s disease right now, and I’ve done some experiments with providing them with exogenous ketones, so supplemental liquid ketones in this case that they can drink. And if I give them 25 to 30 milliliters of BHB bonded to 1,3-butanediol, there are some real concerns around 1,3-butanediol. Just to make it clear, I think there could be some real liver toxicity from extended use, but putting that aside for the moment, 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 answer, one word answers.

**David Baszucki: **Totally.

**Tim Ferriss: **It’s incredibly noticeable. And for instance, I slept like dog shit last night. Not to get too technical. But I just had a ketone salt mix prior to this conversation and it’s like I can feel it now. I can tell when the light switches come on. And there’s a reason Alzheimer’s is sometimes referred to as type three diabetes. And furthermore, I mean I don’t want to dox this scientist, you might know who I’m talking to, but I don’t think he’s been public about this, where there’s also — there might be some explanatory power in various types of infections as catalysts for certain types of what we would term psychiatric disorders.

And if your glucose metabolism is compromised in some way— And people listening, we’re not going to talk about ketosis the whole time, but honestly, if this is the only thing you take from this conversation, I think for a lot of you it will be well worth it — I’ve had Lyme disease twice and there’s a bunch of ridiculous woo-woo nonsense around Lyme disease and quite a few infectious diseases. Not everyone has Lyme disease. You might just be depressed. There’s a lot of overlap with symptoms for various syndromes. But growing up on Long Island, I had two absolutely verified cases of Lyme disease and other coinfections. Then you take a bunch of antibiotics and you do kill that infection despite what people might say. Nonetheless, you might experience what people call long Lyme disease, like long and what, in retrospect, I’ve realized that a lot of my longer duration symptoms, I think were probably neuro-inflammation, probably microglia, but who knows?

There could be other aspects to it. What solved my symptoms, that came after Lyme disease, was three weeks of strict ketosis, very strict ketosis. And I formed a bunch of pet theories or hypotheses as to why that might be the case because this was 10 years ago, but only recently — well, let me back up. Had at least four, maybe five friends or their wives who had actual proper documented cases of Lyme, a hundred percent success rate of getting rid of their cognitive symptoms and joint pain with strict ketosis. I’m not saying it’s a cure all, but it’s four for four or five for five at this point.

**David Baszucki: **That’s amazing.

**Tim Ferriss: **Yeah, long-winded way of saying, it’s such an accessible intervention, obviously do it with doctor supervision and neither you or I play a doctor on the internet. But man, it’s right there. It’s right there in front of you and accessible.

**David Baszucki: **I feel the same thing about sleep. And I feel 10 years ago I used to fear insomnia because that could mean a bad day, but I’ve never correlated this with ketosis. But I now know I can have three nights of what might be considered bad sleep, but I’m not as afraid of it. And now if I wake up at 2:00 a.m. I just listen to some interesting thing I want to listen to, a book or a podcast or something, and I fall back to sleep and I actually feel it’s just like a free learning period rather than something to be afraid of. And I no longer have those days, maybe 10 or 15 years ago where I’d just wake up and just go, it’s going to be a terrible day. I’m exhausted.

And then on the talk therapy thing, the way I sometimes think about this is, it’s kind of interesting that we first go to talk therapy rather than what I would call mechanical therapy. Mechanical therapy is what’s up with the machinery in your brain? Your brain is a machine. And talk therapy, with all due respect, in many cases, very, very valuable. But in many cases, if the machinery is not functioning, not getting enough energy, has a core at the molecular level thing going on, talk therapy is not going to do anything. And so I think that the physiological mechanical should always be the first place to go and in many cases, boom, that can take care of quite a bit.

**Tim Ferriss: **Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I would actually go further because there have been many periods in my life where I’ve, I don’t want to say ignored, but for periods of time, developed a blind spot related to the mechanical therapy. Looking at examining the engine and oil levels and so on, instead of just trying to improve my driving technique.

And I would go further and say that there are times when, and keeping in mind people, please, I do talk therapy regularly, so I’m not knocking it. I view it as necessary but not sufficient. It can actually put you into a precarious position because if you’re doing a lot of talk therapy but making no progress, you can develop almost a learned helplessness and the self-flagellating can get worse where you’re like, well, wait a second, I’m working with this great therapist. They’re giving me all the tools. Why am I of such a fucking failure? I thought I was so smart. Why can’t I figure this out?

And you can end up in this very dangerous, in some cases, 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. Or you at least need that base level of physiological support before you can begin to do some of the higher level functioning and reorienting.

Let’s shift gears. You mentioned listening. This is going to sound like it’s out of left field, but it’s sitting right in front of me. So I might as well ask, this is actually from Lifehacker back in the day. Lifehacker.com. And I want you to tell me if this is still true. “I tend to work well,” this is quoting you, “whenever I’m listening to pure ambient noise, like those you’d find on the Atmospheric Calm playlist on Spotify. It’s my go-to playlist if I need a quick boost in creativity or productivity.” Do you still have any playlists that you listen to of that type?

**David Baszucki: **I still listen to Atmospheric Calm on Spotify. I am unable to function with anything other than ambient noise in the background. And so ambient means no lyrics, no words, no people saying stuff. For me, if I want some chill music, it’s got to be spa music, ambient music. I can’t get distracted by that.

**Tim Ferriss: **All right, I’m going to try that playlist because you and I are the same in that way. If there are lyrics, forget about it. It’s just generally not going to work for me.

Let’s talk about Roblox. So there are a million different entry points here. The most obvious one would be to say, David, tell me the genesis story of Roblox. And I do want to hear the genesis story, but I might want to start with one that’s also sitting right in front of me. And maybe we could just start with this. This is under the heading of the future. Why don’t you give people an overview of what Roblox is for those people who have no idea whatsoever? And then the future I have here procedurally generated real-time worlds, aka dreaming in real time, that’s just too attractive for me not to leap into. So what is Roblox? And you could give some stats and figures if that helps give people an idea of the scale and scope of this. And then could you elaborate on the future as I teed it up?

**David Baszucki: **So hey, the out of the box big picture thing here is humans are just compelled to try to figure out ways to connect and communicate. And we didn’t used to have language and then we figured out language and we could sit around the campfire and communicate and tell stories. And then we tried to communicate at a distance and we had smoke signals or semaphores, and then we figured out writing and the mail system and we had the Pony Express and all of that, but we still wanted to communicate more at a distance. And then we had the telegraph system and then we had the telephone system and we use that a lot. And then we have text. And then in the midst of COVID, all of a sudden video, what we’re doing right now got to be more. And it’s just this core human thing of wanting to connect with people both real time and whatever.

And technically we’re not quite done. Technically, there’s going to be more. And it’s not necessarily dystopian. It could arguably very positive, whether it’s the holodeck we’ve seen on Star Trek or some of those things where maybe instead of a video call, I’m hanging out with my dad and we’re walking around ancient Rome together even though he’s in Carmel and I’m here. Or maybe he feels like he’s right in my office together. And so behind all of Roblox is what I feel is this unstoppable wave of technology that is going to happen. And we have graciously landed in this opportunity to usher it in, initially coming from what seems like a gaming platform, like people playing together, but arguably a platform that, if it’s done well and if it’s done safely and with civility and with scale, can be a very important, not just play, but working platform, communication platform, lonely kid with cancer in the hospital connection platform, lonely kid who’s having a hard time finding their people and finding them digitally platform and maybe even a way to experience music or political rallies even.

So the good news is, it’s good to be in a company with just a big thing happening behind it. The way Roblox presents today is you could think of it as a 3D gaming play platform with about 120 million people on it every day where all of the games, all of the creations, are made by people on the platform, whether it’s a 12-year-old hobbyist, whether it’s a team of 50 people making 10 million dollars a year, where it’s everything in between.

And where, through these user created experiences, about three percent of all the gaming in the world is now starting to happen on Roblox. And gaming is a pretty big market. What’s really beautiful about it is that we see emergent games like you would expect with user generated things where maybe we have a traditional view of what games are. But on Roblox, a top game is Dress to Impress, like a fashion game where you pick clothes out for five minutes and you compete in a fashion show or, what was recently hot, Grow a Garden, where your garden is always growing in the background and you’re tuning it and you’re trying to make it better.

So it’s really a fascinating, interesting journey. I think it started with a combination of great people and just a big vision. It’s an enormous responsibility because there’s probably nine billion hours of people on our platform every month. And at peak times there’s over 40 million people.

And from day one, we’ve built this as a platform for all ages. So we have nine-year olds on the platform. All of their communication is filtered. They’re not able to share images, but they are able to go play hide and go seek. And we put enormous effort on safety and civility with all these things. And we actually, I think have done something very lucky, is 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 the infrastructure around that rather than denying that. So it’s a really fun company to run, it’s in a really big interesting market. I think we’re going to see people doing virtual 3D work on the platform.

**Tim Ferriss: **What do you mean by 3D work? What would be an example of that?

**David Baszucki: **I just think as, over time, Roblox gets more and more photorealistic and more real-time rather than having a video call. What’s interesting about a video call with 20 people is we see 20 windows and only one or two people can talk at the same time because it gets all confusing. But in a 3D Roblox world, we’re all in the same space and we kind of hear us all at the same time, just like the real world. So I think over time some types of video calls will get replaced with 3D calls. We’ll see music concerts. If you’re not live, you’ll be there in a 3D holodeck type version with your friends dancing and seeing everything around you.

And I do think we’ll ultimately see political rallies where, in addition to the stadium of a hundred thousand people within the rules and the laws of the state where that political rally may be occurring, we may see both a video version, a physical version, and a 3D version where you can be there with your friends and go to that. So I really do think we’re at the start of just used to be the phone and now video is pretty big. And someday 3D is going to be pretty big too.

**Tim Ferriss: **Yeah.

I can’t remember. Alan Key? I might be getting the attribution wrong.

**David Baszucki: **Alan Kay?

**Tim Ferriss: **Kay. Alan Kay. Is that “The best way to predict the future is to create it”?

**David Baszucki: **I think the future, in many ways, we sometimes don’t have the hubris to feel many things are inevitable. And so, one other way to predict the future I think is many things are just inevitable. There are enough smart people around that the wheel was inevitable and one could take credit. I invented the wheel, but that wheel was probably going to get invented by thousands of different people anyways. And I think we have a little bit of the same vision at Roblox. We are working on something that is inevitable. We are participating in building it, but I don’t think we would lay claim to being the inventors of it.

**Tim Ferriss: **Although I’m fascinated by the Incan Empire, it seems like they never landed on the wheel idea. It’s like what they were able to accomplish without the wheels is totally bananas. But that’s — go figure.

**David Baszucki: **Yeah, that is bananas. That is. But then again, if they would’ve survived, they might’ve come across it.

**Tim Ferriss: **For sure. Maybe they just ran out of runway. So let me ask you, since a lot of entrepreneurs are listening to this, and I’m sure even if they have not played Roblox, they have heard of Roblox and the numbers you’re providing our mind-boggling numbers in terms of the breadth and size of Roblox and where it’s going. You mentioned the creator community, and I’ve got some numbers in front of me, like Roblox creators earned more than one billion dollars in the past year, and this, in a sense, open development community seems to be key to growth. How early on did you figure that out? Did you try to do things internally for a while and then prototype it and then pour gasoline on it? Or was that just from the very first sort of nascent stages of this product of the company, part of the plan?

**David Baszucki: **I believe one has to always be innovating in a company like this. And part of building a company like Roblox is those innovations have to be happening year after year. One almost needs a system