How to Build a Metaverse, Part 4: Why Build a World? – The Journal.

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Speaker 1: Hey, it’s Ryan, co-host of The Journal. Today we’re bringing you the final episode of How to Build a Metaverse. It’s our series about one of the oldest metaverses out there, Second Life, and the company that created it called Linden Lab. If you haven’t already, check out episodes one through three first, they’re already in our feed. Last week, Second Life’s booming growth hit serious headwinds. In 2007, it seemed like the metaverse was just too slow, too confusing, and too weird for most users. But a lot has changed since 2007. These days, companies that are building new virtual worlds, betting that now is the time for the metaverse’s big moment. Producer Annie Minoff visited one of those new metaverses. Here she is.

Speaker 2: So it’s about noon on Wednesday, I am sitting on the floor of my bedroom with my VR headset on. One afternoon last June, I strapped a $400 headset to my face, and visited a place called Horizon Worlds.

Automated: Hello and welcome to Horizon. It’s a place where you can meet up with your friends and make new ones while exploring virtual worlds.

Speaker 2: Horizon Worlds was built by the company formerly known as Facebook, now called Meta. Last year, Meta poured billions of dollars into becoming a metaverse company. It’s a long term play, and not a whole lot’s been released yet. But one thing you can try now is Horizon Worlds. It’s an app, and the idea might sound familiar. It’s a virtual world where you can hang out, meet people, and build. I wanted to know what the new metaverse might look like, and Horizon Worlds was the obvious pick. So four months after I first joined Second Life, I was back at square one, logging in, creating an avatar, trying to figure out how to work a new world. I’m inside. I’m inside what I think is my house.
When I materialize inside Horizon Worlds, I’m in an apartment. I later learned that this is my personal space, it’s a new feature. The apartment is big with floor to ceiling windows. There’s a balcony with plants. It looks like a tech office. I’ve got fancy kind of modern furniture, some mud lamps, kind of like a West Elm kind of aesthetic.
In Second Life, my avatar had been a figure on a screen, but in Horizon Worlds, thanks to my VR headset, I feel like I’m actually in this space seeing through my avatar’s eyes, I just wish what I was seeing was more interesting. Compared to Second Life, the graphics in Horizon Worlds are simple and blocky. I am too. I kind of look like a Pixar character, or if you’ve ever made a Bitmoji. Meta says that better graphics are coming.
But at least one thing about Meta’s world is exactly like Second Life. I’m stuck. I am stuck. It is still frustratingly difficult to use. On my first trip to Horizons, I spend 11 minutes trapped on my virtual apartment balcony with my avatar mysteriously unable to move. SOS. And when I do finally free myself. Yes, there’s yet another question to answer. What exactly am I supposed to do here?
I visited Meta’s Horizon Worlds a few times. I checked out some of the things that my fellow users had built, including a somewhat blocky replica of the White House. I tried playing with some other avatars in an arcade area. Can you carry the flag to the goal in time? Do you understand the point of this game? A lot of them seem to be kids. This, what do I do here question? It never went away. It’s also not new. In fact, it’s remained essentially unchanged since Second Life’s heyday, despite all the fancy technology we have now. We have a metaverse, now what is it for?
From The Journal, this is How To Build a Metaverse. I’m Annie Minoff. In the final episode in our series, we try to answer the key question about the metaverse. This is episode four, why build a world? Long before Meta launched Horizon Worlds, Second Life was facing a problem that all new metaverse makers will also face, how to get and keep new users. By 2008, people were still flooding into Second Life. The problem was not enough of them were sticking around, and pretty soon, the platform’s growth was stalling.

Speaker 3: It became obvious that the growth rate was slowing, and that there was a upper limit it seemed, to how many people were going to join us.

Speaker 2: That’s Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab’s founder, and then CEO.

Speaker 3: We started to see that it wasn’t for everybody. I guess that’s the way I’d put it. We started to see that, in fact, it wasn’t something that everyone worldwide would find utility in. And so we began to struggle as one does in a startup with the question of what that meant, what we were missing, what we still needed to build.

Speaker 2: For Philip, it was a tough time. As growth slowed, he was under pressure from Linden Lab’s investors to get the engines of growth revving up again. And he told me, he struggled to be the kind of CEO that people expected to be running what was by now a 250-person company.

Speaker 3: I got it in my head that I wasn’t the right person for the job, that I was kind of this mad scientist character, and that the company and the community and everybody would be better served by having somebody else running the company.

Speaker 2: Philip had a vision for a digital future, and for years he’d helped other people see it too. Investors, Linden Lab employees, Second Life users. He was the leader with the quote, “follow me to the desert eyes.” But now the guy who’d been so sure about what the future looked like was less sure of himself. Philip stepped down as CEO in 2008. It was now up to Linden Lab’s new leadership team to find the thing, the must have feature that would make the metaverse relevant for more people. And what could be more relevant than work?

Speaker 4: The use case that they were hoping to prove out was that people could have meetings.

Speaker 2: That’s Wagner James Au. We met James back in episode two when he was blogging for Linden Lab. In 2008, James was still covering the company, this time as an independent journalist. He says Linden Lab’s new bid for relevance was a business product launch in partnership with a content development company called Rivers Run Red. It was called Immersive Workspaces. The idea of bringing corporate offices to the metaverse had been gestating since the Philip days. Fortune 500 companies were already in the virtual world, maybe they’d want to work there too.

Speaker 4: So instead of having a Skype meeting at the time, or Zoom now, you could all have an avatar and go in, and you could meet in a virtual office space or a virtual convention center.

Speaker 2: Sounds very familiar.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 2: This bet that the metaverse will be a great place to have meetings is precisely the bet that some big tech companies are making right now. That includes Meta. In addition to Horizon Worlds, Meta also has its version of immersive workspaces, the company calls it Horizon Workrooms. There, you and your avatar colleagues can gather around a virtual conference table, and sketch out ideas on a virtual world blackboard. But for Linden Lab, the metaverse for a business idea proved to be a tough sell. And to James, the journalist, it seemed like the whole project just took Second Life further and further away from what it was actually good at.

Speaker 4: I was really kind of annoyed that a lot of these corporate spaces that would try to do these meetings, they just recreate what you do in real life, they made office spaces. You could make anything. Why are you making a corporate office park? Why don’t you have your corporate meeting on Mars, or in an orbiting space station or on a castle with dragons flying overhead? And that could be part of the experience. But instead, people were like, well, no, let’s make a whole corporate campus. And yeah, that was very, I thought, hilarious, and also just sort of an offensive misuse of the platform.

Speaker 2: James told me that it seemed like Linden Lab was falling into the trap of trying to replicate reality, which ironically was something Second Life had been lampooned for on TV.

Speaker 4: If you remember the TV show, The Office, they had Dwight Schrute in Second Life.

Speaker 5: I signed up for Second Life about a year ago. Back then, my life was so great that I literally wanted a second one. And my Second Life, I was also a paper salesman and I was also named Dwight. Absolutely everything was the same, except I could fly.

Speaker 4: And to me, it felt Linden Lab had kind of followed Dwight Schrute in trying to recreate kind of real world experiences for companies to have boring conversations in boring offices, and this was the result.

Speaker 2: And it seemed like customers agreed.

Speaker 4: It just was not gaining traction, and so at that point, they laid off like 30% of the staff.

Speaker 2: The layoff happened in 2010. By this point, Linden Lab had grown to over 300 employees. In a single day, about a third of them were gone. Linden Lab employees had always had a unique relationship with the platform they worked on. Many of them were in-world all the time, holding meetings, planning events, even officiating at Second Life weddings. Every winter, Linden Lab employees and Second Life users would have a massive all out virtual snowball fight, and when those employees got laid off, it didn’t take long before the news trickled into the virtual world. Here’s Yas Graham, one of the Linden Lab employees who survived the cuts.

Speaker 6: One famous resident, I can’t remember his name, created an in-world cemetery, a graveyard where he created gravestones for all of the Lindens who had been laid off. And towards the end of that day, I went to visit that graveyard and saw tombstones for a whole load of my friends and colleagues or ex-colleagues, and there were loads of residents around there talking to us, being sympathetic and supportive. It was incredibly moving and sad. One friend of mine told me that evening, he’d had to explain to his wife why he was sitting in front of his computer and sobbing with a picture of a graveyard on the screen.

Speaker 2: The layoff was a comedown for Linden Lab, and more than that, it was bloated, the idea that the metaverse would be taking over the world anytime soon. It was a swift reversal. Just a few years earlier, Philip had been on stage giving talks, predicting that the metaverse would soon overtake the web as we knew it. At one point, he said he believed his grandchildren would come to see reality itself as a kind of museum, a kind of historical reenactment of how people used to live.

Speaker 3: You’re right, I did say that. I said that reality would become a kind of historical recreation where you could go and explore what the world was like before the virtual world. I think that was a bit ambitious to say.

Speaker 2: Is that a future that you wanted when you would talk about that?

Speaker 3: I wanted it then, and I’m not so sure that I want it now. But yes, I certainly wanted it then. I felt that leaving the world behind altogether was a good thing, and that we would be able to have all of the gravity, and intimacy, and vulnerability of reality, of real interaction between people, of being in a place together. I imagine that we would be able to create all of that with technology kind of over the wire. I think today, that it might be harder than I thought.

Speaker 2: Philip is still a believer in virtual worlds, and he has a new company, High Fidelity, which recently invested in Linden Lab. He’s also rejoined the company as an advisor. But today, he’s less sure technology will ever truly capture the nuances of human interaction, all that stuff that makes reality feels so, well, real.

Speaker 3: We are not brains in vats. I think that’s the thing I’ve learned since my techno utopian 30s. We cannot be removed from our bodies, and from the world that our bodies are in, right? There is a connection there that can’t be severed, and as I’ve grown and learned, I’ve become more amazed by what a magical thing that is and how hard it is to just reproduce it.

Speaker 2: Second Life might not have lived up to Philip’s grandest visions for it. In the end, it was not for everyone, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t for anyone. In fact, what’s so interesting to me about Second Life isn’t that it failed to become the next big platform to dominate our lives, a lot of tech companies fail at that. It’s how long Second Life’s version of the metaverse has endured. If you dropped into Second Life during its peak, chances were there were about 60,000 other avatars in there with you. Today, it’s less, but not much less. More like 40,000, about the number of people you can fit in a mid-size college football stadium. People are still here, and meeting those users and talking to them about why? Help drive home for me, just what a metaverse might be good for. That’s after the break. All right. Oh, there you are. Wow. You have wings.

Speaker 7: Yeah. They’re kind of my trademark, that and my glasses.

Speaker 2: A few months ago, I met an avatar named Ishtar Angel. We sat on lawn chairs around a fire pit. It was a starry cricket filled night in Second Life. Ishtar was wearing one of her standard looks. She was a cat woman with long blonde hair, leopard print skin, and dragonfly wings. The bats slowly open and closed as we talked.

Speaker 7: My avatar is Ishtar Angel Michelin or Micheline. I came up with myself about 15 years, nine months ago, or 5,774 days.

Speaker 2: Wow. When Ishtar first joined Second Life, she didn’t look like this. Her first avatar was male, and based loosely on what she looked like then. Tell me about that first avatar. What did he look like?

Speaker 7: More of with a typical Hispanic type of mustache, black hair, brown eyes, kind of short. Of course, I did make him look not any heavyset like I was at the time.

Speaker 2: But she says something felt off.

Speaker 7: I started realizing with the guy character, this doesn’t feel right. I don’t know what’s going on here, and I made it look a lot too much like myself in real life too, and I think that was partly what started to give me slow ideas at the time that, hey, there’s something different here.

Speaker 2: Seeing that male avatar, it bothered her.

Speaker 7: Just seeing that weird reflection of self, just pushing against me like, no, this is not right. No, no, and then like, okay, let’s try this. See if I still feel it.

Speaker 2: Trying this meant changing her avatar’s gender. Ishtar’s new avatar was female, and her look wasn’t nearly as elaborate as it is today. Ishtar describes it as a “bad attempt at an 80s goth,” but it didn’t matter. Ishtar says, playing as a woman, it just felt different.

Speaker 7: Playing as a male self, it just always felt like something was wrong, not fully there. But then when I got to playing through a female self, it’s like all of that weirdness that I was feeling before just was gone and disappeared.

Speaker 2: And playing that female avatar over months, then years. Ishtar had a realization.

Speaker 7: It’s like the dam broke, and I was like, holy shit, I am transgender. I am bisexual. And then I was just cursing to myself, what the hell? Why didn’t I figure this out to begin with? What the hell? What the hell. And just having all of that just rushing out at you, and I was like shit, why didn’t I realize this?

Speaker 2: Key to this realization was a group of people Ishtar had met in Second Life. They were with the Transgender Resource Center, a community group that meets in-world to talk, get information about being trans and support each other. In Second Life, Ishtar had people who she could talk to about the questions that she had, people who were going through similar things themselves, and she felt safe being herself.
In this virtual world, she could have a female avatar wear makeup, eye catching clothing, no one would bother her about it. At home in Amarillo, Texas, she wasn’t so sure. But little by little, the changes that she was making in Second Life started bleeding into real life.

Speaker 7: In real, I think I was slowly making changes of wearing female clothing, but then of course, the more safer way to try to do that at the time is to wearing undergarments and stuff like that.

Speaker 2: But you felt different.

Speaker 7: Oh, yeah. I would felt like actually more real as myself.

Speaker 2: It took time, but today, Ishtar feels comfortable wearing women’s jeans, women’s tops. She started taking hormones. She’s even started volunteering with a trans support group in real life. And a year and a half ago, she took a major step to embrace her new identity.

Speaker 7: I figured like, okay, you can actually change your name, why not change the whole thing? You don’t need to have that last bit of dead weight holding you down anymore.

Speaker 2: For years, she played in Second Life under a name that she chose, Ishtar. Now she chose her own name in First Life too, Petra and Aura. Do you think you would’ve had the confidence transition in real life if you hadn’t done it in Second Life first?

Speaker 7: Honestly, I don’t think so, because not having that experience to be able to just actually try something different, being able to actually have a spot that you can try things and not have anybody give you that backlash or grief, it’s one of the most freeing aspects there can be.

Speaker 2: For Petra, Second Life was a place to play with identity, to mold it and shape it into something that fit. When people talk about use cases for the metaverse, they tend to talk about the things that we already do in the real world, going to meetings or concerts for example. Going shopping in the same stores we already shop at in real life. But what made Second Life valuable for Petra wasn’t that it replicated the real world, it’s that it didn’t. Here, she was free to construct her own version of reality, one that in some ways felt more real, more authentic to her.
It’s probably too early to say whether new metaverses will allow for this kind of self-discovery, but I think back to Meta’s Horizon Worlds, where my apartment looked like an apartment, and people looked like people. No one I saw there had dragonfly wings or leopard print skin. Unlike in Second Life, there were no magical bean stalk stretching into the sky, and it’s that stuff. The weird stuff that I’ve come to think of is Second Life strength. It’s what lets you know as soon as you enter this world that the old rules don’t apply, and to use Petra’s term, that’s freeing. I met a lot of people in Second Life who face challenges in their first lives. Second Life gave them a place to rewrite their stories, like Sassy.

Speaker 8: Second Life is a game for most people. For me, it’s not exactly a game, it’s a second life.

Speaker 2: Sassy Blackwood is an avatar. She has flowing blonde hair, and when we met recently on her private island, she was wearing tight Capri pants and stiletto heels, no foot pain in Second Life.

Speaker 8: Well, actually, I should take you just on a little tour of the island.

Speaker 2: Yeah, that’d be great.

Speaker 8: Let’s go this way.

Speaker 2: Sassy’s island is the kind of place you might build if money and zoning codes were no object. Not only is there a magnificent house, there are also carnival rides, a private fishing pier, and a huge enclosure for Sassy’s turtle. Is this like a pet?

Speaker 8: Yes, mm-hmm. Hi turtle.

Speaker 2: But mid tour, reality briefly interrupts.

Speaker 8: Oh, hang on. You’re ready for what? Just a minute.

Speaker 2: In real life, Sassy is Christine Farrell. She lives in Wisconsin with her mother who has Parkinson’s. Christine is her primary caregiver. She handles meals, doctor’s appointments, and as her mom is now reminding her snack breaks.

Speaker 8: She has her 3:00 popsicle, it’s a Outshine bar, so it’s all fruit.

Speaker 2: That sounds nice.

Speaker 9: Thank you.

Speaker 8: You’re welcome, enjoy. She’s watching game shows.

Speaker 2: Christine has a lot of responsibilities, but Sassy.

Speaker 8: Sassy was my fun part. Okay. Sassy was like just the total, let’s go have fun. I don’t care where we’re going. Yeah, you want to go to the nude beach? Sure, let’s go. I mean, I was out to have fun, until I met Kramer and everything changed.

Speaker 2: Kramer is another avatar, a buff guy with a motorcycle and a man bun. He and Sassy met in Second Life at a party. Christine says they hit it off immediately.

Speaker 8: He was polite, and when he first IMed me, it wasn’t with some hokey sentence like, you have a beautiful avatar or whatever, those pickup lines that you don’t want to hear.

Speaker 2: The two of them started hanging out. They’d go dancing in Second Life or play dice games together, and they started sharing details about their first lives too. Christine learned that in real life, Kramer was Paul Kramer, a trucker in his 50s. Christine liked him, but she was wary. At the time, she told me her marriage had fallen apart. She was struggling with depression.

Speaker 8: And I actually tried to push him away.

Speaker 2: Why?

Speaker 8: Because I didn’t want another relationship like the one I was getting out of.

Speaker 2: Christine pushed, but Kramer stuck around. What was the moment where you kind of realized, I really care about this person?

Speaker 8: When he got down on one knee and proposed to me in Second Life, and he was incredibly serious about it. He wanted me to know that this was going to be a serious relationship, just not a Second Life thing, that he was interested in a real life thing as well, and I was just flabbergasted. I was like, “Are you kidding?” I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t believe it.

Speaker 2: Sassy and Kramer got married in Second Life. She showed me the pictures. Sassy’s wearing a floor length gown, embroidered with lace. Kramer is in a navy suit with shaggy movie star hair. It was about a year after that, that the real Kramer came out to visit Christine. It was a short trip, just three days. He met Christine’s mom. They had dinner. Christine made pork chops. It was a little bit awkward at first.

Speaker 8: And then it just seemed to click. It was like I still… When he went home, I was still pinching myself.

Speaker 2: Wow. I’m curious about the difference between when you’re together in real life versus Second Life. Are there ways in which it’s better being together in Second Life, or worse being together in Second Life? How are those different?

Speaker 8: It’s not exactly a difference. Second Life is just an extension of the fact that we can’t spend all our time in real life together because he’s a trucker and I’m a caregiver, and there’s just no way we can do that. But here, we can spend a couple of hours being what we’d like to be.

Speaker 2: Sometimes being what they’d like to be means building up their island together. Other times, they drag race, they share a love of cars. But often spending time together in Second Life means role-playing parenting. Should we go into the kids’ room if-

Speaker 8: We should?

Speaker 2: Okay. All right.

Speaker 8: Baby Brie is still sleeping, but the other two are up and having way too much fun.

Speaker 2: We head up to the nursery. The sound of the front porch wind chimes follows us up the stairs. This is where Sassy and Kramer’s three kids are the baby, Brie and two toddlers, Darla and Cason. The kids are essentially digital dolls, but with the added benefit of programming. Christine and Paul bought them from a Second Life based company called Zooby. The kids can crawl, speak, cry, and they’re cute. A little girl in blonde pigtails wanders up to me.

Speaker 8: Darla is going to say hello to you.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 10: Hello.

Speaker 2: Hi.

Speaker 10: Hey.

Speaker 2: Are you controlling that?

Speaker 8: Yes.

Speaker 2: Zooby offers an experience where avatars can simulate being pregnant. For Christine, who has a son in real life, it’s all familiar. The avatar’s belly grows, their body changes. She tells me that Sassy was pregnant with Brie, her most recent kid for a full nine months. Why did you two want to do it? Why is that something that he wanted to do?

Speaker 8: Because he’s never had children and he’s never been married, and I think he would’ve made an excellent father in real life. I mean, knowing him and even how he pays all the little attention to these kids, who are not real. Okay. They’re just something we “play with,” but the little things and the… he would’ve made a wonderful father, a wonderful father. And I think if I were still at an age where we could have babies, I think we might have had one.

Speaker 2: I think about a sitting room that we passed through on our way up to the nursery. The room’s walls were covered with pictures of Sassy and Kramer, and their Second Life family. There were pictures of the kids at the playground, on a boat, in a hot air balloon. Pictures of Darla at a firework show. Pictures of Darla and Cason dressed up for Halloween. It was a whole room papered with memories that Christine and Paul will never have in real life, but that they can have here.
What would you say to someone who’s listening to this and thinking… This, meaning the experience you’ve had being in a relationship in Second Life, and being a parent and a mother in Second Life? If someone’s listening and thinking, this is strange, this is too strange for me. What would you say to them?

Speaker 8: Oh, well, for some people it’s going to be too strange, and they’ll never understand it. My Second Life husband and real life boyfriend has never and will never be a parent, so this is his opportunity to do something as close to being a parent as he possibly can. Yes, it’s not real. It’s as real as you make it. It’s real as you want it to be.

Speaker 2: It’s a way to live out kind of, I don’t want to say a fantasy, but it’s a way to live out a dreams.

Speaker 8: It’s a way to live out some of your dreams. If you had a dream of doing something, you can do it here. If you don’t feel like life is giving you something that makes you a little more complete, this helps complete some of the experiences. It’s not going to give you the total experience, but some of that excitement is still there, because it’s the excitement of being able to do it at all.

Speaker 2: Philip and Linden Lab’s dream had been to create a world where you could live a Second Life, the promise was right there in the name. And that’s been true for Christine. It’s true for Petra, for a lot of people who I met in-world. And I think that gives us a pretty good clue about what a metaverse might actually be good for. It’s this place where you can build the world that you want, not replicate the old one. The people I met in Second Life built lives in the metaverse for all kinds of reasons. Some users told me they just found it easier to connect in Second Life.
The social anxiety that they felt in real life melted away in the digital world. Some found a community in Second Life that they weren’t able to find in the smaller towns and cities where they lived. Some people just liked building stuff, but not everyone wants or needs a life in the metaverse. Even Christine told me she’s not sure she’ll be in Second Life forever. Do you see yourself having a Second Life in a year, in five years?

Speaker 8: A year, five years, maybe, in 10 years, no.

Speaker 2: Why not?

Speaker 8: I think that when Paul and I can actually spend more time together, we’ll spend less time here. We do plan on living together when the time is right. And I plan on spending time with him on the truck. I can be on the truck with him for an entire month at a time. I don’t know if that’s what we’re going to do, but Second Life won’t be the all important place for us to meet because we’ll already be together.

Speaker 2: I’ve been thinking about whether I’ll return to the metaverse after this series is over, and I think I probably won’t be back. Not to Second Life and not to Meta’s Horizon Worlds, which if you ask me, has a lot of the same problems, but none of the charm. I just don’t have enough reason to be in Second Life right now. Reality has been feeling pretty rich lately. I adopted a dog. I’ve been pretty busy making this podcast. First life is just about all I can handle, but I like knowing that I have the option. The metaverse is this thing I can slip into if I ever find myself wanting to tweak my reality, or just be someone else for a while. I keep thinking about this moment from my tour of Sassy’s island.

Speaker 8: Children love this, because this area over here is a place where we come with the kids.

Speaker 2: Sassy leads me to a private beach. It’s stacked out with beach blankets, pillows, the kids’ cribs, umbrellas.

Speaker 8: Oh, and somewhere around here, I think there’s even a bottle of sunscreen.

Speaker 2: Do you get sunburn in Second Life?

Speaker 8: No.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Sassy tells me she comes here with the kids a lot. She’ll splay out on a blanket while Darla and Cason wade out into the water. She doesn’t worry about them drowning because they’re not real. So this is like your chill out spot. This is like a day out with the kids.

Speaker 8: It is. But even sometimes when I have stuff around the house to do, I’ll come out here and sit with the kids and leave it on my computer, and as I’m walking through the house and everything else, I can see it and it’s like, it’s a little bit of happiness just on the screen. I don’t know. I don’t know how to describe it exactly.

Speaker 2: I love this image of Christine doing work around the house, caring for her mom, but also keeping this window open on her computer. It shows Sassy lounging on the beach, her kids playing in the water, seagulls overhead, waves lapping at the shore, just a relaxing afternoon with the babies. It’s this vision of the metaverse that appeals to me. It’s not a replacement for reality, more like a parallel one, a life that Christine lives alongside the one that she shares with her mom. A portal into another world, one that anyone could step into.
How to Build a Metaverse is part of The Journal, which is a co-production of Gimlet and the Wall Street Journal. This episode was produced by me, Annie Minoff, with help from Alan Rodriguez Espinoza and Josh Sanburn. Our editors are Brendan Klienberg and Catherine Brewer. Fact checking by Nicole Pasulka. Series art by Laura Kammermann, sound design and mixing by Griffin Tanner. Music in this episode by Catherine Anderson, Emma Munger, Nathan Singhapok, and Blue Dot Sessions. Our theme music is by So Wylie, and was remixed by Bobby Lord. Special thanks to Annie Baxter, Meghan Bobrowsky, Rick Brooks, Hannah Chin, Jason Dean, Rachel Humphreys, Ryan Knutson, Kate Linebaugh, Sarah Platt, and Georgia Wells.
And thanks to the entire Journal team, Melvis Acosta Chrisostomo, Pia Gadkari, Matt Kwong, Peter Leonard, Laura Morris, Afeef Nessouli, Enrique Pérez de la Rosa. Aaron Randall, Vladislav Sadiq, Pierce Singgih, Lisa Wang and Catherine Whelan, with help from Jonathan Sanders. If you enjoyed How To Build a Metaverse, The Journal has way more where this came from. Subscribe to catch our daily new show plus all of our Journal series. That’s The Journal on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you on Monday.