When Second Life officially launched in 2003, it had one guiding principle for all new users: Be Nice. But those users showed up with their own ideas about how to behave in a virtual world. In Part 2 of How to Build a Metaverse, Linden Lab — the company that created Second Life — wrestles with how to govern its new world.

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Ryan: Hey, it's Ryan, co-host of the Journal. Our daily show will be back on Monday, but today we're going back into Second Life, with the next episode in our series, How To Build A Metaverse. If you missed Episode One, you'll definitely want to go check that out first. It's in our feed. It came out last Friday. Last week founder Philip Rosedale and his company, Linden Lab, created Second Life, a metaverse where users could do and be whatever they wanted.

Philip Rosedale: It isn't really about what the system's capabilities are, but instead like what it can do for you, what it is for you. It is a Second Life that you get to live.

Ryan: This week Second Life experiences some growing pains. Here's producer Annie Minoff.

Annie Minoff: When Second Life officially launched in 2003, the people who showed up discovered a world where they could be anyone they wanted, and many of those early users began reinventing themselves. Like Nancy Schenkein. Nancy, the former events planner who we met in Episode One, came to Second Life after getting diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Life in the physical world was getting harder, but in Second Life, Nancy could be someone new. And it wasn't long before she settled on a name for this new someone, Baccara Rhodes. And Baccara, she had a look.

Nancy Schenkein: She had long hair, long burgundy color hair. She's very classy, very classic. Watches her language and doesn't want language spoken around her. Very formal, a very formal type character.

Annie Minoff: Baccara wore ball gowns and fancy necklaces. She was a budding socialite, whose idea of fun was hosting champagne cocktail parties for other avatars. But to host she needed a house. One day, as Baccara was flying around Second Life, she noticed a lovely spot, right by the water, and some of her new neighbors helped her build a little cottage there.

Nancy Schenkein: It had mostly basically a living room. It may have had a dining room thing. I don't think there was a bedroom. There was this big living room with a grand piano. How that got there, I don't even remember.

Annie Minoff: What were you doing at home? Were you like entertaining?

Nancy Schenkein: Yeah, sure. I would've guests over. Like a salon, you know?

Annie Minoff: And then one evening, as she was hosting a party, Baccara heard something coming from outside.

Nancy Schenkein: The shooting started, like crazy.

Annie Minoff: Other Second Life users were attacking her cottage. Are you hearing it? Are you seeing it?

Nancy Schenkein: Oh, sure. You can hear it. And if what they're doing is shooting at your house and clouds of smoke are coming up and my house was over some water. They were putting bombs under there and then setting them off. It was a war zone and I just didn't know.

Annie Minoff: Second Life was changing. As the platform left beta testing and threw open its doors to the entire internet, new users were coming in. And those new users brought their own sometimes contradictory ideas about what a metaverse was for. For some Second Life was a sandbox for building in. For others it was a place to socialize or find love. And then there were those who saw Second Life as a war game, a place to battle and take pot shots at other users, users like Baccara. Second Life was entering its Wild West phase, sex, violence, harassment. They were all infiltrating this new world and forcing Linden Lab to confront a kind of novel question. How exactly do you moderate a metaverse? From The Journal, this is How To Build A Metaverse. I'm Annie Minoff. This is Part Two, Avatars Behaving Badly. Peter Allow join Linden Lab in 2002. This is back in the really early days. Second Life's official launch was still a year off, and Linden Lab consisted of about 10 people.

Peter Allow: I think I was the first non programmer that was hired there, not counting the person who ran the books and dealt with the paperwork.

Annie Minoff: Peter became Linden Lab's first community manager, a job that would become one of the most important at the company, because it was Peter's job to figure out the rules governing this new world. But he wasn't entirely clear how to go about it, so he started looking around for inspiration.

Peter Allow: I cribbed from maybe six different versions of terms of services for online worlds. I found the most common threads, I glued them together, and I wrote something like a nice 20 paragraph terms of service that sounded relatively legal, but easy to read.

Annie Minoff: Peter felt pretty good about it. So he brought those 20 paragraphs to his boss Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale.

Peter Allow: And Philip said, "Okay, it's a good experiment. I'm glad we have all of this out here, but this is the terms of service." And it was be nice.

Annie Minoff: When he's like, "Be nice." What did you? Like, "Uh, okay."

Peter Allow: I think I reacted the exact same way I reacted right now. I kind of laughed and like, "Okay, this is where we're going. All right. I'm sure there's going to be problems, but let's do this. Here we are."

Annie Minoff: It's worth remembering that this was early. There weren't exactly a lot of people in Second Life, and consequently, not a lot of behavior to moderate. It felt like they could afford to experiment.

Peter Allow: Since we were jumping feet first into a space that nobody else had touched yet, he was willing to give it a shot of freedoms for everything and then work backwards.

Annie Minoff: Total freedom, see what happens, and then restrict.

Peter Allow: Add limitations as required.

Annie Minoff: Peter's pages of rules? They were out. Instead, Linden Lab would wait to see what problems came up and deal with them from there. And problems did come up, as soon as users hit the welcome area. This was 2003, right around the time of Second Life's official launch. Back then, the world of Second Life looked like Pangaea, one big continent with a handful of outlying islands. Within that continent, land was divided into square regions, and each region had its own name, like Hawthorne, Shipley, Tabor. To help them get their bearings new Second Life users spawned into a designated welcome zone, a place with maps and navigation tips. And very quickly the welcome area became a magnet for users looking to mess with others. Here's Daniel Huebner, who joined Linden Lab about a year after Peter, to work with him on governance issues.

Daniel Huebner: In our late beta, just before we went commercially live in June of 2003, an avatar flew over the welcome area, in a spaceship. Had a pod door that opened. He tractor beamed other avatars up into his ship and then flew away with them. And not only was this enormously funny, but none of the engineers in the company knew how to build that.

Daniel Huebner: This avatar had created something we didn't know how to make, with the tools that we had provided, and had exhibited a behavior that we had never anticipated. And it was just a moment of absolute awe. And certainly there were abuse reports about it. Some of the people being tractored beamed and abducted by aliens did not like that.

Daniel Huebner: But at the same time, it's exactly what Second Life was made to do.

Annie Minoff: Linden Lab wasn't sure if it was okay or not to tractor beam another Second Life user, but other forms of harassment that the company saw seemed a lot more clear cut. What were the kind of more mundane, like everyday things you would see?

Daniel Huebner: Swearing. People saying offensive things. A lot of the things you'd see on the internet to this day, but with the added benefit of having physics.

Annie Minoff: Physics, it was becoming clear, made a difference in the metaverse. If someone disagreed with you in Second Life, sure, they could attack you over text chat, but they could also assault your avatar. And as this new world expanded and more people joined, more and more of these kinds of conflicts were breaking out. When Second Life officially launched, the internet was largely dominated by niche communities. There were online spaces for people into first person shooter games and war simulators. There were communities built solely around virtual sex and romance. There were entire chat rooms just for fans of Justin Timberlake or Matchbox Twenty. And as those communities discovered and migrated into Second Life, they brought their own ideas of fun and appropriate behavior with them. That created tension and trouble for Linden Lab. Take for example, a user named Stroker Serpentine, who migrated to Second Life in 2003 with very clear ideas about what this new world was for. So if I were to enter Second Life and ask someone in the know, "Who is Stroker Serpentine?" What would they tell me? What's your kind of reputation on the platform?

Kevin Alderman: I am the grandfather of virtual sex.

Annie Minoff: You wear the title proudly, I take it?

Kevin Alderman: I do. I do. Very much so.

Annie Minoff: In real life, Stroker is Kevin Alderman, an ex-plumber living in a 200 acre nudest community outside of Tampa. Kevin's married with grown kids, and he's been retired for about a decade, but he tells me he still works part-time as the security guard at the nudist resort. He calls it his Forrest Gump job, something to keep him busy.

Kevin Alderman: One of the rules is you have to be nude to get into the swimming pool or the spa. And so I get several calls where people are unaware of the rules, and I have to tell them to get naked.

Annie Minoff: Kevin, I learn, is startlingly nonchalant about sex. Which makes sense. When he arrived in Second Life almost 20 years ago now, he was already an online sex veteran. In the late '90s he'd discovered a social networking site called Seducity. On Seducity users could have sex as 2D avatars, by typing out commands and triggering a spherical object called a poseball.

Kevin Alderman: They had a variety of these poseballs that would, once sat upon by your avatar, animate you in sexual positions. And they only had three.

Annie Minoff: Okay, only three positions.

Kevin Alderman: They only had three. That was it.

Kevin Alderman: But it was quite titillating.

Annie Minoff: But not quite titillating enough. And that's where Second Life came in. When Seducity's users learned about a new virtual world where people could be anyone and do anything, they were intrigued. This seemed like a place where their fantasies could have freer reign. And so some of the citizens of Seducity migrated over into Second Life, only to find that this new metaverse was a bit lacking in the sex department.

Kevin Alderman: There were a lot of images. There was a lot of pornography. You could go to meeting spots where they would have the walls covered in pornographic images, but there really wasn't any type of interaction available.

Annie Minoff: Available yet, because Kevin was about to have a breakthrough, a breakthrough that would make Second Life a much sexier place and pushed Linden Lab's laissez-faire approach to its limits. Kevin figured that it might be possible to hack Second Life's native avatar animations to bring sex into Second Life.

Kevin Alderman: I would take the motorcycle animation, which was your arms are up, holding a handlebar, and you're basically seated on a seat. And it would take that animation and it would loop, it would stay on a loop, and I would cut that loop and then merge it with a standing animation so that it would go from standing to that crouching position. And it simulated a doggy sex position. And that was my first. It was hacked from motorcycle sit.

Annie Minoff: So let's just take, for example, the motorcycle sit animation. This was an animation that like Linden Lab had put out there.

Annie Minoff: And you took their nice chaste motorcycle animation.

Annie Minoff: Combined it with a standing-

Kevin Alderman: Several of them, actually. There were lying down animations, so I would take that motorcycle sit, have the male lie down, and then have the female crouching over the male for a cowgirl animation.

Annie Minoff: With just a few hacked animations, Kevin, aka Stroker, had helped unleash a sexual revolution in Second Life. He'd also created endless challenges for Linden Lab's community managers. Does the name Stroker Serpentine ring a bell?

Peter Allow: Yes, it does.

Annie Minoff: Again, Linden Labs, Peter Allow.

Peter Allow: I remember that he was one of the Lotharios of the early, early, days who was there for one purpose. He was there to have virtual sex with as many people as he possibly could in as many ways he possibly could.

Annie Minoff: What was your relationship with him?

Peter Allow: I used him as an example of what the extremes were going to be and what rules we needed to write down. Because no matter what rule we wrote down, he would somehow find some way to get around it. I was grateful, in a very strange way, because everyone on the team, you would say that, "This is going to happen." And somebody invariably would say, "Oh, come on. No one's going to do that." And Stroker was the guy who absolutely did that thing that you just said that nobody was going to do. So he was my far edge case example, whenever I needed it.

Annie Minoff: So someone would say to you, "Well, Peter, no one's going to use the tool this way. Like who would do that?" And you would say-

Peter Allow: Give me five seconds here. And right there, this guy. Yeah.

Annie Minoff: Stroker kept employees like Peter busy, because those hacked animations were not his only innovation. He also figured out how to embed animations into objects. Like, not surprisingly, a bed. These sex beds would animate avatars into all kinds of sexual positions.

Kevin Alderman: When I released that, it went viral.

Annie Minoff: So if I had dropped into Second Life back in the day, it was sex beds all over the place.

Kevin Alderman: All over the place. And pornographic images.

Annie Minoff: Linden Lab had taken a wait and see approach to moderation in Second Life. Now, the company realized some users were seeing way too much, seeing things that let us just say you can't unsee. The question was, what, if anything, should Linden Lab do about it?

Peter Allow: The standard that we held each time is, is this going to turn people away or encourage people in? And the answer to that was, annoyingly, yes. It would do both.

Annie Minoff: So how did you think about that?

Peter Allow: We looked at it in terms of will more people be offended? What's our role in this? What are we going to allow? What's our moral stance? Or a few people who were thoroughly offended by the idea, and other ones who were thoroughly encouraging of it. So from a company standpoint, we had a wide spectrum of viewpoints. And the conclusion we came to is plain brown wrapper.

Annie Minoff: Plain brown wrapper. Peter's talking about how adult magazines used to be sold with their covers wrapped in brown paper. The idea being if you didn't want to see full front nudity every time you stop by the newsstand, you shouldn't have to. Linden Lab took a similar opt-in approach. If you weren't coming to Second Life for sex, you shouldn't have to see it. In practice, Peter says, this meant segregating sex in Second Life into areas marked as mature, for adults only. In mature areas, consenting adults could largely do what they wanted. And Peter says this helped. You're the community manager, right? So you're the guy getting the abuse reports?

Annie Minoff: How often were those about sex?

Peter Allow: Almost never. It was literally, "I can see an image that I'm not supposed to see in my space. Can you please have them hide it?" And then I would click on it and say, "Hey, rules are, inside."

Annie Minoff: Making sex opt in made Second Life a more welcoming place for more people. But there was another group of users who would not be so easily confined to one area of Second Life. And these users, they didn't want sex. They wanted war. That's after the break. Around the time of its official launch in 2003, another wave of users began entering Second Life, except this was less of a migration and more of an invasion. These new users came from a multiplayer first person shooter game called World War II Online. Back in the early 2000s, World War II Online was one of the biggest gaming communities on the internet. It was a place where users could reenact battles across a virtual Western Europe. They could roleplay as American foot soldiers storming Normandy or British paratroopers dropping into Germany. And when Second Life opened its doors, the World War II Onliners saw a place where they could do something that they couldn't in their own game, build.

Carl Fredericks: You could kind of make your own war here.

Annie Minoff: That's a Second Life user with the avatar named Carl Fredericks. Carl was a big World War II Online player back in high school. This was in the early to mid 2000s. And when he saw other players making the jump to Second Life, he followed them.

Carl Fredericks: You played, in World War II Online, you played on the map that other people built. You fight in the towns that other people built. You drive the tanks that other people built. You fly the planes that other people built. You can only really do so much within the confines of how the game is built over there. But over here, if you're a creative person like I am, and my friends were, you can do whatever the heck you want. You can build your own tanks, you can build your own planes. You can build your own little cities to have little fun play battles in.

Annie Minoff: What side did you play?

Carl Fredericks: Because I was a German in that game, and I even had my German name here, I stayed as a German here.

Annie Minoff: So you were like in Nazi costume in Second Life.

Carl Fredericks: Yeah. I don't actually have any of those beliefs at all. But somebody's got to be the bad guy.

Annie Minoff: And you're like, might as well be me?

Carl Fredericks: Yeah. If everybody's a good guy, who's going to be shot at? Where's the bad guys to get shot at?

Annie Minoff: When the World War II Onliners migrated to Second Life, many settled in a region called Jessie. That's where I met Carl. He flipped through a few different avatar looks before settling on a little green bug eyed creature. You look like you're out of like a kid's cartoon.

Daniel Huebner: Yeah. This is from Invaders Inn.

Annie Minoff: Jessie was part of an archipelago off of Second Life's mainland, and it was kind of a natural home for the World War II Onliners, because Jessie operated differently from other parts of Second Life. Here's Linden Lab's Daniel Huebner again.

Daniel Huebner: A lot of the early adopters of Second Life were people who wanted to play games. So one of the holdovers from a more game like Second Life was the idea that in certain spaces you could be killed.

Annie Minoff: Killed. Meaning that if your avatar took enough damage, it could die in Jessie. If you "died," you'd be teleported back to your Second Life home where you'd respawn.

Daniel Huebner: We left Jessie as this one place where action gaming and violence could continue. So when you went into Jessie, you would suddenly have a health meter, and the residents of Jessie made it clear that you would be participating in an action game. And they'd probably shoot you.

Annie Minoff: To prevent peaceful Second Life users from getting shot, Jessie was cordoned off from the rest of Second Life by a thick gray wall. But unsuspecting users still found their way into Jessie anyway, like Baccara. Baccara Rhodes, the fancy socialite, had moved into Jessie before realizing her new seaside cottage was in a combat zone. And very quickly Jessie's residents let it be known that she was not welcome. Baccara's Cottage became the target of a bombing campaign.

Nancy Schenkein: Don't think it could break your house down or something. It couldn't. Just destroy your life if you're in there. And the sounds and everything. And there were other houses, but they seemed to have targeted me. They wanted me out.

Annie Minoff: Initially, Baccara didn't want to move, and she briefly armed herself with a tommy gun, the kind you might see in a black and white gangster flick.

Nancy Schenkein: Sometimes when they would start, I would just go fly over to their place and start shooting. But I didn't want to do it. It wasn't like my thing.

Annie Minoff: Eventually, Baccara left Jessie. She moved to another part of Second Life. For the World War II gamers getting shot at and dying multiple times a day was all part of the fun. But when violence was directed at peaceful residents like Baccara, it looked different. It looked more like harassment. But as long as the violence in mayhem stayed confined in Jessie, Linden Lab was largely hands off. After all, violence was what Jessie had been built for. The problem was that the violence didn't stay in Jessie. The World War II Onliners had come to Second Life to build and to fight. But once they were there, many discovered something even more fun. It was called griefing, i.e., making life miserable for their fellow Second Life users. What we might call today, trolling. Griefing attacks took the World War II Onliners far beyond the Jessie wall. Like this one time Carl tells me, when he and a buddy infiltrated a dance club in another region of Second Life. He says that they showed up in suits, posing as normal club goers. His friend was carrying a suitcase. Oh.

Carl Fredericks: I just put it down there at your feet.

Annie Minoff: Yeah. Carl still has the suitcase, and he shows it to me. It's metallic and looks like the kind of thing you'd carry crisply packed $100 bills in. Except he tells me this suitcase didn't carry money. It carried a bomb.

Carl Fredericks: And while we were dancing, the person put a suitcase in the corner, we left. They set off the timer on the suitcase, and as we were leaving, the bomb went off.

Annie Minoff: Carl sets the timer and demonstrates for me. Well, we'll just, I guess, wait for that to detonate.

Annie Minoff: So how did-

Carl Fredericks: There it goes.

Annie Minoff: Oh, whoa. Geez. Suddenly my entire screen turned orange. I couldn't see Carl. I couldn't see my avatar. All I could see was this bright burning blast. Oh my God.

Annie Minoff: Are we in a fireball? The bomb didn't kill me or anyone in the club, back when Carl and his buddy originally set it off. But in Carl's memory, the explosion was so powerful, so technologically taxing, that it crashed that entire region of Second Life. And there were plenty of attacks like this. One time Jessie's griefers dressed up in ski masks and pretended to be terrorists carrying out suicide missions in Second Life. Another time they hopped in tanks and raided a nearby neighborhood. But to my mind, the event that really demonstrates that be nice was not working? It wasn't a lone suitcase bomb or a suicide attack. It was the time a real war, the Iraq War, to be specific, made its way into Second Life. One of the first people to notice and to write about it was Wagner James Au. James had been hired by Linden Lab to write about events in everyday life inside Second Life. Sometimes he'd do up his avatar like a famous journalist, Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, and wander around Second Life looking for stories. And pretty quickly, James noticed that something was up at the wall that divided Jessie from the rest of Second Life.

Wagner James Au: The Jessie wall. It looks like the Berlin wall, so it demarcates the peaceful area from the combat area. And people started putting posters up, and so they would be, I think it was like World War II era posters.

Annie Minoff: But in the early months of the Iraq War in 2003, the posters began to change. They got political, like posters you'd see in the real world. James says it started slow.

Wagner James Au: As I recall, the first poster on the wall was kind of a sort of bland support our troops sort of poster, probably from the World War II Online folks.

Annie Minoff: But things picked up quickly.

Wagner James Au: More and more posters, back and forth, and then more and more combat around the wall.

Annie Minoff: The wall was becoming a frontline in a new kind of fight for Second Life, not a fight over what this world should be, but a fight over real world politics. What started as a battle of dueling posters was quickly escalating into a war about a war.

Wagner James Au: It was seen what was playing out in the real world, with people kind of yelling at each other or flaming each other in blogs and so on. This is before Twitter, played out in 3D in a full immersive people actually shooting virtual bullets at each other, while putting up posters.

Annie Minoff: Carl wasn't in Second Life when the war broke out in May 2003, but he heard about it from other World War II Onliners.

Carl Fredericks: People would put up posters on their land.

Annie Minoff: Like you would in real life. Like a lawn sign?

Carl Fredericks: Yeah, like a lawn sign. They would have, "Bush is a fascist, change the war criminal," stuff. And then we'd have stuff like "Support the troop, Saddam's a war criminal." And they would get mad at us, and we'd get mad at them. And since you know you could pretty much kill people here without consequence, it quickly devolved into violence.

Annie Minoff: Some of the posters in Jessie crossed the line into hate speech. There were images of Confederate flags and Nazi symbols, and as the violence intensified, Jessie transformed, from something recognizable as a combat game to a place that was much more disorienting and surreal.

Wagner James Au: When it was just fully raging, it was just kind of like this fortress if you were on acid, like a military fortress on acid, because there would be tanks and helicopters and machine gun placements. Someone took a voice clip from Full Metal Jacket, the Stanley Kubrick movie.

Speaker 12: If you ladies leave my island, if you survive recruit training, you will be a weapon. You will be a minister of death praying for war. But until that day, you are pubes. You're on the lowest form of life on earth.

Wagner James Au: So it was the drill sergeant kind of just shouting, echoing through Jessie when you went in there. So that was strange and just, yeah, it was very bizarre.

Annie Minoff: James wasn't the only person noticing that things in Jessie were going off the rails. Peter Allow, Linden Lab's first community manager, was also monitoring the situation around the wall. When the Confederate flag and Nazi posters appeared, he says they moved quickly to remove them. But for Linden Lab, the problems in Jessie went far beyond posters. What specifically were the complaints that you as the community manager were getting from people?

Peter Allow: The one that scared me the most was that, "This isn't fun for me. I don't want to spend my time here because I'm being harassed by people who I don't want to interact with." I think that was actually the biggest one, it overrode all the other ones, like, "I'm being shot. This person is harassing me. This person is saying things I don't like." Usual kind of things that you would expect in an online space where somebody's just being generally rude. But the biggest concern was that people were looking this as an exit opportunity. That, "Okay, I came here to play. It was fun for a while. It's not anymore."

Annie Minoff: As Second Life grew, these problems, griefing, violence, offensive imagery, they only got worse. It all raised the possibility that if conditions didn't improve, users might leave the world altogether. So Linden Lab made changes. A big one was giving people more control over what other users could do to them. Over time, Linden Lab added tools like muting people or blocking them. Say someone was bombing your house. Now you could set up an invisible barrier to stop them. But the biggest change that Linden Lab would eventually make would be to revisit its founding principle, be nice. In 2004, Daniel, who was still working on moderation issues, began writing up new rules.

Daniel Huebner: We needed to make rules that were so simple and so concise that they would be internalized by the people who were living in the virtual world, so that they would share these rules to each other. So if we could get them down from being rules into being ideals, they would tell each other, "Don't do that. That's this violation. Don't do that. We believe in this."

Annie Minoff: What Daniel wrote became known as the Big Six, a list of six things that could get you kicked out of Second Life. They were intolerance, harassment, assault, disclosure of personal information, indecency and disturbing the peace. If you violated one or more of the Big Six, you could get suspended from Second Life or even banned. And some of Carl's fellow griefers were, but not Carl. He's still here, though not griefing these days, just building. When Carl joined Second Life, he was 15. Today, he's 34, and he says he can see now where Linden Lab was coming from

Carl Fredericks: Because a lot of the bullshit we pulled, before when it was really Wild West, like the suitcase bombs and stuff, couldn't get away with that anymore today. They'd ban you at the drop of the hat, and that was because of the stuff we did. So I could kind of see from their perspective now, this is their business. This is livelihood, we don't want a bunch of Troglodytes going around blowing people up just for fun.

Annie Minoff: Do you miss the old days?

Carl Fredericks: Sometimes. I do miss it sometimes, and I like remembering all the times about, oh, I remember that time we jumped into a bunch of tanks and invaded the furry sim. And I can reminisce on stuff like that now, but I don't know if I necessarily want to go start doing that stuff again because we couldn't get away with all the stuff that we did back then.

Annie Minoff: Of course, for Linden Lab, creating rules was just the beginning. Enforcing them would only get more difficult as the world grew. Daniel told me that when he first joined Linden Lab in 2003, he received just a handful of abuse reports in his first week on the job. When he left almost five years later, they were pouring in, and they were fielded by a team of people, not just Daniel. But once Linden Lab established basic rights and rules, the world became a more welcoming space. Second Life had been niche, but now it had a shot at being a place for more than just a few thousand people. It could be a place for millions, maybe for everybody.

Speaker 13: If we keep going at this level of success, we can start imagining what to do with income that is 10 times this size, or even 100 times this size.

Philip Rosedale: We see these problems. We think we can overcome them, and if we could overcome them, then bang, we're good. We're after the races, this thing becomes huge.

Annie Minoff: That's next time on how to Build a Metaverse. 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 Josh Sanburn with help from me, Annie Minoff, and Alan Rodriguez Espinoza. Our editors are Brendan Klinkenberg and Katherine Brewer. Fact checking by Nicole Pasulka. Series art by Laura Cameraman. Sound Design, and Mixing by Griffin Tanner. Music in this episode by So Wiley, Audio Network, Blue Dot Sessions, BMG Production Music and Epidemic Sound. Our theme music is by So Wiley, and was remixed by Bobby Lord. Special thanks to Annie Baxter, Rick Brooks, Hannah Chin, Jason Dean, Ryan Knutson, Kate Linebaugh, Sarah Platt, Pierce Singgih, Georgia Wells, and Catherine Whelan. And thanks to the entire journal team, Melvis Acosta Chrisostomo, Pia Gadkari, Rachel Humphreys, Matt Kwong, Peter Leonard, Laura Morris, Afeef Nessouli, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Aaron Randall, Vladislav Sadiq, Nathan Singhapok, and Victoria Whitley-Berry, with help from Jonathan Sanders. Thanks for listening. Part Three will be out next Friday.

Kate Linebaugh is the co-host of The Journal. She has worked at The Wall Street Journal for 15 years, most recently as the deputy U.S. news coverage chief. Kate started at the Journal in Hong Kong, stopping in Detroit and coming to New York in 2011. As a reporter, she covered everything from post-9/11 Afghanistan to the 2004 Asian tsunami, from Toyota's sudden acceleration recall to General Electric. She holds a bachelor degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and went back to campus in 2007 for a Knight-Wallace fellowship.

Ryan Knutson is the co-host of The Journal. Previously, he spent more than four years in the newsroom covering the wireless industry, and was responsible for a string of scoops including Verizon's $130 billion buyout of Vodafone's stake in their joint venture, Sprint and T-Mobile's never ending courtship and a hack of the 911 emergency system that spread virally on Twitter. He was also a regular author of A-heds, including one about millennials discovering TV antennas. Previously, he reported for ProPublica, PBS Frontline and OPB, the NPR affiliate station in Portland, Ore. He grew up in Beaverton, Ore. and graduated from the University of Oregon.