How to Build a Metaverse, Part 1: Genesis – The Journal.

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Kate Linebaugh: Hey, it’s Kate, one of the hosts of The Journal. Today in your feed, we’re kicking off a new series. It’s about the Metaverse. Over the past year, more and more companies have started talking about building 3D virtual worlds. So one of our producers, Annie, started digging into the Metaverse idea. And she got a little obsessed with one Metaverse in particular, one that’s already up and running, where people have already started businesses, built homes, socialized, and fallen in love, all as avatars.
Over the next four Fridays, she’ll be bringing us the story of that Metaverse, and what it could teach us about a future that seems to be coming.
Here’s Annie.

Annie Minoff: In the beginning, Philip created the water.

Philip Rosedale: The water. The water. Isn’t that weird? We built the water. We built a surface of water, a graphic simulation that was this blue water and sun. There was like a sun and a moon. And it had what’s called specular reflection, which is like, what we call it in graphics back then.

Annie Minoff: Is that sparkle?

Philip Rosedale: Yeah, the sparkle. Exactly. You could see the sparkle of the sunlight off the water.

Annie Minoff: Was there sound?

Philip Rosedale: We did make the wind. We wrote a thing where if you were close to the water, it sounded like water. It was kind of making white noise in your ears. And this part I’m really proud of, if you flew in the world, you heard that wind in your ears.

Annie Minoff: The …

Philip Rosedale: Yeah.

Annie Minoff: Wow.

Philip Rosedale: You can hear it. We also did clouds that were really beautiful. Oh, oh, and we had trees. We had these wonderful trees where all the trees looked different and they had little branching structures and you could move them around too.

Annie Minoff: This is very genesis, I should point out.

Philip Rosedale: Very genesis. Yes. And the evening and the morning was the first day, right?

Annie Minoff: I’m on a video chat with a guy named Philip Rosedale. He’s in his 50s with spiked blonde gray hair. He has a little bit of a surfer vibe, and he’s recalling the time two decades ago when he and a small team of programmers built a world from scratch.
They built it out of pixels, coded it from the second floor of an old industrial building on San Francisco’s Linden Street. In the years that followed that first act of creation, anyone in the world with an internet connection would be able to take up residence in Philip’s world. They’d be able to buy land, build a house, meet people, start a business. But they’d also be able to change gender or species. They could build anything that they could imagine. They’d be able to fly.
And even then, almost 20 years ago now, there was a name for this kind of immersive digital world. It was called a Metaverse. But Philip and his team, they had another name for their creation. They called it Second Life.

Video: You’re playing that game again.
Second Life is not a game. It is a multi-user virtual environment. It doesn’t have points or scores. It doesn’t have winners or losers.
Oh, it has losers.
I signed up for Second Life-

Annie Minoff: That’s Jim and Dwight on The Office in 2007. And to this day, this is pretty much how Second Life is talked about, if it’s talked about at all. It’s a bit of a joke, a place for the Dwight Schrutes of the world with not quite enough going on in their first lives.
But lately Second Life has seemed like less and less of a joke to me. Instead, it seems prescient. That’s because for the past year, the tech world has been consumed by something of a Metaverse mania.

Announcer: The Metaverse.

Announcer: The Metaverse.

Announcer: The Metaverse.

Announcer: Metaverse is the next aversion of the internet.

Annie Minoff: Companies and investors are putting billions of dollars towards Metaverse related projects. Some of the biggest brands in tech are signaling that they are all in. And one company has been particularly public about its Metaverse plans.

Announcer: The social network that we’ve all known as Facebook for the last 16 years now has a new name and it is Meta.

Announcer: Facebook says it plans to hire 10,000 workers in Europe over the next five years. They will work on building a Metaverse.

Mark Zuckerberg: From now on, we’re going to be Metaverse first, not Facebook first. That means-

Annie Minoff: Last year, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled his vision for the Metaverse, a connected world where we could work, shop, play, and hang out as avatars. Meta’s spending on that vision costed $10 billion last year, with much more to come.
But hearing about all of the spending, I’ve been having a little deja vu because of course we do have a version of the Metaverse already. We’ve had it for almost two decades, and that’s the Metaverse that Philip and his team built.
About 15 years ago, Second Life was where the Metaverse revolution was supposed to happen. Back then, it was Second Life that was being hailed in TED Talks and news articles as the future of the internet. And people were here for it. Fortune 500 companies set up shop in Second Life. Rock stars did shows there. Politicians campaigned there. Reuters opened a Second Life news bureau. Sweden opened an embassy. And then, many of those people left. Corporations wound down their campaigns. The embassy closed its doors. Users logged on, took a look around and quit, never to come back. Why?
If we’re all supposed to be living in the Metaverse a decade from now, that question seems worth answering. So earlier this year, I went back to Second Life to find out why people left, but also why they were there in the first place. I discovered a world filled with stories of love, war, sex and creativity, sustained by thousands of people, stubbornly holding onto a vision of the future that most of us forgot about.
From The Journal, this is How to Build a Metaverse. I’m Annie Minoff, and over four episodes, I’ll be telling the story of Second Life, as a way of trying to understand our own Metaverse moment.
This is part one, Genesis.
Username, AnnieWSJ.
One night last February I booted up my computer and signed up for Second Life.
It says loading world. Who am I? Oh, okay.
I emerged into the Metaverse to the strains of the moody blues playing on Second Life’s in world radio. My avatar looks a little bit like Carmen San Diego.
It is me. Okay. I’m a lady in a floppy hat with a suitcase and I’m on a boardwalk at night in a kind of a tropical landscape. And there is music playing.
I, or rather AnnieWSJ, begin to take a look around. My first impression of Second Life is that it’s lush. My laptop screen is suddenly filled with palm trees, ferns and holly hawks. I hear macaws screeching in the distance and waves laughing at the shore. I’m on Adventure Island, where I, and all new Second Life users appear. I use my keyboard’s arrow keys to guide my avatar along the island’s wooden boardwalk, hitting a series of tutorial stations. There I learn how to walk. I learn that I can teleport to other parts of Second Life. I learn how to fly.
Over the next six months I explored Second Life, having increasingly surreal experiences that I found it hard to explain at the end of the day. “How is work,” my partner would ask. “Well, today I cooed at a virtual baby. They are cute.”

Speaker 16: Hi. Hi. Hi.

Annie Minoff: They are adorable.

Speaker 16: Howdy.

Annie Minoff: Today I paid a house call on a dragon.

Tom Verre: It’s like a 13 foot tall sort of feathered as tech and type dragon thing.

Annie Minoff: Today, I went to a poetry reading by the beach. One of the avatars read John Donne.

Speaker 14: Go and catch a falling star. Get with child a mandrake root. Tell me where all past years are or who cleft the devil’s foot.

Annie Minoff: The more I explored, the more I wanted to understand where all of this came from. And that meant starting with the guy who kicked off this whole wild experiment.
So I think a lot of people are going to have the question of who ends up creating something like Second Life. So can you tell me a little bit about your upbringing? Where you grew up?

Philip Rosedale: Yeah. Well, my mom was initially an English teacher very briefly. And then she started having babies.

Annie Minoff: Philip Rosedale grew up the oldest of four kids. His mom was a homemaker and his dad, a Navy carrier pilot, which meant that the family moved around a lot. Most of Philip’s childhood memories revolve around building. He told me he built all kinds of stuff as a kid. Also with models, go carts. He retrofitted the door of his childhood bedroom so that it would slide open, like the doors on Star Trek. He even cobbled together his own record player.

Philip Rosedale: I had a needle stuck through a Dixie cup and I had some arm and I had something that would spin the record. And I ruined my mother’s Barbara Streisand record I remember. But I-

Annie Minoff: And when Philip got his first computer, he was hooked. He remembers experimenting with this math program that let you generate endlessly repeating fractal shapes. He’d zoom into these shapes over and over again, almost like he was disappearing into them.

Philip Rosedale: You just keep zooming and you’d be like, “My God. There’s so much stuff in here.” And I remember at that time thinking like, “Oh my God, the outer space that we all want to or so many of us want to build space ships and go to, the outer space, outer space is big, but I was struck even as a little kid by this idea, that inner space that was the space created by computers and math might itself be huge.” I kind of had this idea, “Well, what if you were kind of an astronaut, but the place that you were traveling to was this computer generated place that was also infinite.”

Annie Minoff: This idea that you could disappear into a digital world, like an astronaut voyaging through digital space, it was Philip’s first glimpse of something like a Metaverse. Except that that word didn’t exist yet. It didn’t exist until 1992, when a sci-fi writer named Neal Stephenson coined the term in a book called Snow Crash. Philip was just graduating from college when it came out.

Philip Rosedale: My wife bought me Snow Crash for my birthday in ’92. And what she said at the time was something like, “Here is a book about that thing you like.”

Annie Minoff: The thing you’re obsessed with, this is the book about that.

Philip Rosedale: Yeah. And she, we’d already been together for a couple a few years. So yeah, she was like, “That thing. I got you a birthday present. It’s fiction. It’s fiction about that thing you like.”

Annie Minoff: In Snow Crash characters enter a computer generated world called the Metaverse by putting on what are basically VR goggles.

Philip Rosedale: Stephenson in Snow Crash had presented a more tangible, achievable idea. The Metaverse as he described it, seemed, and I think, of course it wasn’t just me who felt this way, but seemed to many engineers and technology pioneer type people like something that could be built. It seemed like something that was feasible.

Annie Minoff: The Metaverse idea stuck with Philip, but to seriously explore it he’d need money. So after college he founded a software startup. Then he sold it and used the money to start a new company, one capable of building the virtual world that he’d been thinking about since he was a kid. That company was Linden Lab.
But for Linden Lab to really get building, Philip needed help. He needed to recruit. And that meant pitching potential employees on a world that didn’t really exist yet. One of the first people to hear that strange pitch was Cory Ondrejka. Cory made video games, titles like Road Rash for the Nintendo 64.

Cory Ondrejka: It was a motorcycle combat racing game. So you were racing on motorcycles, but you could also hit the other riders.

Annie Minoff: Okay. Sounds fun.

Cory Ondrejka: It was. It was a great, great game.

Annie Minoff: He heard about Philip from a friend.

Cory Ondrejka: A friend of a friend had met Philip in very vague terms because Philip made sure everybody signed NDAs. And my friend was somebody who took NDAs really seriously. So it was this super cryptic. “There’s this guy in San Francisco and there’s stuff going on, but you should go talk to him.” So I pinged Philip with, “Hey, this friend said you’re doing stuff in San Francisco and I should talk to you.” And apparently it was enough that Philip’s like, “Oh yeah, I know. Come on up.”

Annie Minoff: Cory came up to Linden Lab and over six hours Philip laid out for him some of the mysterious stuff that he’d been working on. One of his projects was a virtual world, a minimalist expanse of wind, trees, and sparkling, rippling water.
Cory had built video games before, but he’d never built anything like what Philip was talking about. He was intrigued by the possibilities.

Cory Ondrejka: … to come in and experience games together. And that was just super exciting.

Annie Minoff: So that’s the thing that happened in this conversation where you’re like, “I guess I’m leaving my job.”

Cory Ondrejka: Oh yeah, no, it was super clear. It was like, “No, need to go do this. This is going to be awesome.”

Annie Minoff: By the end of that six hour meeting, Philip had his first Chief Technology Officer, and Cory, he was not the only one who went in for Philip’s pitch. I heard some version of the story from several former Linden Lab employees. They’d make the pilgrimage to the Linden Lab office, talk to Philip, and boom, they were in. He just had that effect on people.

Speaker 16: I mean, Philip, he’s got … My best friend and I, we joke, he has the follow me to the desert eyes. He has that very intense gaze, and he is so intelligent and so convincing and he’s so sure.

Speaker 17: He would make you believe in this vision that he had, that this was a world where people could do anything. What if we made a world where people could do anything. And that was essentially the entirety of the pitch. So when you would have Philip in his high energy pitch mode, on the back of that wagon, like a manic street, preacher, it was hard not to get carried away.

Annie Minoff: But just what this thing was that Linden Lab was building didn’t become clear for a while. Philip and Cory told me that a key turning point was in 2001. Back then Linden Lab’s digital world was still pretty empty, mostly just an expansive pixelated land. But the company’s engineers had just introduced an exciting new feature, building.
If you were an avatar in Linden Lab’s world, you could now stretch out your hand and boop, span a shape, a cube or a cylinder or a sphere. In Linden speak these basic building block shapes were called primitives or prims. You could mold and stretch primitives. You could change their color or pile them on top of each other. It was a bit like building in the game, Minecraft, except this was almost a decade before Minecraft.
So to celebrate this new feature, Linden Lab decided to kick off its next board meeting with a building demo. Linden Lab had a board by this point, it had investors, and Philip and Cory wanted to show them what their world could do. So they do the demo.

Cory Ondrejka: And then the board meeting as board meetings tend to do moved off into other things around financing and plans, et cetera. But we left a logged in video screen up and everybody who wasn’t in the board meeting just kept building. And we realized suddenly the entire board meeting just ground to a halt because we couldn’t stop watching this act of people building together and making cool things.

Philip Rosedale: I think Frank, one of our early teammates built this big snowman, frosty snowman looking character, and then somebody else built a bunch of smaller snowmen like worshiping the large snowman.

Cory Ondrejka: It was all sort of just sculptural because that was all the building tools we’re capable at that point. But just watching people collaboratively build and sculpt together was really cool and really exciting. And we had this moment of, “Oh, this is the direction. We knew. We need to make this better. We need to focus on this.”

Annie Minoff: Philip and Cory had been primarily thinking about their world as a gaming platform. What was becoming clear though, is that they’d built something much more powerful, more open ended and strange, not a game so much as a place, a world where users could be and build whatever they wanted. Philip remembers meeting with Linden Lab’s first marketing exec, Robin Harper, to talk about what they should call this new thing that they were building.

Philip Rosedale: And what I remember Robin injecting into the conversation was to say 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. And she said it is a Second Life that you get to live. I remember hearing that Second Life and being like, “Okay. Done. That’s it.”

Annie Minoff: But when Linden Lab first opened its world to beta testers, it was still mostly empty. And this was by design. The whole point of Second Life was for users to create this world, for them to come in and fill this void with whatever they could imagine. Linden Lab had thrown open the doors to the Metaverse. The question now, who would show up?
I’d wanted to know when a new Metaverse opens up, who comes? One person who can answer that question is Nanci Schenkein. She’s been in Second Life for a very long time. In Second Life parlance she’s an oldb.

Nanci Schenkein: My avatar in Second Life is Baccara, B-A-C-C-A-R-A, last name, Rhodes, R-H-O-D-E-S. She, what we call rezed on July 10th, 2003. So that was 19 years ago, Monday, Sunday, whatver.

Annie Minoff: Rez as in born?

Nanci Schenkein: Rez that’s when you were born. So we celebrate a rez day, not a birthday in Second Life.

Annie Minoff: Got it.

Nanci Schenkein: R-E-Z.

Annie Minoff: I later learned that the term rez is from a sci-fi movie, Tron. Lots of sci-fi fans among Second Life’s early user base.

Nanci Schenkein: My rez day was among the early members. Like there were about 500 of us. And the name, I’ll tell you the name, Baccara actually, I was in the flower business most of my life in a whole lot of ways. And Baccara is a beautiful rose. It’s burgundy, almost black. It’s a very special rose that you mostly only get from Holland. And that’s why I picked it.

Annie Minoff: Nanci was 50 when she first read about Second Life in the newspaper. She says she always thought of herself as a creative person. So the idea of a world where you could build anything, that was appealing to her. Plus, around the time that she joined Second Life, Nanci told me that physical stuff had started to get harder for her. Nanci has multiple sclerosis. She’d run an events planning business for years, but had to wind it down when the work became too much.
I’ve heard so many people talk about kind of that sense of unlimited possibility.

Nanci Schenkein: Yes.

Annie Minoff: In Second Life. And I wonder as things were kind of getting harder in the physical world, was that part of the appeal at all?

Nanci Schenkein: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Because I did not know where the MS was going, but I felt in this world, nobody would know unless I told them, and this character would be normal and do her thing and nobody would know what’s behind it. And that’s always been a big thing in Second Life from the very beginning. Nobody would know your real age. Nobody would know your life story unless you told them. But there were these wonderful possibilities.

Annie Minoff: In Second Life nobody would know Nanci Schenkein, not if she didn’t want them to. But she wasn’t exactly anonymous either. One thing that I learned quickly about Second Life is that people’s second identities tend to stick. People keep the same avatar for years. They make friends as that avatar and gain a reputation as that avatar. In early Second Life, very few people knew Nanci Schenkein, but a whole lot of people knew Baccara Rhodes.
What did Second Life look like when you first arrived? What was there?

Nanci Schenkein: Not much. Not much. A lot of empty land, a lot of silly things that people were obviously trying to build just little. We only had six building tools. It was a square, a sphere, a triangle of sorts. I think a trap of sorts. I don’t remember. We used to say the motto was, it all begins with a cube. And there were six pieces. And from that we built a world.

Annie Minoff: Do you remember the first things you built?

Tom Verre: Probably the first thing I built was a recreation of a cedar tree that was in my yard in real life.

Annie Minoff: That’s Tom Verre, another early Second Life user. He’s also the dragon you heard from earlier. I’m talking to him or rather his avatar, Fleabite Beach from inside Second Life. Many Second Life users communicate over text chat. Given this is a podcast, Tom and I are speaking over video call, but on screen I’m seeing Fleabite, a massive dragon seated sedately on a stump, smoking a pipe. Anyway, back to the cedar tree.

Tom Verre: I had taken some cedar bows and scanned textures and the needles and imported them and made a tree that was, I think, the tallest thing in Second Life for about a week before somebody else made something taller. But yeah, I think that was the first thing, I made a really huge tree.

Annie Minoff: Tom constructed his tree out of primitives or prims, the basic building blocks of Second Life. Then he’d papered over his prim tree with images of real cedar bows. And Tom was just getting started. The second thing he made …

Tom Verre: Oh, in fact I have those. The second thing I made were little fish, fish from a pond near me, blue gills and pike that just swim around in a little circle. And I just gave them away to people for free because I thought it was funny. Or I’d leave them. If they had a water feature, I would leave fish in their pond. And I would just go around giving people goofy, free things like trees and fish.

Annie Minoff: I think you gave me the fish actually. Let me see if I can find that.
Ahead of our conversation, Tom had gifted me some of his early creations, including the fish. I know they’re somewhere in my inventory, the chaotic file system that Second Life users have to store and organize their stuff. I feel a little bit like Mary Poppins rooting around in my magical carpet bag, looking for fish.
Aha. I found it. I think I found it.

Tom Verre: Oh yay.

Annie Minoff: Did it work?

Tom Verre: Yeah. Oh dear. That’s funny. So this is the newbie thing where you take an object and you wear it instead of placing it on the ground and it becomes your new hat. So you have a nice fish hat.

Annie Minoff: I’m sorry to say that stuff like this happens to me in Second Life all the time.
Second Life’s strength as a platform is that it’s endlessly customizable. There are a million ways to build and move and personalize your avatar, which means for newbies like me, there are also a million different ways to screw things up.
There was the time, for example, that I was late to an interview in Second Life because my avatar was stuck at the bottom of the ocean.
My head is at the wave line and then I just drop right back down and I am stuck.
There was the time that I lost control of my avatar mid-interview.
Nope, no wrong way. Wrong way.
And walked into a pond.
All good. All good.
There was the time that I tried to change my avatar’s hairstyle.
Oh, I’m naked. Great.
And instead ended up removing all of my clothes, in public, which just seems like it shouldn’t be possible until I learned that apparently this happens to everybody.
For the world’s very first users, getting the hang of Second Life was even harder. But Nanci says they toughed it out because of what they could build there.

Nanci Schenkein: Everybody wanted to see how far we could push the technology. The early players were in it. They weren’t in it to play anything. They were all in it for the same reason, just to see what they could make.

Annie Minoff: Second Life’s first users built all kinds of things. They built replicas of the Washington monument in Fenway Park. They built tree houses and airplanes and fragile boats made of leaves that floated on the wind. As Second Life’s early adopters built, Linden Lab’s employees watched on in awe.

Cory Ondrejka: There just wasn’t a day that went by that you didn’t see somebody do something that was just mind blowing.

Annie Minoff: Like what? Like what?

Cory Ondrejka: So they’d do architectural marvels. So like arcing spiral staircases, where you’re like there’s just no way you could have placed all those primitives without spending infinity of time to try to do that. Lots of giant spaceships, like people would build spaceships out of a zillion primitives.

Annie Minoff: Philip told me about another early build by a user named Steller Sunshine. In Linden lore, Steller is remembered as Second Life’s very first user. It’s Eve, if you will.

Philip Rosedale: She built this beanstalk that had big beanstalk leaves and you had to jump from leaf to leaf to basically get up to the top of it. So it was a little bit like a challenge to climb all the way up Steller’s beanstalk. And that bean stock used to cast a shadow. Everything in the world had shadows and you’d be standing talking to people and the shadow of Steller’s beanstalk would sweep over you.

Annie Minoff: Most of Second Life early builds are long gone, but the beanstalk survived. In fact, it’s not that far from Tom, the Dragon’s place. So after our conversation and the mix up with the fish, I suggested a visit and we teleported over.

Tom Verre: Wow. Boy, this has been here for a long time. Look at that.

Annie Minoff: It’s dusk when we arrive, but there’s still enough light to make out the beanstalk. Its trunk is wide, way too big for me to wrap my avatar’s arms around. Oval leaves protrude from the stalk, which tapers as it stretches into the sky. A tendril winds its way up the stalk spreading off these small translucent purple flowers.
That’s beautiful, I have to say.
Far above the rolling hills of Second Life, the beanstalk terminates in a sparkling white cloud.

Tom Verre: The beanstalk is a really fun build because it’s got realistic elements to it. The flowers are realistic, but it’s also a fairytale. It’s the giant beanstalk. And that kind of represents Second Life in a way.

Annie Minoff: How do you mean?

Tom Verre: Stuff you couldn’t do in real life.

Annie Minoff: Yeah.

Tom Verre: Things that couldn’t exist in real life.

Annie Minoff: I think it was in this moment, gazing up at this beanstalk conversing with a dragon that I realized that Philip and Linden Lab’s gamble, it paid off. They’d gambled that if they created this world, people would come and build it into a place worth being. And people did. From where I’m standing, everything I see, rocks, trees, a wooden cabin, a sailboat, they were all built by someone else, a user, like me.
Linden Lab had built something special. That didn’t mean the company had it all figured out. Eventually it would need to make money. But one early Linden Lab employee, I spoke to, Daniel Huebner told me that profits were never Philip’s main goal.

Daniel Huebner : Philip just really wanted Second Life to exist. He didn’t necessarily need it to be wildly financially successful. He didn’t need to become a billionaire from Second Life. He just needed it to exist.

Annie Minoff: I asked Philip about that, to be wildly financially successful. He didn’t need to become a billionaire from Second Life. He just needed it to exist.

Philip Rosedale: Totally.

Annie Minoff: Why?

Philip Rosedale: I don’t know. Well, I guess it’s that thing. When you imagine something in your head really clearly, and you might be able to build it, right, then there’s this itch where you’re like, “Well, what if I was able to build it?” I mean, that’s what it felt like to me. I think I wanted to see it. I just wanted to see what people would build. I just wanted to see what it would look like.

Annie Minoff: What it looked like in the beginning anyway, was the cedar tree. It looked like fish swimming around in a pond and a beanstalk stretching into the sky. But Second Life couldn’t stay a small community of early adopters forever. As the platform moved out of beta testing, its doors opened to the entire internet. The outside world was about to come streaming into Second Life, and it wasn’t going to be pretty. Linden Labs’ Eden was due for a fall.
What were the kind of more mundane like everyday things you would see?

Daniel Huebner : Pushing.

Annie Minoff: Really?

Daniel Huebner : Swearing. People saying offensive things.

Speaker 18: He was there to have virtual sex with as many people as he possibly could in as many ways he possibly could.

Annie Minoff: Should we-

Speaker 19: Oh, let’s-

Annie Minoff: Should we blow some stuff up?

Speaker 19: Yeah.

Annie Minoff: Whoa. Geez. That’s next week 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 me, Annie Minoff, with help from Alan Rodriguez Espinoza and Josh Sanburn. 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 Catherine Anderson, Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, Nathan Singhapok and Epidemic Sound. Our theme music is by So Wiley and was remixed by Bobby Lord. Special thanks to Rick Brooks, Hannah Chin, Jason Dean, David Fox, Ryan Knutson, Kate Linebaugh, Sarah Platt, Georgia Wells and Catherine Whelan.
And special thanks to the entire Journal team, Melvis Acosta Chrisostomo, Annie Baxter, Pia Gadkari, Rachel Humphreys, Matt Kwong, Peter Leonard, Laura Morris, Afeef Nessouli, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Aaron Randall, Vladislav Sadiq, Nathan Singhapok, Pierce Singgih and Victoria Whitley-Berry. With help from Jonathan Sanders.
Thanks for listening. Part two will be out next Friday.