Imaginary Worlds - Second Life Goes On

Episode Date: March 18, 2021

One year into this pandemic, it’s been a struggle to feel a connection with other people digitally. That’s why I was inspired to hear an episode from the show Science Friday about a community that refused to disband their virtual world. As reporter Daniel Peterschmidt explains to me, the staff of Science Friday had set up a virtual outpost in Second Life when it was a trendy thing to do in the mid-2000s. The show eventually left Second Life, but Daniel recently discovered their community of hardcore fans stuck together long after many people abandoned Second Life, and the group went through not-so virtual turmoil along the way.  Today's episode is brought to you by SerialBox and BetterHelp. Want to advertise/sponsor our show? We have partnered with AdvertiseCast to handle our advertising/sponsorship requests. They’re great to work with and will help you advertise on our show. Please email [e-mail] or click the link below to get started. Imaginary Worlds AdvertiseCast Listing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It's time for Tim's. Before beginning the show, I want to let you know about an episode that we're working on about guilty pleasures. I find this topic really interesting when it comes to sci-fi and fantasy because those genres began with these kind of lowbrow pulp fiction roots, and it's been a long journey towards cultural respectability. But sometimes there's a sci-fi fantasy movie or show or book that you love for the simple pleasure of it, even though it's not actually good and people often make fun of it. So we'd like to hear from you.

On the show's website, we posted a series of questions for you to answer at imaginaryworldspodcast.org contact. And if we think your story would fit with this episode, we'll be in touch. Thanks. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds. I'm Eric Malinsky. I can't believe it's been over a year now since the pandemic hit the U.S. and we all went into lockdown. Personally, I am starting to hit a wall. My big escape this year was playing video games, especially immersive games where I could get lost in a virtual world for hours.

Also, I'm more addicted to social media than ever. Although I've really enjoyed hearing from you because I feel like we built a community together around our common interests. And you've kept me company during this pandemic. That's why I was really curious to hear about another show that built a community for their listeners in Second Life. Second Life is a virtual world where you create an avatar of yourself and then you interact with other people through their avatars. Now Second Life dates back to the era of Friendster and MySpace. In fact, I didn't know people were still using Second Life until I heard this story on the show Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Daniel Peterschmidt is a producer at Science

Friday, and they are here with me now. So how did this start? How did you guys first get into Second Life? Yeah, so this happened back in 2007, and Second Life, it had been around for a few years, but at like the mid-2000s, it started getting really popular. I just started working at WNYC at the time, and I remember it was, there was no shortage of stories on Second Life. Right, yeah. And so we basically wanted to be in Second Life so we could have these like kind of virtual listening parties where like our fans would make Second Life accounts and they would come in with their avatars and we would like sit in this big amphitheater thing and we would like live stream the radio show into Second Life. And then, you

know, people would light up the chat with, you know, their kind of opinion on things or things they found interesting. So, okay, so you did this episode of Science Friday where you checked in with your Second Life community like 12 years after you had sort of abandoned them. Had they been there the whole time? Yeah, I mean, we left like around 2009. It just financially wasn't working out for us. And that was kind of like the last that we knew about it. And then one day we got a tweet during our show saying a group of them were listening in Second Life.

And I sent that to the rest of the staff. And it's like, they're still listening in Second Life. And so I just kind of had to follow up with them. I had so many questions. Okay, great. So before we go any further, I want to play your episode from Science Friday. So we're going to hear Daniel take over as narrator, and then we will catch up after the episode because I have a few questions.

But first, here's the episode as it aired on public radio. One of my jobs at Science Friday is to help manage our Twitter account during the live show. And one Friday afternoon, last January, we got a message from a Twitter user named Baragon. He said the show's streaming link was broken and he needed a new one so he could listen on Second Life. And I was like, wait, Second Life? One of the fastest growing sites on the internet is a 3D world called Second Life. This is supposed to be me, kind of.

It's called an avatar, and it's part of a world some people call very cool, while others consider it very weird. Yes, that's Second Life, the online virtual world that became kind of a cultural phenomenon in the early 2000s. If you've never seen Second Life, imagine a vast

ocean dotted with thousands of small islands and large continents. Signing up is free, anyone can create an avatar, and you can really live a second life there. You can meet other people, you can build bustling cities and blissful forests, you can make and sell things and earn real-world money. Second Life really took off in the early 2000s, and it had a million regular users at its peak. But it became the butt of jokes and pop culture, the kind of thing that Dwight from The Office has losers. Mean dig aside, Dwight wasn't alone in loving Second Life. A little over a decade ago, Science Friday was

pretty excited about it too. So excited that we started our very own Second Life community in 2007. And then we forgot about them. But keep in mind, this was 13 years ago. No one I talked to really remembers how it started, but Ira did remember how he felt about it. I do remember being very excited when I heard about it. Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. The idea that you could create a whole new world and put down roots and have a spot where people could come and listen to Science Friday early on, that was crazy. I thought that was kind of cool. We basically wanted to throw an awesome Science Friday party in Second Life.

So one day, Ira announces on the radio that we'd be streaming the show into Second Life. Anyone could log in and listen virtually with us. The thing is, we had no idea what we were doing. We started renting an island. Side note, you can rent or buy land in Second Life and kind of do whatever you want with it. But besides a couple trees and a pond, there was nothing on it. And no one wants to hang out with you on a barren island. Science Friday was my favorite show. And eventually I volunteered to manage and build out the Science Friday island.

Luckily, Lynn Collins, a retired mountain lion conservationist and Science Friday superfan, heard our call out on the radio and volunteered to be our virtual world architect and guide. Do you remember a moment early on when you were playing it and you're like, wow, this is like really working for me? There were so many. The moment when I first created a primitive object in Second Life and realized that I could change this world. I wasn't just playing in it. I was creating it. Designing an island isn't an easy task, but what Lynn created was beautiful. She built an amphitheater right on the water, and from it, every evening, you'd get this stunning view of the digital sunset. You can check out photos of it on sciencefriday.com

slash secondlife. The amphitheater had big, red, comfy-looking chairs where visiting avatars could come sit in a circle, and in the center was just a normal-looking office chair, where Ira's avatar, Ira Flatley, would preside. Yeah, Ira Flatley, not Flato. I had a lot of trouble with the Ira Flatley avatar because I could not get it to look like me. I got as close as I could to it. I'm not great at graphics. But not that close. This was not public radio host Ira. This was Baywatch Ira. Massive biceps, eight-pack abs. I never had such a good body as that avatar has, so I was happy at least with that.

So Science Friday Second Life was all set to go. We had an amphitheater. We had a beefcake IRA. What more do you really need? People, of course. Lynn built it. And after some shout outs from IRA on the radio, they came. All kinds of creatures. There was Violet Azimuth, who showed up as a rabbit. Like a realistic rabbit. As for why, I don't know. Bunnies always spoke to me. C.B. Axel, a retired paramedic, came as a rabbit. Like a realistic rabbit. As for why, I don't know. Bunny's always spoke to me. C.B. Axel, a retired paramedic, came as a human. She's younger than I am in real life. She's thinner than I am in real life. And of course, Baragon, the person who wrote to us on Twitter. His avatar is tall and comic book muscular with long silky hair. My avatar is really handsome. I'd like my

avatar to be hot. In real life, he's Matt Burr, a patent attorney with a degree in molecular biology. Usually there'd be around 70 people who'd show up every week, but at its peak, the group had a huge amount of members, over 2,800 people. There were so many people showing up that we had to set up an overflow space so the island wouldn't crash. Let me see if I can get one more audio question in from Second Life. Absolutely. One of the group's favorite things about the shows was being able to send their questions to Ira through the chat, and sometimes over voice too, like this one.

A few billion years from now, the sun's going to become much brighter, swell into a red giant and scorch the surface of the Earth. What we're looking at on Mercury right now, will that tell us anything about what it will be like on the Earth this time a few billion years from now? Wow, that's a really good question. Whenever Ira would say, oh, here's a question from so-and-so in Second Life, everyone would get really excited. Yay, we're mentioned, and congratulations, you got your name on. It was really fun and exciting for all of us to hear. It made us feel part of the radio show. So during the live broadcast, Lynn moderated the

chat and sent the best questions to the studio. She remembers this one time while she was moderating and there was this massive thunderstorm happening in Sacramento where she lived. And at the same time, I was watching a hundred-year-old elm tree whip wildly about and crashed through the roof of the church across the street. And I just kept typing because what was happening in my home was very different than what was happening in the studio in New York and very different from what was happening under the clear blue skies in Second Life. And that was part of the magic, was being three places at once. But despite what a frantic job it must have been? It was an experience that I looked forward to every single week.

I remember a couple of times going out with Ira and walking around the island and chatting about the show. And it's one of the highlights of that relationship for me was to be able to spend that time with Ira. You know, why did we leave Second Life? We left Second Life on a purely monetary basis. It was too expensive, to put it simply. It was 2009. We'd been in Second Life for roughly two years, and we'd reached a point where renting an island was just outside our non-profit budget, roughly $800 a month in rent.

And as the executive producer of the show, Ira had to make a difficult call. The hardest thing was the decision to say goodbye. And that really was the hardest part of Second Life. Because we stopped paying for the island, it disappeared. Ira and our other admin stopped logging in, and Lynn, our Second Life maestro, left Second Life entirely. in. And Lynn, our Second Life maestro, left Second Life entirely. And that appeared to be the final nail in the coffin. Lynn was gone. We were gone. The island was gone. The space we helped grow over two years was swiftly dismantled. Violet, one of the members of our group, says losing communities in Second Life is pretty normal. And at some point, you just get used to it. Personally, I wish more spaces would last longer. A lot of my favorite spaces are gone now.

And I miss them. I wish I could access those spaces again. But things are more transient. An interesting thing I've noticed is the prevalence of Buddhist groups in Second Life. Sort of central to Buddhism is, you know, the idea of impermanence and letting go of attachment to things. And I've always wondered how literally that can be applied to like a constantly changing virtual world where things are just gone all the time. These vanishing virtual lands, it's a trend across all kinds of tech platforms.

And when online community spaces disappear, users are often abandoned and left to fend for themselves. And that's what we thought happened to the Sci-Fi Island just swept away with time. But it turns out our Second Life listeners decided that even though we left, they weren't done with this. So they decided to pick up the pieces and ran into some snags along the way. Yeah, here we can get into the whole soap opera, which I've kind of been waiting to tell you, actually. We have that story after the break. This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda.

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When we left Second Life back in 2009, that's where we thought the story ended. It was something our longtime staff members would talk about occasionally at happy hours, that for a couple years, we did these cool kind of kooky broadcasts from a virtual world. But then we left before our for our second life group, that was very much not the end of the story. Yeah, here we can get into the whole soap opera, which I've kind of been waiting to tell you, actually. Yeah. At first, things weren't so bad. They went back to a public space where the sci-fi stream was originally hosted, but that soon closed down too.

After that, the group hopped from private island to private island, hosted by different members in their group who already had their own land. But their numbers dwindled to about 20 people, because, being on private islands, their weekly meetups were now closed off to the public, plus, IRL wasn't doing shoutouts on the radio anymore. One of the members, CB Axel, sent me a screenshot from this time. It's a group of about a dozen avatars, some sitting around a glass conference table, overlooking an ocean at sunset,

propped on top of a wooden box as a projector screen that reads, Keep SciFriday in Second Life. The fact that the group was starting to get so small, that bothered Matt and the others. They originally joined the Sci-Fi Second Life group because of all the people and the exciting conversations that would spring up in the chat. So they decided to do something about it. We sort of wandered the desert for a few years, basically gathering in public places. They decided to leave their safe private islands and head back out into public land.

Matt hoped that being out in public spaces where anyone could listen in might help them recruit more people. And soon, they found a public space that hosted an NPR stream that carried Science Friday. In many ways, it seemed like the solution to their problems. But there were some downsides. Like, when anyone can join your group, anyone can join your group. We had no admin rights to control access to the land. So our gatherings in public spaces attracted an unsavory element of the public.

It was basically two guys, just griefers and trolls and climate change deniers and wacko wackadoos, you know, and they would come in and provoke arguments with us and stuff like that. And they would sort of end up dominating the conversation. So the griefers, which is second life lingo for trolls, didn't just stick to climate change denial, but tackled a range of anti-science issues like anti-evolution. They would show up every Friday at their meeting place like clockwork and harass the group members. They wouldn't even necessarily wait for the topic. They would just start grieving us right off the bat as soon as they got there. That was their whole point. Matt and the others, they didn't ignore them, but they actually went toe-to-toe with them. I generally do push back on things like that

when I see them. But with someone like that, who's doing it continuously and probably not doing it in good faith, it hits a point where you're just talking to a wall. Sometimes they would devolve into personal insults where we're calling each other stupid and you don't know what you're talking about and you're just a troll. And they would not take a hint. I mean mean they would show up week after week after week after week with the same routine and they didn't listen to our complaints so it became quickly evident that it was not being done in good faith if they were just there to to disrupt us and there wasn't much they could do no one in the group had admin privileges, so they couldn't kick anybody out. And the group put up with all of this for a long time. So we actually tolerated it for years. How many years do you think, roughly? Five years. You know, we put up with it for a long time

because we wanted to, we sort of had some pride in being able to listen to other points of view and to address them and so forth. But eventually, enough was enough. We had to get control of the situation. They really needed those admin privileges back. So roughly two years ago. So I did that. I created a new Science Friday group, Science Friday the next generation. That's great. They needed private land again. And luckily, one of their members, CB, actually had private land and offered up part of her space where they could all meet.

Now, you know, this space is no sprawling outdoor amphitheater. It's kind of the opposite. It's basically a game room, homey with lots of couches, a couple of card tables at the back, but they finally had safe haven once again. So after all the trouble they went through over the years just to listen to a show together, I was wondering, was it all worth it? Matt says, basically, it was because of the community. It's like walking into the Cheers bar, I guess. Whenever Norm would come into the bar and everyone would go,

Norm! Right? It's like that. It's like everyone knows your name kind of thing. When Matt went into Second Life over a decade ago, he wasn't expecting it would end up meaning so much to him. It kind of snuck up on me that it would become so important. You know, I have a great family and I have a lot of great friends, but this is just a particular idiosyncratic interest I have that I don't really have a like a real life community to share it with. But here I do. And so so I just don't want to I don't want to lose it. Although Matt has spent less time in Second Life than he thought he would during quarantine, it's still a valuable place for him. If you didn't have, you know, the history that you do in Second

Life that you think you're like emotional well being would be like, worse off right now. that you think your emotional well-being would be worse off right now? Yes, I definitely do. Because I have this great resource that's going to help me cope with it. It is a comfort to me to know that Second Life is right there just to click away if I start feeling lonely or something. And that's something I was thinking a lot about as I was working on the story. You know, now during the pandemic, a lot of us are stuck at home, our previous social lives are in pieces,

and Zoom calls aren't really ideal replacements for face-to-face interactions. So could Second Life and other virtual worlds give us something that endless video meetings can't? I remember having this moment where I felt like I might be living in the Matrix, where I was like, are these people anything more than talking heads?

Catherine Espister is a human computer interaction and games researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz. And like a lot of us, she spent a lot of time in the past few months on video chat. And then I was having a co-working meeting with a friend and I could see her in the background making her tea. And it was just so comforting to see her doing that in her own space. And I think what is really interesting about shared worlds is you can go through the ritual of making tea together. You can sit quietly and just say nothing in an online world and still feel a sense of co-presence. You know, you can get in a virtual boat and just be rowing for a while and say nothing. Seeing the avatar's whole body, even though it's virtual, Matt says that for some reason, it's actually really satisfying. I think that virtual world avatars have an

unappreciated psychological power. It's especially true in a world like Second Life, where you create your own avatar from scratch, basically. So that avatar is an actual creative expression of yourself. You're emotionally invested in your avatar. So being in the presence of avatars triggers perfectly real emotional responses to things. For Celia Pierce, an associate professor of game design at Northeastern University, this checks out with the research she's done on virtual worlds. In 2015, she released the results of a demographic survey with over 800 participants that she conducted on these worlds. Who uses them, how they use them, and why. And one of the most surprising findings was that some people reported that using virtual

worlds helped mitigate depression and even suicide, especially if they were disabled or trans. Support groups in the virtual world helped, but also just regular old play, whether it was roleplay as different creatures like vampires, holding events, dancing, or even people creating their own games. And unlike other games, most people using virtual worlds aren't teens. They're usually Gen Xers or Baby Boomers. In the quarantine era, like what does Second Life have to offer to us right now? I think it offers a connection through play. In the US, for instance, I think we have a little bit of Protestant work ethic baggage that really kind of marginalizes play. And I think that adults just need other forms of play besides sports

that are socially acceptable. What I'm seeing right now that's super exciting is we're starting to see more and more of this. So this normalization of adult play in virtual worlds, it's helping marginalized communities with their mental health. It's allowing others to freely explore their identities. And it's helping a lot of people with loneliness. In Celia's survey, many disabled people self-reported that they use virtual worlds to mitigate loneliness. These worlds and the play that happens inside them give people social connection.

Connection that a lot of us are missing right now. I think we all need to play more, and how we choose to do that is really up to our personal taste. That conversation between Dwight and Jim in the office clip I played at the beginning, that's kind of how society has looked at virtual worlds like these, as a sad waste of time. But it seems like we've made some progress since then. And in the midst of quarantine, it looks like people are responding to this return to play. Linden Lab has seen about a 20% increase in users that are logged into Second Life at a given time,

roughly the same rise that Twitter saw with its users since the pandemic started. Now, there's about 50,000 people playing Second Life at any one time. It's clear that Second Life means a lot to people, even to someone like Lynn, who doesn't play it anymore. You know, people that play video games, especially multiplayer online games, will recognize the pull of these virtual worlds. And Second Life is special in that regard. And after a while, Lynn realized that that pull had gotten too strong for her. Over time, I began to feel the loss of experiencing my other senses and the world outside. Lynn loves Second Life. She was able to completely financially support herself in-world, but she ended up spending about 14 hours a day there for a couple years,

including weekends and holidays. And it turns out Second Life can't completely replace your first life. I miss things like the scent of flowers, on the breeze, the buzz of insects, you know, the subtlety of a unique sunset instead of the same old sunset on the Science Friday Island. Lynn doesn't look back on her time there as a waste. I mean, she was experiencing real life and second life. She had real jobs that paid her real money. She formed real memories and had real relationships. And as far money. She formed real memories and had real relationships. And as far as the Science Friday Next Generation group goes, they've still been meeting up every Friday, continuing a tradition that, for many of them, goes back 13 years.

Whoa, it is very weird just to see people flying around in midair. After catching up with the members of the original Science Friday Second Life group, after learning everything they went through, I felt like it was only fitting that we had a reunion. And even though we'd abandoned them a decade ago, they were willing to host us. So Ira, myself, and a group of us from Science Friday made Second Life accounts,

learned how to put on different outfits, and slowly learned how to move around. What are you... Are we all in different rooms? I'm watching the Weather Channel in a dungeon or something. Life accounts, learned how to put on different outfits, and slowly learned how to move around. What are you? Are we all in different rooms? I'm watching the Weather Channel in a dungeon or something. I don't know. Playing Second Life today is kind of like going back into a time machine. The graphics haven't really changed since the early 2000s, but trying to learn how to use it, even though it was really tricky and confusing, It was actually kind of fun. I spent over two hours making my own avatar, but I didn't really like it. You know, just kind of like slicked back white hair and like torn skinny jeans. And it just kind of looked like they were about to head

to a pop punk concert or something. But I really dug my co workers avatars, a mage, a werewolf, and of course, Baywatch Ira. Oh my god, we're doing it. 30 minutes later, guys, and we finally are meeting up with each other. I think I found you all. Oh, I see you guys. Yay! Eventually, we all teleported to CB's space. It was a Friday afternoon, and for the first time in a decade, we were all going to listen to the show together again.

And things had changed. There was no more amphitheater, no more giant rising sun, just a homey game room. Yeah, it seems to be people are filtering in, as we used to say. And we're not even offering hors d'oeuvres. That's the miracle of it. So we got there early,

and as we were finding our seats, we watched as members of the original group teleport in one by one. There was Beargun, a.k.a. Matt Burr, looking strong and stoic. Violet was hopping around in a realistic rabbit avatar. CB was wearing a Science Friday t-shirt that she made. I see Burel and Loon. Yep, that's uh, that's Lynn Cohen, Zyra. Yeah, wow, that brings back

memories. And Lynn, who hasn't really set foot in Second Life since 2010, returned as well. As each person teleported in, the group chat sprung to life. It was just like Matt said, like walking into the bar from Cheers. And for Ira, who, since this pandemic started, has missed doing a live show and having live people call in, he was ecstatic to have something akin to a live audience. Over the course of the show, hundreds of messages were sent through the group chat discussing the segments. And by the time the second hour had started,

there must have been about 20 people there. And the game room felt full and alive. Oh no, I'm out of the picture. I'm out of the picture. And I'm back with Daniel Peter Schmidt. I mean, we've all been like living in a virtual world pretty much for the last year. I mean, not Second Life, but it's felt like a virtual world. In doing that story, did you reflect back on sort of the virtual worlds that have helped you deal with this kind of the daily grind of the pandemic? Totally. This is not the exact same as Second Life, but I've just been playing a lot more video games since the pandemic started and playing online with my brothers and my cousins

we play Super Smash and Fortnite which is actually surprisingly fun I had no idea yeah my D&D group you know it was getting with our busy schedules it was getting so hard for us all to meet and then our gaming has been so robust you

know over the last year and we've been using an app called discord where you can do voice i think you can do video as well but um we've only been texting but it's been like going back to the 90s and doing one of those like multi-user dungeon games and it's been kind of amazing uh and we are more in touch with each other than we've ever been you know wishing each other happy new year and things that we just never you know merry christmas we just never did back beforehand yeah i'm sure you uh you feel this too but like you know i find if you're just doing a straight video chat nowadays there's like this pressure to you know like catch each other up on you know each other's lives and you know it's kind of like a relatively heavy conversation like how you're doing is like well i'm you know i like catch each other up on, you know, each other's lives. And, you know, it's kind of like a relatively heavy conversation. Like, how are you doing? It's like, well, I'm, you know,

I'm holding up, I'm surviving. But when you're doing these like online video game sessions with your friends and family, the conversation gets much more casual and it feels more akin to like hanging out, even though it's still happening virtually. Huh. So I'm curious, was there anything really interesting that you learned from these experts that you just couldn't fit into the episode? Yeah. One of the things that Celia Pierce, the game design researcher, was talking about was how for whatever reason, social relationships are in a virtual world. They just accelerate the pace of

those relationships just happen so much quicker. You know, even though you're not seeing their face, you may be hearing their like actual voice. People just get really attached like really quickly compared to real life. And another thing she said was that like marriages happen all the time in virtual worlds, just really quickly within months, and that people can be married in a virtual world and then also be married in the real world to a different spouse. And sometimes the spouse is fine with it, and sometimes they're not. But it's sort of an interesting redefining

of how our social and romantic relationships can work. You know, it's also interesting, too, because, I mean, this whole year has really challenged, has been challenging to sort of define what exactly counts as human contact. Yeah, totally. And this is something I kind of touched on the episode a little bit, but you know, all the people I talked to from our Science Friday Second Life group, you know, they were typically boomers or, you know, over the age of 50, which I found kind of surprising. But when I talked to Celia, who had, who's been studying virtual worlds for around 20 years, she was like, yep, that is the demographics are quite different

in virtual worlds compared to like World of Warcraft. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you know, you think of like the typical gamer as like young male, you know, griefing and trolling and all that stuff. With the study she's done with people who play in virtual worlds, older adults are drawn to that because there's like way less emphasis on violence or there's no violence. There's much more emphasis on creation and socializing. And also the gender demographics are also flipped and it's mostly women who play in virtual worlds. Wow. Very interesting. Well, the biggest surprise for me is that Second Life still exists. Yeah, they're still going. And they've actually been moving the game over to the cloud, to different servers, and they're still implementing all these upgrades to the game.

And the game financially is doing quite well. It has a thriving marketplace that people make and sell things through. And yeah, it's a cashflow positive game for the studio to this day. All right. Well, thanks, Daniel. Thank you, Eric. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening.

Special thanks to Daniel Peter Schmidt and the staff of Science Friday. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweeted emulinski and Imagine Worlds pod. The best way to support the show is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you get either free Imagine World stickers, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. You can learn more at imaginaryworldspodcast.org.