Philip Rosedale and the Epstein Files

When the Epstein files came out and someone said “Philip Rosedale’s name is in there,” I’ll admit my stomach did that little drop thing. Second Life is my virtual home. Bay City Studios, machinima, The Guild, all of it; a lot of my creative life traces back to something Philip built. And…I mean, didn’t we just do something like this not too long ago?

Hearing his name in those files? Not a fun moment. So I did what any normal obsessed Second Life person does - I downloaded every one and read them. :)

Spoiler alert? What I found was the most boring thing imaginable - in a very good way. :) Feel free to double check me by using this link here, but I’ll save you some time with a summary. Here is what I didn’t find:

I didn’t find secret meetings. I didn’t find private island invites. No favors, money, or anything shady.

It’s basically:

Epstein / Epstein Minion: “Want to talk sometime?”
Rosedale: “Busy coding.” / “Can’t travel.” / “Maybe later.” / “Here are some thoughts about virtual currency.”/”Let’s meet at this super public place.”

Over and over.

A third party introduces them because Philip built a virtual economy during the days of mega tech-bro-dom. They try to schedule a call. A San Francisco visit gets canceled. A ranch invite gets declined. Conference invites get declined. A few nerdy emails about Bitcoin and regulation happen. All of this is very normal for someone in Philip’s position then, especially since he likely didn’t know everything we now know about this particular group of people.

And then what happens? It kind of fizzles out. If anything, the overwhelming tone reads to me as polite distance on Philip’s end. To me it’s very “friendly engineer who has too much work and doesn’t really want to travel and maybe doesn’t want to be around this guy”. He doesn’t sound like a power broker. He sounds like… an engineer (and I say that with much love, but if you’ve ever worked in the tech industry you’ll know what I mean…):

“Sorry, immersed in design and coding.”
“My new virtual world is coming together.”
“Can’t make that date.”

It’s the most ‘omg shiny, I’m building stuff’ tone imaginable and it very much reminds me of how he was when I was interviewing him in our PODsCast a year or so ago. He was nice, curious, a little dreamy (not in a hot guy kind of way, but in a ‘OMG! There is a giant donut on the mainland!’ kind of way), very “what if we built this cool thing?”.

Don’t get me wrong; Philip is brilliant and a lot socially smarter than people give him credit for. There is a reason he has been a CEO of many companies and why Brad asked him to come back as the Second Life CTO. But even as I pondered this, the thing that really stuck with me wasn’t even in these emails. It was in a separate interview where he did a public round table discussion (I think it was this one?), where Philip was asked if Teen Second Life would ever come back. His answer?

Basically it was “No. That’s never happening.”

It wasn’t a dreamer answer; it was a “I’ve seen enough to know better” answer. I think a lot of people forget that Second Life was navigating young people on a virtual grid long before Minecraft was doing it’s thing. The SL Governance and Legal Team has probably seen some things that would make most peoples skin crawl, especially during the early days of MMOs.

His response that “Second Life was a place for people that are over 18” made me trust him more, and I say that as a person who DOES want the SL teen grid back. If there was something creepy going on there, his answer isn’t the answer that predators give. His answer sounded like someone who understands the darker sides of the internet and isn’t interested in going near it again.

After reading everything, the interactions don’t look like a relationship to me. It looks like early 2010s networking with a young ‘tech bro’ Philip Rosedale that went nowhere. Rich guys (Epstein and his minion Boris) were interested in ‘all the sex’, data collected via virtual means, and virtual currency. Logically, they asked a virtual economy founder (Philip) for advice. They tried to schedule a couple calls, but Philip mostly declined invites and stayed home coding. There was a time they were suppose to meet when they were going to be in San Fran, but the trip was canceled and all attempts after that (seem to me) like they were dodged artfully by Philip.

If anything, the emails made me feel MORE confident that Philip isn’t a creeper. What do you think?

Philip Responds HERE