John Hanke is the CEO of Niantic, a company that makes the wildly popular Pokemon Go mobile game in partnership with Nintendo and the Pokémon company. Pokemon Go, and its predecessor Ingress, are now the largest and most successful augmented reality games in the industry, which means John has long been at the forefront of what we’ve all started calling the metaverse—digital worlds that interact with the real world. Lots of companies are chasing metaverse hype but John’s been at it for a while, and I wanted to talk about the reality instead of the hype. We also coin the phrase “marketplace of realities.” It’s a ride.

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Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, and Jackie McDermott with research by Liz Lian and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andru Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

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