John Hanke | The Video Game That Was Secretly Mapping Your World

About this episode

What if the summer you spent chasing Pikachu in the park was actually you volunteering to build a global military mapping system? Yeah. That happened. Ever wondered where Google Earth actually came from? Buckle up, because this one goes to some wild places. This week Jaron and Tim dig into John Hanke, the University of Texas grad who helped build one of the very first MMOs (Meridian 59), then pivoted to a tiny startup called Keyhole that was basically Google Earth before Google Earth existed. Nobody wanted it — realtors shrugged, civic planners laughed — until the War on Terror hit and cable news made satellite imagery a household thing overnight. Then Google bought them, Street View was born, and Hanke spun off Niantic to make augmented-reality games like Ingress and, eventually, the cultural tidal wave that was Pokémon GO. But here's the mind-bending part: those AR mapping tasks where you filmed statues to make Pikachu climb them? That was 30 billion user scans of the planet, feeding a visual positioning system now partnered with defense contractors, Palantir, and a CIA-linked investment firm called In-Q-Tel. It's a story about maps, video games, and the uncomfortable truth th