Lost Without You

2025 marks 20 years of Google Maps — a tool that many of us would be, quite literally, lost without. We hear from New Orleanians who used Google Maps/Google Earth in its inaugural year to survey the damage to their homes following Hurricane Katrina. We also talk to the internet's Map Men, who ask whether "the best maps humanity has ever produced are simultaneously the worst maps for humanity?" in their new book, "This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters). https://www.harpercollins.com/products/this-way-up-map-men?variant=44603661746210"

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. A recent episode explores how AI is reshaping our schools. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 1:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 1:10Speaker 04

  It's really weird, the things you remember. I still remember like the layout of the downstairs. I remember the kitchen. I remember the photos being on the wall. I remember their little dining table that was like itty bitty, just big enough for, you know, two grandparents to eat their like boiled eggs and drink their coffee in the morning.

• 1:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  This is Scooter1021, as he is known on Reddit, remembering his grandparents' house back when he was a kid in the late 90s and early aughts.

• 1:39Amory Sivertson?

  And this is another reminiscing redditor.

• 1:42Speaker 06

  My dad bought this house when I was a kid. You know, it was like less than a thousand square feet, very small, unfinished. He worked overtime for three or four years to pay it off.

• 1:54Amory Sivertson?

  This is Wayne, describing a childhood summer home by the water.

• 1:58Speaker 06

  Anytime that my dad could get away, we were at that house. You know, I have very fond memories of my siblings and I sitting in the back of a Radio Flyer wagon and our mom pulling us to the beach the day while my dad built a deck or rigged pine needles or whatever it was they needed to do around the house. So it was a, you know, a place that was very, very, very precious to him.

• 2:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  Wayne's summer house was in Clermont Harbor on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, not far from Scooter's grandparents' house in New Orleans.

• 2:26Amory Sivertson?

  Which is where another redditor, Laureen, had an old home that she'd recently purchased from a sort of well-known family in town.

• 2:33Speaker 07

  And it had been in their family for many years, so for me to even get that house was a big deal. But over the years, they couldn't afford to do anything to it, so it had been completely gutted. So it was in a weak state.

• 2:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  Three redditors with homes that held generations of memories.

• 2:51Speaker 04

  That's where we had Christmas every year until then, and then never again.

• 2:54Speaker 06

  Everything was okay, and that everything is definitely not okay.

• 2:57Speaker 07

  I just started to cry because I'm like, there is nothing that you can really do at this point.

• 3:02Speaker 08

  A category four storm with winds topping 145 miles an hour.

• 3:07Speaker 09

  Water is pouring into the city.

• 3:09Speaker 10

  So catastrophic is the destruction, some emergency officials are calling it biblical.

• 3:17Amory Sivertson?

  20 years ago this year, August 29th, 2005 to be exact, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near the Louisiana-Mississippi border. Scooter, our first redditor, had already evacuated with his mom and older brother and grandparents.

• 3:34Speaker 04

  It was very clear, even as a seven-year-old, that what was happening was a big deal.

• 3:40Amory Sivertson?

  Wayne evacuated too, along with the rest of his immediate family.

• 3:44Speaker 06

  In the aftermath, there was really nothing to do but just absorb all the bad news that was being piled on us, the news.

• 3:50Speaker 11

  The water is rising steadily. Homes are vanishing. Tonight, people, hundreds of them, we believe, are stranded on rooftops.

• 3:56Speaker 04

  This is a four-lane road, or let me put it this way, this was a four-lane road.

• 4:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's like nature's magician simply made a neighborhood vanish.

• 4:04Speaker 06

  My sister's house was being flooded as we were sitting there. My grandmother's house was being flooded as we were sitting there. But my dad was, you know, I guess the one thing that he could worry about to take his mind off of that was what was happening in Clermont Harbor, what was left of the house in Clermont Harbor.

• 4:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  The house that was right on the Gulf, the area hardest hit by Katrina.

• 4:25Amory Sivertson?

  Meanwhile, Laureen was hundreds of miles away from her house in Tremay, one of the oldest neighborhoods in New Orleans.

• 4:32Speaker 07

  Tremay doesn't flood, sister, and that's what Google Earth told me.

• 4:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  Google Earth. This is what led us, navigated us, you might say, to Lorene and Wayne and Scooter. They were all using this same tool at this crucial moment in history.

• 4:53Amory Sivertson?

  A tool that was in its infancy, having launched just months before Hurricane Katrina, a tool that a lot of people had barely used at the time, if they'd even heard about it.

• 5:04Speaker 07

  My neighbor called us and said, "You can look on Google Earth."

• 5:09Speaker 04

  My mom heard through the grapevine that Google Earth was updating photos basically as often as they could.

• 5:15Speaker 06

  After a storm like that, everybody is looking for answers, and they're looking for answers right away. And so Google Maps and Google Earth and that satellite view was something that we used to sort of help fill that vacuum.

• 5:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  But some people would say that while Google Maps and Google Earth have filled a vacuum of knowledge, they've also created one, a vacuum in our collective sense of direction that has left many of us dependent on these tools.

• 5:43Amory Sivertson?

  Myself included, along with some 2 billion other monthly Google Maps users and millions of websites and apps. It's our compass, our traffic watcher, our business finder, our eyes on the ground of ground we may never touch. And so in 2025, we're looking at 20 years of Google as our guide and how it's changed how we see the world and move through it. I'm Amory Sivertson.

• 6:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm Ben Blue Dot Johnson, and you're listening to Endless Thread.

• 6:17Amory Sivertson?

  Coming to you from latitude 42.361, longitude negative 71.057.

• 6:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's what I put in when I go to work. That's what I put into Google Maps.

• 6:28Amory Sivertson?

  That's WBUR, baby, Boston's NPR. Today's episode?

• 6:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  Lost Without You.

• 6:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  In 2005, it felt like the internet was changing how we did just about everything. We had music videos a click away with the launch of YouTube.

• 7:02Amory Sivertson?

  Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed social media platforms were offering new ways to connect. Today, all students really need to hook up is a dedicated service line and time to surf the Facebook.com.

• 7:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  And?

• 7:17Speaker 09

  Welcome to Google Maps. Here you can search for places, businesses, directions, and much more, all from one website. To get started-

• 7:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  We had a new way to, quote, "get from point A to point B," as Google's official blog announced. In a new way of visualizing the world we were navigating through.

• 7:36Speaker 09

  With a click of a button, you can switch from map view to terrain view or to satellite view. You can even see the planes.

• 7:43Amory Sivertson?

  Ben, do you remember the first time that you played around in Google Maps? Particularly with satellite view, if you used that.

• 7:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  I feel like the answer's no, weirdly.

• 7:53Amory Sivertson?

  I know.

• 7:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  Like, I just sort of like, it's just like in my brain now. I, um, when I lived on Elm Street in Stonington, Connecticut, uh, back in the day, I think I looked at satellite view.

• 8:07Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah. Yeah, I don't remember when it was, but I do remember the zooming in and out. And I don't know what it is about seeing our neighborhoods from a bird's eye view, but there's something that kind of like, you kind of feel like a character in your own animated series or something.

• 8:25Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hmm.

• 8:25Amory Sivertson?

  You know, you have this sort of out-of-body experience where you're like, "That's my roof, but I'm, but I'm up here."

• 8:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  But I'm under the roof, but I'm on the roof.

• 8:36Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 8:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 8:37Amory Sivertson?

  You feel at home and removed at the same time.

• 8:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 8:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  So back to our Redditors, who have all evacuated in the lead up to the storm. And now they're waiting and watching the destruction from afar. Scooter was with his mom, brother, and grandparents in a hotel across the state. And his mom was watching the news.

• 9:02Speaker 04

  And suddenly there is her childhood home underwater, her whole neighborhood underwater. Unfortunately, it was her parents' anniversary, August 29th. And so they cried, they don't know what to do, they panic.

• 9:20Amory Sivertson?

  Meanwhile, Wayne and his dad were watching the news from a relative's house and losing hope.

• 9:26Speaker 06

  It was really the coast, right where my dad's house was, Mississippi. That's really where the worst of the storm came ashore.

• 9:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  And Laureen, she and her then-husband were trying to follow the conversation online.

• 9:39Speaker 07

  We were first looking at comments on places like Facebook or just nola.com. So people were starting to pass tips about information.

• 9:49Amory Sivertson?

  That's when one of her neighbors told her to go to Google Earth.

• 9:53Speaker 07

  So we just did it.

• 9:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  What Laureen found was updated satellite imagery of the flooded areas. Google had made it publicly available within just a few days of the storm.

• 10:08Amory Sivertson?

  Which might not seem all that speedy today, but behind the scenes, this was the result of long hours of processing aerial images captured by NASA and NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and uploading and overlaying them to Google Maps and Google Earth.

• 10:27Speaker 07

  It was very eerie, in a way, because you're looking at a dead city.

• 10:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  All of a sudden, this new Satellite View tool that had mostly been used to tickle our curiosity was providing critical information in a time of chaos. And what Laureen found is that she wasn't totally right about her neighborhood of Tremet. There had been some flooding, but overall, it was spared from the worst of it.

• 10:57Speaker 07

  It was really interesting, though, to be able to focus into the level to where we could see where the water, like, we could go, oh, the water's there. We see it. It's a darker shade, but we could see that it was not inundating the property. That level of detail made a huge difference because I knew I would be able to get back.

• 11:18Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 11:19Speaker 07

  Some people couldn't come back yet, like, in stages because they were in harder-hit areas.

• 11:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  Harder-hit areas like New Orleans East, where Scooter's grandparents' home was, which they already knew was in bad shape from seeing it on the news.

• 11:32Amory Sivertson?

  But now, they too had heard about Google Earth from a friend, who said there were pretty up-to-date images of the New Orleans area.

• 11:40Speaker 04

  What they did use Google Earth for was not to check whether or not the house was flooded, but it was basically to see when the water receded so that they could go back and start the process of rebuilding their lives, you know, checking what was damaged. Like, literally, just like, is the area around the roofs still blue? Or can you see... It went from blue to brown. I mean, it was like, it's like, and of course, I say that, but really, it was brown to brown. I mean, floodwater is super dirty, but you could tell when it was not flooded anymore. And so they would just check on Google Earth every single day, probably ritualistically, just to see when they could go back and start the process of assessing the damage to their home.

• 12:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  Scooter says it was weeks before his grandparents went back. Their entire bottom floor had flooded, destroying the Persian rug collection they were so proud of, washing away the miniatures his crafty grandmother had made, treasures both material and priceless.

• 12:38Speaker 04

  One of the things that my grandmother, like, still mourns to this day is this, like, big oak tree that she had in her backyard that, like, all the grandkids would climb. And, you know, she, like, still talks about that oak tree and how, you know, Katrina destroyed it and killed the tree and, you know, all the things that she lost. It's a looming tragedy on, basically...

• 13:04Speaker 04

  Everyone who lived in the city at the time, because the city's never been the same.

• 13:11Amory Sivertson?

  As for Wayne, his dad was actually pretty tech savvy. He'd already been using Google Maps and Google Earth in his everyday pre-disaster life.

• 13:20Speaker 06

  Things like driving directions.

• 13:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  Driving directions pre-smartphone, no less. Back when you had to, you know, print them out.

• 13:27Amory Sivertson?

  Which I definitely did.

• 13:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  So did I.

• 13:29Amory Sivertson?

  But pretty soon, driving directions would be useless in New Orleans.

• 13:35Speaker 06

  No one could go there because the roads were just unpassable and it was just complete destruction.

• 13:41Amory Sivertson?

  And Google Satellite View would be the closest Wayne's dad could get to his getaway home in the Mississippi Gulf.

• 13:48Speaker 06

  I think for a week after Katrina, that was what he spent most of his time doing, was looking at Google Earth and looking at Google Maps and hoping that what he saw meant that there was something left of the house there.

• 14:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  Wayne says he doesn't think the images were updated all that much over the course of that week. But having this tool at his fingertips gave his dad a sense of agency at a time when there really wasn't any.

• 14:13Speaker 06

  When you're sitting there and we're sitting in that house and there was nothing to do but to either watch the news and get, you know, bad news, you know, more confirmation of the horrible things that were happening, or to, you know, look at the map and to hope that that thing that we were looking at meant that there was something left that we could rebuild, that it wasn't as bad as we really suspected it was. Like, maybe this is the peak of the roof. Maybe this is the gable on the roof by the kitchen where it goes off the side of the house, you know? Maybe this is part of the roof standing and a tree fell over it this way. Maybe that's what we're looking at. You know, trying to think of what we should see and kind of overlaying what we are seeing on top of that. And how do we make those two, those two images combined? How do we stitch those two together

• 14:55Speaker 06

  and come to some kind of conclusion that gives us cause for optimism? And, you know, and once we finally got there, we realized that it was a, that we were delusional.

• 15:05Amory Sivertson?

  The house was gone, reduced to a pile of debris that had been blown blocks away.

• 15:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Still, Wayne says he's glad for the glimmer of hope that Google Maps and Google Earth offered in those early days after the storm, false as it may have been. His dad eventually put a prefab house on that property in Mississippi, and it's still a gathering place for the family, just bigger, higher off the ground.

• 15:32Speaker 06

  My dad has 18 grandkids, so he has a lot of beds to accommodate all of the children and their friends when they all come to work.

• 15:39Amory Sivertson?

  Then there's Loreen, whose historic work in progress in Tremay might not have flooded, but it didn't survive Katrina's high winds. She sold the lot.

• 15:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  Loreen says Google Earth was a reality check that gave her time to strategize in the immediate aftermath of the storm. Offering a lay of the land before she herself landed back in New Orleans helped her focus on recovery.

• 16:04Speaker 07

  And once you're focusing on recovery, you don't feel sorry for yourself and you're not stuck. But when you get back, you're going to get hit with all kinds of bad news. So the more you can process and think about before you get into the disaster zone is really going to help you keep your head on straight.

• 16:19Amory Sivertson?

  And you feel like Google Earth maybe played some role in that, just by giving you a sense of what the reality actually was?

• 16:26Speaker 07

  That's what I think information plays. Yes. Accurate information is everything.

• 16:35Speaker 04

  It looks pretty much exactly the same on the outside. It's kind of surreal to look at it, honestly.

• 16:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  Scooter's grandparents never lived in their New Orleans East home again, but he can still visit it whenever he wants, from the outside, at least, using Google Maps.

• 16:53Amory Sivertson?

  This like brick house with the trees in front?

• 16:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, that's it.

• 16:56Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 16:57Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 16:57Amory Sivertson?

  Wow, it's very, it's like regal looking.

• 16:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:01Amory Sivertson?

  Very cool.

• 17:02Speaker 04

  It was a cool place. It was a good, it was a good grandparents' home, you know? It was really nice. The lot that is emptied next to them that you can see

• 17:11Amory Sivertson?

  Yep.

• 17:11Speaker 04

  was not empty, and that is where their neighbor passed away in her attic. She got stuck there. So, so yeah, but it's a, it's a really nice house, as you can see from From space.

• 17:25Amory Sivertson?

  So our three reditors can appreciate Google Maps and Google Earth for the tool that it was during Hurricane Katrina. But they also acknowledge that that tool has changed. It's become more powerful and more ubiquitous than we probably ever imagined, which, yes, can be incredibly helpful.

• 17:44Speaker 07

  I definitely will turn to it. It's amazing.

• 17:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  But has maybe also made us a little help less?

• 17:53Speaker 06

  My wife teases me endlessly because when she tells me to take a right, then she always says the other right. And so I rely on Google Maps far more than I should.

• 18:03Amory Sivertson?

  And also, just because we can fly around a map doesn't necessarily mean we have control over what we're seeing.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  It has been quite helpful, you know, revealing the tragedies in Gaza and Ukraine in terms of just like being able to show, I mean, it looks like hell on earth, right? Like, all these places. It's a very powerful narrative tool, but that cuts both ways, right? I mean, it's this, you know, now the Gulf of Mexico reads the Gulf of America.

• 18:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  More on the widening Gulf and our sense of place.

• 18:37Amory Sivertson?

  And direction.

• 18:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  In a minute.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI?

• 19:12Speaker 12

  Instead of observing the final artifact, instead of observing the final essay or the final program, observe the entire process of creation.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts, and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on rethinking academic and job assessment when AI can do the work.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 20:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  What's your reaction to the realization that Google Maps and Google Earth turned 20 this year?

• 20:18Speaker 13

  It's no understatement to say that they are the best maps humanity have ever produced. It has completely changed the world. Not necessarily for the better, for reasons we might go into, but it's been huge.

• 20:30Speaker 14

  It both makes you feel quite old, doesn't it, on the one hand? And on the other hand, it's such an integrated part of our lives in so many ways that it's hard to remember a time before it, I think.

• 20:41Amory Sivertson?

  This is former geography teacher Mark Cooper Jones.

• 20:44Speaker 14

  When you have studied geography at university, you slowly realize that the next thing is you become a geography teacher.

• 20:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  And comedian Jay Forman, who is not a former geography teacher, but is very good at saying geography the way British people say it.

• 20:59Speaker 13

  It's not geography. Here it's geography. It sounds slightly sillier.

• 21:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Together, they are the map men.

• 21:13Amory Sivertson?

  It's a series on YouTube where Mark and Jay explain things like, why maps show places that don't exist.

• 21:20Speaker 14

  Excuse me, does your map show the village My Girlfriend? Of course, it's here on page five. Aha! You stole my map! My girlfriend doesn't exist. It never has and never will.

• 21:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  And the world's silliest time zones. This is the east London suburb of Greenwich, where you don't pronounce the W or one of the Es.

• 21:40Amory Sivertson?

  They're also co-authors of a new book called This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong.

• 21:46Speaker 13

  I think Mark and I both know that there's a story to be told behind almost any map in the world that you can think of. And very often, especially when a map's gone wrong, there's a great story behind it.

• 21:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  The map men had one such story for us about a place where Google Maps was initially useless.

• 22:04Amory Sivertson?

  A place with more than a billion potential users.

• 22:08Speaker 14

  I think it's 60% of streets in India do not have road names. So that was one of the big, big hurdles.

• 22:16Speaker 13

  Yeah, so there's a few territories in the world where they tend not to use street names even when they're available. And India, being the size it is, it has by far the most streets without names in the world.

• 22:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  Back when the British occupied India, they gave major roads names that were culturally significant to them, Mark says.

• 22:34Speaker 14

  British figures and British words and British names. And they never particularly caught on, unsurprisingly, with the Indian population. So in many ways, people got used to just not using the street names.

• 22:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  There's also been a massive amount of urban population growth in India over the last century, which has led to the creation of more informal settlements with unnamed streets between them.

• 22:56Amory Sivertson?

  So Google Maps had a challenge on its hands when it came to India. Fortunately, Jay says, they also had...

• 23:03Speaker 13

  Olga Kristolova, she was working at Google at the time, and she was the one who suggested that the researchers at Google, who do most of their research on their own campus, and she suggested, we need to actually travel to India. I think we should get on a plane and ask people how they navigate, watch them and take notes.

• 23:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  Olga and a small team flew to India and paid people to give them directions the way they would give them to a friend or a family member, to draw diagrams showing how they saw certain routes.

• 23:34Amory Sivertson?

  In just a matter of weeks, Olga and her team found that the secret to navigating the streets of India was landmarks. Instead of saying, you know, "Take a right on Chive Street and then a left on Marjoram Street in half a mile", people would say things like, "Okay, you're gonna go straight until you see the Gita statue, then turn right. When you see the glitter shop on the left, you're gonna turn there." Basically, anything permanent that could guide someone to a destination took the place of a street name in this updated approach to Google Maps in India.

• 24:07Speaker 14

  But also, there was a sort of routine to it. So you would describe where you were going. You would give them a direction. But at the end of it, you would say, "If you see this, you have gone too far." There was a confirmation element to the process of navigating, which they built into the system that they rolled out in India.

• 24:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's interesting because I feel, you know, I've lived where I live in the US for about 10 years. And I don't know, I feel like, any of the names of the streets that I use all the time.

• 24:40Speaker 13

  Well, you're not alone. This is a very common phenomenon.

• 24:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  Really?

• 24:43Speaker 13

  There's a generation of young whippersnappers now who are very familiar with their local area. And whether or not they can name their local streets, a lot of them won't be able to tell you which way is north. Because why would they need to know? These days, the map revolves around you, rather than you look in the map and then put it on the pavement and step on it and spin around to try and find where north is. But no one does that anymore.

• 25:03Amory Sivertson?

  No one does that anymore because no one has to do that anymore. The introduction of location services means that we don't have to find our starting location on a map. The map knows where we are, and it shows it knows with that little blue dot. Simple, yet sacred. The center of our own little navigational universe.

• 25:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  Which is great. Until you need to find north.

• 25:31Speaker 13

  There's actually some studies that have been done that show that these days, the hippocampus, the part of the brain that deals with spatial areas and memories, is not being used as much because we're not using our brains to navigate the way that we used to before GPS didn't just make it easier, they did it for us.

• 25:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  So not only are we getting worse at finding our way around without GPS, Mark says.

• 25:54Speaker 14

  But also that there can be, there could potentially be some bigger health consequences in terms of dementia, Alzheimer's, because the hippocampus is also the part of the brain responsible for memory.

• 26:06Amory Sivertson?

  This is just part of what Jay was referring to when he said that Google Maps and other GPS tools like it might be changing us for the worse. But Mark says, we don't have to surrender to this. And that when it comes to our brains navigational capabilities, it's use them or lose them.

• 26:25Speaker 14

  Yeah, ultimately, it's a choice. It's a choice how you decide to navigate. I mean, the case of London taxi drivers, they quite famously have to go through this rigorous period of study and learn something called the knowledge, which is like a sort of university level test where you have, I think the ultimate test for it is they say, you've got to go from here to here and you have to, you have to take the very best route and all the best wiggles that there possibly are. So the ultimate aim is that anyone who gets into your cab can say, I want to go to this street and it can be a pretty random, out of the way part of, you know, northwest London, way outside the center and they'll be like, yeah, I know it.

• 27:01Speaker 15

  Take me from Middleton Square to Golden Square.

• 27:04Speaker 14

  Middleton Square, that is Lincoln N1. So leave by River Street, left into Ample Street, right into Marjorie Street, forward, Caltholme Street, forward, Guilford Street. It's an incredible skill that they have. And yes, that test showed they had these enlarged hippocampuses and that after retirement, that part of the brain actually shrunk back down to a normal size. So yeah, there is hope and it is just a choice as to how, as to whether we ever opt to turn it off the blue dot.

• 27:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  So what exactly does turning off the blue dot mean?

• 27:36Speaker 13

  There's a fun trick you can do, which is to keep using the GPS on your phone, but turn off location services. So it means you still get the reliable self updating maps to make sure that you don't get lost on the way to your meeting. But you have this tiny little extra step where you have to work out where you are on the map and which way north is. And it means that you're going to be much better off if you run out of battery or something goes wrong with your GPS. You're a lot more likely to know where you are if it goes wrong, if you've done that first, than if you just rely entirely on staring at the blue dot.

• 28:09Amory Sivertson?

  There is another concern about Google Maps that one of the Redditors, Scooter, hinted at earlier with the whole Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America switch. And that is, Google is a company, a huge for-profit company that ultimately controls what we see on Google Maps.

• 28:28Speaker 14

  It's a commercial map. It's about his cafes, his restaurants, his this airport, his this thing you might want to buy. You know, that's its model. It's Google Maps is about advertising things to you. It's about people paying, it's about businesses paying to be on there and to get visibility.

• 28:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  And it's worth remembering that Google owns all of the data it collects.

• 28:47Speaker 13

  If any company has a big scary monopoly over something, it sort of means that you don't really know what this one company that you have to trust is going to do with all that data. And then from another map geeky point of view, it's just a pity that all of the, it's making all maps around the world look the same. And that you're now less likely to run into a different map of a familiar place and seeing something that you thought you knew well, in a new way. And that's something that you get less of now that Google Maps is now shorthand for any digital map.

• 29:18Amory Sivertson?

  But as Mark said, we have a choice in deciding how we want to navigate ourselves. We can go back to good old atlases, which is charming, but not going to happen.

• 29:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  We can turn off location services, as Jay suggested. So we have to orient ourselves in space and activate our hippocampuses.

• 29:37Amory Sivertson?

  We can also diversify our digital maps. There's something called OpenStreetMap, which is a nonprofit endeavor that works similarly to Wikipedia. It's like a big volunteer group project of a map where anyone can contribute. It's transparent and the data is free for everyone to use.

• 29:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  You might actually already be using OpenStreetMap. If you use any of those outdoorsy apps like Strava and AllTrails, or if you ever tag your location on Instagram or Facebook.

• 30:07Amory Sivertson?

  Or if you dabble in Apple Maps.

• 30:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  Ugh, I would never.

• 30:12Amory Sivertson?

  The majority of Apple Maps data is OpenStreetMap, which yes, is a forever work in progress for those of you Apple Map haters, Google Map loyalists.

• 30:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  I mean, what can I say? Google Maps is just so much easier to use and also Apple Maps isn't available on my Android.

• 30:31Amory Sivertson?

  Fair. I think, I think the endeavor of trying to have a good map, a good like public crowdsourced map for the sake of having a good map is, is a worthy goal.

• 30:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  Agreed.

• 30:43Amory Sivertson?

  And we'll keep chipping away. But in the meantime, it's undeniable. Google Maps has been a transformative force in showing us the way for the last 20 years. It's just not the only way.

• 30:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  And overall, we might be missing and losing a lot by relying on maps as much as we do to always find our way, which is why the map men, Jay and Mark, say that sometimes in order to see the world in a different way and better understand our geography and our sense of place. Why not do it by getting lost on purpose for fun? We gotta lose the map.

• 31:19Speaker 14

  It's an enjoyable thing to try and find your way somewhere. It's an enjoyable and slightly romantic thing to get lost, we think.

• 31:25Amory Sivertson?

  And so Ben, I think we gotta do that. I think we just gotta go get lost.

• 31:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  No, my precious.

• 31:35Amory Sivertson?

  So we've been given a destination by some of our colleagues here at WBUR. And our goal is to go find it without using a map.

• 31:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm ready. Let's ride.

• 31:47Amory Sivertson?

  Rita Hester Green.

• 31:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  And what is it? It's a park?

• 31:51Amory Sivertson?

  It's a park.

• 31:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  Rita Hester Green. Okay.

• 31:54Amory Sivertson?

  I actually feel like maybe we head towards Brookline.

• 31:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right. Oh, should we ask this runner? They'll probably want to stop doing what they're doing and talk to us, right?

• 32:03Amory Sivertson?

  We can try.

• 32:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, you try. You try.

• 32:06Amory Sivertson?

  Can I ask you a quick question? Do you have any idea where Rita Hester Green is?

• 32:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  We'll job with you while you do it.

• 32:12Amory Sivertson?

  No, I'm from Canada. Okay. All right. Thank you. Have a good run.

• 32:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  Good luck. I'm gonna use that.

• 32:21Amory Sivertson?

  I'm from Canada.

• 32:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  No, I'm from Canada. Nah.

• 32:26Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written, produced, and co-hosted by me. Who are you?

• 32:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  Great question. This is Emery Sivertson.

• 32:40Amory Sivertson?

  This is Ben Brock Johnson. We make a podcast at WBUR just down the road. And we're making this episode about Google Maps. It's 20 years of Google Maps this year.

• 32:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  Our show was edited by Meg Kramer, mixed and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

• 32:53Amory Sivertson?

  Rita what? Rita Hester Green. Okay. Green as in Google it. Rita Hester Green. Yep, she's gonna Google it.

• 33:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  Of course you are. Of course you are. All right.

• 33:02Amory Sivertson?

  Our managing producer is Summit Tijoshi. The rest of our team is Grace Tatter, Franny Monahan, Dean Russell, and our production manager, Paul Vikes.

• 33:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  Rita Hester Green. You have to ask Mark about that one. Mark, you know Rita Hester Green?

• 33:14Amory Sivertson?

  No.

• 33:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, man.

• 33:17Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 33:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  We're gonna have to Google that one, cheat, huh? Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between a blue dot and no dot.

• 33:25Speaker 16

  Like, I just moved to Brookline a few months ago. And the way I get to know a neighbor with my dog is we just want, like, we don't look at routes. We change it up and we just wander. And that's how I get to know, like, the layout of the neighborhood.

• 33:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  And by the way, we did reach out to Google to tell us more about the history of Google Maps. And while it didn't work out for this episode, we may bring you some Google folks in the future.

• 33:46Speaker 17

  I actually think that that park must be one of the parks around here going towards Bees Campus, by the way. Like, in between here, I think it's one of these little side parks.

• 33:55Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, those little side parklets.

• 33:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  We've been hopping around, but we haven't found it yet.

• 33:58Amory Sivertson?

  But we haven't gone that way yet, so I do want us to...

• 34:00Speaker 17

  We're not allowed to cheat. Otherwise, there is a park on this side.

• 34:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or another wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, or find, or another place you want us to search out, you can hit us up, endless thread, at WBUR.org.

• 34:18Amory Sivertson?

  And this is, we can say, is truly an example of, it's about the friends we made along the way.

• 34:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's about the friends we made along the way.

• 34:27Amory Sivertson?

  Because we, we had this much geographic success, and we had like this much humanity success.

• 34:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  The first one, you were making a small shape, and the second one, you made a big shape.

• 34:37Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, loads more humanity success.

• 34:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  Loads, yards, veritable yards.

• 34:42Amory Sivertson?

  Thank you to the Brooklineans who tried and failed to help us find Rita Hester-Green, Tammy, Nick, Mark, Ilka, and the runner from Canada. And that's good for our brains, too, right? Talking to people.

• 34:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  Human connection.

• 34:57Amory Sivertson?

  We'll all be lost, but we'll be chatting it up together.

• 35:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes. Lost, but not forgotten.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts, and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, Executive Director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education.

• 35:50Speaker 18

  I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context.

• 35:55Speaker 06

  And just to explain why you're excited about it.

• 35:56Speaker 18

  Oh, my gosh, individualized support, right? Personalization, and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities, for example, speakers of different languages, there are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops.

• 36:28Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 37:15Speaker 19

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