Lost Without You

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And, of course, Is Business Broken? Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Survey, survey, survey. Get your survey, ladies and gentlemen. We're doing a survey. How is that? That's the zest I look for in every... endless thread taping from you, Ben. He's not wrong, though. We do have a listener survey, and this is actually really important to us because... We, in the new year, just want to keep making the show more of what you want it to be. We want it to be better and better.

And so we have put together a short survey, survey, survey for you to tell us what you love about the show, what you want more of, what you could stand a little less of. And if you complete the survey. which is available at a link in our show notes, we have an extra episode that we're going to give you. We're putting together a bonus episode where Ben and I tell all.

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It's really weird the things you remember. I still remember the layout of the downstairs. I remember the kitchen. I remember the photos being on the wall. I remember their little dining table. It 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. 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. And this is another reminiscing Redditor. 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. This is Wayne describing a childhood summer home by the water.

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 for the day while my dad... built a deck or rake pine needles or whatever it was and needed to do it around the house. So it was a place that was very, very, very precious to him. Wayne's summer house was in Claremont Harbor on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, not far from Scooter's grandparents' house.

in New Orleans. Which is where another Redditor, Laureen, had an old home that she'd recently purchased from a sort of well-known family in town. 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. Three Redditors with homes that held generations of memories.

That's why we had Christmas every year until then, and then never again. Everything was okay and that everything is definitely not okay. I just started to cry because I'm like, there's nothing that you can really do at this point. A category four storm with winds topping 145 miles an hour. Water is pouring into the city. So catastrophic is the destruction some emergency officials are calling it biblical.

20 years ago this year, August 29, 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. It was very clear, even as a seven-year-old, that what was happening was a big deal. Wayne evacuated, too. along with the rest of his immediate family. In the aftermath, there was really nothing to do but just absorb all the bad news that was being.

The water is rising steadily. Homes are vanishing. Tonight, people, hundreds of them, we believe, are stranded on rooftops. This is a four-lane road, or let me put it this way. This was a four-lane road. It's like nature's magician simply...

made a neighborhood vanish. 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 at Clamwood Harbor, what was left of the house in Clamwood Harbor. The house that was right on the Gulf, the area hardest hit by Katrina.

Meanwhile, Laureen was hundreds of miles away from her house in Treme, one of the oldest neighborhoods in New Orleans. Treme doesn't flood, sister. And that's what Google Earth told me. Google Earth. This is what led us, navigated us, you might say, to Laureen and Wayne and Scooter. They were all using this same tool at this crucial moment in history.

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. My neighbor called us and said, you can look on...

Google Earth. My mom heard through the grapevine that Google Earth was updating photos basically as often as they could. 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. 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. 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 Anne-Marie Sievertson. I'm Ben Blue Dot Johnson. And you're listening to Endless Thread. Coming to you from latitude 42.361, longitude negative 71.057. That's what I put in when I go to work. That's what I put into Google Maps. That's WBUR, baby. Boston's NPR. Today's episode, Lost Without You. 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.

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

We had a new way to, quote, get from point A to point B, as Google's official blog announced, and a new way of visualizing the world we were navigating through. With a click of a button, you can switch from Map View. to terrain view, or to satellite view. Ben, do you remember the first time that you played around in Google Maps? Particularly with satellite view, if you used that. I feel like the answer's no.

I know. Like, I just sort of like, it's just like in my brain now. When I lived on Elm Street in Stonington, Connecticut, back in the day, I think I looked at satellite view. 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. You know, you have this sort of out-of-body experience where you're like, that's my roof, but I'm up here. But I'm under the roof, but I'm...

On the roof. Yeah. Yeah. You feel at home and removed at the same time. Yeah. So back to our Redditors, who've 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. and suddenly there is her childhood home underwater um her whole neighborhood underwater unfortunately it was her parents anniversary uh august 29th um and so uh

They cry. They don't know what to do. They panic. Meanwhile, Wayne and his dad were watching the news from a relative's house and losing hope. It was really the post. Right where my dad's house was, Mississippi, that's really where the worst of the storm came ashore. And Laureen, she and her then-husband, were trying to follow the conversation online.

We were first looking at comments on places like Facebook or just NOLA.com. So people were starting to pass tips about information. That's when one of her neighbors told her to go to Google Earth. So we just did it. What Lorian found was updated satellite imagery of the flooded areas. Google had made it publicly available within just a few days of the storm.

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. uploading and overlaying them to Google Maps and Google Earth. It was very eerie, in a way, because you're looking at a dead city. 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 Laurine found is that she wasn't totally right about her neighborhood of Treme. There had been some flooding, but overall, it was spared from the worst of it. 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. Some people couldn't come back yet in stages because they were in harder hit areas. 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. 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.

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 i say that but really it was brown to brown i mean flood water is super dirty but you could tell when it was uh 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

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. One of the things that my grandmother still mourns to this day is this big oak tree that she had in her backyard that 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 um you know all the things that she lost um it's uh it's a looming tragedy on basically everyone who lived in the city at the time, because the city's never been the same. 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. Things like driving directions. Driving directions pre-smartphone, no less. Back when you had to, you know, print them out. which I definitely did. So did I. But pretty soon, driving directions would be useless in New Orleans. No one could go there because the roads were just unpassable and it was just complete destruction.

And Google satellite view would be the closest Wayne's dad could get to his getaway home in the Mississippi Gulf. 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. 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. 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. Maybe this is part of the roof standing and a tree fell over it this way. Maybe that's what we're looking at. 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 images combined? How do we stitch those two together and come to some kind of conclusion that gives us cause for optimism?

And once we finally got there, we realized that we were delusional. The house was gone, reduced to a pile of debris that had been blown blocks away. 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. My dad has 18 grandkids, so he has a lot of beds to accommodate all the children and their friends when they all come together. Then there's Laureen, whose historic work-in-progress in Treme might not have flooded, but it didn't survive Katrina's high winds. She sold the lot.

Lorraine 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. 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. And you feel like Google Earth maybe played some role in that just by giving you a sense of what the reality actually was? That's what I think information plays. Yes. Accurate information is everything. It looks pretty much exactly the same on the outside. It's kind of surreal to look at it, honestly. 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. This, like, brick house with the trees in front? Yeah, yep, yep, that's it. Wow, it's like regal. looking yeah yeah very cool it was a cool place it was a good it was a good grandparents home you know it was really nice uh the lot that is empty next to them that you can see yep was not empty and that is where

their neighbor passed away in her attic. Um, she got stuck there. Um, so, so yeah, but it's a, it's a really nice house as you can see from, from space. So our three Redditors 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. I definitely will turn to it. It's amazing.

But has maybe also made us a little helpless? 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. And also, just because we can fly around a map doesn't necessarily mean we have control over what we're seeing.

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. More on the widening gulf and our sense of place and direction in a minute.

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

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. This is former geography teacher Mark Cooper-Jones. studied geography at university, you slowly realize that the next thing is you become a geography teacher. And comedian Jay Foreman, who is not a former geography teacher, but is very good at saying geography the way British people say it.

It's not geography. Here it's geography, which sounds slightly sillier. Together, they are the Map Men. Map Men, Map Men, Map, Map, Map Men. It's a series on YouTube where Mark and Jay explain things like why maps show places that don't exist. 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. 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 E's. They're also co-authors of a new book called This Way Up, When Maps Go Wrong. 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. The map men had one such story for us about a place where Google Maps was initially...

useless. A place with more than a billion potential users. I think it's 60% of streets in India do not have road names. So that was one of the big, big hurdles. 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.

Back when the British occupied India, they gave major roads names that were culturally significant to them, Mark says. 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. 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. So Google Maps had a challenge on its hands when it came to India. Fortunately, Jay says, they also had... Olga Krystalova. She was working at Google at the time, and she was the one who suggested...

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. 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 family member, to draw diagrams showing how they saw certain routes.

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 Margarine Street and half a mile. People would say things like, okay, you're going to go straight until you see the Gita statue, then turn right. When you see the glitter shop on the left, you're going to 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. 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's a confirmation element to the process of navigating, which they built into the system that they rolled out in India.

It's interesting because I feel, you know, I've lived where I live in the U.S. 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. Well, you're not alone. This is a very common phenomenon. Really? 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. No one does that anymore. 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. Which is great. Until you need to find north. 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. So not only are we getting worse at finding our way around without GPS, Mark says. But also that 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. 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 brain's navigational capabilities, it's use them or lose them.

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 um 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 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 the way part of, you know, Northwest London way outside the center and they'll be like, yeah, I know it. Take me from Middleton Square to Golden Square.

Middleton Square, that's Islington N1. So, lead by River Street, left into Amble Street, right into Marjory Street, forward Calford Street, forward Guilford Street. It's an incredible skill that they have. And yes, that test showed that 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 whether we ever opt to turn it off the blue dot. So what exactly does turning off the blue dot mean?

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 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. It's a commercial map. It's about here's cafes, here's restaurants, here's this airport, here's this thing you might want to buy. You know, that's its model. 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.

And it's worth remembering that Google owns all of the data it collects. 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. 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. 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. We can turn off location services, as Jay suggested, so we have to orient ourselves in space and activate our hippocampuses. We can also diversify our digital maps. There's something called OpenStreetMap.

which is a non-profit 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. 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.

Or if you dabble in Apple Maps. Ugh, I would never. 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. 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. fair. I think the endeavor of trying to have a good map, a good public crowdsourced map for the sake of having a good map is a worthy goal. Agreed.

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

No, my precious. 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. I'm ready. Let's ride. Rita Hester Green. And what is it? It's a park? It's a park. Rita Hester Green. Okay. I actually feel like maybe we head towards Brookline. All right. Oh, should we ask this runner?

They probably want to stop doing what they're doing and talk to us, right? We can try. Yeah, you try, you try. Can I ask you a quick question? Do you have any idea where Rita Hester Green is? We'll job with you while you do it. I'm from Canada. Okay. All right. Thank you. Have a good run. Good luck. I'm going to use that. I'm from Canada. No, I'm from Canada.

Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written, produced, and co-hosted by me. Who are you? Great question. This is Emery Sievertson. This has been 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. Our show was edited by Meg Kramer, mixed in sound design by Emily Jankowski.

Rita Hester Green. Green as in Google it. Rita Hester Green. Of course you are. Of course you are. All right. Our managing producer is Summit Ajoshi. The rest of our team is Grace Tatter, Frannie Monahan, Dean Russell, and our production manager, Paul Vykus. Rita Hester Green. You have to ask Mark about that one. Mark, you know Rita Hester Green? No. Oh, man. Okay. We're going to have to Google that one sheet, huh? Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between a blue dot...

and no dot. Like I just moved to Brooklyn 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.

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. I actually think that that park must be one of the parks around here going to.

towards B. News Campus, by the way. Like, in between here, I think it's one of these little side parks. Yeah, those little side parklets. We've been hopping around, but we haven't found it yet. But we haven't gone that way yet, so I do want us to... We're not allowed to cheat. Otherwise, there is a park on this side.

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. And this is, we can say, is truly an example of...

It's about the friends we made along the way. It's about the friends we made along the way. Because we had this much geographic success and we had this much humanity success. The first one you were making a small shape and the second one... when you made a big show. Yeah, loads more humanity success. Yards, veritable yards. Thank you to the Brooklinians 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. Human connection. We'll all be lost, but we'll be chatting it up together. Yes. Lost but not forgotten.