Lost without you: 20 years of finding (losing?) our way with Google Maps

Anyone who remembers road trips before GPS devices will say... nothing because we're still looking for them! We jest, but there's no denying that these tools changed our lives. One in particular dominates the space today, and it took the world by storm when it launched 20 years ago: Google Maps.

In this episode, we go back to 2005 and another storm — Hurricane Katrina. We hear from three Redditors who used Google Maps and Google Earth to survey the damage to their homes in the days and weeks after Katrina made landfall.

We also talk to the Map Men, geography-loving comedians and co-authors of "This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters)," who ask, "Could it be that the best maps humanity has ever produced are simultaneously the worst maps for humanity?"

This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.