Talks at GoogleJay Foreman & Mark Cooper-Jones | Map Men: This Way Up | Talks at Google
Talks at Google
Welcome and Introductions 0:01
Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones arrive at Google to talk about Map Men, their YouTube series that mixes geography education with silly sketch comedy. Each episode runs about ten minutes, and the show recently became a book, which is the occasion for their visit.
How Map Men Began 1:00
Neither of them can pinpoint exactly when they met, guessing it was around 2009 on the live comedy circuit, where they shared gig lists and nodded at each other at the Edinburgh Fringe. Jay had already started a YouTube channel with a series called Unfinished London about infrastructure projects, while Mark was doing niche stand-up about being a former geography teacher. Mark pitched the idea of Map Men to Jay as little more than a title, and the show grew from there, including a theme tune Jay secretly composed and added before the very first upload.
Turning Sketches into a Book 5:31
HarperCollins approached them to expand their ten-minute sketches into a ninety-thousand-word book, which left them wondering how to keep something so visual from becoming a dull block of text. They leaned on footnotes, doodles, and jokes hidden even in the copyright page and bibliography, including a Spotify playlist recommended for reading a chapter. One chapter compresses a complicated story into a single sentence that runs four pages long, and another uses fake redactions about Soviet mapping that stretch across two pages with only the word van left visible.
Writing for Page versus Audio 9:02
Jay listens to audiobooks constantly but rarely reads physical books, so he wrote with the audio version in mind and sometimes forgot maps needed to exist on the page at all. Mark focused on the written word and kept pushing off Jay's worries about audio production, which caused problems when they recorded chapter ten. That chapter parodies a serial-style podcast in the vein of NPR's Ira Glass, forcing Jay to spend an hour doing a vocal-fry American accent while Mark supplied sound effects like wailing oxen and marching footsteps, in what turned out to be the longest chapter in the book.
A Favorite Discovery: Columbus's Brother 13:30
Mark's favorite research find was a cartographer brother of Christopher Columbus who distorted world maps, shrinking the Cape of Good Hope and parts of East Asia, to make the western sea route to Asia's spices look more appealing. Only a couple of academic papers exist on him, so piecing the story together felt like detective work, and they deliberately never use his real name, Bartholomew, calling him only Columbus's brother throughout the chapter, where the word brother appears ninety-four times.
How Maps Shape Reality 17:00
Maps present themselves as objective truth but always carry distortion and bias, since even a simple street map is designed around human needs like readable street names rather than, say, a bird's need to know tree height or which direction is south. The London Underground map is a familiar example of something useful for navigation but inaccurate about real distances between stations, and it has become how many tourists picture London itself. Google Maps now plays a similar role for many people, functioning as the default mental image of what the world actually looks like.
Running Map Men as a Business 19:00
Doing everything themselves, writing, filming, editing, and building props, gives Map Men its scrappy charm but has become difficult to sustain, especially since a full television production would involve a whole team they don't have. Writing one episode takes at least three weeks, and batching eleven episodes together once meant Jay was still editing footage a year and a half old by the last one. Their fastest turnaround for a single episode was six weeks, and Mark has since quit his day job to work on Map Men full-time, though they're still figuring out how many episodes they can realistically produce.
Writing the book took longer than planned 22:31
When publishers asked them to write a book alongside their YouTube episodes, they expected to need about three months off. It actually took a year, forcing them to pause the channel entirely, and they are only now returning to focus solely on Map Men.
Maps as a way into any story 23:00
Asked about mapping things like the human genome or the brain, they explain how the show has evolved. It started as strictly cartographic, telling the story of how a map was made, but they soon loosened the rules so that a map becomes an aid for telling a geographical, historical, or political story rather than the story itself, even joking that a map could frame something like Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
Making the twin towns map 24:31
For an episode on Britain's twin towns, they finished writing before realizing no map of twinned towns existed, so one had to be made from scratch, a tedious spreadsheet job Jay did not enjoy despite it seeming like a dream task.
Finding fun in boring topics 25:30
They describe loving topics that seem dull on the surface, like the ITV broadcast regions chapter or why London has 32 boroughs, aiming to make the facts themselves genuinely interesting rather than just mocking the topic as boring.
Possibly influencing real world maps 26:30
Jay recalls suggesting the London Overground give its lines separate names and colors instead of one orange color, which later happened, and jokes he may have indirectly prompted the London Borough of Harrow to change its old logo after criticizing it, though the new version turned out worse.
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