Map Men | Jay Foreman & Mark Cooper-Jones

11:18Jay Foreman:So chapter 10, basically Mark wrote this chapter. So basically Mark and I wrote our chapters separately and then came back and edited each other's work. But in general, you could go through each chapter and I could tell you whether it was my one or Mark's one. And one of Mark's, he brought it to the table and it was, I think it was very, very funny. It was a brilliant satire of podcasts, but a very specific type of podcast like the NPR, serial, eyewitness, that kind of thing. And he'd written this story about a bad map in the style of one of those podcasts as if it was a transcript. And it was these brilliant descriptions of exactly what this person's voice sounds like and where the music fades and stuff.

11:55Jay Foreman:And I think this is great. And I was like, but wait a minute, wait a minute. How are we going to do this in the audio book? Like, are we going to actually recreate the podcast? And every time I asked this question, you said, it doesn't matter. We'll deal with it at the time and the time we came to deal with it was about five minutes before we were recording the chapter and you went no I've just realized I've got to do the voice for an hour it was about

12:14Mark Cooper-Jones:five days before when I started listening exclusively to NPR everywhere I went so and I was just just trying to listen to Ira Glass as much as possible because I can't do an American accent really and it was clearly stipulated that it must be a good vocal fry American accent in that style so it would have been worse had I not done those five days but again anybody who wants to know how bad it was. Can you just speak to this gentleman over here?

12:38Jay Foreman:I thought you pulled it off. I mean, I got a real deal because while you were doing the American voice, I had to do all the sound effects.

12:45Mark Cooper-Jones:Yeah, we decided that rather than try to actually make the podcast, which just would have been underwhelming and weird, that you would just have to do things like make the sound of an ox wailing or marching footsteps and things like that. Yeah, and also the problem is it's the longest chapter. So, yeah. Have you thought about

13:03Jay Foreman:a Mac Men podcast separately?

13:05Mark Cooper-Jones:No. They are words that have come up, but we don't have an idea.

13:11Jay Foreman:No, I mean, we do try to think about ways to expand the Mac Men cinematic universe beyond just the 10-minute YouTube videos and book. You know, there's all sorts of other media that maybe we could try out, such as potentially a podcast, potentially a live show, potentially a lawsuit. We need to see what options are there. But we haven't thought about a podcast, really, because a lot of our videos tend to be very, very tightly scripted, whereas a podcast, we have to know stuff about maps. That's the problem. We don't really know anything about maps. I think...

13:39Mark Cooper-Jones:Although, no, we should say, like, Mark, you did do a degree in geography. I do have a BA on 2.1 in geography from Durham University. And you were a geography teacher. And I'm a geography teacher. In fact, we say it's in the introduction of the book, but we're not cartographers. There are people who could have, you know, a podcast where they could just sort of riff about maps without having to sit down and do research beforehand because they know the whole world of maps, whereas for us we just take topics that we think we're interested in. We might know something about it, but we are always fleshing out that research for each video.

14:09Mark Cooper-Jones:We're always just one Wikipedia article ahead, basically. So, you know, we, yeah, it's, I don't know. But also, not no, but not yes.

14:20Jay Foreman:Does this count as a podcast? Because, you know, we're laughing at each other. Yeah, I think there is a Talks podcast version. Oh, right, so yeah, we'll just do one with Rob then. Great. Yeah. In the book, what are your favourite... What are the favourite things you discovered whilst writing the book? What's kind of the favourite...

14:33Mark Cooper-Jones:Discovered in terms of research?

14:34Jay Foreman:Yeah, and then what's your favourite chapter?

14:36Mark Cooper-Jones:OK, who wants to go first? Well... You look like you need thinking time. OK, so... My favourite one, in terms of what was uncovered, if you like, was... Is it chapter 11 or 12? The... Columbus's brother. The one where we have the word brother appear 94 times. Yes. Which chapter was that? But anyway, there was a story that I like it because I'd never come across this story before. And it just popped out of some research I was doing on another chapter. There was something that briefly mentioned that Columbus's brother was a cartographer who had made these world maps that massively distorted the known shape of the world in two places in particular, the African peninsula, the Cape of Good Hope and over in East Asia as well.

15:23Mark Cooper-Jones:and he had done this to make the world look more, to make it look more appealing to take the western route to the spices of India and China and all this kind of thing, which is what Columbus was obviously trying to achieve before he discovered North America, South America. And I'd just never heard of Columbus's brother and so little was written about him that it felt like not many people would ever know that story. In fact, there were only like two or three papers out there which we sort of used to cobble stuff together and you had to sort of do a bit of detective work to figure out what the story was.

15:55Mark Cooper-Jones:And that was really satisfying because I really liked the story. It was definitely a map that had gone wrong and obviously a kind of a different perspective on a story that we all do know really well. And we just really enjoyed writing. We refused to use his real name. We just thought Columbus's brother was a funnier way to constantly describe it, which is why the word brother comes up 94 times in that chapter.

16:14Jay Foreman:It's just such fun to finally bring this guy's story to light, but to also completely undermine him by referring to him every time as Columbus's brother. Yeah, which of course is what he is. You still haven't called him by his actual first name yet. Oh, something Columbus. It's either Bartholomew or Bartolomeo, depending which part of the world you're in. And St Bart's was named after him. It was, yes. I learned a new book. Did you learn that from the book? I did. You made it sound like you just knew that. Oh, you've read it. One of the things I think I took away from the book was you talk about the power for maps to kind of shape reality.

16:43Jay Foreman:They are, on one level, objective facts. This is what the world looks like. But also they overlay how we view the world ourselves. I think we're you know if birds drew a map they would look very different or if different animals you know they have a different view what is your opinion on how maps shape reality and how that affects you know

17:00Mark Cooper-Jones:our use of them well they're just very sneaky maps i think you know they do just present you you look at a map and you are i think well most people are just tempted to think ah well the map shows this and therefore that is true and i think a lot of us have got a lot more savvy and knowing how to read between the lines of media articles and understand bias in certain spheres. But I don't think most people are particularly clued into how maps always have bias built into them as well. I think it's this area where we just go, oh, maps are truth and sort of forget that they are editorialized, that they're produced by somebody with an agenda, including the good people here, right?

17:37Mark Cooper-Jones:I mean, but like every map ever made, you can't avoid it. I mean, there's a famous quote by an American geographer, which is that, actually, I can't quote it It's basically just like all maps lie. I mean, all maps are a lie to begin with because they're just representations.

17:51Jay Foreman:Yeah, every map necessarily has to have some kind of distortion because the only possible map that doesn't lie, that doesn't have any kind of distortion, is a photograph of the world at a scale of one-to-one, which is a very limited use. But even a simple street map where you're showing something that surely doesn't have an agenda, it's just where the streets are and what their names are, Yes, that's an agenda because it's designed for humans that want to find their way around. Like you said, if you could have a map of exactly the same area designed for birds, which would show, instead of the names of the streets, it would show what kind of trees there are, how tall the trees are, how close together they are, and what direction south is, because that matters more to birds.

18:30Jay Foreman:And you wouldn't need to distort it by showing the streets much wider to squeeze in the human-pronounceable names. I think the Tube map's a good example, which I know you've done other videos on, whereby it helps us get around the Tube, but isn't a representation of actual reality of where stations are and how close they are to each other.

18:46Mark Cooper-Jones:Yeah, but to answer your question, that then becomes how a lot of people imagine London. For instance, a lot of tourists will imagine London because they'll probably have seen the Tube map more than they might have seen a map of London as a whole or whatever. So that becomes their imagination. And that's where it can be dangerous, but that's kind of the interesting part about... You asked the question about how they shape the world is that they become a shortcut to how we think of places and therefore the things that are omitted or included are how you imagine those places and that's where their power lies, I guess.

19:15Jay Foreman:Yeah, and that's even more true now that with so many people using Google Maps as if it's like the official default standard map of the world, that's how people, they look at their phones and go, that's what the world actually looks like. Incidentally, is there anyone here that's working on Google Maps? Hi. Thank you. Yeah, you get mentioned in the book quite a lot. You've worked together for a decade. I'd love to talk about how you have a creative partnership and a business partnership. How has that evolved over time, that creative side to the finished book, the finished video, versus building a business together, which is its own set of challenges?

19:47Jay Foreman:Oh, that's an admin question. And you're looking at me.

19:51Mark Cooper-Jones:Yeah, Mark does the emails. I think it is interesting, because if what we did was telly, first of all, it would look a lot better than what it does. But if it was telly, we would be two presenters who maybe did some of the writing. and then there would be quite an enormous team of people. You would have a production company with accountants within it, production coordinators within it, producers, exec producers, obviously commissioners, all sorts of people. Obviously, then you've got the camera team and the audio team and all this. But actually, we do do every single thing. And it is getting to the point now where it's really hard.

20:26Mark Cooper-Jones:And I think you can see that in probably the infrequency of posts. There's just so much to do to get a Mapman episode together. And we are sort of doing all of it, which we like. And it's obviously the great thing about YouTube and has been the big sell about YouTube is, you know, having that complete license to what we want and not having to answer to commissioners and exec producers and people like that. But also now, you know, we probably need a bit of help with that because I think doing the book as well. It's sort of and, you know, you mentioned in Joker Cinematic Universe, but there is the opportunity for us to do more things than, you know, six YouTube videos.

21:01Mark Cooper-Jones:a year, which is roughly what it is. But to do that, we've sort of got to think about, you know, how we do it practically and who can maybe help us with that.

21:11Jay Foreman:Yeah, but I also think it's part of our look is that everything looks just a little bit shit because we've done it all ourselves and the props are normally made in a lot more of a rush than we'd like them to. And I kind of want people to watch it and go, why didn't I think of that? That looks like it took them seconds.

21:25Mark Cooper-Jones:Yeah, I mean, my cousin said to me the other day when I told her how long it took us to write an which is probably about, what, three weeks at least? Or maybe more? Depends. Depends if there's the wrong words in it. Anyway, she said, she said, oh, I thought you just improvised to them. And I was like, oh, God, it takes so long to structure these things.

21:42Jay Foreman:It was painful. Three weeks of writing, what's the whole end-to-end process for an episode? Like, how long does it take you to start the writing? Well, it depends, because a few years ago, we attempted making, because we make them in batches, in series, to sort of, like, try to achieve some economies of scale. So, like, the bit where we sit behind our desk with maps on the wall, the bit that we called Map HQ, we try and get as many episodes of those done in an afternoon. There was one time when I think we bit off more than we could chew and we tried 11 episodes in one batch. And what that meant was we were editing them one at a time.

22:10Jay Foreman:After a month of getting an episode out, I'd then start editing the next one. And then by the time it came to doing episode 11 from that series, I was watching footage that we'd filmed a year and a half ago. I was like, I've aged since then. Oh, I don't remember that line.

22:23Mark Cooper-Jones:Yeah, yeah. But I mean, so we have recently, I think the quickest we've ever done an episode to answer your question is six weeks. And that was the last one we did. Yeah, that's the only time. We did beginning to end it on its own because we didn't film anything in a batch there and did it in six weeks. And yeah, I don't know that we can do that back to back every time.

22:41Jay Foreman:We're still experimenting with finding the sweet spot for what's the best way to get all the episodes out because for the longest time, Mapman was on... It was just my channel for a while and I was working on it full time and then Mark was like, whenever he'd get a spare moment between his proper job, and that's when we'd get our episodes out. But Mark has now finally done the right thing and quit his job and become a full-time Mapman. But we still don't know how many episodes... We've got made redundant, actually. Oh, yeah. And I was here to pick up the pieces. Reforce my hand. but then you know we thought oh great now we can both work on it we could do like you know five episodes a day but that hasn't actually happened we are still trying to find out how much we can put out because the book it turns out we when the publishers came to us and said could you write a book in the background whilst you're doing episodes and we said yeah we'll give it a go I reckon we could take about three months off making episodes on YouTube yeah three months that should that should be enough time to write a book no it took a year and we had to stop making episodes on YouTube because writing took a really long time.

23:37Jay Foreman:But we're now, only just now, finally dipping our toes into the exciting world of doing nothing but map men. And time will tell, I guess. Have you considered making an episode on either the human genome map or the map of the brain, sort of other maps that take a step away from cartography?

23:54Mark Cooper-Jones:We haven't gone that far away yet, but who knows? I mean, sort of what we realised about map men after maybe one series of it was I think when we started it, we chose stories that were very cartographical. It was almost like this is the story of a map. It's like how this map was made, isn't this interesting? The cartographer who made it, this is what it told us about the world at the time.

24:14Jay Foreman:That's why the title sequence involves us going, here's the map and we unveil something that we're going to discuss. Yeah. Very quickly made that redundant and weird.

24:21Mark Cooper-Jones:Well, yeah, we still do it. But yeah, quickly it became, oh, actually, there's stories that are geographical in their nature or have something geographical in their nature, where obviously you can map it, but the map is not necessarily the story. It's something else that's the story and the map is the aid to telling it at the end of the day. So we've already loosened the rules considerably from where we began. It's not really a cartography thing, show, but we haven't gone as far away yet as any information that can be mapped in a really kind of abstract or conceptual way. But I don't know.

24:54Jay Foreman:If we ever completely run out of maps, which there are only a finite number of maps in the world technically, So maybe one day we could do that. But what we discovered is that a map can be used to tell almost any story you can think of. Like even Goldilocks and the Three Bears, you could have chapter one be a big picture of the forest and where the bear's house is. And so we've used very often a map as a window into any story we feel like telling, whether it's about geography or history or politics or onions or whatever we fancy.

25:21Mark Cooper-Jones:As I said a hundred times, I am vetoing that particular episode. Yeah, because I mean, there was a Three Bears or Onions? There was a relatively recent one we did, which was about twin towns. And we talked about it. We were like, twin towns feels like a sort of interesting quirk of geography that we could talk about. How did they form? What are they about? Where are some of the more interesting places that are twinned with where? And we'd finished writing the episode. We were saying, oh, my God, we don't have a map. And we realised that a map had not been made of Britain's twin towns. And so I had to make one to make the episode work, which took me absolutely ages.

25:59Mark Cooper-Jones:Did you love it? It's your dream come true, though, isn't it? Yeah, the process, the spreadsheet part of the process was not up my street. Yeah. Don't forget who's here in the audience. Yeah, we do love you. Well, no, I mean, you could come and work for us. Love you.

26:16Jay Foreman:One thing I will say is that I don't think there's such thing as a topic for us that's too boring. I think one of my favourite challenges... Oh, that's true, yeah. I do love the idea of a topic that looks on the face of it like this is incredibly dull and boring. Well, chapter five, for instance. Yeah. We did a chapter all about the story of why it's in the book in the first place, but there's an entire chapter about the broadcast areas for the ITV regions in the UK. But what I like is finding a niche topic that's so niche and so dull that we have the challenge of making it interesting. And I mean by actually trying to make the facts interesting themselves rather than just like, you know, put it in a funny box and declare it's boring.

26:55Jay Foreman:I think one of my favorite challenges is taking something that no one is interested in and then making it interesting. And I want people to get to the end of either an episode on YouTube or a very dull chapter about ITV in the book and go, oh, I had no idea I was interested in this until I got to the end of it.

27:09Mark Cooper-Jones:Have you got something you're proudest of that has achieved that?

27:13Jay Foreman:We did an episode of Unfinished London all about why does London have 32 boroughs, which is incredibly dull, but I think we managed to make it interesting. How would you improve the tube map of London? Well a while ago I did a video all about the history of the tube map and it very nearly was a map men episode by the way because it's all about maps but then we decided at the last minute actually I can do this without Mark let's make it unfinished London but I had a whole section in there this is a few years ago where I said do you know what I think they should do they should change the overground instead of having all the lines orange they should make them different names and colors and then they did it and I'm not I'm not saying that I'm entirely responsible for that, but there genuinely was one thing that happened in London that I might have been responsible for.

27:56Jay Foreman:Because a couple of years ago, the London Borough of Harrow, which used to have a very dull logo, changed their logo. And then the person who tweeted about it on Twitter, back when it was Twitter, mentioned and said, I hope this is an improvement over rubbish, or however it was phrased in my episode. Now, I'm not saying that I am responsible for the London Borough of Harrow changing its logo, but I might be. There's a paper trail to maybe it was my fault.

28:23Mark Cooper-Jones:That's very good. You should be very proud.

28:25Jay Foreman:The new logo is much worse.

28:31Jay Foreman:Wonderful. All right, team, thank you so much for coming in today. Thank you.

28:38Mark Cooper-Jones:Thanks for listening. You can watch this episode and tons of other great content at youtube.com slash talks at Google. Talk soon.