I Interviewed Hundreds of People and Never Saw Them on a Map

For years, the people I've had on my show lived in one place: a long list of names.

I could scroll it. I could search it. What I could never do was see it. Hundreds of conversations, hundreds of relationships, and no sense of the shape of the thing, where these people actually are, who's near who, where the clusters are.

So we put them on a map.

There's a new Guest Map on the Network page. Open it, and the guests you've recorded with show up where they live. When a few of them are in the same city, they group into one marker. When two of them are connected, there's a line between them. It's the same network that was always there, you just couldn't look at it before.

You don't have to enter any of it by hand. The map reads whatever location a guest already has on their record. Where all it has is a phone number, it makes a fair guess from the country. One button fills in the rest.

The first time I opened it, I found three guests clustered in a city I'd never thought about, people I'd interviewed months apart, who had no idea they had anything in common. That's a live event waiting to happen. Or an introduction I'm now in a position to make.

That's the part I care about next: making the clusters do something, nudging you toward the meetup, the intro, the collaboration the map is quietly pointing at.

The episode was always the byproduct. The relationships were the point. Now you can see them.