Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff you should know from how Stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
Speaker 1: Clark with Charles W. Smiley Faced Bryant and Jerry party
Speaker 1: face rolling. I got no emoji. I'm just Josh wink face. Sure,
Speaker 1: eggplant and peach. Whoa, I know that's dirty, but you
Speaker 1: can say eggplant and peach and get away with it
Speaker 1: even on the team. Sounds like a the lightful meal.
Speaker 1: It does. Actually it doesn't at all, but not at all.
Speaker 1: It is cute for sure. I use the bitmoji now
Speaker 1: some some which I see is not even in this research.
Speaker 1: So I just thought to throw it out there early.
Speaker 1: I want to go on record as saying that my
Speaker 1: bit mooji is one of the best, because I'm honest,
Speaker 1: even do a bit moji? Do you even have that? Sure?
Speaker 1: I've going okay, because you know, you design your own thing.
Speaker 1: So I found that a lot of people's bitmoji's aren't
Speaker 1: very honest. You mean, the the the image of the person.
Speaker 1: I said, you know, I got a little chubby bearded guy,
Speaker 1: and every time I sent it to someone there like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, that looks just like you. And I
Speaker 1: said yeah, because I'm honest, I didn't make myself a supermodel.
Speaker 1: I got you. I got you. I thought you meant
Speaker 1: you were just like like you'd say like I don't
Speaker 1: like that and mean it kind of thing. Now, I
Speaker 1: don't know if I've ever sent you a bit moji,
Speaker 1: so I'm gonna do that right now. I don't think
Speaker 1: you have checked in real time. What do you want? Uh?
Speaker 1: You want me on an elephant? Yes? Or me crying
Speaker 1: in the rain because you're not near me. Can you
Speaker 1: cry in the rain on an elephant? I don't think
Speaker 1: I can bind either. One's fine, elephant, we'll do elephant.
Speaker 1: I love elephants. Well, I can't find the elephant now,
Speaker 1: so I'll diploy you a kiss. Okay, So what we're
Speaker 1: talking about today are not bit mooji's, although they would
Speaker 1: qualify as a sub type of this, I guess. But
Speaker 1: they use a lot of words. It's kind of like
Speaker 1: when you're playing charades and somebody's like, that's close. That's close.
Speaker 1: It's like you can't talk, man, you have to just
Speaker 1: shut up. You have to charade it. That's the difference
Speaker 1: between bit mooji and emoji, and emoji is really what
Speaker 1: we're talking about today, which is a pictograph basically like, um,
Speaker 1: a hieroglyph okay, but it's a modern hieroglyphic. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: I will also go on record as saying I don't
Speaker 1: really use emojis anymore because of the bit moji um
Speaker 1: and I don't use them that often, but it's always
Speaker 1: funny to send a bit moji to someone, like kind
Speaker 1: of go out on a limb and be like, should
Speaker 1: I send this? And then you get one back? Like
Speaker 1: I remember the first time I bit moji Hodgeman. I
Speaker 1: thought he's gonna think I'm just so stupid, and he
Speaker 1: sent one right back. He's on the bitmoji train. I
Speaker 1: can buy that for sure. But I don't use the
Speaker 1: emoji as much anymore. But I did when they when
Speaker 1: I I guess they first kind of hit the scene
Speaker 1: on the smartphone. Um, and now I get a little
Speaker 1: I mean, kissy faces and stuff are fine, but I
Speaker 1: don't like when I just get like a thumbs up
Speaker 1: reply for okay, that's fine, or thumbs up is almost
Speaker 1: like I can barely tolerate you. Yeah, that's what it
Speaker 1: feels like to me. That's what they're saying. I can't
Speaker 1: be bothered to type okay, Right, I say k K
Speaker 1: because it really kind of takes okay and and turns
Speaker 1: it even more personal. I always thought you were just
Speaker 1: jittery admitt to type k and just said it. No,
Speaker 1: I'm saying kak. So now you have legendarily fast thumbs.
Speaker 1: I do. It's from all the coffee I drink and
Speaker 1: the speed. I will also say this that this article,
Speaker 1: and I mean I kind of picked it because well,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be honest, we needed something a little easier
Speaker 1: this week because it's a tough week. This is a
Speaker 1: little more in depth than you may have thought, more
Speaker 1: in depth and like way more interesting than I thought.
Speaker 1: The whole history of it I thought was pretty fascinating.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about the history of it. Man. The
Speaker 1: the widely agreed upon start date for emojis comes back
Speaker 1: in Night two, all the way back in two. And
Speaker 1: it wasn't an emoji that first came out. It was
Speaker 1: what are known as emoticons, the predecessor of emoji. Remember
Speaker 1: those days, And we're all just big dummies and type
Speaker 1: colin parentheses on a way. It wouldn't mean that that'd
Speaker 1: be that's not even a thing. Yeah, colin parentheses is
Speaker 1: smiley face. I was thinking quotations. Sorry, yeah, right, So
Speaker 1: colon in a parentheses either way is a smiley face
Speaker 1: or a frownie face. And that we can point to.
Speaker 1: This is so cool that that they know who did this.
Speaker 1: But a guy named um uh Scott Falman, and he
Speaker 1: was either an admin or a frequent user or whatever
Speaker 1: had something to do with the message board, the electronic
Speaker 1: message board UM which was a very very early like
Speaker 1: chat room forum prototype back in two for Carnegie Mellon University. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which we did some time there. We served out of
Speaker 1: sentence there, we did. Now we did a little uh,
Speaker 1: a little short video Carnegie Mellon for days. Yeah, short
Speaker 1: video for days. But yeah two he uh and I
Speaker 1: don't even know if you said specifically, but September nineteenth.
Speaker 1: They actually have the actual date, which is amazing. And
Speaker 1: he said on this bulletin board, if you put a
Speaker 1: smiley face using this actually he even gus seated up
Speaker 1: with the dashes the nose that they lost the dash
Speaker 1: pretty quick. I like the dash, do you it gets overdone?
Speaker 1: Do you know what I like? It's like it's a
Speaker 1: horse face. What I like her? The people that are
Speaker 1: can do like a whole picture out of typing things?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, like the Shrug Guy. Yeah that's no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I mean like this whole page would be a big rooster.
Speaker 1: It's like the kids and me, you and everyone we know.
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly. They had like the Book of Them that
Speaker 1: was the cutest touch. Yeah, good movie. That is the
Speaker 1: one movie that has ever done whimsy right and didn't
Speaker 1: go over the edge. It was whimsical to an exactly perfect,
Speaker 1: non annoying degree. So every other movie with whimsy you hate, yes, okay,
Speaker 1: like hate. I do like Shrug Guy, though Shrug Guy,
Speaker 1: I've never learned it just copy and paste him. Well,
Speaker 1: I've never done it myself, but I just like the
Speaker 1: way it looks. And I thought that's creative because it
Speaker 1: looks exactly like what it is. Um And I was
Speaker 1: always partial to as well to the awkward which was
Speaker 1: which was that Colin slash. Oh that one's kind of
Speaker 1: makes feelings about because it can also mean like wow,
Speaker 1: I'm really disappointed, or it's like sure it means that's
Speaker 1: why I like it. I think very versatile. It is versatile.
Speaker 1: There's a lot to it, all right. So anyway, he said,
Speaker 1: if he used a smiley face with a colon and
Speaker 1: that dash in parentheses in your comment to say it's humorous,
Speaker 1: then I think we can avoid it was kind of
Speaker 1: used to clear up like the ambiguity of text and
Speaker 1: things like that, not texting, but you know, sometimes it's
Speaker 1: hard to read, like wait, does this person making a joke? Right? Right?
Speaker 1: So if somebody was joking or being sarcastic, yeah, like
Speaker 1: he used this thing, you right, and then the person
Speaker 1: will know and we won't have an argument on the
Speaker 1: message board because the person will know you were joking, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it started in and what as we'll see. What
Speaker 1: Falman hit on the head was the very point that
Speaker 1: emojis fulfill, which is they add context to plain text,
Speaker 1: which is important. Yeah. So um, Falman came up with
Speaker 1: his triumphant victory, like you said, September nineteen, and now
Speaker 1: he's sitting on a mountain of cash and oh yeah, man,
Speaker 1: he trademarked it very wisely. So hope everybody's sending him
Speaker 1: the money in the time they used that emoticon, but
Speaker 1: before him and I thought this was super interesting. People
Speaker 1: have always, of course put little smiley faces and letters
Speaker 1: and things like that. So this was an extension of that.
Speaker 1: But um, some historians say in Robert Herrick wrote a
Speaker 1: poem entitled to Fortune, and it seems as if he
Speaker 1: is purposely included an emoticon in a line upon my
Speaker 1: ruins smiling Yet and he puts a colon in a
Speaker 1: parentheses after the words smiling, And people say that may
Speaker 1: have actually been the very first use of this. I
Speaker 1: read the little article that had that, and there was
Speaker 1: a um. There was a note in addendum and appendage,
Speaker 1: if you will, basically said and it was from an
Speaker 1: English professor who said that at this time, in what
Speaker 1: sixt in the mid seventeenth century, there was no no
Speaker 1: standardized punctuation, and so even a poet writing something sending
Speaker 1: it off to the printer would not necessarily expect the
Speaker 1: printer to follow his punctuation to a t. I think
Speaker 1: it's a bit of a lame explanation. Why even go
Speaker 1: to the trouble. Maybe maybe this professor was saying the
Speaker 1: printer himself could have added this, and that it wasn't
Speaker 1: the poet's intent, and that it was just accidental. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure. I like to think that. Yeah, this guy
Speaker 1: had a tremendous amount of foresight and and in sixty
Speaker 1: Robert Herrick said, here's your first emoticon. Everybody, come back
Speaker 1: and find me in two thousand twelve. I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: with that story. Okay, that's where we're going with. So
Speaker 1: we had the emoticon either beginning in six or definitely
Speaker 1: beginning in nine two, and that's all we had to
Speaker 1: deal with for a good thirteen years if it was
Speaker 1: the latter UM. And then in we finally get our
Speaker 1: first emojis, and we know where those came from too,
Speaker 1: and believe it or not, everybody, they came from Japan.
Speaker 1: I don't no surprise, right right. It was a company
Speaker 1: called n T t uh D Little Low Big Seed,
Speaker 1: Little low M Little Low Como. We're gonna call it
Speaker 1: DoCoMo because that's what it spells. And they had to
Speaker 1: icons a phone and a heart. And this is when
Speaker 1: people um had pagers beepers. Did you ever have a pager? Tons?
Speaker 1: Did you really? You had like two or three at
Speaker 1: a time, depending on you know, what you needed. I
Speaker 1: don't think I maybe I did. I think when I
Speaker 1: got into the film business, I had to get a pager.
Speaker 1: But it was very very soon after that my first,
Speaker 1: like Nokia phone came into play. I didn't have a
Speaker 1: pager for years and years. I didn't had a page
Speaker 1: of like a year, if I remember correctly. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean they were for those of you, for you kids
Speaker 1: out there. There's probably plenty of kids who listen to
Speaker 1: us to have no idea what a page is, all right,
Speaker 1: It's like a little a little I guess digital thing
Speaker 1: that was like the size of it was like the
Speaker 1: size of a cigarette pack. But you guys all vape,
Speaker 1: you don't smoke cigarettes. It was smaller than that. Okay,
Speaker 1: it was the size of I don't even know what
Speaker 1: it was, the size of a very tiny cell phone.
Speaker 1: I guess we could say inches. It was about like
Speaker 1: two inches by an inch and a half, which is
Speaker 1: some unknown amount of centimeters, right. But it was a
Speaker 1: very small little box and you carried it with you
Speaker 1: and clip that you could put on your belt. It
Speaker 1: was a magic little box because somebody would call a
Speaker 1: number that was associated with your pager and they would
Speaker 1: like type in their phone number after the beep and
Speaker 1: hang up or press pound I think afterwards. Then you
Speaker 1: hang up and then you got a little alert on
Speaker 1: that little thing you wore on your belt. Then it
Speaker 1: would be like bee. It was very annoying, and the
Speaker 1: person's number would be next to it, and if they
Speaker 1: really needed to talk to you, they put nine on
Speaker 1: one after. So you would then pull your car over,
Speaker 1: find a pay phone, call the number on your pager
Speaker 1: and say you got the stuff. I'd be like, what's up?
Speaker 1: What's so important? Right? Yeah, that was how people communicate
Speaker 1: with one another before cell phones. It's really it seems
Speaker 1: like a hundred years ago, and it's really funny that
Speaker 1: it was the mid nineties, right, and then people said, well,
Speaker 1: why don't we just make phones more portable? And they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's actually had thought about that, good idea, because I
Speaker 1: mean you had that bag phones and car phones at
Speaker 1: the time. It was a thing. So the the Japanese,
Speaker 1: the entire country of Japan had pagers in the early nineties.
Speaker 1: They were early adopters. Yeah for sure, and um this
Speaker 1: DoCoMo uh. They had a line called Pocketbell Pagers and
Speaker 1: they were the ones that first added emojis. There was
Speaker 1: a heart and a phone. Yeah. The phone meant call
Speaker 1: me the heart very sweetly. I love that. The heart
Speaker 1: was one of the first ones basically sending a message
Speaker 1: of love. Uh. And then later on in the nineties,
Speaker 1: late nineties, I guess they streamline streamline that got rid
Speaker 1: of those icons because apparently uh pocket Bell pagers with
Speaker 1: a lot of business people that used them, and they
Speaker 1: weren't into it. So the teenagers were like, forget you, then, DoCoMo,
Speaker 1: we're out of here. We're going to Tokyo messaging because
Speaker 1: they've got these little what would eventually be called emoji's.
Speaker 1: I love that that. Um, the docmo like they got
Speaker 1: all business like. They were like, we can't have the
Speaker 1: heart on there. Yeah. Um, that reminds me of probably
Speaker 1: my favorite Onion headline of all time. Man accidentally ends
Speaker 1: business call with I love you the greatest one ever.
Speaker 1: That's a good one. My favorite was always Drugs Win
Speaker 1: War on Drugs. Oh yeah, did you see the video
Speaker 1: they made with I think Little Wayne. But they were
Speaker 1: saying the d e A Had tapped Little Wayne to
Speaker 1: go like carry out the war on drugs by doing
Speaker 1: all the drugs. Well just to picture of his face,
Speaker 1: yeah right, yeah, but they would they use like clips
Speaker 1: of him like on a on his tour of us
Speaker 1: trying to talk but he's just so waste. He's not
Speaker 1: even making sense, and but they clipped, they interspersed it
Speaker 1: in like it was a news report, and he was
Speaker 1: doing a great job. It's funny too. After our ten
Speaker 1: years of doing this, we've gotten to do so many
Speaker 1: cool things because of the show. And one of my
Speaker 1: favorite things ever still is that when we knew people
Speaker 1: at the Onion, they took my picture one day and
Speaker 1: they'll still trot that out as Aria man and I
Speaker 1: will be My mug will be in an Onion article
Speaker 1: every now, and it's because area man. Yes, shout out
Speaker 1: Joe Randazzo for there. Yeah, back in the day, getting
Speaker 1: us in the office. All right, so should we take
Speaker 1: a break. Oh god, we haven't yet, haven't we. Now,
Speaker 1: let's take a break and we'll be back to talk
Speaker 1: about where they went with Dokomo right for this? All right? Man?
Speaker 1: So DoCoMo said we're done with you kids, and then
Speaker 1: they said, oh wait, god, come back, you're like a
Speaker 1: third of our business. We had no idea. Um, Luckily
Speaker 1: they had an engineer named Shiga Takakura. You're really good
Speaker 1: at the Japan much. I'm around it a lot, and
Speaker 1: uh I guess coud tasan Okay, we'll go with that
Speaker 1: he was working on a mobile internet platform called i Mode,
Speaker 1: and he said, you know what, we're just trying to
Speaker 1: get some pretty basic thoughts across here, like on a
Speaker 1: on like a mobile network, so like your phone, stuff
Speaker 1: like the news or the weather or something like that.
Speaker 1: Headlines literally had news headlines and what the stock markets doing,
Speaker 1: or if it's sunny out so right, right, and stuff
Speaker 1: that's going to like repeat on like pretty predictable over
Speaker 1: like fairly short time scale. So it's gonna be sunny
Speaker 1: this day, and it's probably going to be sunny again,
Speaker 1: so you're gonna go back to the sunny thing over
Speaker 1: and over again rather than you know, typing out sunny.
Speaker 1: What if he just had an icon of a son, right,
Speaker 1: And this is a huge breakthrough. And what this guy
Speaker 1: did was create the very first emojis for this imode platform.
Speaker 1: And he actually coined the term emoji two shigy taka kurita,
Speaker 1: that's right, uh. And there was a character e limit,
Speaker 1: a two character limit, which is kind of the main
Speaker 1: reason behind why we have emojis as good. So, like
Speaker 1: you said, he didn't have to type out sunny. You
Speaker 1: could use one character uh. And in nine it sounded
Speaker 1: like the future back then. Remember it's crazy. Um he
Speaker 1: developed a hundred and seventy six of these initial emoticons
Speaker 1: for things dealing with the weather, sports, food and drink,
Speaker 1: love of course, and like you said, he made up
Speaker 1: the word E which was a picture emoji, which was
Speaker 1: character and that's where it comes from. Yep. So the
Speaker 1: thing was then you had how many did he come
Speaker 1: up with? Two hundred seventy six initial ones? Okay? Um,
Speaker 1: so the thing is is this this whole mobile platform
Speaker 1: I mode and again this is we're talking about. Um.
Speaker 1: They they had like two fifty characters tops. But these
Speaker 1: broadband networks weren't invented yet. This was all like really
Speaker 1: low fi stuff still, so it was very much ahead
Speaker 1: of his time, so he kind of had to reverse
Speaker 1: engineer how to get these things across. They had a
Speaker 1: stroke of genius since there was a finite number of
Speaker 1: these things. Rather than sending a picture from one phone
Speaker 1: to another when one user wanted to send that emoji,
Speaker 1: they stored the pictures in the phone and then you
Speaker 1: could activate those emojis from a simple too to alpha
Speaker 1: too I guess to bite alpha numeric code. So when
Speaker 1: your phone got the right alpha numeric code. It would
Speaker 1: produce a smiley face. Yeah. It really set the stage
Speaker 1: for what we have today. Yeah, you know, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Umi was over there at this time. She was in
Speaker 1: Japan teaching and she told me, like, you know, I
Speaker 1: came back and I was like, wait, we're not We
Speaker 1: don't have texts, like everybody texts. You don't have Hello
Speaker 1: Kitty right exactly. And it was like years before, Like
Speaker 1: Japan was definitely doing this fairly early compared to us here. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I remember seeing, um, the first handheld cell phone that
Speaker 1: wasn't the big brick phone. I saw one of those
Speaker 1: in l a in the in the late eighties or
Speaker 1: early nineties, like on a literally in a Hollywood backlot,
Speaker 1: some producer had a brick phone, Like, oh my god.
Speaker 1: But the first I kind of cell phone cell phone
Speaker 1: I ever saw was in London, and I guess it
Speaker 1: would have had to have been ninety five or ninety six,
Speaker 1: and I had never seen one. Was like the big
Speaker 1: rectangle with the flip down mouthpiece and the pull up
Speaker 1: antenna something like that. It may not have had to
Speaker 1: flip down, but it was, you know, it was smaller
Speaker 1: than a brick phone. Um, but I just remember thinking
Speaker 1: a while, like London, that they're on the leading edge
Speaker 1: of technology here. I've never seen that before. What in
Speaker 1: the world's that guy doing? Let me see that thing?
Speaker 1: All right? So many years passed more they called them.
Speaker 1: I don't even know how much they called them emojis
Speaker 1: or icons back then. Probably well now the guy had
Speaker 1: coined the term emoji, yeah, but I just don't know
Speaker 1: if it was like the popular term at the time.
Speaker 1: I see, I think it was Japan. Okay. Yeah, again,
Speaker 1: ahead of the ahead of the thing, ahead of the curve. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I just want to make sure that that's been gotten
Speaker 1: across very much ahead of the all right. In two
Speaker 1: thousand ten, a company called Unicode Consortium, well it wasn't
Speaker 1: a company, it was the Unicode Consortium or a nonprofit
Speaker 1: and they are a group of tech companies and volunteers
Speaker 1: from the tech industry that basically really understood this stuff.
Speaker 1: Saw the writing on the wall with the emoji on
Speaker 1: the wall and where it was going, and they says,
Speaker 1: why don't we do this. We need to create a library.
Speaker 1: It needs to be standardized. Because I even remember early
Speaker 1: on with smartphones, you know, different platforms, someone would send
Speaker 1: you an emote, an emoji from an Android to an iPhone,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't come across. So they said, we need to
Speaker 1: standardize this so it can operate across all iOS devices. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or even if like the phones had the same emojis,
Speaker 1: they might not use the same codes, so you might
Speaker 1: get like the opposite of what you're looking for. You're
Speaker 1: looking for a peach and you get a big right exactly,
Speaker 1: and they're like, wow, are you trying to say? Man?
Speaker 1: So there was there was this great need for uniformity,
Speaker 1: but it didn't come out until what what year was
Speaker 1: the two So this Unicode Consortium and the Daily Mail
Speaker 1: by the way, called it the Unicorn Consortium if you noticed,
Speaker 1: and I called it the Unicode Consortium either way? Can
Speaker 1: you pronounce it both ways? I think the Brits do that.
Speaker 1: And that's when you saw your first cell phone, so
Speaker 1: full circle. Yeah. So, um, Unicode got together and they
Speaker 1: said we're gonna we're gonna make this this like collective,
Speaker 1: open source, nonprofit effort to encode these things and create
Speaker 1: a universal standard. And in doing so they've made what
Speaker 1: some people point to is we'll see as one of
Speaker 1: the first universal languages. Yeah. And also but it's not
Speaker 1: really um. Strangely, it's it shocked me to know that
Speaker 1: no one owns this. I love that there is no
Speaker 1: patent or i P property rights to emojis. That it's great,
Speaker 1: but it's it's kind of shocking that something so ubiquitous
Speaker 1: some like no one's making money off of it. I
Speaker 1: love that it's wonderful and rare and so rare. That's
Speaker 1: why it's shocking them. It is now. Um, we should
Speaker 1: say that some people point to the Unicode Consortium being
Speaker 1: uh dominated by some major major companies. I think Google
Speaker 1: and Apple really have a lot of people in there.
Speaker 1: But again it's a nonprofit group and there are rules
Speaker 1: that are followed. I think the implication is is that
Speaker 1: there if Google or Apple puts up some suggestions, which
Speaker 1: they do sometimes, they may have a little more likelihood
Speaker 1: of getting past than other people's emojis. Maybe probably uh.
Speaker 1: And then also since they're both American companies, the universal
Speaker 1: set of emojis tend to skew a little more American.
Speaker 1: Like hot dogs and hamburgers and French fries are there,
Speaker 1: and now they're just now starting to get to like
Speaker 1: euros and things like that. Those are not too huge
Speaker 1: downfalls in return for this thing being open source and
Speaker 1: unowned by anybody except for the entire world, right. But
Speaker 1: one huge downfall because it's open source and anyone can
Speaker 1: do anything with these emojis is that we got the
Speaker 1: Emoji movie because some Hollywood executive was like, well, we
Speaker 1: don't have to pay for this. We can just go
Speaker 1: out and make a movie. Will be the first one
Speaker 1: with an emoji movie, and since we don't have to
Speaker 1: pay for it, we can put all of that money
Speaker 1: into making something really great, and they did. I I
Speaker 1: didn't see it, obviously, but I remember when it was
Speaker 1: announced there would be an emoji movie. I just remember thinking,
Speaker 1: come on, well, it really delivered on on that reaction.
Speaker 1: From what I understand, I mean think it was a
Speaker 1: bomb in all respects, but they still made like four
Speaker 1: times what they put into I think the box off
Speaker 1: million and they spent like fifty million on it. I
Speaker 1: don't know, but I will say this, I have no
Speaker 1: idea what it's about at all, but I know but
Speaker 1: my prediction, having not seen it or read anything about it,
Speaker 1: is that it was some dumb story about the different
Speaker 1: emotions coming together in the end to solve some problem.
Speaker 1: I'm sure you're right. I'm sure Hugh Jackman was in it,
Speaker 1: and Jared from Subway was beaten up by a bunch
Speaker 1: of people. Yeah, and then there was a Sharknado. Although, um,
Speaker 1: the one of the guys who used to be on
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley, t J. Mitchell, J. Miller, Miller, he was
Speaker 1: in it. And so I was looking up the Emoji
Speaker 1: movie and he apparently is accused of making a bomb. Man,
Speaker 1: I saw that. Isn't that crazy? Yeah? He I don't
Speaker 1: I don't know how he's doing. That article made me
Speaker 1: worry for him. He I think he got in some
Speaker 1: argument on a train with a lady and then and
Speaker 1: then was taken off the train and called in a
Speaker 1: bomb threat on the train that she had a bomb
Speaker 1: and you can't you can't do that, allegedly allegedly allegedly,
Speaker 1: yeah you can't do that, t J. Miller, that you
Speaker 1: really can't, man. But yeah, I lay all this at
Speaker 1: the feet of the Emoji movie because he was the
Speaker 1: star of absolutely what was he uh see the egg
Speaker 1: plan of the Peach? I don't know. Well, if he
Speaker 1: was the star, then he probably would have been crying
Speaker 1: with laughter because in two thousand seventeen. I believe for
Speaker 1: three straight years US fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, crying with
Speaker 1: laughter was the most popular emoji, which I have issue
Speaker 1: with that, and in two thousand fifteen it was Actually
Speaker 1: this is what I have a problem with. Oxford Dictionary
Speaker 1: chose it is the word of the year. I don't
Speaker 1: have a problem with that part. Yeah, that shows Oxford
Speaker 1: Dictionary is keeping up with with the ever evolving language.
Speaker 1: Their descriptive ist not prescriptive ist. All right, that makes
Speaker 1: him a okay in my book, So what's your problem?
Speaker 1: My problem is that that means that crying with laughter
Speaker 1: is overused. None of the people maybe one hundreds of
Speaker 1: one percent of the people who sent the crying with
Speaker 1: laughter emoji actually crying with laughter over like laugh out loud?
Speaker 1: How many people are like l o ol, Like that's
Speaker 1: not that's not what that means. Everybody, you ruined it.
Speaker 1: You ruined laughing out loud, and you're ruin in the crying.
Speaker 1: So you're saying, literally, if you're crying with laughter, is
Speaker 1: the only time you can send that, not just saying
Speaker 1: hey that's really funny. Yes, all right, I think it
Speaker 1: would it would be a much better world if that
Speaker 1: were the case. Okay, I just think it's overused, and
Speaker 1: I think that's part of the I think that's one
Speaker 1: reason why everybody is so cynical and sarcastic, is because
Speaker 1: they're so out of touch with our emotions that we
Speaker 1: have the similatroom to stand in for us that instead
Speaker 1: of actually experiencing them, and everything has to be so
Speaker 1: much bigger and bolder than it actually is. There's no
Speaker 1: subtlety your nuance, which is ironic because there's tons of
Speaker 1: subtlety and nuance in actually communicating with emoji, right, I
Speaker 1: mean there's like a medium laughter emoticon probably right, I'm
Speaker 1: sure probably. But it's the same thing is using exclamation points.
Speaker 1: You get trapped in it, you know what I'm saying, So, like,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, if you take away the exclamation points,
Speaker 1: people are like, are you mad at me? What's wrong?
Speaker 1: I've definitely gotten in texts exchanges like hey, do you
Speaker 1: want to go do this thing or whatever? And if
Speaker 1: someone sends back, sure you do that, or yeah, you
Speaker 1: do that a lot. If you just send back sure,
Speaker 1: it's like, well, I guess Chuck's not very happy about this.
Speaker 1: I guess I'll start adding exclamation points. No, but you
Speaker 1: shouldn't have to, is my point. You should not have to,
Speaker 1: and I think we just need to rip the band
Speaker 1: aid off. I don't ever want to see an exclamation
Speaker 1: point for you again that you don't mean much less
Speaker 1: of double. The one that really is unsettling, though, was
Speaker 1: when when somebody replies with sure period and the s
Speaker 1: is lower case, that means that means things are not
Speaker 1: going well? Right? Then sure? Yeah? Don't You don't want
Speaker 1: me to be a funny because when I say sure,
Speaker 1: I mean sure, but that's how I say it my head.
Speaker 1: But I guess lower case sure period is definitely that's
Speaker 1: saying something. Adding the period onto a lower case word,
Speaker 1: you're sending a message. But if you're not, if you're
Speaker 1: just saying sure like normally, that that's the problem Bloom
Speaker 1: with with text based um communication. It lacks context, that
Speaker 1: lacks emotion. So we're used to communicate any kind of
Speaker 1: text base. Yeah, that's what I'm saying, like, just just
Speaker 1: let right that. You have to add some sort of punctuation.
Speaker 1: That's the role that emojis fulfill. And we'll talk about
Speaker 1: that after a break. How about that sure lower case period. Alright,
Speaker 1: so we'll go over some interesting stats here of people
Speaker 1: use emojis online. What that's a that's almost everybody, surprising, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the other eight percent, I don't know. The other
Speaker 1: eight percent have their arms folding. They're like, I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna do it, darn it. That's right. Uh, we've been
Speaker 1: dancing around this peach in the eggplant thing long enough.
Speaker 1: Are we getting there now? Well we might as well.
Speaker 1: So these have famously become uh stand ins for body parts, right,
Speaker 1: like the peaches, like the Almon brothers sense of the words,
Speaker 1: so what they meant? Yeah, I never really thought about that.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, eat a peach. Huh. All right, so it
Speaker 1: soon became a thing to send a peach with an eggplant.
Speaker 1: I am so old and out of that loop that
Speaker 1: I didn't know this was a real thing. I didn't
Speaker 1: either until um this article, and I was like, oh yeah, obviously,
Speaker 1: especially after reading about it, I'm like, then you look
Speaker 1: at the egg plane, You're like, um. Another uh famous
Speaker 1: emoji is the poop i con. It's one of the
Speaker 1: most ubiquitous, very popular in Japan and has become huge
Speaker 1: in Japan popular in America with its fun little googly eyes,
Speaker 1: And I think didn't Google even have flies buzzing around
Speaker 1: the poop the first poop, which was a little much, frankly,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I think back in like two thousand eight
Speaker 1: or something like that, Google came out with their their
Speaker 1: own poop icon for Gmail two seven and they put
Speaker 1: flies around and it was just gross, um, but they
Speaker 1: it's since somebody added the Google eyes later on and
Speaker 1: now it's like a mascot the poop. The poop emoji
Speaker 1: without the eyes is like gross, Like, what's wrong with you?
Speaker 1: Why would you send that? It's like sure, period, right right?
Speaker 1: But the poop with Google eyes is like sure exclamation
Speaker 1: point right, Okay, I think you're right. I'm following along. Uh.
Speaker 1: And there's been a lot of kind of um I
Speaker 1: would call them folk controversies over the years, like last
Speaker 1: just last year, Goal in two thousand seventeen had a
Speaker 1: cheeseburger icon that had the cheese under the meat patty
Speaker 1: and people went berserk. That's really stupid that people went berserk,
Speaker 1: But it's also stupid to put the cheese under the meat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just a weird choice. Did that. It's some the
Speaker 1: person who make that never see a cheeseburger before. It's
Speaker 1: a really ducking stupid thing to do. But if it
Speaker 1: was somebody who really had never seen a cheeseburger before,
Speaker 1: then God bless them, and I feel bad for him
Speaker 1: for the outrage they created. Because even if even if
Speaker 1: they put the bun on upside down, even if they'd
Speaker 1: left off the ketchup, okay, it doesn't matter, it still
Speaker 1: looks like a cheeseburger. Settle down. Sometimes I wonder if
Speaker 1: they do that, some of that stuff that these programmers
Speaker 1: or designers or coders or whoever does these they do
Speaker 1: that on purpose, just to rib people like, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: put the cheese. Yeah, We're going to set the internetut,
Speaker 1: And they did. Apparently the CEO of go goal Um,
Speaker 1: I did not know that this was the CEO of
Speaker 1: Google sundar Okay, he said, we are going to drop
Speaker 1: everything else we are doing to go sort this out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I imagined fairly sarcastically. I would think so sarcastic emoticon, right,
Speaker 1: whatever that is that is, Like, I don't know what
Speaker 1: that would be. I think you've got to use I
Speaker 1: don't know what you would what is a sarcastic emotive?
Speaker 1: I bet there's one people use and we're just not
Speaker 1: hip to. That would be my guess. Another word is old.
Speaker 1: There was a survey for match dot com that claimed
Speaker 1: that people who used emojis had sex more often than
Speaker 1: those people who didn't. Apparently, the wine emoji is huge
Speaker 1: in Britain and Australians love their drug related emojis. We're
Speaker 1: gonna be in Australia, it's right, So we're gonna find
Speaker 1: out what that's all about when we went down enda. Uh,
Speaker 1: and of course we need to talk about the skin tone.
Speaker 1: Very early on it was um I think in two
Speaker 1: thousand fifteen, the Unicode Consortium changed the default skin tone
Speaker 1: to what they call Simpson's Yellow. But then you have
Speaker 1: the ability to tend them two different I think five
Speaker 1: different skin tones to represent um, you know, at least
Speaker 1: five different shades of skin. Right, which was a good start, right,
Speaker 1: It was a good start. And there, I mean there's
Speaker 1: they are still just getting going. There's plenty that have
Speaker 1: been left off. Um like they just now are starting
Speaker 1: to add redheads to things and curly haired people. That's crazy,
Speaker 1: which is crazy, um cool that they're adding it. But yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's always somebody whose feelings are hurt because they're
Speaker 1: left out by the emoji people every year. They also
Speaker 1: say that too many smiley faces, Uh, if you're dealing
Speaker 1: with work, And if you're dealing with work, maybe avoid
Speaker 1: emojis would be my guess. It depends on who you're
Speaker 1: talking with. I mean, if it's a friend or whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it depends on your job too. Yeah, if you're in banking,
Speaker 1: in your community, hating with the client you've just met.
Speaker 1: It depends on what job it is too, of course.
Speaker 1: But there is apparently a study out there that said, um,
Speaker 1: contrary to what you think, using too many smiley emoticons
Speaker 1: don't increase your perception of warmth. They decrease perception of competence.
Speaker 1: I totally get that. But like the study was from oh,
Speaker 1: the Journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. It was a
Speaker 1: two thousand seventeen study and they said, um, not only
Speaker 1: is it a smiley face emoji not a smile, it
Speaker 1: has some of the opposite effects, which is like, I mean,
Speaker 1: it totally makes sense if you think about it, Like
Speaker 1: somebody smiling, You're like, oh, I want to be around
Speaker 1: that person. Somebody's saying a bunch of smiley face and
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, what an idiot. You know, it's really
Speaker 1: easy to cross that line. Well, yeah, and it's also
Speaker 1: really easy to get in trouble. Um, do do not
Speaker 1: send emoji threats because that's a real thing. There have
Speaker 1: been people all over the world that have been arrested
Speaker 1: for sending like handgun emojis two people that they were
Speaker 1: angry at and getting arrested. Yeah, for making like actual
Speaker 1: threats threats, right, that that counts legally, which so that raises,
Speaker 1: um some questions about what emojis are? Are they language?
Speaker 1: Are they are? There's actually I want to give um.
Speaker 1: There's this guy I think he's a rapper actually named
Speaker 1: Young Jake y U n G Jake. So the absence
Speaker 1: of the oh and young indicates he might be a
Speaker 1: rapper Young right, Young Jake? You and Carl um. But
Speaker 1: Young Jake is an emoji portraitist. Man, that stuff was
Speaker 1: so cool, didn't that awesome? Yeah? So this guy does
Speaker 1: portraits of people, like really good portraits strictly from emojis
Speaker 1: layered in really interesting ways. He's got like a really
Speaker 1: great Instagram to check out too. Why you eng Jake?
Speaker 1: But go check that one out. And then there's also
Speaker 1: a dude named Fred Benninson and he translated um Moby
Speaker 1: Dick into emojis. It's called emoji Dick. And every word
Speaker 1: of every line of Moby Dick has been translated into emojis.
Speaker 1: And this guy did this right. He hired three people
Speaker 1: to translate every single line, and then he had he
Speaker 1: hired another group of people who would look at each
Speaker 1: line and then look at the line of text and say,
Speaker 1: this is the one of the three that's the that
Speaker 1: best gets this across for every line. So you can
Speaker 1: get Emoji Dick online for two hundred bucks. For hard
Speaker 1: copy two dollars, but I think he sells it by
Speaker 1: the PDF for five bucks and as Moby Dick represented
Speaker 1: by an egg plant in the peach, or at least
Speaker 1: the egg plant. So there's a lot of like, it's
Speaker 1: obvious that emoji is art, but there's a lot of
Speaker 1: people out there, linguists included, who are saying emoji she
Speaker 1: is words too, and it may be a language that's
Speaker 1: developing in front of our eyes. It's pretty interesting as
Speaker 1: it stands now, though technically, if you're a linguist, it
Speaker 1: is not a language because it lacks grammar, which is
Speaker 1: structures that allow you to take words and put them
Speaker 1: into different combinations to create higher thoughts. Emojis do not
Speaker 1: yet allow us to do that because there's not real rules. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but there, I mean, there are people studying at this
Speaker 1: one article you sent a woman named Rachel Tatman Uh,
Speaker 1: a linguistics PhD candidate from the University of Washington, Go Huskies. Uh.
Speaker 1: She did some studies like where she would show people
Speaker 1: pictures like photographs and then say, how would you emoji
Speaker 1: that description of that picture? Right right? And there are
Speaker 1: different pictures that were subtly different, I mean, they were
Speaker 1: obviously different, like the the first one was a man
Speaker 1: counting money, and she would say, would you would you
Speaker 1: say what this picture is doing by emoji man emoji
Speaker 1: dollar bill or emoji dollar bill emoji man. And the results,
Speaker 1: I mean, it seemed like she didn't get a lot
Speaker 1: that were fifty fifty for any of these. It seems
Speaker 1: like most of them that she got were like seventy
Speaker 1: eight of people kind of citing one way or the
Speaker 1: other as far as far as far as order goes.
Speaker 1: So she believes kind of firmly that she's proven that
Speaker 1: their bidirectional well, depends, It depends. So with the one
Speaker 1: of the man counting money, of the people said that
Speaker 1: they would they would depict that emoji wise with man
Speaker 1: and then dollar bill. And the reason why she said
Speaker 1: it was because there was an agent patient relationship. The
Speaker 1: agent was the man acting on the money the patient,
Speaker 1: and it was very clear. So there's really only one
Speaker 1: way to say it. Man money, man is counting money
Speaker 1: very much like a subject and a predicate in a sense.
Speaker 1: That's one way they could act. They can also be um.
Speaker 1: They can also kind of describe the layout of a
Speaker 1: photo too, if there's not a very strong agent patient relationship, right,
Speaker 1: So her takeaway basically is that they can represent like
Speaker 1: the physical arrangement of things and also words. So there's
Speaker 1: another one was a picture of a man walking past
Speaker 1: the castle, and the castle's basically the big part of
Speaker 1: the picture and the man's pretty small, but the man
Speaker 1: is in the lower right corner. So most people said
Speaker 1: that they would do castle man because the man is
Speaker 1: not acting on the castle. Castle is not acting on
Speaker 1: the man, but that's the yeah, and that's the way
Speaker 1: it's arranged in the picture. So she was saying that
Speaker 1: it can it can it can mimic the structure of sentences,
Speaker 1: and it can also mimic the structure of pictures, which
Speaker 1: makes emoji definitely their own thing. But the whole reason,
Speaker 1: the whole point of emoji, the reason that we use them.
Speaker 1: There's a guy named Viv Evans think he's at a
Speaker 1: Banger University. He's a huge proponent of emojis as a
Speaker 1: new way to communicate rather than a step backwards, because
Speaker 1: you know, there's a lot of people, probably people who
Speaker 1: hate vocal fry or like emojis so stupid. Anybody who
Speaker 1: uses emoji stupid, And it's a giant step backwards for language,
Speaker 1: which is what why I think the Oxford English Dictionary
Speaker 1: was making such a statement by choosing the crying face
Speaker 1: as the word of the year. They were they were
Speaker 1: casting their lot on the side of emojis as being
Speaker 1: a new form of communication. Um so, Viv Evans is like, yes,
Speaker 1: that's absolutely true. And they what they do is they
Speaker 1: stand in for things like gestures and intonation, things that
Speaker 1: are missing in its strictly text based message like texting
Speaker 1: or Twitter or an email. And that's what emojis do.
Speaker 1: They add emotion, they convey nuance to it that otherwise
Speaker 1: in there, and they're fun sure, like get the stick
Speaker 1: from your peach, you can stick out of your peach
Speaker 1: and have a lot fun with emoji's. You know what's funny?
Speaker 1: Chuck is um the Apparently the mystery has never been
Speaker 1: solved as too exactly why eggplant is in there in
Speaker 1: the first place. It's kind of a weird one to add,
Speaker 1: considering we didn't have redheads until recently or curly heard people,
Speaker 1: but there's always been an eggplan. It makes you wonder, Yeah,
Speaker 1: for sure. Uh and this is the last thing I've
Speaker 1: got was something you sent, which is kind of a
Speaker 1: cool move. Apple wants to be more inclusive with their emojis,
Speaker 1: so they are proposing as a starting point and not
Speaker 1: a comprehensive list there proposing including emojis uh to represent
Speaker 1: people disabilities, so things like uh a man or a
Speaker 1: woman with a cane, prosthetic legs and arms, guide dogs,
Speaker 1: hearing aids, people in wheelchair stuff like that, right, and
Speaker 1: those would be part of Emoji twelve point oh, which
Speaker 1: would come out in March of two thousand nineteen. And
Speaker 1: they just released Emoji eleven point oh to the publicum,
Speaker 1: which includes the partying face cupcakes? Is that what this
Speaker 1: huge list is? So these are all available now, they're
Speaker 1: going to be available on phones in August, but they
Speaker 1: were what the list was released to the public, and
Speaker 1: this this Unicode consortium. They take all these under advisement,
Speaker 1: but they also put him out into the public to say,
Speaker 1: what do you guys think about these two write um
Speaker 1: and there's a few that they will never take. They
Speaker 1: never will will accept when of a living person, a deity,
Speaker 1: or a business logo, all those are off the table immediately.
Speaker 1: But then other ones they want to make sure aren't
Speaker 1: too specific. And then like the Golden Arches, you'll never
Speaker 1: see something like no, not as long as it's open source.
Speaker 1: But there are some pretty good ones coming down the
Speaker 1: pike this August. I wonder what super villain is. It's
Speaker 1: um Mustache. It's kind of like a doctor Stranger, Professor
Speaker 1: Stranger or whatever, kind of like pop call cape. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it obviously gets across, especially when it's next to the
Speaker 1: superhero one that it's the super villain. I think my
Speaker 1: favorites coming soon are nazar Amulet. I don't even know
Speaker 1: what that is. I don't either, Mosquito that seems relevant
Speaker 1: there's there's one that's coming that's it's probably the best
Speaker 1: emoji of all time. The clown face. Oh, that's not
Speaker 1: a thing. It's really well done. Yeah, because that's so versatile.
Speaker 1: It is, but it's also like a good looking emoji. Um,
Speaker 1: is it a scary clown or now? No, it's a great, perfect,
Speaker 1: universally beautiful clown. And I can't remember, you know, we
Speaker 1: did our clown episodes, so I can't remember if it's
Speaker 1: an August clown or what what type of clown it is,
Speaker 1: but it's a great clown. Um. And you can see
Speaker 1: all these by the way at emoji Pedia. I just
Speaker 1: saw it. Oh what do you think? Did you see it? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's good. The guy who did Pennywise the I can't
Speaker 1: remember which he's he's a Scars guard. That's why you
Speaker 1: say we don't know. We'll never know, but um, he
Speaker 1: did just an amazing job. Yeah. And I had no
Speaker 1: skin in the game. I had never read any of
Speaker 1: it or seen any previous versions at all, and I
Speaker 1: just thought it had a lot of heart and was creepy,
Speaker 1: and I thought it was really good. I thought it
Speaker 1: was good too. But you could also tell that stranger
Speaker 1: Things had come out while they were writing this, and
Speaker 1: they were like, oh, let's retool this a little bit
Speaker 1: to really hit the Stranger Things crowd. I don't think
Speaker 1: that's true. I think it is true. I think they
Speaker 1: were I think that script was locked long before Stranger
Speaker 1: Things came out, and I think they retooled it. Uh,
Speaker 1: you got anything else on the kid from Stranger Things
Speaker 1: is in it? That was a little on the nose.
Speaker 1: I'm curious about the timeline there. So, Um, there's another
Speaker 1: one coming out to It's a dude with a frow
Speaker 1: who looks exactly like Slim Good Body. That's coming out
Speaker 1: in the mod Slim Good Body. Remember the guy who
Speaker 1: wore the suit that showed his internal back in the day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just like Slim Good Body. And then there's a mind
Speaker 1: blown one in a vomiting one too. But the clowns
Speaker 1: the best one. Okay, I'm excited. Do you want him
Speaker 1: more about emojis? Go out, go forth, start talking in emojis.
Speaker 1: It's pretty interesting. Uh. And since I said it's interesting,
Speaker 1: it's signed for listening to me. I'm gonna call this
Speaker 1: meals on wheels. We got a lot of great follow
Speaker 1: up from people who were in fact inspired to go
Speaker 1: out and join Meals on Wheels, which was best case
Speaker 1: scenario exactly what we're in Meals on Wheels was hoping for.
Speaker 1: So Hey, guys, thanks for your commitment and in awesomeness.
Speaker 1: I've been an a listener for the past few years
Speaker 1: your might go to for workouts a long car rides.
Speaker 1: A few weeks ago, I heard your episode of Meals
Speaker 1: on Wheels was absolutely blown away. I'm not sure if
Speaker 1: it was the sliding scale model for just the overall
Speaker 1: effects of the program, but you encourage me to sign
Speaker 1: up to serve with my local community center that offers
Speaker 1: Meals on Wheels in central Ohio. He's in Columbus. Yeah.
Speaker 1: After getting thing your printed a few days ago, I
Speaker 1: guess you gotta do that. Sure they don't want any weirdos. No,
Speaker 1: I am awaiting come for me like weirdos with no fingerprints.
Speaker 1: I'm awaiting confirmation before going on my first and only
Speaker 1: shadow ride before being a driver myself. The program is
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Speaker 1: anyone of any age to look for the opportunity look
Speaker 1: into this for meals on wheels, as you can do
Speaker 1: things like food prep, administration work and more. I know
Speaker 1: if I would have signed up. I don't know if
Speaker 1: I would have signed up if not from learning about
Speaker 1: it on your program. That's awesome. Yeah, that is from
Speaker 1: Dalton Schaefer. Good work, Dalton, and Dalton wrote back after
Speaker 1: I told him he was going to be a listener,
Speaker 1: mail said, tell Josh, I live in Columbus now, and
Speaker 1: I purposefully do not say the Ohio State University and
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