Hi everyone and welcome to this conversation on all things emoji. We're coming to you from Future Tense, which is a partnership of Slate Magazine, New America and Arizona State University that looks at the intersection of policy, society and technology. I'm Tori Bosch, the editor of Future Tense and I'm so excited to be here. I wish I could show you an emoji to really capture that excitement because I think so many times they do capture those kinds of emotions and gestures better than words can. After I introduce our wonderful speakers will spend about 45 minutes discussing some of the questions that surround the creation and governance of emoji, and then we'll open it up to Q&A. So you can submit your questions at any point in our discussion. So first we have Gretchen McCulloch, who is an internet linguist who explores the language of the internet for the people of the internet. She's the author of the New York Times bestselling book because internet understanding the new rules of language, which was published in 2019 and was named a best book of the year by Time, Amazon and the Washington Post. Gretchen also writes the resident linguist column at Wired and has written for the New York Times, New York Magazine, Slate, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Toast, which is dear to my heart. She has a master's in linguistics from McGill University and has spoken at South by Southwest and Emojicon. She's also the creator of the Daily Linguistics podcast, All Things Linguistic, and the co-creator of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that is enthusiastic about linguistics. And then we have Jennifer Daniel, who is the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee Chair, which is a very enviable title for anyone to have. Her first contribution to Unicode was standardizing gender inclusive representations in emoji. She was a former graphics editor at the New York Times and is co-author and illustrator of a number of graphics books, including How To Be Human, Space, Exclamation Point, and The Origins of Almost Everything. Her work has been recognized by the Walker Art Museum, Society of Illustrators, and published in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and Time Magazine, just to name a few. So thank you both for being here with future events today. I'd like to start by asking you if you each have a favorite lesser used emoji. We're going for the deep cuts. Okay. Well, so one that occurs to me is the sailboat emoji, which has a particular meaning in a few of my friend groups. So, and a few friend slacks and discords that I'm in, we have a channel called Wining on the Yacht. And this is when you have some sort of problem that's almost too trivial to complain about. But you still want to complain about, and sort of the archetypal example is, I'm here on this yacht, I have this nice free drink, and the ice cubes in it are my preferred style of ice cubes. And so it's the sort of, you know, self-reflexive annoyance, and particularly good yacht wines are awarded a yacht, a sailboat emoji. So it's got this sort of in-group meeting with that particular friend group. That's delightful, Jennifer. How about you? I will say I've never heard anyone talk about using any of the transportation emojis, so you already win on identifying. I have been taken to the natural disaster emoji lately. So the volcano, when I have big strong feelings, or the tornado plus basically any emoji. So tornado poop when I'm describing my kids, or tornado, I don't even know, coffee when I'm guzzling it in the morning. So yeah, I've been using nature, a lot of nature these days. I love that the tornado is sort of emphatic modifier, which is I'm sure not the technical term, but how I will think about it. Sounds very technical to me. So also one quick question is I want to get the language right here. Is the plural emoji or emojis? Emoji. That's a fun question. For me, it depends on what you're trying to signal. So people who are trying to signal like they like emoji specialization or an awareness of emojis roots in Japan, use unmarked emoji without the s. And people who are anglicizing it more intensely use emojis with the s because they're thinking like this is completely adapted into my vocabulary. This is something that I'm just using. I'm not thinking about as a Japanese thing like it's English for me. It sort of depends on what you want to signal. Jennifer is a deep cut emoji specialist and she's going to say emoji as the plural doesn't surprise me at all. But there are also people who use emojis. We used emojis recently on a project that I was working on because we wanted to signal like young approach ability to a younger audience. So it really depends on what you're what you're trying to signal. I will try to use emoji in this but I cannot promise I won't slip up with an emoji. You use what feels good to you. I actually didn't realize why I like emoji. That's just the standard that which people around you. That's what Unicode people say. Well, so now that I know I should be at least in this context, perhaps saying emoji. Jennifer, could you tell us a little bit about sort of how the Unicode subcommittee works? How does a tornado become an emoji? Well, one day when two people love each other very much, they get together and they write a proposal for a tornado. I mean, a lot of emoji have lots of different origins. I suppose if you wanted to make like if we were talking about a specific emoji like how a specific emoji came into being, we could talk about one. I'm trying to think of a good one. But of course, nothing comes to mind. There's tears of joy. I mean, there's obviously the tears of joy. It's nice when you have like a specific one in mind versus like all of them possibly be. Tears of joy was one of those smiley faces that everyone types with regular punctuation, just colon, comma or apostrophe, dash and then per in, but it didn't exist an emoji. So it was sort of one of those things where the best emoji are ones that are really obvious where you're just like, that was an emoji. I swear that was an emoji, but it was never emoji. So you kind of start looking to see how people are currently using it. Is it being currently used? Fortunately, it is because it's made of punctuation. And you can kind of compare it to other punctuation smileys, right? Just convert to the regular smiley or the frowny smiley or a number of other kinds and through different measuring like you could use video or search results or image results, any kind of way of measuring how people are using it online and see, okay, how does this, oh, it's actually more people are using this sequence of punctuation. And then, I mean, I'm already talking about like the criteria for inclusion now but basically you want to get a sense of the frequency of use that isn't rhetorical, like it's actually grounded in reality. And it's been happening for a long time. It's not just like happening this year, or even kind of this decade. You really want to go back decades of how people have been using it. And then Unicode has a whole document about submitting emoji proposals. I don't think we have to go line by line but the most important parts of them really are around frequency of use and multiple uses and how it'll be used with other emoji. I want to get a sense of, this is an emoji, is this emoji flexible, like language? Like, can it be, is it just going to mean literally I'm crying while I'm smiling? No, no, no, it's going to mean so much more than that. It's going to really express things how you feel, not just actually how you can sort your face and leak water out of your eyes, right? It's going to actually bring you somewhere more metaphorical. And then how it's used with other emojis is really important because you want to add new emoji to operate and expand how we use them generally and specifically, like my example of the tornado, right? Like how can it be used other emoji to bring me somewhere more me, right? It doesn't just mean one thing. And there's a number of other criteria as well. And I think that's one of the things that people sometimes don't think about with respect to Unicode is that once Unicode adds a symbol, whether it's an emoji or a, you know, punctuation character or anything else, they never remove it.  So they don't even open that can of worms because if something's too evanescent, then it, you know, that's a problem. So like at a really basic level, what does it mean for Unicode to add an emoji? Like what, what does that kickstart? How does it go from Unicode deciding to add it to it showing up on my iPhone? Well, I, I work on Android, so I couldn't tell you about the phone, but I can tell you about Unicode. Unicode is, think of Unicode as your, your friendly plumber. They lay, they lay the plumbing down so that folks at Apple or Google or Twitter or whoever can then fill those pipes with emoji. They effectively, everything when you read something online, you know, the letter A is assigned a code point so it always, you can reliably know that you're going to be reading the letter A. And emoji operate the same way. It's effectively a font.  They're, they're, they're a font and they're assigned a code point, which makes them lightweight. It also means that's why you can insert them anywhere there's a text field online. And so once there's a code point, once those data files are released, really, it's just, you know, off the races, you know, it's basically anyone who, who wants to, there's no, you don't have to, but if you want to, you now have a code point that can be assigned an image that will reliably look like that image when you send it to someone else and it's that interoperability that really makes Unicode good. Honestly, like what they're doing is a service to all of us. Like we can actually send not just emoji to emoji to someone, but we can send something of Arabic to someone else and they can read it in Arabic, which wasn't possible before Unicode came along. And that's really their mission is to digitize the world's languages in some meaningful way so that we can continue doing. It's kind of like to continue your plumbing metaphor. Like, it's like how the electricity as it arrives in your house is sort of standardized and you have like a certain type of jack that you can plug all your devices into. And so you can plug in like any sort of device into that jack, but you know the electricity company is giving you like a particular kind of electricity so that all of your devices can work with that. So it's, it's sort of that invisible like internet plumbing that people mean Unicode consortium existed since the 1980s right so people haven't paid as much attention to until emoji started. You know, it's, and I think the emoji for bringing that to our attention because it is something that's really difficult for people to sort of understand is this architecture that supports our ability to communicate with with one another. So Unicode will create sort of the font essentially but then every platform will implement it a little bit differently so could you talk a little bit about how much you Unicode want standardization across, say Slack iPhone and Android or other ways that platforms can maybe create problems or opportunities there. I mean, it's, it's called the Unicode standard, right they create guidelines, but they're not the police. You know, they're they're just here to like say this is what you guys should do. This is what it should be here's an example. We spent two years vetting it. You know, be fruitful and multiply right. And so I would say less about what it's not necessarily, I mean, I care about it as part of the subcommittee, but I would say that the group as a whole cares deeply about it. And in the past, I'm not sure before I was involved, I'm not sure how much they did care about it. I think it was more like, thank you Unicode, we will accept this gift that you have given us and then they went off and they did what they did with it. You know they aligned it to their brand or they, they shoved it in their keyboards or you know some people embraced it other people kept it at a distance but they kind of just did their own thing.  This is actually communication, and it matters when you send something X to and it looks like X. I think for the past couple years you've really seen a reconciliation there where people are aligning more in a meaningful way so that you when you're sending something you're here. Yeah, and I think I actually think that's in the past couple of years that's mostly been addressed, at least for the most frequently used about you. I think that users really hate it when I send something from my Android and they shows up as a completely different looking emotion on my friends iPhone and like, but I wasn't trying to be sarcastic I was trying to be sad for you. People really hate that. And I think vendors in the past two years have been realizing that. When I first joined I was like, I didn't understand the, the fragmentation at all, you know I was like, when I was like, oh just gonna look at all the emoji and do an audit get a like a sense of like what this ecosystem looks like and I was like, what. What. What was a lot of this is, and you know what it was easily fixed. That's the thing is like actually it was. You need to talk to you.   You know it's just like anything else any other relationship it's just about, you know, meeting and figuring it out. I mean it's fun to look at who's hamburger puts the tomato underneath the patty rather on top so it's yeah it's a, it's nice to see like a small a bit of a diversity and how the platforms integrate them while keeping things consistent enough yet to, to communicate what you want. I think it's a big difference between what people do with what what the platforms do with the object emoji versus what they do with the sort of face emoji. And that's where like the face emoji need to align really precisely because this eyebrow is like slightly different on this platform versus this other platform. It can create a really different emotional interpretation, whereas you say like the exact styling of the hamburger or like the exact ingredients in the salad or like what color the fish is like what the birthday cake looks like. Those are areas where you know it doesn't necessarily matter exactly how many candles you have on this one birthday cake versus other birthday cake, because the, you know, like people people aren't using the object emoji for as precise meanings in some cases as they're using the face ones. Well, we're also like biologically ingrained to read people's faces, like micro expressions and so like we are paying attention to the details of the smiley's in a way that we're not the burger. You know what I mean. I mean, maybe, maybe food I'd be curious about how we look at food and how you know how the brain what part of the brain is activated but the smiley's really are where it's most I would totally agree. I mean the smiley's, you know, in some ways are sort of the original emoji, as you said, but it feels like smiley's faces people are where things can get the most tricky in terms of representation, as well as in terms of interpretation. I mean, could you talk a little bit about how representation and emoji have changed over recent years. And I have a pretty different philosophy around additions that, let's open it this way. I think there have been efforts to increase a sense of inclusion, but they didn't result in more diversity. And so largely what I've been trying to do is find ways to make things more broad and less specific. So the gender inclusive work largely wasn't about adding a third gender that would be alienating a great deal of other types of genders. It's about adding a concept of a spectrum of gender, and that is much more broad than distinctly male or female. It's about trying to kind of play in a space rather than specifically say this, this looks like me. This is more this is representative and makes it is what I feel like. And I think that's, that's really important is that the emoji aren't meant to literally reproduce reality, but effectively let you play with language just the way you like you play with your own identity. This gets a little bit to something that you've talked about as well, which is that like emoji are not words, right, you know, what exact function do you see them using instead of like a literal translation of what we see there. The way that I like to talk about how emoji function communication and this is a real whole paper about this with with Lauren gone who is also a mutual friend of me and Jennifer, and is emoji as a type of gesture or emoji is having a similar function as gesture even though sometimes there's this very obvious one to one mapping you know you have a thumbs up emoji you have a you have a peace sign you have, you know, like all of these different kinds of literal you know cross fingers physical shapes, but there's also a sense that when you look at how people use emoji, they're often doing it as an accompaniment to words, whether that someone else said this thing and I send back a smiley face in reply, or like a laughing emoji I send that back and reply, or I say this thing and I add a few emoji at the end or sort of the context in which I wanted to be interpreted, you know, so if I say, good job, versus if I say, you know, good job and flip someone off which maybe I'm not going to do on this family friendly stream. Then that one of those is sarcastic right one of our good job with the eye roll of OG, which is family friendly. One of those is more sarcastic than the other and I can do that with physical gestures in in space and broaden the scope of interpretation for what I'm saying, and I can also do that with how gestures in how emoji influence the context of what I'm saying about about the words that I'm producing. And I think that this sort of explains some of the usage patterns that we see in emoji for one thing people really like repeating an emoji, you know, you have like, you know, the top emoji strings a few years ago when I was looking into this were tears of joy tears of joy as like number one tears of joy tears of joy tears of joy as number two, and tears of joy tears of joy tears of joy tears of three. And, you know, and then you go down and you find other other strings of repetition or even when it's not sort of simple repetition like the exact same emoji, it'll be like complex repetition like parts of different colors. And so you're still doing something it's very sort of repetitive in spirit. And that's not really how people use language most of the time, you know, here I am saying words.  It's, it's not that I'm just going to say emoji, emoji, emoji, emoji, emoji, emoji, emoji, emoji, emoji, emoji, emoji, emoji. I mean, I could do that but that would be sort of a performance piece. Yeah, sorry, I've actually been bugging you. That's how I got that clip. But, you know, so but when it comes to emoji, you do see a lot of that repetition. And yet gestures are an area where you do see what see what researchers call beat gestures so I'm going like, Okay, here's what's going on. This is me doing the same hand shape in a repetitive beat And that seems to be more like what's going on in the emoji domain, we do see a lot of repetition in gestures. And the other thing is it from the kind of other spectrum, there's the sort of naturalistic emoji use of like, Okay, I'm going to add a few emoji to influence the context of why you want something to be interpreted, or if someone's talking I can give like a nod or a, Oh, wow, you know, shaking your head, and that sort of the emoji reaction to what someone else is saying.  But it's that's a playful function. It's not, I'm going to, you know, stop using letters. I think it's very clear, you know, many years into emoji being widely available on our phones that people haven't stopped using letters, because emoji have shown up.  Tony mentioned that I don't know if either of you have read The Unseen World by Liz Moore, which is a novel that's about AI and ethics and it's really, really wonderful but I mentioned it and I was going to bring it up anyway because in the book, far in the future, the main character is now an older academic who talks about how younger people only communicate in what they call glyphs, which seem to be like an evolved version of emoji and young people have to tutor the old people and only use words, you know, as a sort of soft to the older people so you don't see it heading in that direction. No, no, no, no. Like, it's a cute science fiction device but it's like time travel.  But no, like, no, because the thing is, is like there are languages with different writing systems. But first of all, for a society to transition to a different writing system. That's, that's possible, you know, in Turkey and I think the 1920s they transferred from an Arabic based alphabet to a Roman based alphabet. You know, this is a thing that's happened in various places. But it's this sort of massive infrastructural issue that requires a lot of like state support and you have to reprint all your books. And even that is not as big of a wholesale change. So like, we could, you know, switch out and stop using the Roman alphabet but we would still be speaking English using it.  Just like, okay, great. So for the next, you know, the next time you're trying to text with someone send text only an emoji, and it turns into this guessing game where the other person's like using words to guess what they're trying what you're trying to say. And, you know, like, it's just, no, it's so it's rock on so many levels.  Oh, no, I was just gonna just briefly piggyback what you mentioned in your book, Gretchen, the idea of emoji being co-speech. I think you even credit that to why it's, it has maintained popularity because it isn't its own language. It works with all the other languages and because it interplays, that allows it to sustain and fill in the gaps that plain text is not sufficient and conveying all the examples that she provided. Right. And so there are moments for like, weird owl moments of play being playful with language, right, where you can do with words and you can be playful with emoji in that way and make it more of a party game. Sure.  And like, it turns out it's actually really hard to give people to learn a new language. And people, you know, people find it difficult, they find it challenging, you have all this vocabulary to memorize, like, and it has not actually been hard to give people to adopt emoji. Like, technological implementation wise, there have been challenges, but people can see an emoji and be like, oh yeah, I'm going to start using this. And they don't actually need, like, the thing that's useful about language is you can communicate beyond the here and now.  It's, I can talk about abstract ideas, you know, I can talk about, you know, I can talk about this question of like, how do emoji work. And that's a sort of broad question. You can't talk about an emoji. There is no emoji for emoji. Why does the ABCD emoji talk about emoji? Those are letters. Those are letters. It doesn't belong to be an emoji. That's all the things that needs to be. Why does it exist? It doesn't exist and it's not an emoji.  Yeah, like it's, and, you know, people have tried to make, you know, universal languages and stuff like that. But the things that are really sort of interesting and exciting about emoji in many cases are either the stuff that's very deliberately not linguistic, like, these, all these facial expressions that are hard to describe in words and the unicode names for them sound kind of silly, because they're not conveying the same thing. Or it's something like, oh, here's the eggplant and someone has to tell you what that means and it doesn't mean that for everybody. You have to be sort of inducted into the society of people who know what the eggplant emoji means. So, you know, the stuff that's really exciting about emoji is all of the stuff that's sort of non-obvious. Yeah, that should get to something I think about a lot. Well, so in May there's a horrifying conversation on Slate's Slack, in which I learned that several of my colleagues use the slightly smiling face, mostly as a kind of screw you, rather than as a smiley face. And some of them seem to be surprised that everyone didn't see it that way. And I was realizing I might have been telling people screw you when I just meant to communicate some warmth. I mean, so are there ways in which the malleability and the way the meaning of an emoji change between person to person can create problems?  I think that, you know, that's a very passive aggressive use of an emoji, right? And it's a sort of sarcastic or double meaning use of emoji.  And so there's a sense in which, okay, if you're going to use something as a sort of subtle nod to passive aggression, that for you and a few people you know is passive aggressive, you need to expect that in an internet context where you're communicating with a bunch of people from different backgrounds and different understandings of things that not everyone is going to receive the exact subtleties of the passive aggression that you are trying to convey. And in some cases that sort of plausible deniability is actually what people are aiming for. So, if I know that I'm being passive aggressive when I sign an email sincerely, and I also know the other person will not necessarily be able to put their finger on why it seems a little bit hostile, or maybe they'll interpret it as if I was being positive. That's this sort of private intro with myself that I can have. And it does sometimes the failure in communication is the point or the plausible deniability of it is the point, because I did a lot of research into the sarcasm literature for for because internet as well. And one of the things that's really interesting is that sarcasm is a linguistic trust fall. You can you express sarcasm, even in sort of gold standard like face to face full bandwidth communication. Sarcasm always involves two parts one of them is the stating of the sarcasm and the other is acknowledgement on the part of the recipient that you've received the sarcasm and you've acknowledged it as such. And sarcasm can go wrong, even in that full bandwidth face to face communication. So, of course it can go wrong online because, you know, once you remove a little bit of that bandwidth and things have had the potential for miscommunication more and anything that's sarcastic or passive aggressive or ironic is a when someone gets it when someone understands your sarcasm for what it is. They're signaling that they're a member of a similar sort of speech community as you are. And when someone doesn't get it to signal that they're sort of an outsider. But if you want, you know, we communicate with so many people across different groups. If you want people to really get an overt message, you need to actually say it. And if you want to convey something really subtle, you need to accept the possibility that your message could be misinterpreted, which sometimes is the point but it's. I think we've, you know, there are enough emoji that have double meanings and sarcasm and like additional layers of interpretation that I don't think any one person knows all of the possible meanings in that space and I think it's unrealistic to expect that that everyone's just going to come with this knowledge. And there's a great moment in the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, a few months ago, in which there was a massive argument about whether a thumbs up emoji meant FU and I highly recommend watching it for the plausible deniability reasons. Right, exactly. A particular smiley face is there have been studies demographically about different interpretations of emoji. And so, for example, I forget the name of the study I wish I could cite it. I believe they showed that emoji to a number of folks in China. And they're like, what does this mean to you right and they're like, don't trust that person. They look like they're humoring me. I wouldn't that is not, that is not a smiley evidence. But you show it to another group of individuals, perhaps yourself and they're like, seems pleasant. They seem they seem trustworthy. I trust that person. And so you see that both culturally, you'd see it with age like younger folks tend to use the, the more Edward monk kind of looking one to say surprise, whereas older folks use that to mean being scared. And so, an important part of emoji is that they are alongside words, so the words can clarify that intent. Right, so if you're using it in a way that's sincere, that should hopefully be able to be conveyed in that message. And to Gretchen's point, if it's being used sarcastically, hopefully you have a relationship with that person know their sense of humor that it would be used sarcastically. And with other sort of pragmatic particles as well I mean you talk about this also in your, your book Gretchen but just like anything that can indicate to the recipient that you're just, you just understand them you just get them you just you you're chill. You, you're on the same page here and emoji do a lot of a heavy lifting there just to connect because you're physically not in the same place. Yeah, if you're communicating with someone on a regular basis to have a sense of sort of what their baseline norms are like oh this person always ends their text with the period or this person never ends their text with the period and so when they do something that's different from what their baseline is and we sort of develop a sense of this without thinking about it too hard. When they do something that's different you're like oh maybe they have their driving and someone else is using their phone to reply back to my text, or maybe they're they're trying to communicate some sort of additional level of I think one of the things that I try to encourage people to do is have sort of open ended exploratory curious conversations about what something means for a person in that context. So, it's not that one way has to be right and one has to be wrong or that like just because some people in one group are using an emoji in a particular way means that you need to necessarily change what you're doing if you're mostly hanging out in a different group of people. It's, we can have these meta level conversations about how we're using emoji, and find out what someone means by it because you can't possibly can take, you know, make a permanent directory of what all of them mean because this is changing, but that's okay you have this sort of conversations like oh what did you mean by this in this context, or figuring out what someone's using based on based on other kind of kinds of context and I think that's sort of a more expansive definition that I would also like to have people approach to to language and to other kinds of communication where we're sort of having this attitude of curiosity about what people mean. Jennifer you talked about how when Unicode is deciding which emoji to adopt you look at how people are using it in conversation so does this sort of like metaphorical use come up much I mean how do you like when you're exploring whether to add one how are you thinking about the different ways people might use the same symbol. We try not to get theoretical like how could they use it right it's more like how are they using it. We do try to anticipate things like abuse, for example, but I think most of it is grounded in how is it being used because it's just, I mean, language is unstoppable a human mind interacting with each other you know like they will determine what it means not like not the consortium the consortium just like recognizes already being used. But yeah the multiple uses is super is super relevant because you don't want to add something that is only singular in nature. And that's a tricky question when it comes to something like Unicode because people can't use a Unicode based emoji in all of the context in which they might want to use it until it's already encoded. So like a dictionary can say okay, most people are making words in English or the same 26 letters. Let's see what let's see what new words people have come up with this year that we should be adding to our, you know, Mary and Webster or Oxford or any of the dictionaries they can apply on what people are doing with a finite set of combinatorial things. And with emoji that's more difficult because there are places where people can use different kinds of custom emoji, you know, platforms like slack and discord, where users can upload small images, and then they're usable within that particular platform for a particular set of users, which, you know, I wish we had more data about how people were using custom emoji there, because I think it's a really interesting place of like what are people doing in the ability to upload any tiny image, which ones are really common. I, we don't have data on this yet, but it would be really interesting to find out. And it is sort of a more challenging proposition to say, well, what would people use in a tiny image, but they don't have the ability to send it yet. Well, I don't think you have to be restricted to digital spaces, right, you just look at how people already communicate just like you and I, Tory right now or in pop culture or in manga or in graph in any, any sort of visual ephemera.  You see it in a comic all the way to Looney Tunes have been using that sort of visual morphine for over 100 years. You can then say, okay, this is a very well established visual representation of feeling. And then it can graduate to the point of it scaling and digital spaces, but I don't think it has to have digital origins. It really is just about how we, how things exist in the world. And again, not trying to reproduce them because the example like my face is melting off but it's like how I feel, and how is that being represented. Yeah, that's a good point. So if there's a, you know, gift that's really popular for particular emotion or there's, you know, something that's used as a convention in cartoon spaces that and be like, okay, or, or something that's already being used as a gesture. I know the Manawa Bursa gesture, which is the sort of Italian gesture that you that you do was recently added to Unicode. And that's a gesture that was already common. It has a name in Italian. And you could use this sort of handshape for other types of things like that's the shape the hands can make even if you don't have the Manawa Bursa gesture as your as an English speaker necessarily, but that's something that's sort of established in a, at least one cultural context. Yeah, I think you can even cite written language examples like the smile with tear like that that happens in Shakespeare Shakespeare talks about people smiling with tears you know it has happened in like the Odyssey. You know, like, they talk, you know, like, there are examples of that expression that have existed throughout literature that you can quote even though it's, it's up to your imagination to imagine like how that might might look. So it gives feel a little bit to transient sometimes because they kind of meant to like be swapped like that but I do think that everything like if I remember the first emoji proposal I wrote that was declined was I was to represent existentialism. That sounds easy. I like to go with the first, you know, how people are kind of forced themselves to look inward. And it's really that it's in throughout art history of a person looking in a mirror. You have like old ancient stories about it you have Alice in Wonderland, you have just like the whole bathroom selfie thing more in contemporary kind of a way to like, you know, and but that's more extracurricular kind of identity. I didn't get past but that is the kind of reference like I'm not looking to see how are people sending pick, you know, like pictures of themselves in a mirror. Like, people are deeply existential, I know that existed for a long time. How, how has that been represented and then. And then even if you end up if person looking in mirror ends up succeeding and getting proposed that doesn't really mean people will use it as existentialism maybe they'll use it for vanity or something instead but it is at least some, you know, portion of the spectrum of human emotion. That's right when someone looks at it, even if they don't know it is what it is, but they understand how to use it. Like the motto emoji, I think folks from Argentina know exactly what that is someone from Iowa does it and they're like oh it's a coconut drink. I can use it as a coconut drink you know like for them, they've been able to derive meaning from it, and it's okay that it doesn't mean what someone else in the world thinks it means because they're not talking to that person. They're just talking to their buddy, you know, whoever who also thinks it's a coconut drink and so it really is just effectively like the beginning of this conversation, making sure that you're not being misunderstood, and you're using it in a way that other people understand you. Jennifer, what do you have like a sense of how many proposals, the committee gets and how many are approved in a given year say, I don't think we share those numbers. But it's, it's, it's a lot. A lot of proposals and fewer accepted I assume. Right so the see we have reduced the number of emojis accepted to around 38 year. And how would you say that maybe the, I should mention to that we're going to head to Q&A in two or three minutes so start thinking about your questions for Gretchen and Jennifer. What's the sense of sort of like how a batch of 30 has changed over the years, particularly since you became involved. Sure, yeah. So I became the subcommittee chair 2019, like late 2019. A lot of what I was witnessing externally like just as a person who uses emoji, that is someone who works at a company that is responsible for making the emoji. And then someone on the committee reviewing the proposals that we were way over indexing on rhetorical possibilities and and not enough on actually how people use emoji. And so we crafted a whole strategy last. So we think we published it in 2020 April time around how we were changing our process a little bit that we, we want to focus on things that are more useful that have evidence of that utility to reduce the number of emoji we actually do I think previously where it was closer to 60. And that again is because there's so many on the keyboard as we add more we are creating zones of exclusion without consciously trying. And so when there's less to encode that puts more pressure on those 30 to be the best 30, not just like the first 30 that came across our desk, which could was happening previously where it was just like, Oh, this one's good. This one's good. This one's good. And then we just move forward. And then we slightly modified our process in pursuit of that of those goals and that process is mostly just holding ourselves accountable to the criteria for inclusion that you write in your proposal. So when you say zones of exclusion meaning that some things are just buried too deep in the keyboard for anyone to find and then realistically use. No, I mean how much time do we have, I think we're trying to do Q&A soon but I would say like, you know we used to just have martini glass emoji, and that was supposed to represent bar, or going out for a drink, you know you see it at international airports right just old martini glass. But now we have like whiskey, a tumblr glass and my tie and I don't know how many other alcoholic drinks we have a number of drinks. There's wine glass but the wine glass is conventionally depicted with red wine and so this is question of like well should there also be white wine. And at a certain point, it might have been almost simpler if there was only martini glass that represented all of the alcohol, rather than sort of trying to get into the entire menu of like, you know the rocks glass has a brown drink in it but what if it had like, but why don't people who drink vodka or like a gin and tonic what does that look like. I don't want to reproduce the entire possible menu for a bar in emoji because they've got like 30, 50 alcohol emoji and that's you know and you could and you could go down that rabbit hole for every single domain. It's just menu is fallacy right and you do that with the animals as well you can do that with any category where you can't month but you don't have score all right but emoji sizes they're kind they can be used you can your imagination can in the context of the text also let you know what you're talking about. And maybe the drinks are a bad example because effectively all of those drinks have very distinctive containers. And so they don't need to be filled with anything you could just put that emoji next to something else to imply what might be in it so like there's like lots of legacy decisions there that that can be unwound a little bit, but what I'm just talking about one like why do we have my day right like that's that's that's a very specific group of the world that understands what that is when the rest of the world doesn't and so how do you and create things that feel globally relevant, but also you know that are, you know. Yeah, anyway, so, and that's why that mountain is an interesting example someone can look at that and not know it's my day but have a use for it and that's that's the important part is that that makes it globally relevant like hand gestures hand gestures mean one thing I want part of the world that same hand gesture mean something different though yeah that ambiguities is a key feature of emoji. So the zone of exclusivity is what has not been made into an emoji rather than emojis that are now being left behind. That's more like you can do whatever you like right now. Whatever you want, anything you just play. The fun of working for home. There's an interesting proposal with the dinosaur emoji where there was a proposal for I think one dinosaur, and then there was a proposal for like two dinosaurs because you need a predator and a prey and there's a proposal for three dinosaurs. And then it went all the way up to like, what if we included like 32 dinosaurs to represent all of the major dinosaur, you know, species groups, and then it's like wait a second but do we need 32 dinosaurs. And at a certain point the dinosaurs start really looking like each other and, you know, but this is for every single category you know you could encode 32 dinosaurs you could encode 32 kinds of drinks, you can encode 32. Like anything. And like, but but at a certain point like the usability becomes a factor and the like, maybe this pleases dinosaur fans but people who are a fan of something else or like why they're only like three fish, shouldn't we be encoding like more fish, you can do it for everything. I have a thousand more questions but I'm going to open this up to our Q&A now. To start just very quickly somebody asked me to repeat the name of the sci fi novel I mentioned that was the unknown world by Liz Moore, highly recommended the glyph thing is only a small part of it about AI but it's very enjoyable. So, Wolfgang Bearman asks how do you determine frequency of use when speaking of adding a new emoji. We talked about this a little bit but is there maybe a little more detail you can go into there Jennifer. We talked to actually quite a bit about frequency of use. I'm not sure if the question was asked after we talked about it or before. It's again looking at how it's currently being used whether it be in digital spaces are not digital spaces and and being able to found that grounded have a benchmark to measure it again so you know it's not operating sort of vacuum. Cassidy moody asks what kind of self identification emoji do you commonly see that are not people's faces so plants animal sailboats and how do you see them used. That's like, you could spend, you could do PhDs on that. There's a paper that just came out last October about how studying specifically emoji and Twitter bios which I think is probably the best way to measure identity use cases versus messaging use cases. And honestly, none of the objects reach to the top 10. It was all colored hearts and soccer ball. I've seen people use the red rose for socialism and Twitter bios. I think the flowers are actually really interesting emoji use case so Unicode released a bunch of sort of compiled aggregate data from a combination of vendors that was all very sort of carefully back in I think it was towards the end of 2019 which feels like a million years ago, and I wrote a piece about that for wired about what the what this aggregate data can tell us in terms of which things are popular and sort of unsurprisingly your faces and your hands and your hearts are all very popular. Basically everything in that in that category even the unpopular faces are more popular than most of the objects. And one of the sort of surprising like sleeper hits in the that data set was that the flowers are really popular. And it's interesting because Unicode has encoded a lot more animals lately. And, you know, in recent years, but the flowers have kind of remained fossilized because like what we already have like eight kinds of flowers do we really need more flowers like what are flowers for. But what's interesting about how people use flowers at a communicative level is choosing between flowers flowers are often used sort of almost entirely for their decorative slash semiotic function. You know, flowers are themselves a symbol in many cases. It's not just like oh here's a flower and they're all interchangeable like they're in a vase on your on your table, but that this flower signifies this and this flower signifies this. And there's a lot of symbology around flowers in various different cultures for sort of how they're being used and what's going on with them. So I think there's potential for there are probably some flowers that have widespread symbolic use that might not be in the in the emoji set yet because it seemed like all flowers being treated as a unified category. But they're actually, you know, like, there's the red rose for love but there's also like, I don't know if there's a lily for, you know, peace or for for grief for these kinds of things like what other, what other types of symbolic meanings do flowers have because yeah flowers are are often really just symbols. Well they're emblematic right that's what you're actually talking about is like a rose means literally 15 different things like it is the US in Western culture but also an Eastern culture it's like very, very emblematic of so very much I like can't So first with other flowers which are more decorative. Yeah, we'll say on the, the next emoji release 14.0 Lotus flower. Great. Great. Great. Great deal of representation outside of literally representing Lotus. I know Cassidy actually has written emoji proposals for a number of different plants so thank you Cassidy I'm sure I know that the there was a house plant recently added like a plant in a pot, which I thought oh that's very useful because this isn't just sort of an abstract plant it's just like plant in the domesticated context which is kind of me. Another example of a container, you know, and what I really struggled I came in much later in that process but are we emoji, are we creating an emoji for a pot, or are we creating an emoji for a potted plant and then why are we making a distinction between which plant it is and how do you choose you the plant that isn't an emoji that has the highest frequency of representation in the world, you know, do you pick one that emblematic of the concept of a plant. That's just a little like seedling, you know, you're forced to make these arbitrary decisions that you should not be forced to, when people add these emojis so it really needs to be able to like stand on its own and that when you get to the design phase they're like, but what kind of Hindu temple, but what what what what hemisphere will this exist on like you really those those that should be reconciled in the proposed phase. Habib El Harani asks how different is it when Unicode asks a new emoji versus another script slash character with regards to the committee processing criteria but also more philosophically on debates about what concepts or symbol a Unicode code point should represent. And it ends with a thank you and a colon parentheses. The script discussions I only bear witness as an interloper four times a year as part of the UTC quarterly meeting so I'm not I couldn't sadly give you a satisfying answer there but a number of the folks who work on the scripting committees are on Twitter. And they're very, they are wonderful human beings and to give any questions around that I'm sure they'd be more than open to discussing or chatting on Twitter about it. I think one thing it's a little bit different so as an outsider you correct me if I'm wrong here. I think one thing it's a little bit different about the script discussions is that in many cases. What symbols are in and not in a script has already been previously established in some cases by centuries of convention. So, there isn't necessarily in the sort of handwritten and even you know type written typewriter sense or being used in a particular software program or something. There isn't necessarily as much, at least for the early stages when they were encoding very widely used scripts and this is potentially changed when they're encoding sort of more and more newer or emerging or ancient, or, you know, sort of less standardized scripts, but at least in the early stages like we know how many letters are in the Latin alphabet. We know how many accented characters are used in, you know, major European languages. So, like, how many letters are in the Cyrillic alphabet we know what what the letters are in the Greek alphabet you don't have to like go do focus groups to be like, but like, should the letter P be in there and how should we represent it. That's not an issue that you have with scripts in the same sort of way as you have with with emoji of like, you know, but what should the potted should like what should a potted plant look like and should it even be there is a more sort of existential one whereas for the scripts, there are often you can go look at newspapers that are currently being produced in this language and say what are they put in them. And so there's a much bigger corpus of data to draw on. And of course that can still be a complicated question because sometimes it's like, well this, this symbol is used differently in this area in this area, and should we let that be dealt with at the font level, where you can specify like this is the font that is the symbol differently, or should we have that being coded at the Unicode level where it's not a font and there's actually like two different symbols for how that's displayed. And that's, that's I think where the trickiness happens for the at the script level of like, should be should this be dealt with as a font or should this be dealt with as a, as a different script. But there are parts of it that are certainly easier than trying to figure out from the entire set of like things that could be pictures. We have four minutes left and several questions. So I'm going to try to get through some of these very very quickly, lightning round. Um, so Karen prello asks, do I understand that once accepted emoji or never retired, if so approximately 30 emoji are accepted per year at what point does the emoji collection become unusably large. And Karen notes side note I see there's a coronavirus emoji now would love to see that one retired. Which one. Yeah, there's no coronavirus, but I will say that there's already too many already too many. Because there's too many of them. It's just because the experience using them hasn't adapted. It's largely remain the same. When there are 700 emoji, and now we're at over way over 3000 emoji. There are ways to make that experience feel more intuitive and natural, things around proactive suggestions and prediction, things around the actual exploration of emoji themselves the browse experience the search experience so, you know, like, it's sort of one of those questions where one might say it's an opportunity, and others might say burn it kill it with fire, but you know I think the truth lies somewhere between you. I'll just leave it there, we're doing lightning round. Wilking bearman asks how international is the emoji subcommittee how much consideration does global meaning have and how does it get revised or evaluated which we've talked about a little bit but I'm curious about the makeup of the committee as well. We're surrounded by experts, I will say that it's a volunteer group that requires a great deal of work that's being done for free and asking people around the world to do work for free is very unreasonable, like you can't ask people to do that. What we're trying to do is meet up with people who maybe that time zone doesn't work and meet with them outside of the committee and consult and develop strategies around whether it be how facial expressions are done, or maybe it's about plants, or maybe it's about animals, or any number of cultural relevancy. So, I would say just like languages, like, you know, is for is by the people like we do the same thing and we surround ourselves quite a great deal of individuals. Gretchen, Angeline bio is asking if you could perhaps tweet the name of the study you mentioned before about emoji use. I think readers were our audience is very interested in that so. Which, which study was this with the with Swift key, she says. Oh, okay, yeah, so I did this, I can tweet that I can tweet the paper that I mentioned about emoji is gesture as well. So there's a few, a few things they're all I'll tweet some, some. That's that's the paper. I was like, who's that. Well, I think that is unfortunately just about all the time we have today but thank you both so much for joining us. Again, kind of want to make an emoji face to show how excited I am about this. I cannot wait to see what happens next with emoji. For the audience to upcoming events that you might be interested in on March 8 at 3pm will be speaking for about an hour on disruptive innovation and what it looks like today and where we can find disruptive innovation where we can expect it. And then on March 10 at noon Eastern author Ben McIntyre will be with us to talk about his new book, agent Sonia, which I highly recommend about spying and science. So Gretchen and Jennifer, thank you again for joining us and everyone thank you for tuning in today. Thank you. Thank you.


Now as gunshots echo across the wind-swept snow-covered reaches of the wild northwest, Quakerpuff wheat and Quakerpuff rice, the breakfast cereal shot from gun, present the challenge of the Yukon. It's Yukon King, swiftest and strongest lead dog of the northwest, blazing the trail for Sergeant Preston of the northwest modern police in his relentless pursuit of lawbreakers. Gold, gold discovered in the Yukon, a stampede to the clondike in the wild race for riches, back to the days of the gold rush, with Quakerpuff wheat and Quakerpuff rice bringing you the adventures of Sergeant Preston and his wonder dog Yukon King as they meet the challenge of the Yukon. Hello, I sure can. Our family enjoyed Quakerpuff rice with milk and fruit and tomorrow morning we're going to eat Quakerpuff wheat. There's a family that's a breakfast happy family.  Like for instance, delicious Quakerpuff rice or Quakerpuff wheat. These ready to serve king-sized grains are shot from guns, actually exploded up to eight times normal size to make them crisp and tender. Tomorrow morning, why don't you enjoy this thrifty, tasty, easy to serve breakfast treat. Quakerpuff rice or Quakerpuff wheat. King knew that his master was unhappy about something. After the sergeant had harnessed the team that morning, he had patted king on the head and said, All we have to do today, kings, drive up to Christmas Creek and deliver these papers to the miners on the bench. Simple enough, it's going to be one of the most difficult jobs we've ever had. Duty could be mighty unpleasant for him. The words met nothing to king. The tone was enough. He wished he could do something to cheer his master up and he made the team give one of its best performances that day. They reached the creek shortly after noon and drove on past the company buildings. Then they followed the trail that led to the higher ground above the creek. Now they were approaching a cabin.  Hello, Harry. King knew the man. He was one of the sergeant's best friends. King liked his face and his ready laugh. He hoped this friend could make the sergeant feel better. Hello, hello, hello. What are you doing up here, Harry? Anke and Nancy have taken me in. Broke again? Naturally. I'm paying for my board by digging gravel. You won't be for long. What's that? It's always Nancy. We've already had dinner, but she'll find something for you. I won't be a welcome guest today. Why not, sergeant? You'll hear all about it in a minute. Oh, it's that company lawsuit. Yes, Harry. But come on in. Thank you. Nancy, Hank. Here's Sergeant Preston. Tell me why you're here. Don't I, Hank? Of course not. You've come to arrest Harry. What's he been up to? Don't say things like that, Hank. I almost wish it were true, Nancy. You do not. Now come on out in the kitchen. I have a bone for you. Oh, wait, Nancy. What's wrong? I have to give Hank this paper. Here. What is it, sergeant? Court order. Restraining you from working this claim until the company suit's been settled. No. Well, that isn't fair. Well, I don't think it is either. There's nothing I can do about it. Oh, Nancy wasn't blaming you, sergeant. He knows that, Hank. It's costy as I'm blaming. Let me get this straight. We have to wait for the new government survey to be made and for the court to decide where the company's land ends. Mine begins. That's right. Maybe six months. Perhaps a year. These suits drag on. And during all that time, I can't wash out any gravel. I'm sorry, Hank. Well, how can we live? How can we get money enough to eat, let alone pay for lawyers and all the rest of it? We can, I guess. It means we'll have to sell out the car stairs. He'll only give you a fraction of what this land is worth. Naturally. Why do you think he started the suit in the first place? I won't let you sell to him. It isn't fair. There's nothing else to do. Can't you borrow money somewhere? But what security? I can't prove I own the claim. Isn't there some way of hurrying things up, sergeant? If we went to the judge and explained, I'd show you now. Oh, wouldn't do any good. Car stairs would find some way to delay things. But you don't need much money. Enough to live for a year, enough for lawyers' fees and all that. Three or four thousand dollars might just as well be a million. Well, you certainly don't have to sell right away. You can wait a little while and something may turn up. I might be able to raise some money. How? Different ways. I've grub-staked quite a few people. If any of them happen to strike gold, they'd pay me back. Sure, but that probably won't happen. You're not the only one with a claim, Hank. Everybody up here is involved in the suit.  I'm the only one who has any cash. Mine's about gone. Would it do any good to go to car stairs? I doubt it. I can't believe that anyone could be so unfair. Well, I'll have a talk with him, darling. But I'm afraid it won't do any good. Car stairs was living in Dawson for the winter. And the following day, Hank drove back with the sergeant. He found car stairs in his office and ready enough to talk with him. But when he had finished, the head of the company laughed at him. I have never heard anything so ridiculous. I had an idea you might feel that way about it. How else should I feel? My contention is that we own your land. Why should we let you take gold, darling? You don't own my land. Well, of course you will be sad. They've already decided that you can't work the claim until the case is settled. What's your proposition? Composition? I have none. I don't know what you're talking about. Yes, you do. You're willing to buy the land. Well, I must admit there's a nuisance value in your claimed ownership. How much will you pay? $2,000. Well, that's robbery. The ground's been proven. You know there's gold there. And it belongs to me. $2,000. Not a penny more. With my car stairs, I don't have to do business with crooks. I'm not starving yet. Hank returned to the creek. When he had told Nancy and Harry of car stairs offer, Harry announced that he was going to make a trip to Whitehorse. What for? I think I can raise some money there.  You haven't got a chance. Don't be too sure of that, Hank. All I ask is that you wait until I come back before you do anything. Promise that you won't sell until then. I won't sell until I have to. Until our supplies run out. That gives me plenty of time. I'll start for Whitehorse in the morning. Harry stopped in Dawson and told the sergeant he was making a trip to Whitehorse. Actually, he had no intention of going there at all. He made sure that a number of people saw him take the Yukon Trail to the south. Then, 10 miles outside of Dawson, he crossed to the western bank of the river and headed north. Two days later, he was camped in a wooded ravine halfway between Christmas Creek and Dawson. He stared into his campfire for hours that night, and finally he knew that his mind was made up. He was going through with it. Isn't that wrong? Carstairs is a thief of ever there was one. It isn't wrong to steal from him. A trail between Christmas Creek and Dawson wound through the hills, and at noon on the following day, Harry was wading in a clump of woods at the top of one of them. He wore an old parka. The lower half of his face was covered by a bandana. Nervously, he fingered his guns as he watched the sled coming up the hill toward him. It was a supply sled, and it belonged to the company. All the gold that had been washed out during the past week would be on board. There were two men with it. You don't like it, do you? But what about Hank and Nancy? Do you want to see them lose their claim?  Maybe you don't like it, but you're going through with it. The sled was nearing the top of the rise. Harry waited until the last minute. Then he stepped on the cover of the trees and leveled his guns at the two men. Up with your hands. Stop your team. I want your gold. Hand it over and you won't get hurt. You'll get no gold from this sled. You killed it. I doubt it. I shot for his arm. You hit too. It's nothing but a scratch. Don't you try anything, mister. I'm not. First, I'll take your guns. Where's the gold?  Not bad. You'll never get away with it. I am getting away with it. You got something you can use for a bandage? You want me to bandage you? No. That man on the sled. And hurry it up. Okay. There's a first aid kit here. Harry watched the driver bandage his companions wound. Them? All right, you can go now. Go. Get moving. Get that man into Dawson as fast as you can. Yeah. The driver cracked his whip over the heads of the team. They took off down the trail. Harry waited until the sled had disappeared around the bend before he turned back into the woods where his own team was hidden. He made a campfire and bandaged his own wound. Then he started for the north. The cabin where he intended to hide out was 20 miles away. Must. It was rough country and there were many small streams. Whoever there was glare eyes, he traveled over it in order to make his trail harder to follow. And he drove the team hard. But suddenly he began to feel weak and he realized that his wound was still bleeding. He halted the dogs and tried to stop it. It was impossible. He must make the most of the strength he had left.  But there was something wrong. Oh, oh, there. Oh, no. No, I can't be.  There was smoke pouring from the stove pipe that projected through the roof. Someone was living in the cabin. He had thought to be deserted. His hiding place was gone. There's nothing to do about it. No help. I can't go on. Let's continue our story in just a moment. Folks, step right this way. Listen to this. Today we present to you Levrim the Mental Marvel. Yes, here he is. Spell his name backwards and you'll get Marvel. Got it? Levrim the Mental Marvel. He will now perform feats of the mind that stagger the imagination. He will answer questions that will positively amaze you. Now for the first question. Mental Marvel, are you ready? I am ready. What name is listed on page 1497 of the Chicago Telephone Directory? In the right hand column, 60 names down from the top. The name you seek is the Quaker Oats Company. The Mental Marvel is absolutely right. Amazing. It is the Quaker Oats Company. Maker of delicious Quaker Puffed Wheat and Quaker Puffed Rice, the ready-to-serve breakfast cereals shot from guns. And now let us test the Mental Marvel's amazing ability in arithmetic. Tell me, Mental Marvel, quick now, how much is 192 divided by 16? Take away 10 and add 6. The answer is 8. 8 is correct. Remember that number. Quaker Puffed Wheat and Quaker Puffed Rice are giant premium grains of wheat or rice that exploded up to 8 times normal size. That's what makes wheat or rice shot from guns crisp and tender, bigger and better tasting. And now for the final question. What breakfast makes a hit with many a he-man Hollywood movie star? That's easy. Quaker Puffed Wheat or Quaker Puffed Rice with milk and fruit. Right, you are. And, fellas and girls, you don't have to be a Mental Marvel to know the answer to what makes the most tasting breakfast ever. Just one taste and you'll say it's Quaker Puffed Wheat or Quaker Puffed Rice topped with milk and fruit. What's more, wheat or rice shot from guns is nourishing. Good for you. That's because Quaker Puffed Wheat and Quaker Puffed Rice furnish added food values of restored natural grain amounts of vitamin B1, niacin and dion. So take a tip. Ask mom to look for those famous big red and blue Quaker packages. Get delicious, nutritious, Quaker Puffed Wheat and Quaker Puffed Rice shot from guns. Now to continue our story. After the hold-up, the company driver brought his wounded partner into Dawson and left him at Doc Munson's. Then he reported the robbery to Carstairs, who took him to the northwest mounted headquarters at once. There he told his story to the inspector and Sergeant Preston. Ten thousand dollars, Inspector, and they went quick action. You'll get it. I'm assigning you to the case, Sergeant. Very well, sir. You know where to start, don't you? I've already started. I have the man's description. I know he's been wounded. Well, it may not have been bad, but Sandy hit him. It was one of those minors up on the bench land about Christmas Creek. The driver didn't recognize him, Carstairs. That doesn't matter. It was Hank Maniz, I'm sure of it. And I wanted him to meet me at a rest. We don't make a rest until we're sure we have the right man. I'm telling you, this was his way of getting even for that injunction. The Sergeant will use his own methods. You'll start at the scene of the crime and follow the man's trail. Try to follow what you mean. The robber may have gone east, west, north, or south. He's had half a day's start. There's only one way to get quick results. And how's that? Money. I'm going to post a reward. Half of the gold that was stolen, if the man is captured and the gold recovered by six o'clock tomorrow night. You have my authority to pay it out to anyone who brings him in, Inspector. We don't need rewards for doing our job.  When they hear about the reward on Christmas Creek, things will start to happen. Hank Manners did it. The others know it. They'll turn him in for $5,000. That would mean a great deal to any of them, that's sure. With $5,000, for instance, Hank Manners could fight you in court and save his claim. Yeah. Just as I thought, you were on their side. The Sergeant isn't on the side of anyone who's committed a crime. I have my own ideas on the subject, Inspector. I'm posting a reward. As you wish. It will be paid to anyone who brings in the robber with the exception of members of the force. Well, I intended to make that stipulation myself. It's been made for you. But it isn't necessary because it won't be the Sergeant who captures this crooked. If you'll excuse me, Inspector. I'll get started. Go right ahead. I have complete confidence in you. Like you say. One, King. It was a strange case for King. A confusing case. He and the Sergeant reached the scene of the hold-up late that afternoon. The Sergeant picked up a stained bandana and held it out to King. Let's belong to the hold-up, man, King. We've got to get him. But don't you understand, boy? We've got to get him. No, King didn't understand. He knew the Sergeant wanted him to follow this scent. Why did he use that grim tone of voice when he was talking about his friend? Perhaps the friend needed their help and the Sergeant was merely worried. King picked up Harry's trail easily enough. A few minutes later, he was leading the Sergeant's team along. Good boy. On, King. On, King. At that same moment, Harry was hiding the gold in the woods. Then, with his last remaining strength, he climbed aboard his sled and drove across the clearing to the cabin. Oh. Oh, there. Hold on. A big, hard-featured man opened the door of the cabin. What do you want? I've been hurt. I want to rest for a little while. You can't stop here. But I've got to. I can't... Harry lost his grip on the back of the sled and slipped to the ground. Hey, Jack, come here. This guy's passed out. Stop the bullet. Looks like he's done for. What do we do with him? I don't know. Depends on who and what he is. Take him inside and decide what to do with him later. All right. Harry was carried into the cabin and placed on a cot. A blanket was thrown over him. But otherwise, the man gave him no care. An hour later, he became delirious. Put your hands... Hey, Lou, come here and listen to this guy. What's he saying? Listen, take your gun. Sounds like he held somebody up. What's the gold? The crustacean's steel-soaked iron. Over that gold, it got him. Gold on his sled? No, just supplies and some clothes. Maybe he hid it someplace. Maybe he didn't get it. Maybe they got him instead. We'll find out. You can't make any real sense in what he's saying now. Take a look at his wound.  Then we'll get some sense out of him. People here can't go on. Better hide it first. Hide it good. The rocks. Make sure I remember. Red rock. Did you hear that? He hid something, all right? A red rock, he said. I wonder if we can follow his back trail. It's dark, Lou. Let's try it anyway. Get a lantern and we'll take a look. When the sergeant and king reached the clearing, the cabin was dark. King! Oh, no! King ran to the door. Their friend was inside. There was a scent of other men around the clearing, but it was faint. They had gone several hours before. King scratched the door, anxious to lead his master to Harry. All right, boy. A man wounded. Harry had been sleeping. His fever gone.  Hello, Harry. Oh, hello.  Yeah, you and a lot of other people. It was to give myself an alibi.  You've trailed me here, sergeant. I guess you know. I always did say you were the best on the force. It was King who trailed you here. I didn't know who we were following.  Even now he thinks we've come here to help you. Why'd you do it, Harry? Seem the only way to get the money hank needed. How's the guard that I shot? He isn't hurt badly. How about you? I feel all right now. I know. I'll have to take you back to Dawson. We'll put you in jail. I've got a coming. I don't mind that. I'm only sorry hank will lose his claim now. You can still save that for him. How? You certainly want the gold, don't you? Car stairs is offered a $5,000 reward to anyone who brings you in. That is, unless I do it. I don't understand. You will be the one to do it. So you're ready to take your medicine? I want to. And you can drive back to Dawson and give yourself up. You don't let me do that. I know I wouldn't be taking any chance, Harry. You're right, Sergeant. Well, let's see. It's two in the morning. You'll have to be there by six this evening. You'd better get started right away. I don't know if my team's still around. There were a couple of men here. They carried me inside. That's all I remember. The dog's out and back, but if there were other men here, Harry, where's that gold? Well, that's all right. I've hidden it in the woods. Well, let's get it and get you on your way. Right, Sergeant. I'll find my part. But when Harry rolled back the red rock under which he had hidden the gold, there was nothing there. It's gone. They took it. They've known where it was. It doesn't matter what they look like. One of them was big, as big as you are. Very dark and tough. He was wearing a black and white parka. I didn't actually see the other one. I only heard his voice. Are you going after them? Can't control them. You want me to wait here? No, you're still weak. You won't be able to travel fast. You'll have to start right now if you want to make it to Dawson by six. But the gold's... There are rewards for your capture. I can bring the gold in later. Come on, let's go. The Sergeant helped Harry get underway. Then he put King on the trail of the two men in their sled. Once the great dog realized what his master wanted, he led the team with an airing accuracy. They raced through the moon at night. Just at dawn, they saw a campfire ahead. Hit the team quiet, boy. The Sergeant's team drove toward the glow in silence. But the dogs around the campfire announced they're coming. The Sergeant saw two men standing by the campfire and recognized them. Lou Godwin and Jake Warren King their wanted in white horses. The men started for their sled and then changed their mind. Slipping on snowshoes, they lifted a heavy bag in their sled and then plunged into the deep forest at the left of the trail. The Sergeant stopped his team. Oh, King, hurry up, Steve, hold on. He, too, put on snowshoes. With King at his side, started into the shadowy depths of the forest. You're the one who has to find them, boy. King picked up the men's trail and he and the Sergeant followed it on and on into the forest. The sun was up now, but among the trees there was only a dim, mysterious twilight. Suddenly King growled and the Sergeant saw a hulking shadow near a great fir tree. He dropped to the ground as the shot rang out. It was the beginning of the gunfight in the forest. Two men against one. Two men who were shooting to kill. Two men wanted for murder who knew the law was on their trail. But the Sergeant closed in on them little by little. His gun answering their fires, they dodged from tree to tree deeper and deeper into the forest. And then... Jake was hit and fell to the ground. He was carrying the gold and Lou turned back to get it from him. The Sergeant saw his opportunity and ran forward just as the burly killer bet over his fallen partner. You're covered, Lou. Drop your gun and I'll shoot. You're not going to take me in. Stop him, Jake! The great dog leaped forward. Lou was running desperately, but King closed the gap between them in a matter of seconds and dove from the man's feet. And a moment later, the Sergeant pulled the outlaw up from the ground and leveled the gun at his heart. This is the end of the trail, Godwin. You're under arrest in the name of the Queen. Shortly before six o'clock that evening, Carstairs and the driver of the supply sled that had been held up were in the inspector's office. Well, your plan hasn't worked, Carstairs. No one has turned the whole up man in and there are only a few minutes to go before your deadline. It may not have worked, but it was still the best way to catch the crook. The Sergeant hasn't returned from his wild goose chase yet, has he? Not yet, but I... Come in. Sir, Harry Manners is out here. He wants to see you. What about? I don't know, sir. He'll only talk to you. All right, send him in. Yes, sir. I knew it. What? You say my plan didn't work, but it has. And I've been right all along. It was Hank Manners who held up the sled. Now his own brother is coming here to inform against him. Pay him the reward as soon as you recover the gold. With Hank Manners in jail, my suit against him is won. You're not very smart, Carstairs. I don't suppose any man is as vindictive as you could be. Inspector Conrad. Come in, Harry. What's on your mind? I want to give myself up. I'm the one who robbed the company's sled yesterday. That's a lie. It's the truth. And I hear you've offered $5,000 to anyone who turns the whole up man in. Well, I'm turning myself in and I'm claiming the reward. You're lying. You're defending your brother. No, I'm not, Carstairs. If you took the gold, where is it? I had it, but it was taken away from me. Sergeant Preston's gone after the man who have it now. Hey, withdraw the reward. You can't make me pay to him. He admits he doesn't have the gold, and he can't prove he took it. See, Joe, this isn't the man who held you up, is he? No, sir. Do you mean that after he's confessed you're not going to press charges against him? And pay him $5,000? I should say that. Then I guess we can't hold you, Harry. The men who have the gold now are the real crooks. And I insist that you arrest them. That's already been taken care of. Sergeant. You've made it. Who are they, Sergeant? Whom have you arrested? Lou Godwin and Jake Warren, sir. Godwin and Warren? But the arrest was for that murder in Whitehorse, not for robbery. Where's my gold? Right here. Every ounce of it. They had it. That's it. That's the bag he... I mean, that's the bag they took. All right, take it back to the office. Yes, sir. The matter is settled as far as I'm concerned. Inspector, I'm... I'm not going to pay any reward. Come on, Joe. They won't pay any reward, Harry. But he's giving you your freedom. It's more than I deserve. And there is $1,000 coming to you. What? The Yukon Bank in Whitehorse posted it for information leading to the arrest of Jake and Lou. You're the man who put me on their trail. But, Sergeant, $1,000... It should help Hank a lot with his suit, and both you and he can make a living. After what I did...  I'm glad, though, that you're getting another chance. So am I. Don't worry. I'll never get a crazy idea like that again. I promise you, King. I'll never let you down. Good. He doesn't like to put his friends behind bars. Do you, boy? No, it's all right, King. The case is closed. In just a moment, Sergeant Preston will give you a preview of Wednesday's program. Say, here's a tip. Quaker-popped wheat or Quaker-popped rice are never sold in bags or bulk. To get the famous crisp, fresh, wheat or rice shot from guns, always buy the big Quaker red and blue package. You'll go for both delicious kinds. For variety, eat Quaker-popped wheat one time, Quaker-popped wheat one time, Quaker-popped wheat one time, Quaker-popped rice the next. These tasty, king-size kernels shot from guns are made from only the premium grains. So for the best, always ask for Quaker-popped wheat and Quaker-popped rice. These radio dramas, a feature of the challenge of the Yukon Incorporated, are created and produced by George W. Trennell, directed by Fred Flower Day and supervised by Charles D. Livingston. The part of Sergeant Preston is played by Paul Sutton. They are brought to you every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at the same time by Quaker-popped wheat and Quaker-popped rice, the breakfast cereal shot from guns. Listen Wednesday when Sergeant Preston and Yukon King meet the challenge of the Yukon in the adventure of manhunt. I helped the man escape from jail. He was a notorious criminal who long evaded the law, and yet when he was captured, I helped him to freedom. Even though I realized that my job, my life, and my honor were at stake. I wonder how many of you would have done as I did. Be sure to hear this exciting story Wednesday. Till then, this is J. Michael wishing you good-bye, good luck, and good health from Quaker-popped wheat and Quaker-popped rice. So long. For a delicious hot breakfast, eat Quaker-oats. The giant of the cereals is Quaker-oats. Yes, the giant of the cereals is Quaker-oats. Delicious, nutritious, makes you feel ambitious. The giant of the cereals is Quaker-oats. Say, boys and girls, do you want to be a star someday in sports and activities? Then start on good Quaker-oats breakfast tomorrow because nourishing oatmeal gives you more growth and endurance than any other whole-grain cereal. Still less than one penny a serving. Quaker and Mother's Oats are the same. This is ABC, the American Broadcasting Company.


Live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.NEXT 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT. We are here in Copenhagen. I'm your host Rebecca Knight co-hosting alongside Stu Miniman. We are joined by Dheeraj Pandey. He is the CEO and founder of Nutanix. Thank you so much for returning to our program.  It's my pleasure. Thank you. I want to talk to you about what we're here to do is celebrate 10 years of Nutanix. Ben Gibson when he was up there on the main stage he's the head of marketing. He was talking about watching you backstage saying that I saw in him a lot of pride and emotion because this is really your baby. He started 10 years ago. There's been a lot of nostalgia bringing up some of your first employees.  So talk a little bit about what this means to you to be here 10 years after you founded this company. Yeah, first of all, thank you so much for the opportunity to come here. And it looks like an era. 10 years is an era. We've built a family of customers and employees and partners and yet it feels like we haven't achieved a thing. So to me the more I make it look like it's 2010 back again we can go back to being like a startup again and growing from here because growth is a very relative term. It's a mindset thing. And I think the new day and age of multi-cloud and what we have to do to virtualize all these different silos that have emerged and to virtualize, simplify and integrate. Virtualize, simplify, integrate clouds is going to be a journey of a lifetime actually. Yeah, dear Rich, I think back to some of our earliest discussions. You would bring us in and talking about that the challenge of our era is building software for the distributed architecture that we need. And that was as relevant in 2010 or 2012 as it is here in 2019. HCI helped simplify that deployment of virtualization. We are definitely a point that we need to simplify cloud. Cloud is here, it's growing, the hybrid pieces are there. So maybe bring us inside, kind of what's the same about the journey and some of it is making one click upgrades in today's environment is way more complex than it would have been back when it was just an appliance. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think about the whole concept of hyper-convergence initially started out as converging compute with storage, how to keep them close together because machines need locality, applications need local data because the network is a real enemy. And the same was true of human performance, like lots of teams, lots of bureaucracy, very little autonomy. So when you brought data close to applications, application people became autonomous. They could do things on their own. And that was the power of hyper-convergence. You were able to provide performance to data and machines and you were able to provide performance to people because they became autonomous. I think that is not changing even in the hyperscalar data center environment and I think the fact that you have to hop multiple switches to get to data, I think it's recreating the same problems that we started out this company with almost 10 years ago. In fact, if anything, the hyperscalar networks are worse than the networks that private clouds actually had or even on-prem data centers had. So keeping data close to applications is relevant and it's fashionable one more time. And the fact that you can provide that autonomy to application folks to go launch their apps in the public cloud through this new architecture, using the bare-metal service offerings to the public cloud where the bare-metal offerings look like an HP server or Dell server to us, I think it recreates the same. So I think I'm a big proponent of the saying that says the more things change, the more they remain the same and they actually look very much the same as 10 years ago. So how do you think that you're describing the technological changes that have taken place, but really we're sort of back to where we started from, but how would you describe the ways, the differences in the ways that people work together, talking about the human beings who are actually using this technology? Well, for one, this notion of converging teams and people is similar to the notion of converging machines, hardware to pure software. I think whatever happened in our personal lives with the iPhone and the Android OS, it's exactly what hyperconvergence did, is we had all these gadgets and they were special purpose, single purpose gadgets. And we made them as apps and they were all together in this one sort of device, and then the device connected to cloud services. I think that's what happened in enterprise computing as well. Compute storage, networking, security, everything coming together is pure software, running as apps. And I think that has created the notion of generalists in IT as well. Because as IT matures, you can't have so many specialists. And just like in healthcare, you can't have so many specialist doctors when you need a ton of primary care physicians and generalist practitioners after you. And that's what IT is going through as well. And so that's changing the skills that are in demand too from employers because you are looking for people who are sort of a mile wide and inch deep. Yeah, and in fact, the inch deep is actually not a pejorative. I would say that it's a good thing because with automation and a lot of layering of software, you don't need to get deeper into the details, the weeds, especially if infrastructure computing, because what's our mission is to really elevate IT to go figure out things that really matter to the business. Which is applications and services, as opposed to going and stitching together stuff that really can be done with pure software. And standardization, you know, the level of standardization that operating models can bring with commodity servers and pure software. So let people go and do things that really are more relevant in this age actually. Yeah, I was wondering, the close of the keynote, there was discussion of the tech preview of Xi clusters. You and I have spoken a little bit off-camera about this, but there is a lot of interest out there, everything when Azure first announced Azure Stack, it got everyone excited. To be honest, Rebecca and I were at the Microsoft, one of the Microsoft shows last year, and most of the attendees weren't really talking about it. So it's that kind of the buzz versus the reality of what customers are actually using. Where do you see, where are we with kind of that hybrid discussion? And why is Nutanix taking a slightly different approach than some of the others out there?  And whatever HCI was in 2010 is what hybrid is today. So imagine 10 years from 2010, we are still talking about HCI, especially in the large enterprises, they won't barely begun to say, look, private cloud equals HCI. I think that's been a sort of an epiphany moment for most of the CIOs of the global 2000 companies. Just in the last three years, we've been talking about it for 10 years now. So there's a bell curve of technology adoption. We are in the very early stages of what hyper-converged clouds will mean or what hybrid clouds should mean. I think doing it right is important because the market is large, the ability to really move applications and infrastructure. I call them apps now. The hypervisor is now an app because it can run in the Amazon platform. It can run in the Azure platform. And that platform that they provided, billing, identity, recommendations and things of that nature. So on top of that platform, how do you go and put your app in the catalog? I think that's the overall sort of metaphor that I use. So in that sense, I don't look at the platform as a zero-sum game for us. We just have to look at it as a platform where our apps can actually go and run. Yeah, Teerich, how does a company, you've grown quite a bit, but if you look at the overall market, you're still a small player compared to a Microsoft, a Cisco, or a Google out there. So we definitely think you have that opportunity to help simplify that cloud, hyper-converged cloud experience, as you've said. But how does the Nutanix get there? Yeah, I think, and I say this to people who followed virtualization, the history of virtualization. When VMR was building virtualization, server market was $55 billion. Storage was $30 billion. Networking was $25 billion. Another $110 billion market. When they meant to $4 billion, they just had to think about what does it mean to put a layer of software on top of all this stuff so people can drag and drop experience from one server to another, from one storage array to another, and so on. So there's enough value to add on top of that $110 billion with their own $4 billion. In 2012, they were a $4 billion company, actually. Right now, we are thinking about, okay, these things are the new platform, where is the value in going and virtualizing, simplifying, and integrating them all with a layer of software that becomes the new integration software for all things multi-cloud? Yeah, so it's interesting. I want to connect the dots with that to, Nutanix has been going through its own transformation, and you've talked publicly a lot about, you sit on the board of Adobe that move from software to subscription is challenging. What I want to understand is, what does that end result of being a subscription model? What does that mean for your customers, and how they can change that relationship? Yeah, I talked about this in my keynote as well, the why of subscription. I think the very fact that we have decoupled the entitlement from hardware was the first change for us, the fact that software can live anywhere. And on top of that, what subscription delivers is this notion of residual value, where you can say, look, if I have unused products and unused terms on some of these products, can I use them for other things, actually? So it provides a very agile procurement framework that is very new to the world of infrastructure, actually. We've had a ton of shelf-wear infrastructure in general, and on-prem software in general, even in the public cloud, there's a lot of shelf-wear. I think the ability to really go and repurpose stuff for new things that you want to buy provides a lot of optionality to our customers. Subscription also is about bite-sizing things, so you don't have to buy big things and delivering it in real time. So I think you will see more and more of consumption model change towards subscription in the coming years. In talking about the value of Nutanix in this multi-cloud world, and you're talking about how customers really want that optionality, we're here in Copenhagen, how would you say the US customers are different from the European customers in terms of what they're looking for? Or are they different? You know, they're very similar, because there's a ton of global companies out there who have local offices and such, and so the global 2000 has tentacles everywhere. I think in some ways where they do differ is when it comes to the partner community and the channel and the system integrators, they're actually more influential here in Europe and Asia-Pacific than in the US, because most of the talent in the US goes and works for companies like us, and most of the talent in Europe and Asia-Pacific, they work for the channel and the system integrators. So how we actually work with them and learn from them and educate them on the transformation, I think, is basically the only thing that's different. All right. Deerich, one of the feedback I got from customers is something that I hear at the Amazon show. I'm inundated with so much new stuff, you know, I can't keep up with it. I want you to explain a little bit kind of the portfolio and also if you can, just organizationally how you think of this, you know, when we hear, you know, Amazon does their two pizza teams and they scale is very different from a traditional software or infrastructure company, so. Yeah, I think it's a great point and one of my favorite sort of things to think about these days is, how do you not sell things but sell an experience? It's very, very important to differentiate the two because, you know, you can build a ton of things and then the question is, if you've left the integration as an exercise to the reader or to the customer and you're basically telling them, look, you can as well buy best to breed from other companies that integrated on your own. So the job of integration and to really sell in experiences has to be left shifted to companies like us and that's what we've been doing with our products. You know, we're really bringing them together. When you say all together now, it's also about our products, actually. It's the portfolio around data, making sure that we're really bringing them all together. They can leverage each other, one sits on top of the other, one tears to the other. They can share common policy, policy engines and things like that. I mean, what we're doing with security, for example, is bringing multi-cloud with the old world of micro segmentation, actually. There's a lot of integration that's going on. Yet, we want to provide each of these GMs autonomy because, you know, at some level, they're all looking for individual use cases and workflows and they're looking for mastery, which is like, how do I master what I do well with my customers? But then the purpose has to be more than their own, actually. Like, if you think about autonomy mastery purpose, you know, one of Dan Pink's philosophies of motivation.  But at the end of the day, the purpose is customer driven. It's not driven by products, it's driven by customers. It's driven by customers' experience rather than the general managers' things they're actually building for the customers. Yeah, just one follow-up. When I think about, you know, one of the challenges I hear inside customers and I thought we'd made more progress is still a lot of silos. I talked to customers that are like, well, you know, I've deployed Nutanix and I love it, but there's this group over here and they're doing something different and they're certified or they're starting to use it or, oh my God, this developer team spun something up and didn't pay any attention. So, you know, IT was supposed to get everything back under control and manage it and work with the business, but, you know, I feel like the customers haven't made a lot of progress on that journey in the last 10 years. What's your feedback from customers? And how are we doing? Yeah, it's very true. Look, I think what you just said is also about autonomy for the developers and autonomy for that other team and such. So you can't force fit everything into single-size, you know, this one-size-fits-all kind of philosophy. That's why there's a bell curve of adoption, you know, any technology.  So I think going back to understanding that each of these groups actually has skill sets that are different, they're used to doing things a certain way and unless you go and weave it with them, you know, what I tell people is, you've got to walk to where the customer is before you walk with them to where you want them to be actually. So walking to where the customer is is about going to the private cloud. You know, we could easily have said, look, let's banish all this, let's build everything as an off-prem cloud service 10 years ago, but you said the market is not there yet. Similarly, we said, we've got to build appliances because right now the white box market is not there yet for the enterprise, you know. Then when we came out of it, we said, look, the market is already there. Let's walk with them with pure software and now subscription. We did the same with the underlying virtualization software below Nutanix. We said, let's walk over to where the customer is. Let's run on top of VMware, if that's what it takes and then walk with them to where we want them to be, which is an invisible hypervisor and such. So I think we've got to keep doing this, you know, where let's remove the hubris from innovation and Silicon Valley. There's a lot of hubris about these things that we know it all. I think when you try to go and understand and have the empathy for the customer is when magical things happen. That's a fantastic note to end on. Dearage, thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE. It's always a pleasure talking to you. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more from Nutanix.next.