Citizens of the World: A Stoic Podcast for Curious Travelers - Hipster London: An Interview with Emoji Expert Jeremy Burge

Episode Date: November 16, 2017

We’re exploring hipster London with Jeremy Burge. Since moving to London from Australia a few years ago, Jeremy has turned a side-project creating an emoji dictionary into a full-time career. Today, Emojipedia gets about 25 million visits a month 🎉    Jeremy’s part of the secret squad that makes the rules about which emojis are available to us. We have a fun conversation about the evolution of emojis, and World Emoji Day 📅, which he invented (this year the Empire State Building’s lights turned yellow in recognition). Jeremy also shares his favorite London travel recommendations. Coffee, bikes, Google campus. It’s a London hipster paradise.   Links to what we discuss can be found on postcardacademy.co   If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe and forward this episode to a friend.     You can follow Postcard Academy on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.     If you’re feeling especially kind, please leave a review on iTunes. This helps people discover us. 🤗  Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free Conversation Cheat Sheet with simple formulas you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you’re in a meeting or just talking with friends.Download it at sarahmikutel.com/blanknomore and start feeling more confident in your conversations today.

Welcome to the Postcard Academy. I'm your host, Sarah Micatel. Today we're exploring hipster London with Jeremy Burge. Since moving to London from Australia a few years ago, Jeremy has turned a side project creating an emoji dictionary into a full-time career. Today, Emojipedia gets about 25 million visits a month. Emojis are those smiley faces and other images that we text each other. And in case you're wondering, here is the difference between an emoji and an emoticon. An emoticon is a face you make out of keyboard characters, like a colon and a capital letter D can be a big smile.

Emojis are actually pictures, but our phones and computers treat them like letters. So Jeremy is part of the secret squad that makes the rules about which emojis are available to us. We have a fun conversation about this, about the evolution of emojis, World emoji day, which he created. And we also chat about his favorite London places. So coffee, bikes, Google campus, it's a London hipster paradise. I've included all the details for you on postcardacademy.com, so don't worry about writing anything down. Now into my conversation with Jeremy. Welcome, Jeremy. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

Thank you for having me on the London episode. I'm very much looking forward to it. So you are from Australia. Where in Australia are you from? Sort of all over. I grew up in a few different places, but I'd call Melbourne home. I spent most of my life in Melbourne. So Australians are famous for their gap years. So had you done much? traveling before moving to the UK? I had, but I'd done a lot of the bits that you can get to within one flight from Australia. I felt like, I'm sure I hadn't exhausted them, but sort of Southeast Asia is super popular for Australians to travel around Vietnam and Hong Kong and Japan.

So I've done a lot of that, but then Europe had gone on these flights where you'd go over three weeks and you'd barely see anything. So I thought I should change that. So how long have you been in London? I've been here. I have not. People ask me this every now and then. I really don't know. I think it's about four years. Okay. Because I can sort of come and go. I feel like, yeah, I'm going to say four years. Why not? That's going to be close enough. And so how is a non-UK person? Are you allowed to live and work in Australia?

I like a lot of Australia. I have British parents. Although a lot of people just have British grandparents. So the process was pretty easy. I just, yeah, I went great. That is good. I can apply for a British passport, which was a European passport when I got it. is for now. But yeah, that's it. British parents, let me, means I can stay here as long as I like. Sorry, UK. I'm here for a while. Thanks, Mama and Dad. Thanks, thanks to Queen. So you are chief emoji officer at emojipedia, which you founded. Before we get to that, can you just define what an emoji is and how that differs from, say, emoticon stickers, now an emojis, I guess? Yeah, I've just got the new iPhone, the iPhone 10. The Animoji is very fun, although it has nothing to do with an emoji other than that it looks like the rest of

the emojis. But the real difference is just that emojis work wherever you can type text. If you can type text, you can type an emoji, whereas stickers and all the other things, they're pretty fun, but they only work in the same app. You know, you might be able to send a sticker on Facebook to someone else on Facebook, but you couldn't just put it in a notes app or in a text message or an email. So emojis work like text, and that's why they need to be standardized. And that's why I can catalog them because there's only a certain number. And is the plural of emoji emojis in English? People get very worked up about this.

You know what? So in Japan, the plural of emoji is still emoji. Like the plural of sushi is sushi. But in English, for the most part, as best as I can tell, all the style guides have pretty much just gone to say that emojis works better in English, that we tend to pluralize things with an S. We say tsunamis over here. A lot of nerds get real worked up about it, though.

So the problem is that I feel like the general populace, they'll say emojis and they're fine with it. But if you get people that are very particular about it, they get very upset and they'll say, no, no, no, the plural is definitely emoji. I think both's fine, honestly. Say what you like. Everyone knows what you're talking about. You're the expert.

So I think emojis is... I think emojis is fine. I like emojis. Everyone says emojis. Why fight it? Okay. And so emojis were invented in Japan. right?

Yes. Yeah, they came Japan. What's the backstory with that? They were sort of a, I'm not going to, I don't want to say a hack, but because they came around at the 90s, we didn't have smartphones, but Japan was trying this thing called Imoad, which I don't know whether you saw what this was at the time. It kind of leaked into Australia almost at the time, but it was a really cut down internet, basically.

And it didn't do much, but what they could do is they could insert these little pictures into the text, and they used it for like bus timetables or the weather. or just being more polite in messaging. Japan, that's sort of quite important when you're writing to people to add a bit of, I want to say fluff, but, you know, we do it in the UK as well. You talk about the weather to start with and then you get on to the point. So emojis sort of helped fill a little gap there where you could fit a bit more into your text message than if you could only use words.

Right. And you've said that that's the reason why there's so many weather emojis. Yes, that's partly the reason why there's so many, there's all the weather and all the, And so much transport, because often public transport operators, you could text them and they'd send you the bus time table or the train. But then they'd put the little icon to say, this is the bullet train or this is the normal train. And that's why when you look at the whole train set, it's too many. You don't need that many trains for normal use, but in Japan they had a good reason. Very convenient.

So what is Emojopedia? So Emojopedia, because there is a finite number of emojis, it's like a dictionary, but you can look up what an emoji looks like on different phones. That's one key part of it. They have different fonts on every phone. So imagine if your phone was in Comic Sans and my phone was in Times New Roman. If you sent me a letter, maybe I want to see what it looks like in a different font. So people will look up the emojis on emoji pedia, find out what they're meant to be used for, how people use them, and what they look like on different phones.

Because sometimes, especially if you have a Samsung phone in particular, they can look a bit wacky. You think you're sending a happy face from a Samsung phone. everyone else gets the rolling eyes. Right. So the platforms, like all our images appear differently depending on what we're using. Yeah. I mean, they're meant to be similar. The idea is that if there's an emoji called rolling eyes or face with rolling eyes, that it should look like that on all the platforms, but it's up to each company. Maybe some companies aren't very good at drawing that or often what they'll do with the animals. Some animals will look really cute on one platform and on another platform and like on the iPhone, they might look really realistic. So people will,

often want to look up on the internet on emojipedia to say if I send this face exactly what does it look like on every major phone and that's what we do and then I love your cut and paste feature I go to emoji pia every time like I'm on my Mac and I want to add add like the hug or the heart easy copy from your website yeah a lot of people use it for that it's it's got a good search it looks like Google for emojis if you went to Google and the only thing you could search for was emojis then that's emoji media and plenty of people they're on the computer and it's either quicker or easier or something and they just type in what they want to search for, copy and paste it into a tweet or wherever they want to send it. Where do you send

them to? On the tweets, on the Instagram? Me, my emojis? Yeah. Yeah. Where do you send the emojis? I use them everywhere, actually. No. I mean, always in text. But then also, if I'm typing like an email on my computer, yeah, that's when I go to Emojopedia and want to do the copy and paste. Make sure that you've got the right one to set the tone for your message. Yes. How have emojis changed the way people communicate? I think some of it's made us a bit lazier.

You know what? It's not made us lazier, but it's made us, hmm, how do I say this? You can say something brief, but it still looks heartfelt. And maybe it is. Maybe you want to say to someone, you send someone the throwing a kiss or the flowers emoji, that feels nice, right? When someone sends you three bouquets of flowers, but really, they just tap the button three times. Really, it does add a lot more warmth, considering it's just like a little picture.

I feel like a bit of it, when you send multiple of them, though, it feels like you know they had to spend a bit of time searching for them. So maybe there is a little bit of your brain that knows, oh, they sent three of them and they were in different bits of the keyboards, and they actually did spend some time on me. So I do wonder if that plays into it a little bit. Well, and I think, you know, text a lot can be misinterpreted, and so emojis can help bring some clarity. Yeah, I mean, with your closest friends, maybe it's fine because they kind of get your nuances, but then you've got all these people that they're not super, super close friends, but they're people you talk to and you want to be friendly with.

And yeah, that's a risky middle ground where maybe you're making a joke, but you really want to chuck the winky on the end or something, just to make it clear that you don't get a bed at night and think, oh, no, did I offend that person? Did I make it clear enough that I was joking? So I think that's definitely an important bit that I'll use that quite a lot. I think also probably in the workplace, people are using them more. And if you want to be a bit authoritative, but also want to seem nice, you can give a directive, but then a smile. I love that. Yeah. Do this immediately. Smiley.

So you're part of the Unicode Consortium. Tell us what that is. So because emoji is a part of this text standard, text doesn't really work by itself. You know, there has to be a body that decides which characters can you type. And in English, this was sorted out years ago. But in all the other languages, you've got Chinese characters and Russian characters. And Unicode sit there and they approve each character to say, yes, that is a legitimate Chinese character. And that should exist on computers. And emoji falls into that.

So every year, Unicode sit down and I'm involved with Unicode. So we'll look over proposals for new emojis and make a determination to say, yes, we should have a dinosaur this year or we should have a vomiting face this year, which we do. And that's what Unicode get involved with. They do everything from the text right through to the emojis. And so you're sitting down with all the big tech companies are part of this, right? So like Apple, Microsoft, Google, and having like a group discussion on. Right. I mean, it wouldn't work. Right. There's no point having, sometimes people sort of ask me about, you know, is it really right that Apple and Google and Microsoft that they should decide what the emojis are? But if they didn't, I mean, if I set up a separate group today and said, we're going to decide the emojis, but then these companies didn't implement them, then what's the point? So, yeah, that's it. If I have an iPhone and I'm sending a message to a friend who has Android, like, I want them to be able to see what I'm sending. Right. Yeah, that's the whole. they need to agree, right? If Google said, I'm going to add these 30 emojis this year and they

don't work on the iPhone, then that's not helpful to anyone. So yeah, that's the group of people at the table. It's Apple. It's Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook. Every company that deals with text, they're there. They're at Unicode and me for emoji video. And Jeremy, yes. And me. Most importantly. Well, least importantly, if you look around the table, but sure, I'll take it. So you must hear all the time, like, why isn't there an emoji for such and such a thing? I feel like I say that once a day. But I was in Scotland this summer and hearing all about the front history with the English. And I wanted to post something about my trip on Instagram. And I'm looking for the Scotland emoji and it wasn't there. And I was thinking, is this a political thing? Like,

why can't I find the Scottish flag? Now I see that it has been added this year. And you helped co-author a proposal for these flag additions. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? So I did. So anyone can propose an emoji. It wasn't just because I'm involved at Unicode that I did this, but what I saw happen was that especially at sporting events, you'd have things like the football and the rugby where England and Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland, they compete separately outside the UK. But the way that the flags in the Unicode standard work is they're tied to this ISO standard, which lists every country in the world. But as you know, countries are contentious, right? Which country? countries agree on who else is a country is up for debate. So the way that Unicode did this, they said, look, if you're on this ISO list, you get a flag. And if you're not on the list, you don't get a flag. And it turned out that England, Scotland and Wales were on an ISO list, but a different one. So I sort of put together this proposal to say, yeah, that they should be on there. And Northern Ireland, too, really, except for they're a bit tricky because they don't have

an official flag. People think they do because it's shown at sporting events, but it's quite politically contentious. And so I learned that flags are very contentious as well. And then you get different movements of people around the world and everyone loves a flag. And Unicode's just sort of cautiously trying to keep people happy. They want to give people what they want, but also not start wars. Yes, that's always a good thing. And yeah, I mean, emojis do get political, right? Like, and I think they've evolved quite a bit over the years in a positive direction. But people like, they make certain things political that probably shouldn't be.

I mean, political depends on who you are as well, right? That, you know, if we add two men holding hands to one person that's political and to someone else, it's absolutely not. So I guess the tricky thing is when you're representing anything that exists in the real world, it's pretty hard not to avoid anything that there's no implication of. It's just a matter of finding the line and really making sure that the vendors, the companies like Apple and Google and Microsoft, if they're happy to go with it, then it can happen, basically. But if they say, oh, you know what, this is pretty not up our alley. If you approve this, we're not going to do it, then it probably just won't make the list. Yeah.

Well, it's nice to see the diversity that's evolved over the years racially, but also it's nice to see women have more career options than dancer and play by Bunny now. Yes, yes. That was a proposal from Google. not just the lead designer of the emojis at Google, but she was a strong proponent of the idea that at the time, the set was very gendered, it was very masculine, and in particular there weren't even many jobs at all, but she sort of thought, well, why not?

Yeah, at a bunch of professions, they had the judge and the rock star and the person at the computer, and they were done with men and women, but definitely there was a focus on sort of getting women up to speed on the keyboard, so there was a parody, but for every man, there was a woman and every woman that was a man. Excellent. I like that. Yeah. It makes sense, right?

You wanted to sort of look a bit like the real world when you look at your keyboard. Yeah. So what were you doing before Emojopedia and what prompted you to invent this career for yourself? I've done a few things before. I've always worked, I say always, for a fair while, I've always worked on the web. So I was working with universities in Australia on all kinds of just different web projects that have. They'd be trying to set up things for students to, you know, look up their book lists or anything that you do at uni on campus, there's a need for some kind of web component in the last 10 years. So I was sort of helping them with that. And I liked it.

It was good work. But universities, they're not quite governments, but they work quite slowly. You know, they sort of, the wheels move sort of slowly. And you propose something and it's a nice pace, but you'd be doing these things over six months or a year that really you could do with you. a few people in a couple of weeks, you know. So emojipedia is sort of a fun side thing that I'm not a great developer, but I just started that out of hours just to, yeah, keep my mind active. You know, I thought this would be fun, this would be interesting.

And maybe even a little demo piece for some clients I had at the time to go, look, you know, here's this thing. And look how, look how easy it is to set up something new if you don't deliberately, if you don't hamper it with all these requirements. And in the end, that just was enough to quit my real job and do this full time. Yeah, so how many page views do you get a year on Emojopedia? So it's about 20 to 25 million a month. So I guess what is that?

So that's sort of approaching 300 million emojis are looked up every year on Emojopedia. So it's, yeah, it's pretty overwhelming compared to, say, I recently looked up compared to my hometown newspaper, that it gets more traffic than, say, the newspaper in Melbourne. which I know as a global thing, you know, that we're sort of comparing one thing it's global and one thing it's local, but it's a bit strange having that comparison that you always think maybe growing up as well in the age when newspapers were a big deal, that you'd think, well, yeah, they're a big media empire. And then how could this little emoji site get more visitors than them? So are you working with advertisers then? Advertising. You know what? The advertising part just doesn't interest me at all.

ads and that's how Mojibedia funds itself, that there are ads on the site. But it's, I just, I just can't get my brain to care about it, you know, that I sort of, they're there. And I think it's amazing that I can write whatever and we can publish news and information, and that funds the site. But actually dealing with advertisers directly, I couldn't think of anything worse. Thankfully, we've got someone looking after our ads, which is great. So what is your favorite part then? I just like writing, you know what? So I like producing things. I think are interesting when I see this would be interesting like when you see this fact

or something interesting and you go, I want to share that with people. That's literally it. I love the fact that on the web you can just do that. You can write an article or you can tweet something or do something on Instagram and say, look, I found this fact about it emoji or recently there was the issue where Google, someone complained that Google's hamburger had the ingredients in the wrong order and then you can sort of dive deep into that. So I'd contact Microsoft and say, well, what do you think of the order of the order of the

these ingredients. Do you think that you've got a good order and contact Facebook and create a narrative that people find interesting? So I love being out to just dive into something that is a bit absurd, but people seem to like it. So that gives me pleasure. And you've created a globally recognized day, World Emoji Day, and it's gotten huge. I saw you everywhere this year. What is that exactly? And how did it take off? So World Emoji Day is a, I found it's got a Wikipedia page now and it calls it an unofficial holiday. But it's a day to celebrate emojis because there's already days for donuts and patting your pets. And there's a day for everything.

So, of course, why not have an emoji day? So a few years ago, thought, when should it be? And July 17 is on the iPhone calendar. If you type the calendar emoji on an iPhone, it says July 17. And I thought, well, people already love that day. People would sometimes tweet and go, hey, look, it's the, the calendar emoji is today. So I thought, well, why not give it a name? Make it a real celebration and see what happens, which is what I did. So you were at the Empire State Building this year, right?

Yes. This was the first year I did things in the real world. In past years, I tended to sit there on the computer seeing tweets come in and see what happens and it was very online, whereas this year, yeah, the Empire State Building lit itself yellow for World emoji days. So at nighttime on July 17, this year. If you were around in New York, you can see the building was bright yellow and it was great. So we had this opening ceremony where they invited people from the emoji movies, Patrick Stewart was there and Maya Rudolph and I was there for some reason. And yeah, it was, it was good fun. It was very bizarre having this thing that I just made up a few years ago be a real world event. And you were at the New York Stock Exchange that day as well?

Yes, which I've got to be honest. I didn't actually know. They said, do you want to come to the closing bell of the New York Stock Exchange. And I knew of the opening bell. I'd never really, I don't pay a lot of attention to the financial markets, I guess you could say. And I knew there was an opening bell because you see companies when they're launching on the stock exchange and they ring the bell and everyone claps. I never paid any attention to the closing bell, but they invited me to that. And apparently that's a thing too, that you go along and they all clap as well. It's just, I don't know, I don't know who they normally invite. I've never seen it other than the day I was there.

And you were talking about the emoji awards? Yes. We also, a year or two into a World Emoji Day, people would start asking like, oh, what are you doing for World Emoji Day? What is Emojopedia doing? And I thought, well, we're not doing anything. We're just here. So I thought, well, we should have a day where we celebrate and give awards to,

not to people, but to emojis. So we'd have Best New Emoji and Lifetime Achievement Emoji and get people to vote. And down at the New York Stock Exchange, we did a live, I say, presentation. There was no one to hand them to, but we announced the winners of the emoji awards, which was good fun. First time we'd done it. And I think it was Tears of Joy, won, which they always do, the laughing with tears of joy. That's always the most popular one. And, yeah, it was sort of fun having an absurd version of the Oscars where you give prizes to emojis rather than to people.

What would get, like, what earns lifetime achievement? So, you know what? So what we did with lifetime achievement. So often we had best new emoji and most anticipated emojis. A lifetime achievement was just of all time. What's the one that you always like? It doesn't have to be new this year. It doesn't have to be new next year, which is what we'd done the previous year. We thought this year you should be able to vote any emoji as well. So it was between the pile of poo, I think, came second. I thought that was going to win myself and the heart ice quickly. Yeah, you're glad. You wouldn't want the pile of poo to come first place. No, sorry, who did you say was number one?

The tears of joy. The laughing, laughing crying was number one because that one's... More deserving. More deserving. Yeah, it annoys people, but I feel like it's a bit divisive. Most people like it, but definitely it has its non-fans. I mean, I can't say that I am a fan either. I prefer my smiles with no tears, but it's better than two.

You prefer just the regular old smiley. I don't think that's extreme enough. The heart eyes as well, that was number three. And I think that's... I don't think that's got a good chance. That maybe if we do it again next year, I'm not sure how you do a lot. I guess you can do a lifetime achievement every year, right? We could do it again next year and see what happens.

Do you have a favorite emoji? I like the upside down one because it's sort of a bit vague and ambiguous and I like having fun online. Like I just think that sometimes you can get yourself way down. People get into these sort of fights and arguments online. And for me, I'm like, if I'm going to spend time typing anything, I want to be having a good time or why am I even doing it? So for me, the upside down one, it throws a little bit of chaos into the mix.

No one can tell if you're being serious. And it gives you a bit of wiggle room later as well. If you decide to change whether you were being serious or not, you go, look, there's an upside down smile at the end. True. How much travel do you do for your job? For my job, quite a bit. Unicode meets four times a year in Silicon Valley. It moves around between Apple and Microsoft and Google, Adobe, IBM.

All the companies, they're all over there on the west coast of the US. I don't necessarily go to every meeting in person, but, yeah, it gets me to the US at least three or four times a year. And then everything else, sometimes some conferences will be kind enough to invite me along to talk about emojis or online publishing or that sort of thing. So, yeah, I spend a good third half of the traveling. Some of it for work, some of it just because I like to travel. Where do you usually work in London? You know, so my main point of work is at Google Campus. They've got a startup space, which they let startups use for free, mind you, that you can come along and work there.

And they've got good internet and they've got a cafe. And it's quite a good spot. But I kind of like to move around as well, go to different cafes. Every now and then I'll work from home. I like a bit of stimulus. I don't like to go to the same place every day. I couldn't be the person that rents a co-working space and just sits in the same one all week. That has no appeal for me.

So for me, it's either Google Campus or different cafes. Oh, tell us, what's your cafe circuit? So my cafe circuit, it moves around a little. Because I'll get around London sort of by bike normally. It gives you a bit of flexibility on where you go. I feel like, I like sort of spending a bit of time in Bloomsbury. It feels pretty normal to me. And I don't know what it is about it.

It's a lot of London, you sort of get these bits that are very touristy in some bits, and other bits are very sort of businessy and men in suits. And I say men in suits. It can be women in suits as well, but predominantly the financial district of London does have a lot of dudes wearing the same blue suit walking around. Definitely. And so for me, Bloomsbury is sort of a university sort of area, and maybe I'm getting a bit out of the age range, but I feel quite at home around there.

So I like going to cafes in that sort of bit of town. Which cafe specifically? So it's one I quite like called Store Street Expresso. It was called Continental Stores. It's on Tavistock Place. It's like a, they've upgraded it to give it a, it's a nicer bike street now. It's quite a relaxing bike street where there's a little one-way bit of traffic through there, but otherwise people flood through the area and they do a good coffee.

And it's a nice place to hang and watch people go by. Yeah, Blumen Sparry is gorgeous. It's very like Old World, Virginia Woolf. The literary club. Yeah, it's not flashy. It doesn't show off. It's quite a, yeah, the buildings are like, there's sort of these manor-like buildings,

but they're not, you know, it's not Mayfair and it's not, it's not Lester Square. It's, yeah, it's quite understated, but really quite beautiful when you pay a bit of attention to it, I think. Yeah, I agree. Where else do you like to hang out? You know what? So, I mean, by way of the fact that the tech scene in London is around

Shortwich area, I'll often be around there. And I quite like Shortwich. I think it's sort of a bit of a punchline where people will like it sort of hipster central or whatever. And it sort of is, but I mean, mostly for me. I mean, it definitely is. But I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily. They've got great coffee shops, you know, a good art scene. Right.

Exactly. It's overall, it's a pretty good place to be anyway. So and the fact that for me that it means that other people that work sort of in the tech industry tend to be somewhere around there. I appreciate the proximity that I sort of, when I moved. London to start with it. The size of it was very overwhelming. In Melbourne, if you're in the city and if you contact a friend and say, oh, where are you? And they say, I'm in the city. You'd say, oh, me too. Let's catch up for lunch. But in London, that's not, you know, if I just said,

oh, you in town and someone else is in town, they're probably nowhere near you. So I think there's something nice about being in the same area as people you're likely to catch up with. And a lot of them, they are in shortage. Yes. Is that where you live? No, so I live out west. I'm in the inner west. So for me, the area that I live, I don't tend to hang out a whole bunch of inner west is quite residential, which is great for me. I love living somewhere that's quiet, and then I just hop on my bike and go somewhere more exciting. That's a perfect balance for me. I like the, I like the two. It also stops me being too lazy. If I lived five minutes from everywhere I wanted to be, I just wouldn't leave the area, and that would be not good for my health. So what's your favorite coffee shop in Shortage? When I get under Shortch, I really like ozone. They do a good job. They're just near Old Street roundabout.

The only complaint I'd say is that they sort of, it's not a place to work. It's a good place to go for a coffee, which, you know, there's different types of coffee shops, right? Sometimes you go to one that's good to work in for a while because it's got enough space that you're not in the way, whereas ozone is busy and you go there to catch up the brunk. with someone or a good coffee, great recommendation for that. But if you want to work somewhere, then go somewhere different. So what's your favorite neighborhood to hang out in then? If I'm not in Bloomsbury or Shortwich, I'd say Angel. I really like Angel, you know, upper street down there, good cafes, good restaurants. Yeah, I think that's a sort of a happening place to be. And then if it's more sort of on the weekend, I guess a lot of friends of mine are

pretty central. Soho is great for, you know, ramen, cocktails, everything really. Soho's sort of my, more of my nighttime hangout. And it's super central for everyone to get home as well. You can't be hanging out one side of town. So where specifically would we find you hanging out on a Friday night? Friday night. Maybe London cocktail club. There's a lot of them now because everywhere in London's a chain, but they do great cocktails. So I'd often be at a London cocktail club and maybe, where else might I meet? It might be getting some ramen at Shoyu Raman in a kingly court. Nice little place in there.

Yeah, I love that area because there's so many. I mean, it's just such a concentration of good places to eat. Yeah, there's no shortage. You're not worried if you meet up in Soho somewhere, especially if you're around Carnaby or Kingley or something around there. But yeah, there's no, there's no risk that you're going to say, well, no, we don't want to do this one, this one or this one. and we'll run out of options. You'll definitely, we'll definitely find them. Are you a pub guy?

You know what? The UK makes this distinction between pubs and bars that Australia doesn't really, and maybe the US as well. I'm not sure if you notice this, that I tend to refer to pubs and bars interchangeably, but over here they seem to care about the difference. Yeah, I think there kind of is a difference. I mean, and we don't really have a pub culture in the US. It is more bars, but I don't even like beer, but I enjoy a good pub. There's just something different about the aesthetic. I like a good gastro pub that's kind of just wood and old world inside and just relax, maybe a fire going. Yeah, you know what? For me, pubs, I find them a bit interchangeable, which I like, I like, and there's some great pubs that I've been to, but there's so many good pubs over here that

I don't tend to find myself going, I've got to go back to that pub. You know, even if you walk around any neighborhood, there's so many good pubs that, if anything, I tend to just sort of go, well, where is anyone going to be? Let's go to that pub because, yeah, I think there's a lot of good pubs. There's no shortage of them in London. So where would we find you hang out on the Sunday afternoon? You know what? So I don't really do, this is going to sound like the biggest old man thing.

But on week, where I can help it, because I've got a fairly flexible schedule, I tend to stay out of central London on Saturday Sunday. Not always of going out with friends or to an event, but otherwise I tend to get out of town, hop on a train somewhere or if I'm in London, just go to some of the parks. Country walks are quite nice. I think Victoria Park's a good park. I mean, I'm in the west, so Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens are super pretty, but Victoria Park has a nice vibe to it.

It's very friendly. It's out east and it's sort of more. Yeah, it's more relaxed. Everyone's having a good time and a lot of tourists float into Hyde Park in Kensington Gardens, which is fine. I'm sort of tourist myself, but there's something nice about being somewhere where it's just people relaxing, having a good time rather than people coming in trying to frantically get their photos for the weekend. So I think Victoria Park is a good park. Yeah, it's a bit under the radar. Yeah, and there's playgrounds for kids as well. I don't have kids, but the people that have kids, it's sort of there's fun stuff, especially in summer water things and playgrounds. Yeah, looks very fun. So if you, say you did have friends who are in from out of town and they've never been to London before, where would you take them? So I've got a bit of a circuit that I tend to do.

If you've never been to London, you know what, it's easy to be like, don't go to the landmarks or whatever, but I feel like to some degree you sort of should see a lot of the landmarks, especially if it's your first time somewhere. Absolutely. So what I tend to do is not just because I ride a bike, but if anyone's able to ride a bike, I will take the on the new-ish cycle highway that goes through central London. So it starts, say, start in Kensington Gardens and you can ride all the way through Hyde Park. It takes you down through Green Park past Buckingham Palace. So you can hop off your bike there. Look around Buckingham Palace.

Takes you all the way past Big Ben, houses of Parliament, the London Eye, all the way down the Thames to the Tower of London. And it's a super easy ride because it's completely segregated. You're not mixing with the traffic at all. So even if someone's only ridden since they're a kid, it's like one of the best cycle tracks in all of London. And it happens to go directly past like every, say every, a lot of the major landmarks. So I'm always desperate to get someone on a bike. I think it's the best way to see all these spots. And it's only been open about a year and a half now.

So it's not even that congested if you're there on the weekend. Yeah. And even just walking a lot of that route, I love walking along the Thames with friends. and there's so many shops now that have different goods from local designers. And it's just a beautiful walk that and you end up at Tower of London, which I think is really cool. I love going in there and seeing like graffiti from hundreds of years ago. Do you ever go inside? Have you been inside?

Tower of London? Yeah. I've been in once as a kid and I went once recently with a friend who was visiting. It's one of those things that the London attractions, they tend to be friends. or a little bit pricey. You know, it's sort of 20, 25 pounds, which is absolutely no problem, but you just wouldn't want to do it

every time someone comes into town. Yeah, yeah. And you can see so much from the outside as well, so you don't necessarily need to go. But absolutely, Tower of London, beautiful, beautiful buildings. And yeah, well, and even, I'm not much of a tour guide kind of person,

but I think they do good tours in there that are quite actually sort of interesting and entertaining and they give you a bit of what you want to know because the actual beef eaters take you around, which they're not just, some kid that rolled in for the summer holidays and quickly learned their script. So, yeah, I think that whole stretch is great and I'm always keen to take people along there. So where do you go when you're in the mood for some culture?

When I'm in the mood for, you know what I really like in London is there's a jazz club under the palace theater, which is, it's the one they used to have, what are they got at the moment? They've got Harry Potter airing there at the moment. They've got the Harry Potter musical there at the moment. And there's a jazz bar just basically underneath it in the pub that's sort of next door. You can go underneath it. It's called the Spice of Life. And yeah, the boy's got different gigs on there during the week.

I really quite like it. There's got this lunchtime gig where they often have sort of retired old musicians who are amazing, but they're not really on the scene as much anymore and they'll do a two-hour gig. And yeah, I think that's great a noise. If I ever can get a chance in the middle of the week to pop in and do a lunchtime jazz session. That's where I'll be. That is a great little hidden gem. Yeah. And it's super central. You'd have no idea. You walk into the pub and you walk downstairs.

It's one of those sort of happens in London a bit. I've not seen it as much in other cities, but where the venue underneath is basically separate to the venue upstairs. And yeah, you walk into the pub, go downstairs. I can't remember the price, but it's quite cheap admission. And yeah, you can see some really great jazz musicians who have basically retired, but they still like to show their, get their gear happening every now and then. So that's always a good one. Yeah, you can see some great music in London, even during the day. Like you said, whenever my mom comes to visit me, she's always going to St. Martin's Church, because they always have something cool going on a little afternoon concert or a candlelit music, something happening.

That's a good tip. Yeah, the church is, I've not been in during the day, but, you know, around Christmas still often have sort of different events going on. And yeah, the acoustics in these buildings when they get a, especially if they get a big choir happening is pretty incredible. What's been your best day in London so far in your four years? I find this, my best day in London, I'm really bad at giving best, you know, best friend, best day, anything that requires being above all. I mean, recently what I did, though, which was really fun that I really liked. I had no idea in Olympic, park, that big statue, the big, there's this sort of big, uh, abstract art that's made of metal in

there. I had no idea there was a slide inside. I just thought it was abstract art and I went down that slide and that was really fun. Is that that big red thing at Hackneywick? Yeah. Yeah. It looks like a, yeah, it's a big red sort of rusty metal, uh, object, sculpture almost like in the sky. It's huge and It's sort of ugly, but it's, you know, it fits into its landscape. But I just thought it was art. I didn't realize that entwined this slide through the whole thing and there's great views up there. And, yeah, recently I went out there and I wrote a bit around Olympic Park. There's some nice rivers around there and some good cafes and went down the slide.

And that was just really fun. I think it was the surprise of not knowing that there was a slide inside that really made that fun for me. I love that. You're a little explorer. Yeah, I love that. All right, so you don't like giving your best, but before you go, I would still like to hear some of your favorite London places. So can we do a bit of a lightning round? Yeah, of course.

Okay. brunch. Brunch. Italo is very good in Vauxalcelsal, in the backstrates of Vauxhall. Very good. Coffee shop. Stor Street Expresso in Bloomsbury. Very good.

And lunch place? Home slice. There's a few of them now, but the Neal's Yard one, even though it's the busiest. is Neil's Yard is beautiful. So I think if you're going to do home slice for pizza, that is. Do the one in Neil's yard. It's worth the wait. Have you ever taken your mom for high tea when she visited?

I have just once. And I went to Aquashard, which is halfway up the shard. And it was very good. It was very good. I honestly didn't know where to pick. There was so many choices. So I went with that one and it was very good. No complaints.

If you like good views, do that one. Excellent. How about a Sunday roast? You know what? Anything on the road. river. I particularly like when you're out sort of Chiswick, Hammersmith, Q sort of area. I don't think I have this particular one, but head down, find a pub on the overlooking the river. That's what you want to do. And how about for dinner?

Flat iron. I'll always take friends to Flatiron. It's down in Soho. Get a 10 pound steak. It's delicious. And it's great. They've got good cocktails, wine. Yeah, it's always, it's fun. It's a fun vibe in there. I like it. Flat iron. How about wine or cocktail bar? London Cocktail Club are always. They're cocktails. They're very good. They've got a good happy hour. So definitely go there. And how does tipping work in London? Badly. Nobody knows. Pay it if there's a service charge. And if there isn't a service charge, debate how much you should give and moan that maybe we should just pay everyone a correct amount. It's so confusing, right? Everyone

still gets worked up about this. So at the bar, at the bar, you know, don't tip. So in America, you always tip if you're like paying for your drinks at the bar. Yeah, never tip at a bar. That's very confusing. Yeah. So, yeah. But for a meal, yeah, very borderline. So much of London puts a service charge on there, which is just, I guess it's

fine. It's easy because it just gets built in. But then when places don't, they'll put a big thing saying no service included. And then you sort of feel like, you know, we're not in the US. How do we, if it was just a very basic service, it was fine? Do you feel obliged to put the 20% or so on there or 12 and a half or do you not? I think when they include it in your bill, they would put 12 and a half percent. Right. And fine. That's what we want to do. Just do it everywhere then. Or just put up prices 12.5%. Just tell us what to do. We don't know. Yeah. I wish it was the same

everywhere. But anyway, moving on. So you mentioned Victoria is your favorite park. Do you have any outdoor markets that you like? Borough market. Brilliant. I know it's sort of, it's one of the bigger markets in London, but their pork rolls, amazing.

So good. Best pork rolls I've had in all of London. Yeah. And the cheeses, brilliant. So many good foods. And also, maltby market is nearby,

which I quite like that. Mm. Yes, good call. Do you ever, are you a museum goer? British Museum is amazing. So big, though. It's overwhelming.

That's my only problem with it. But you can go see the Rosetta Stone. I didn't even believe. it was the real Rosetta Stone when I went there. And yeah, what an incredible museum to go to. Yeah. And I, something that I really love about London is that all the museums are free. Almost all of the museums are free. All of the major museums are free. Yeah. I just think making culture accessible to everyone like that is just such a great thing. I wish more cities than the US do that. Yeah. And they're great museums. I mean, it's hard to pick one.

But honestly, the whole, this so many, Victoria and Albert Museum, science museum, natural history, they're all good. But, yeah, British Museum, if I had to pick one of them, I just think it's got some really interesting artifacts in there. You mentioned that on the weekends you kind of like to get out of London. What's a day trip that you would recommend? Oh, yeah, I love getting out of London. Not that I don't like being in London, but I love the fact that one hour on a train, you can get so many places from London. Henley is beautiful out on the, in the Thames, out west. You can go for some nice walks along there and beautiful parks.

So I'd say that's a big one. And if I had to go a bit further afield, then even just Oxford or Cambridge, they're not far by train. You can get there an hour and a half and completely different city to explore. Yeah, all of those are really gorgeous places. You said this is lightning round. I'll give you three answers for nearly everything. I'm so sorry. No, it's fine.

I'm like this slow going lightning around. Do you go to theater or what would be your favorite, like, nighttime activity? You know what? So I do like going to the theatre. The best show that I've seen. So I normally like to go to a musical for some reason to me. I'm like, if it's not a musical, I'm like, is I'm going to be bored. But the woman in black, I went to see that last year, which is a two-person play. And I'd seen the movie. I didn't think it was anything like the movie, but it was amazing. I love the performance of that. But two people somehow captivate you the whole time. There's very little going on. And they just own the stage. And yeah, I love that. So if I can get to shows in general, that's something I'll always try and do. Is that still on? Is that sure? I think it's still on. Yeah, I think it's been on for a long time. And I believe, because it's got such a small cast, because you only need two people, I think it'll be going for maybe not forever, but it's one of those ones that keeps going for decades, because they can just keep running it. And I'd tell anyone it's a horror. But so don't go if you're easily

scared, but otherwise, I'd give that as my tip. And it's normally, you can get some cheap tickets to it as well, because it's on every night. And like New York, London also has a half-price ticket booth at Interested Square. So I think you line up. I'm not sure what time in the morning. Maybe it opens at 10. I'll link to it into the show notes. But that's a good way to find affordable theater as well.

Yeah, go down there. And they know what they're doing as well. When you go to the ticket window, they're pretty good. They can answer questions about the seats and where you're sitting and what's on. And yeah, they know what they're doing. And that's for me, always the top tip. Go see a show. Go see heaps of shows. Well, this has been awesome, Jeremy. Thank you so much.

This has been fun. So where can people find more about you? Probably follow me for travel type stuff, Instagram. Jeremy Burge on Instagram. I post photos wherever I go. Sometimes I mix some work things in there. Or you can follow me on Twitter, but I mostly... Twitter's more of my nerd space and Instagram's more of my travel space.

So you pick what you want to learn about. And your Emojipedia.com. Yeah, you can go to emojipedia.com or dot-org if you want to look up what an emoji means. And yeah, you'll find awesome emoji news. There's always emoji news happening. If you want to go there, we've got a podcast as well, which is called emoji wrap. And I'll talk to people who design the emojis and get involved in the approvals every month. Oh, yes.

I've been listening to your podcast, Jeremy, and I really love the song. Yeah, that's great. That is so good. I was singing it the other day. Yeah, that is by Jonathan Mann. He's called Song a Day Man on YouTube and he sings a song every single day. And he's been doing it for about seven years now. He's a Guinness World Record holder for singing a song every day for the most number of days.

And did you approach him or did he approach you? I approached him. I said, well, of course he should do a song for the show because why not? It was actually originally for World Emoji Day, but we mangled it into being the podcast theme now as well. Okay. Well, maybe we can play out this episode on that song. That'd be amazing. Yeah, cue it up. Cure it up whenever maybe it's on now. Okay. Thank you, Jeremy.

Good to speak to you, Sarah. Are you ready to bike through London with Jeremy? Not me. I'm afraid again and we'll be walking or taking the tube. But I do want to check out that slide. For a list of Jeremy's recommendations, add to postcardacademy.com slash hipster London. Next week, the Postcard Academy goes to Istanbul. I talked to Jenk Sammasai about his new cookbook, The Artful Baker, one of the most beautiful books I have ever seen.

Seriously, this is the ultimate food porn. We talk about some of its favorite recipes and the foods that you cannot miss when you visit Istanbul. If you like today's episode, please share it with a friend and leave a review on iTunes. This helps people discover the show. And if you're on Instagram, come on over and say hello. That's it for now. Thanks for listening and have a beautiful week wherever you are. Never go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot.

I created a free conversation cheat sheet with simple formulas that you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you're in a meeting or just talking with friends. Download it at sarahmicatel.com slash blank no more.