Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - family leave week: "1 Way To Make An Emoji (the bison emoji podcast)" Episode 1

Episode Date: March 30, 2026

Please enjoy this treat from Alex and Katie! It's the first episode of Alex's special miniseries about creating the bison emoji. You can hear all the episodes (including Katie guesting on episode #3 out of 4) at the miniseries's website: https://www.bisonemojipodcast.com/ Or search "1 Way To Make An Emoji" in your podcast app.

Hey, folks, this is Alex. I'm with Katie. Thank you for joining us for these weeks of family leave. Each of us, we're each having a baby. Yes, separate babies. And we're sort of pre-taping these intros because I'm sure as you're listening, we're both elbow deep and something. Right. Yeah. I just want to make it clear. We're not creating one big Franken baby. It's two babies. There's the Schmidt baby and then the golden baby. And then we're going to have them compete in the baby Olympics. Baby Olympics is also a great show idea. Right.

A couple weeks ago, we talked about a baby hosted podcast by them. Right. But the Baby Olympics, too. I would like to see them each and funny little singlets. Yeah. You know. Yours can represent Italy if you want, you know. Yeah.

Here's a javelin. Now you, now you talk, now you, no, you sit out. No, stop lying down. Maybe worse choice of a sport for them. Great. Yeah, but this is, I'm, I really enjoyed doing this, this podcast. It feels, man, this feels like this is a blast from the past and it's also a very momentous, momentous podcast because it actually changed the world, this one. And yeah, the thing we're sharing with you today is the first of four episodes in a.

mini series I made about creating the bison emoji. Yes. There's a bison or bison emoji on your phone right now. Yeah. Like if you don't believe Alex, look at it right now and you'll see there's a bison on there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And if you're like shocked that that would even be possible, like how would a person create one, please enjoy the miniseries. We've got the first episode right here for you in the feed and then I'll link to the feed for the rest of it. And I made it back in 2020. and Katie is a guest on one of the episodes, like about a quarter of it and brilliant on it. And we also, I put it in the SIF feed way back in 2022, and there are new listeners now.

So I think folks in this year would like to hear it. And other programming note about it is that it's very emotional, especially at the end, because it's partly about my father. Yes. And I'm going into fatherhood. So, you know, it's actually kind of an interesting thing. I wonder how I will feel hearing it at some point. So, yeah.

It's a lovely podcast series. And, yeah, it has a lot of, it's both incredible storytelling. And you learn a little bit about bison's. Thanks, buddy. Yeah. Especially the bison learning. We got to do it together. Yeah.

They're really cool animals. They are super cool. Yeah. And you might hear a fanfare sound effect that you know from SIF in one part. Like there's a lot of, if you like this show at all, I think you'll like. like that. And also with all these family leave weeks, if you've already heard these things, simply thank you. And I hope you catch up on another archive or something. But we're planning on five total weeks. This is the third one. And we'll probably be back with SIFs soon.

Yep. See you soon. Yeah. Hi, I'm Alex Schmidt. This podcast is called One Way to Make an Emoji. It's a story about how I created the bison emoji. a new emoji coming to your phone and every other device on earth later this year 2020. Here's how that happened and why that happened, because it's a bigger story than you might think. Yeah, so welcome. This is a four-episode podcast. It is about me, Alex Schmidt, hello, creating the bison emoji. That's right, the bison emoji. I want to make sure it's clear what the bison emoji is. So an emoji is a small picture, such as a smiley face or crying laughing face, and it can be typed, like a letter or number or punctuation or anything else.

The bison is a large hoofed mammal. It's usually a brown and black color with horns and a big hump. Many Americans call it the buffalo, but the bison. You know what I'm talking about. So I have created an emoji for the bison, and then I made this podcast about that. I'm doing this because I think I have something useful to share with you. something about how to be alive. And it's something very private. I wouldn't otherwise be comfortable sharing it, but I'm going to share it anyway

because I think this is that important. In order to share that one thing with you, we are going to take a journey, okay? And it's a journey with lots of parts. Some of them may seem kind of unrelated to each other at first, but stick with me. This is going somewhere, and it's going everywhere. In these four episodes, just four podcast episodes,

we are going to explore the roots of emoji, quantum science, American history, digital language, meatpacking, teen girls speak, European history, Native America, hoax super volcanoes, accidental movie stars, the size and scope of our legacies as human beings, Victorian flowers, freak lightning, artisanal unicorns, particle accelerators, Midwestern salad culture, and bison fun facts. And that's all springing from one story, a story told with many sound effects, and a series of plot twists. The plot twist will have that sound effect.

Okay? Okay, we all know. Great. Anyway, here's the story of me creating the bison emoji, and it's a story that starts at Fermilab. You've probably never heard of Fermilab, I'm guessing. Its full name is the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. It's named for 20th century physicist Enrico Fermi,

And Fermilab is in Batavia, Illinois, a town in the Chicagoland region, about 40 minutes drive west of the city. Hundreds of particle physicists work there full-time, using Fermilab to do experiments with particle accelerators. Giant, underground, particle accelerators. Do you know what particle accelerators are? Like, they're these huge machines that smash subatomic particles together so they can see what happens. You've probably heard of the large Hadron Collider, the giant Swiss particle accelerators. accelerator first booted up in 2008. Well, before the Europeans built that, the Tevatron at Fermilab in America,

was the world's biggest particle accelerator. And it's still big. Then and now, Fermilab physicists use the Tevatron to make incredible discoveries. Like in 1995, they discovered the top quark, a discovery that paved the way for the future discovery of the Higgs boson. In the year 2000, Fermilab discovered the first ever evidence. of the tau neutrino, hey. And on top of all those

Fermilab achievements, there are countless other things that I also do not understand. I have Googled them, I have listed them, I don't totally know what they are. Like, what are quarks? I know they are subatomic particles. They're super, super small particles.

According to a 2016 piece in The Guardian, a quarks radius is less than 43 billionths of a centimeter, and there's no way to react your head around that. You can hear someone say it, but you can't process it. But anyway, Fermilab has underground particle accelerators, but when I was a kid, I only cared about what was on top of the accelerators, because on top of the accelerators was a prairie. Why is there a prairie on top of particle accelerators? Right? Like, what kind of Midwest Starfleet Academy is this place,

you might ask, even though it's more of a Midwest Dexter's laboratory, but with a adults. Here's the story. Fermilab broke ground on its first particle accelerator in December of 1969. They were led by a physicist named Dr. Robert R. Wilson, and Robert R. Wilson had no particular plans for the land on top of the accelerators until he got approached by a biologist named Dr. Robert F. Betts. And you would assume Robert R. Wilson and Robert F. Betts are getting together for a meeting of the Roberts with Initials Club, but no, it turns out Robert R.W. and Robbie F.B. are talking prairies. Dr. Betts wanted to recreate Illinois Prairie. A prairie is a low maintenance, drought-resistant erosion-preventing ecosystem. It's a perfect habitat for local birds and

reptiles and insects and butterflies, and one prairie can preserve and revitalize its entire region. The only trouble is most prairies get ripped up to build subdivisions. Fermilab's accelerator land cannot be a subdivision. You cannot, like, dig plumbing and stuff into a particle accelerator down there. So Betz tells Wilson that that makes this perfect Prairie Restoration territory. And Betz's Prairie Idea only has one catch. The catch is, Prairie Restoration takes forever. And Betz is honest about it. Betz, the biologist, tells Wilson, the physicist, that this prairie restoration will take 40 years. Four zero. And then something great happens, because according to all the sources, when Betts asked Wilson if he was up for 40 years of watching grass grow, Wilson replied with a great line, quote,

If that's the case, we should start this afternoon. So thanks to two crazy Roberts, we start to have particle accelerators with prairies on top of them. Okay, follow so far? And by the way, prairies used to blanket North America. The land that's now the U.S. state of Illinois once contained 22 million acres of tallgrass prairie. 22 million acres is more than 16 million football fields worth of land. And can you guess how much of that prairie is left today? Approximately less than 0.01%.

Less than 0.01%. And there is no way to wrap your head around that. You can hear someone say it, but you can't process it. You certainly can't see how one particle accelerator land loops worth of additional prairie could possibly make a difference. But because of two crazy Roberts, neither of whom lived another 40 years, those 40 years of prairie labor happened. And slightly more than 40 years later, a young boy enters our story,

and his name is Alex Schmidt. Yeah, Alex Schmidt from the start of the show. How about that? I grew up in Chicago land, about a 15-minute drive from Fermilab, and from time to time, we would drive around the Tevatron's Outer Ring Road, because you could just do that. It's free. And Dad would stop the car, and we'd look both ways before we got out, and then we'd go watch the grasses rustle, and the birds flit around, and the butterflies do that floaty nonsense thing that butterflies seem to like to do for some reason. What is that thing? They're just kind of there. Anyway, I would, I was also a boy with sun-sensitive eyes and computer games back home and a general disinterest in, you know, effort and doing stuff. I am not proud to say it, but I had no real interest in staring at tall grass, you know, no matter how many crazy Roberts it took to put it there. And then we'd see bison, because they were bison in that prairie at Fermilab. And when we saw bison, I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay and watch them move around.

I wanted to stay and watch those big brown bison humps, you just kind of drift through the tall grass, like fun, hairy ships. And we look for the biggest bison and look for the baby bison and look forward to the next time we'd stare at the grass. And the story keeps moving from there, because next two weird things happened. We'll follow the second thing for the rest of the episode. Both things happened after I moved away from Chicagoland to go to college in Syracuse, New York. and then live in California and then New York City and then California again

and then North Carolina and as I did all that two weird things happened thing number one I started receiving photos of the Fermilab bison from time to time I'd open my email account and there

in my inbox would be another photo somebody sent me of Fermilab Bison plot twist and just hang on to that plot twist. It'll come back in episode four. We want to focus on Weird Thing Number Two now. Weird Thing Number Two, the whole rest of the episode.

Weird Thing Number Two is that for maybe the first time ever, my partner Brenda and I jointly listened to a podcast. My partner Brenda is a person I love talking to. Also, she has excellent taste in music. So I think when driving, we had pretty much always done music and talking, and that's what we do. And I think we'd never made the decision to hear. Kira podcast together. But it's a couple years ago, we're on a road trip, and I'm driving us

through this weird stretch between San Diego and L.A. And she's got the phone cord thingy. And she's flipping through her phone and she says, hey, there's a new 99% Invisible. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. 99% Invisible is an amazing podcast about design with an amazing voiced host. I'm very jealous. And Brenda puts it on and we're listening together. And Amazing Voice hosts says, hey, we're throw into a whole other show we're featuring. It's called Welcome to Macintosh. This is Welcome to Macintosh, a tiny show about a big fruit company. I'm your host, Mark Bramham. And it's a show about Apple and the community around it and the history of it, but they're featuring a special episode because it's about emoji. The host of Welcome to Macintosh created an emoji.

And pretty soon, me and Brenda are stopping and starting the show to talk about it in wonder. To our amazement, we are learning anyone can propose an emoji. So Brenda and Mark Bramhill, this podcast host, kind of co-sent me on this journey. I decided to tell Mark Bramhill all about that, and apparently I am not the first. Do people often come to you with what I'm coming to you with? Like, thank you for the inspiration kind of thing. I'm curious if I'm the first one or one of thousands or, you know, I don't know. You're not the first one.

You're certainly not the first person to come to me with an idea for an emoji or saying that they want to create an emoji. I've gotten that a lot of times. And some people have gone through and submitted. I've had at least a couple people who have gotten something through. The weirdest one for me was actually I got an email from. some college students in western Washington state who were in like an intro media studies, kind of like digital media class. And one of their assignments was from a professor who had heard my podcast and thought,

this is so cool, assigned it as a thing for them to listen to. And then had the students like write up, if not formal pitches to Unicom. at least a sort of mock proposal of what would be a good emoji? Why would it fill a gap or whatever? How would it be used or whatever? And thinking about these things, I heard from the student asking some questions, and I reached out to the professor just being like, oh, this is so cool to hear about this and wound up Skyping into one of their classes or whatever

and hearing some student ideas and answering questions. And it was just really surreal to be in that position. It's like I definitely don't feel like I should be the esteemed guest of a chorus there, you know? But it was very fun. I think you're one of the first people reaching out to be like, hey, I got a new emoji in because I heard this thing. I have not heard that too many times. It's a tough bar to clear. So congratulations.

Oh, thank you so much. It's a very interesting thing because I feel like probably everyone who's ever tried to pitch one of these has imposter syndrome about it. And you eased mine quite a bit because you talk on the podcast about having it. And then you go ahead and do it anyway and pitch it to them in person and everything. It seems like it's such a new thing that we all feel a little crazy that we can even do it. Yeah. I mean, it's something where a whole idea of them, the Unicode Consortium as gatekeepers of this is still relatively new to them, too.

I mean, they've been, you know, making decisions about text and language and all of these things for quite some time, but they're still learning how to best handle stuff around emoji. And, you know, the process has changed a little bit, at least since I went through the whole thing, enough that, you know, I have to, when people reach out to me asking for advice, I actually have to go brush up on, you know, what are the latest guidelines? What have they updated? Just because some of the things, you know, they've learned there's some places where more information would be helpful or certain types of data or evidence aren't as good as predictors for how useful an emoji would be. And, you know, those refinements to the process are really encouraging to see and nice to see that this is the same way that we're trying to figure out how to propose emoji.

then, you know, they're learning the best way to judge them and make the system the best it can be. And why is the Unicode Consortium, a name that sounds more and more like a convention for robots, the more I say it, why is the Unicode Consortium in charge of new emojis? Well, the answer comes from the origin story of all emojis, which I'm guessing you probably don't know. Emoji began in 1998 in Japan, and it's a very specific birth, a graphic design, named Shigataka Kurida, created the first emoji set. He drew 176 emoji characters. They are the basis of the set we use today,

and he drew them for a Japanese cell phone carrier named NTT Docomo. Because the people at NTT Docomo wanted more people to send more text messages. Remember 90s text messaging? When it costs a dime? Oh boy. How do any of us have money left? Anyway, NTT Docomo assigned 176 separate code points to those 176 emoji to add them to NTT Docomo phone keyboards. What are code points?

Great technical question. Code points are brief strings of code. Each letter, number, punctuation, or emoji has its own code point. Digital devices read those code points in order to understand what is being typed. The Unicode Consortium, not a robot convention. organizing those code points into a big directory. That directory is called the Unicode Standard. All the world's tech companies program their devices to use that standard for the code points for characters, so everything matches all over the world. So that is very helpful and normal and good work

they're doing. But emoji were created outside the Unicode Consortium's Unicode Standard. That one guy, Shigataka Corita, developed them for one company, and they were a hit. So then other competing Japanese cell phone carriers rolled out their own emoji keyboards, but the other companies did not bother to make sure their own code points for their own emoji image sets matched up. This put Japanese folks in a situation

where they could try to text a smiley face emoji, but their friend, with a different cell phone carrier, could receive that code point as a frowny face emoji, or a middle finger emoji, or an eggplant emoji. And we all know what the eggplant emoji means. Anyway, eventually the Unicode Consortium stepped in. The Unicode Consortium added standardized emoji code points

to their Unicode standard in 2010. And shortly after that happened, Apple added emoji support to iPhones and emoji conquered the world. Unicode continues to manage the emoji keyboard. They add new emoji every year. if you want to propose one, you need to meet their exacting proposal requirements. To propose the bison emoji, I drafted and submitted a 17-page proposal document. 17 pages of text, science, culture, history, charts, graphs, screenshots,

a piece of sample art that I commissioned, all with super-specific document formatting because the Unicode Consortium calls the emoji shots. And that's something that Mark Bramhill taught me about by investigating it personally. Your proposal is dated October 2016, and then in your podcast you describe doing the live pitch of it to Unicode in person in November of 2016. How much longer was it to get it approved and when did you kind of start putting it together? It actually, the whole thing started with just calling Jeremy Burge in the summer of 2016. Quick context there. Jeremy Burge is the founder of the website Amojopedia and the creator of the website, Emojopedia, and the creator of the

World Emoji Day holiday. World emoji Day falls on July 17th because that is the date displayed in Apple's art for the calendar emoji. And, you know, at this point, I wasn't planning on proposing an emoji. I actually, like, I think I was maybe kind of aware of this was a thing that people could do, but I never thought of it as a thing of, like, I, a regular person could do. And just talking to him, and I kind of had this realization, it's like, oh, wait, no, then this is this is a thing I could do this is I could have an emoji and so it was just like okay I want

suddenly I had so many more questions for him um from just like I was calling because I wanted to do some kind of story about emoji because I thought they were weird and cool and I was curious about it and I was just kind of doing it an interview just to explore like what kind of story is there in this and realized it's like oh this is the story this is what I can do And basically just asked him, like, what would be the best thing to propose? Like, you are on this board and you can't tell me what outstanding proposals there are. But you can also say, you know, this one might be good because you have a good sense of what would be approved and what would be a good use of time or whatever that no one has already taken up the cause. And so he told me that someone meditating or doing yoga would be a good one.

I had never done yoga before. This was not a thing that was really deeply important to me, but it was like, okay, I know that a lot of people do care about this. This seems like it'll be fun. I'll learn a lot. And then started doing some research and just kind of casually putting that together, really focused on that in September, submitted it in October, and then went to the in-person quarterly meeting. for Unicode the day before the 2016 election. Oh, it's a busy week. Wow.

Yeah. I very distinctly remember interviewing someone for the story on Election Day, someone who was more critical of emoji and thinks that they're kind of silly. He doesn't use them himself. And he was saying how today our country is going to make a very important decision, and we're here talking about one of the least important things that we could be thinking about or whatever. And it's just like, ha ha, that's so funny. And then, you know, everything since then has happened. I had submitted right before the last quarterly meeting of the year before they had all the emoji. And then anyone who submitted after that deadline was going to be in the next year's kind of school of emoji, the next graduating class.

And so I had the most accelerated timeline possible of submitting, getting it approved, and then being in the next released set. Did they encourage you to go to San Jose and make your case? Or was that just something you thought would be fun? So it was something that wasn't presented in the, I sent them the proposal and they emailed back being like, this is great. Do you want to come to San Jose? That wasn't how it went. Oh, it wasn't. Okay.

But what it was, I interviewed one of the people who's on that committee. Jenny Aitley, I interviewed her and essentially while I was writing the, like had a draft of my proposal and had her walk me through like, okay, tell me everything I'm doing wrong here. What looks bad about this? What would you improve? And she thought what I was doing was interesting and was just like, you know, actually, then this meeting that it would be considered at once you do. submit this is on this day in California. And if you want, then you can come and do this. It's a thing that you can like kind of request to do. And it doesn't, I don't think it particularly helps or hurts your chances, but it was still fun to go and do that. And it was the same time that Jenny was

putting on this kind of like emoji con, which was this conference of emoji thing, all the people who I might want to talk to were going to be there. And so it's like, you know, this is a fun little thing. I can do all the interviews in person rather than remotely that I want to be doing for this project. And I get this kind of weird, unique experience that I wouldn't otherwise get. So that was a lot of fun. You can't turn that down, you know. I'm curious how much you've gotten to know, like the emoji community, right? Because it seems like, especially with that trip, you've got Unicode, which I assume is a massive headquarters in some giant building. like in a cartoon.

But then also there's like the emoji community meeting and this what I feel like would almost be a Comic-Con sort of vibe. That's not too far off, yeah. It's not too far off? Cool, good. Well, the Comic-Con, the Comic-Con thing is. Oh, yeah. So Unicode actually doesn't have a headquarters.

They don't have any sort of building because it's just made up of people who have other, like, full-time jobs working at Apple and Google and Microsoft and all these places. But for their meetings, then they rotate between the different companies' headquarters. So when I went and presented, it was being held at an IBM campus in San Jose. I like to imagine it as, you know, in Super Friends, there would be the evil guys where it's a skull and a swamp and that's their building. I really wanted it to be like the smiley face just in some location. That's where they are.

I would love that. But unfortunately, it is not. that cool. It is more it's a free conference room in regular building. In real life, yes. In real life, it's just a conference room that wasn't being used at Microsoft or at

Adobe. And then in terms of Unicode being in charge of this, there's also that way where people who use Slack can just create their own emoji in a custom fashion and there's other things like that. How excited are you about that avenue for people to just generate something,

even if it's not a canonical keyboard one. Oh, and I think that's great, and I love that that exists within those platforms. I've used those to make my own custom emojis, whether that's of like, if you want to reference something that's extremely specific to the group that's on there, like, that doesn't need to be an emoji.

Or it could be based on like a picture of someone's cat. Like, you know, it can be anything and be so unique and specific to you. I think many times when someone wants a very specific emoji, then those are, if anything, better than what you're going to get from Unicode. It can say something that just inherently isn't going to be universal. It's also very fun to imagine somebody going all the way to Unicode with, like, the emoji of Robbie, you know? Look at Robbie, my friend.

It's just funny to me. Oh, yeah. And so, and yeah, Robbie is doing this little dance and there's music notes around it. Yeah. It's like, that's not going to pass. No one. There's like three people in the world who are going to use that. And that's great that you can make that with almost no effort.

Well, and then you are the creator of person in Lotus position. And I'm curious how often you use it. I use it definitely. And I'll use it sometimes in like signatures or things like that for signing off. on some emails or whatever, like, depending on who it's with. I'll definitely use it as a sort of like symbolizing calm or zen or whatever. I really should meditate more just because I think that would help with anxiety a little bit. You know, I'm not using it a ton myself, but I see it used a lot.

I get sent it a lot. My favorite is, you know, I will get sent photos whenever like a celebrity has used the yoga emoji, I'll immediately get like at least one or two people sending me a screenshot. And that's just so delightful to see every single time. That's awesome. Is it important? No, but like it's something where it's like, it's fun and it's nice that whoever is using it has this thing that allows them to get the message they want exactly to, that allows someone to get exactly the message they wanted to across to people. And that's really fun.

Yeah, it's like you're a collaborator on what they're writing almost, right? Yeah. Yeah, no, it's really special to get to see that. It's good to talk to anybody else who's done this because I don't know who else to grab. But yeah, I look forward to, you know, I look forward to my yoga emoji getting to be on the same, on the prairies with your bison. This is so sweet. Seems like a very peaceful, a peaceful scene, you know, meditating in the prairie. There's something really fun about just how kind of, like, silly and absurd all of this is.

It, you know, it feels like there's both a lot of drama in all of it, but that at the end of the day, the stakes are very, very low. And that's high drama, low stakes. Yeah, it's low and global. I love it. It's, is there anything else you want to share about just the overall emoji experience you had or what's going on with the one you made? I'm not sure exactly. I'm trying to think if there's anything else. And I guess one question I have for you is how did you pick to do a bison?

What drew you to this? Let me tell you something. If you are lucky enough to interview a skilled interviewer, you know, such a. as Mark Bramhill, your interviewer-interviewee might pitch you the perfect question. That question drives the rest of this show, because there are three big reasons I bothered to propose an emoji in the first place. Those three reasons are the three remaining episodes of this podcast miniseries, because we keep it tight, and here they are. Reason number one, emoji are worthwhile, all on their own. Reason number two, bison are incredible, all on their own.

And reason number three, well, not to hit you with too much of a plot twist. You gotta listen all the way to the end for that one. This has been part one of a four-part podcast mini-series. That many series is called One Way to Make an Emoji. It's a podcast by me, Alex Schmidt, but I am not a musician. The music on this episode is listed in the episode description and in the show notes at buys an emoji podcast.com. I want to get particular thanks to Pottington Bear for this.

This shows Intro Outro Song. It's entitled Disco Chic, and it's used under Creative Commons license from his Sound of Picture production library, which is amazing. Learn more and hear more at Soundof Picture.com. Additional engineering on this episode by Mark Bramhill and by Annette Ron Hell. Many thanks to my guest, Mark Bramhill. Please go out and hear his brilliant audio storytelling at Mark Bramhill.com. He has a lot to share with you beyond the person in Lotus Position emoji.

Links for that, as well as sources for the science and history and crazy Roberts in today's episode are in the episode show notes at bison emoji podcast.com. By the way, I said anyone can pitch an emoji. So, this episode's show notes link off to Unicode's instructions for emoji proposals, also Mark's proposal and my proposals, so you can see examples. And there is a link to the email address, Bison emoji podcast at gmail.com. I am opening that up to your. how-to questions. My feedback may be slow, misspelled, or otherwise frustrating, but since you

bothered to hear this show, I will bother to help you. Now, please subscribe to this podcast's feed so I can give you a heads up when the bison emoji is available on devices worldwide. All the regular episodes of this show are available right now, so go ahead and pull the next episode up in your podcast player, and thanks again for listening to this one. Thank you.