0:00:14 - (Matt): Welcome to Podcast awesome where we chat about icons, design, tech, business and nerdery with members of the Font awesome team. And occasionally I have conversations with non font awesome types. Maybe you've noticed in recent episodes. Today's episode is about iconography, but not the pixels and polish variety of conversation. We're going to be digging into how symbols shape culture, identity and inclusion and what it takes to change a globally recognized icon when the world changes around it.

0:00:48 - (Matt): And our guest today is Brian Glennie. He and I used to run in the same circles in the music and skateboarding community that grew up were a part of as younger guys. And along with music and skateboarding culture, Brian used to be a graffiti artist back in the day. These days, Brian's a philosophy professor and he was part of the Icon Accessibility project from several years ago. Maybe you've noticed in recent years that there's been a slight variation to that icon and we're going to get into how that variation came about and we'll get into the surprising story of how a couple street art stickers led to st statewide legislation, the ethics of visual representation, and how even the smallest symbols can really pack huge deep social meaning.

0:01:38 - (Matt): Brian's definitely a smart cookie and intellectually he's like he's off on the stratosphere and I'm sort of putting along in my moped trying to keep up with him. It's a pretty wild ride through art advocacy and semiotics will define what that means with pit stops along the way in neuroscience, punk Rock and Web 2.0. So how's that for a combination? All right, so enough of all that nonsense. Let's get into it and get to our conversation with Brian Glennie.

0:02:14 - (Matt): Brian Glennie, thanks for coming on podcast. Awesome world pals from back in the day. And I've noticed over the years that you got involved in this episode Accessibility Icon project that was super interesting and I saw how in some ways our worlds came together. Here I am working for an icon company and I'm like, wow, that's really interesting that you had your hands and helping to make a change to the Accessibility icon.

0:02:45 - (Brian): Yeah.

0:02:46 - (Matt): For folks that are just listening in and can't see a visual representation. Can you tell folks a little bit about and explain the original Accessibility icon and what it was you were trying to correct or or call into question and what it is you are creating to send a different signal to people?

0:03:07 - (Brian): Sure, sure. The I think Cofed is the graphic designer. It's like in the 1970 she won a contest to symbolize disability. And that symbol, which is so universal, it could be the most seen symbol ever. But it's like a stick figure. Right. In a stick figure wheelchair. For some reason, it reminds me, there's that game Life, and you have a little car, and then you got little people that you could place in the car, these little pegs.

0:03:45 - (Brian): That's what this symbol reminds me of. Like a little peg person in a wheelchair. At the time, there weren't very many icons, so you didn't have, like, women and men's bathroom icon. Right. And so these were developed over time after that, but they never developed the disability symbol along with those, you know, women, men, like all these other symbols, it didn't evolve largely because I think there was so many restrictions against any changes.

0:04:19 - (Brian): Once the ADA came out in the early 1990s, no one wanted to mess with disability. There it is. Boom. Let's just leave it alone.

0:04:31 - (Matt): Yeah.

0:04:31 - (Brian): And what our symbol was attempting to do is update it with the. I think it's called the ISO. There's like these 50 basic symbols and ISO 50. And we just took the man or the woman symbol and just placed them in a chair and then made the chair fit that symbol. So that is essentially like an update. The. The additional thing we did is we had the person represented leaning forward, and that was kind of like a little social, political, like, hey, these people, you shouldn't stigmatize them.

0:05:08 - (Brian): They're. They're. They have their own agency. They're Moving forward. Was like a branding campaign that a lot of these bills, like New York State, Connecticut, Ohio, they used Moving forward as this brand to persuade their constituency to vote for this symbol.

0:05:29 - (Matt): Yeah.

0:05:29 - (Brian): So another way of putting it is it's just like the old one, but it's bolded and italicized. Right. You. You actually have a look. Someone that looks like a person that's leaning forward.

0:05:42 - (Matt): Yeah, yeah. Showing agency movement that they're participating in something instead of just sitting there looking at a wall doing nothing.

0:05:53 - (Brian): Yeah. And, but see, this is where, you know, I think back to that woman in a bed, and she's like, look, I am that old symbol. My disability has turned me into a meat stick. As terrible as that sounds. There's this sense of like, I am a. Like, more like a stick than a moving forward person. I actually wrote a little essay about this. I just said, look, the fact that you're on a platform in front of 200 people sharing your story, you are our symbol.

0:06:34 - (Brian): You are an icon. And I. I mentioned something about how, like, awesome it was that the controversy of our symbol could platform her and give her a voice, whereas previously she didn't. So, again, I think symbolically, our symbol really does capture the agency of people with disabilities.

0:06:59 - (Matt): There's so much rich discussion here. Could you tell me a little bit about how that project came about and what you were trying to address with that?

0:07:10 - (Brian): Yeah, I mean, I suppose the context of my aesthetic background in graffiti is like one of the main pivot points. And one of my colleagues who I was doing a collaborative art installation with, she was pregnant, I think, at the time, with a baby that she knew was going to have down syndrome. Her name was Sarah Hendren. And Sarah, she is now quite famous. She has a wonderful book called what a Body Can Do.

0:07:44 - (Brian): So check it out. I mean, it doesn't detail so much the story of our icon, but it really talks about the fundamental concepts of urban planning and how we find our way through a pretty complex space. So anyway, she's thinking, oh, my gosh, there's stigma against people with disabilities. And I'm thinking, hey, there's easy ways to change that. You just spray paint it on a wall. Right? You can mess with people's minds very easily.

0:08:14 - (Brian): And I was like, let's just do that, but make it publicly available. We made a thousand stickers and started putting them up all over Boston. So I think this quick, let's just do this, and let's do it on the street, and let's see what happens is, I mean, the main focus here and the idea of changing something from private to public.

0:08:39 - (Matt): And you probably had to negotiate, like, at that point, you're, what, maybe in your early 40s? And, like, it probably wouldn't be a good idea to start doing graffiti art again. So I imagine you had to negotiate, like, how do we do this? And then you created a stencil that went over the original accessibility icon, Right?

0:09:00 - (Brian): Yeah. On the ground, we could just go over the old symbol and then still on signs. But then people started liking our symbol better more than the old one, including disability advocates. And out of nowhere, the state of New York passes a law to use our symbol.

0:09:21 - (Matt): Wow.

0:09:21 - (Brian): It was crazy. That's like. That happened two years after our little public campaign, our little sticker campaign. And so, you know, we were in the news, Good Morning America, like, all this stuff was popping off, and. And disability advocates were like, yo, these are the ones that made that symbol. Like, these people, they don't even have disabilities. I was like, oh, that's. That's a good point. Yeah, yeah, they have this phrase, nothing about us without us.

0:09:51 - (Brian): And so, you know, represent representation. These things really matter to people. And they want their symbols to really represent who they are, not just in terms of how they're depicted, but who made them. And there's all these debates. And I remember in Phoenix, Arizona, they were like, we're going to change over to this new symbol. And there was a public debate and a woman, she wasn't even able to be in a wheelchair. She had to be in a bed.

0:10:26 - (Brian): And they wheeled her bed onto the platform. There's like 200 people in this room. And she said, this new symbol does not represent me. Not made by people with disabilities. I'm offended by it. They still adopted our symbol, but you can see there was debate, sacrifice and frustration. And none of this could have been predicted by me on our little sticker nights.

0:10:57 - (Matt): As a content creator for this company, of course I'm going to have these kinds of conversations with designers and talking about user experience. And it's been eye opening to have conversations like this. Where the Internet is a public space. You have to think about it in terms of if you were out and about on the sidewalk. Well, you need to create wheelchair ramps for people that may not be able to step up onto a curb, you know, and.

0:11:25 - (Matt): And so when you think of it that way, like you want to make spaces as accessible as possible to as many people as possible, it would be wrong to deter someone from getting the information or to engage with other people in the way that they would want to. And that was just a brand new concept to me. When you're walking on the sidewalk, you see a wheelchair ramp. It makes sense. Cause it's this concrete thing. But when it came to the world of the web, I was like, wow, this is really important.

0:11:52 - (Matt): Whenever we talk about it, I'm always a little bit hesitant because like you said, the people that are a part of this community and are experiencing those challenges, they need to be the ones at the forefront of defining these things and saying, this is what we need and this is what advocacy looks like to be a part of that conversation. And for me to say, wow, I'm a learner, I want to be an advocate here, but there's a lot I don't understand yet.

0:12:21 - (Brian): Well, and I think one way to cash this out is an icon is way more than just geometry. Right?

0:12:28 - (Matt): Yeah.

0:12:29 - (Brian): I watch people talk about the apple icon and how the bite of the apple matches the angle and the hardware. They all have the same radius on the edges. And I'm like, wow, yeah, geometrically. That's really austere, really minimalistic. That's very interesting. But it's doing more. It's saying something social. Right. Saying something almost political. And, you know, as a philosopher, I'm like, what is it saying?

0:13:04 - (Brian): Is the minimalism there to open up extra access for people, or does it give exclusivity? You know, what's being signaled here? When we made our icon, we were thinking a lot about the geometry of it, and what. What came out was something that looked like a guy wiping his butt. I mean, it was. It was whack. And it wasn't until, like, we put it in some. In front of some people's eyes that actually had disabilities, where they were like, oh, you should just change the angle of the arm like this, because that's actually how we push our chair.

0:13:46 - (Matt): Oh, yeah.

0:13:46 - (Brian): And. And so, like, Sarah was the main person working on that, and she tried it, and she's like, oh, my gosh, it doesn't look like he's wiping his butt anymore. You know, I. I think even though icons are all about geometry, that there's something real that they're representing. And if you have that realness feed into the. The icon, it cashes out in this incredible amount of meaning. I have to say, I don't understand why our symbol popped.

0:14:16 - (Brian): You open up your phone, there's our symbol as one of the icons. That's surprising to me. I don't think it's the geometry. It is something else about it. It could be the graffiti campaign, the people with disabilities who voiced some of the design support, and they helped us do some illegal work. There was definitely some interesting solidarity they gave to our symbol. And then I think about your work just popping out, you know, these symbols, and I'm like, is that real?

0:14:50 - (Matt): Tell me more. What do you mean by that?

0:14:53 - (Brian): Here's. I don't know. I mean, you know, are you just looking at geometry of the symbol and trying to match it with other symbols, or is there rich social and political content that is being expressed in those symbols? It sounds crazy, but I think people can see it. And so I don't know. But as somebody who lucked out on this one symbol, I'm no expert on creating symbols or icons. Yeah, it seems like putting that extra effort in was the pivot point, the change making.

0:15:31 - (Brian): I'm not saying that you should go around putting. Putting stickers of your symbols out to test them in the public eye, but it would be interesting, wouldn't it?

0:15:40 - (Matt): Well, I can tell you I'm not A designer. I'm not a developer. I'm a writer and a podcaster. But I do know that the designers are some of the best icon designers in the world. The amount of care they take thinking about the design, making them as readable as possible, trying to lower the barriers as far as the readability of them. They're redoing their eye contacts constantly. So they have a specific style.

0:16:11 - (Matt): One style is a little bit more rounded and a little bit more friendly to engage with. Some of them are a little bit sharper around the edges and maybe lend itself more towards, like, fintech or professional types of design and layout. So they're very thoughtful about the environment that they're read in and the feeling and the vibe that they're trying to get across. And there's just so much behind it.

0:16:34 - (Matt): So it's super interesting.

0:16:36 - (Brian): I wonder if their goal is to not so much appeal to an audience, but to literally educate an audience. I think the real symbol makers are tastemakers, right? They're the ones saying, hey, this tastes good. Here it is. And the consumers, if it actually does taste good, they'll be like, oh, yes, this is it. This fits my expectations of how these symbols can convey meaning and all that different stuff.

0:17:11 - (Matt): I'm curious about because you're a professor of philosophy and I think you've done work in epistemology and sensory perception. How is it that the mind deciphers a symbol? And how do you account for when a symbol is new to the general population, that you're having to educate people on what something means and that at some point there's inevitably a cognitive load? So it seems like there's a certain amount of time where a population has to, like, I don't know, assimilate or have a agreed upon way that they're reading the symbol, but you have to educate them at the same time. But the end goal is that when they see this, there's no cognitive load. They just know what to expect.

0:18:07 - (Matt): They know, like, say, for wayfinding icons, as an example, they just know where to go, or they know, oh, there's the wheelchair ramp or whatever, like, what is going on inside of the brain. I don't even know what my question is, Riff.

0:18:20 - (Brian): For me, this is the question. I studied neuroscience with this guy, Irving Biederman at USC University of Southern California, and he has this. It's called Geon theory. And he basically took every possible way of representing every possible object. And he said, you can break it down into 16 shapes and four relationships between those shapes. So think About a cup. What you have there is a cylinder and a horseshoe.

0:18:57 - (Brian): Two different shapes, and they're related side to side. Take the horseshoe, put it on top. What do you have? Pale, right. And you have the same two shapes but just different relations between them. You would talk about elephants having three different shapes, four different relations. And so one claim is how quickly the human brain is able to take a shape and kind of represent it in their mind using these geons, these shape, these basic shapes and the relations between them.

0:19:34 - (Brian): That was like the 90s. And now with FMRI and all these empirical studies, everyone's like, there are no geons in the brain. Like we can't find them. So it doesn't seem like geon theory is correct. And nobody knows how it is that we're able to process these. The fact that we can process this as a cup even under all these different orientations is pretty astonishing. So we don't know. And the best guess was geon theory.

0:20:12 - (Brian): But let's turn it back to this guy, John Locke. I study blindness and what it what happens to an individual as they reacquire sight. That's like one of my main specialties. And John Locke was the first to try to think about this. And he, he thought that a person who is blind slowly coming to see would see. I don't have a sphere around me, but they would see a sphere as a circle of all these different colors.

0:20:44 - (Brian): Right. It would be a two dimensional surface that is kind of like when we first see a symbol. I don't think we actually acquire the right meaning when we first see a symbol. Right. We're just seeing maybe some geometry. And then Locke says, over time and repeated experience that's associated with other things, that circle that's variously colored will soon look like a sphere with one color. He doesn't tell us how that happens, but I have to imagine that is exactly what's happening.

0:21:22 - (Brian): As we learn to receive these icons that become so familiar to us and that we don't even think about them when we see them, we automatically know what they mean. Bloc kind of like gets subsumed by this guy Hume who is like, you think that's how the visual world works, but that's how the mental world works as well. He's like, take our words. Nobody's reading a word. Right? You just see it as an icon and it's just immediately processed.

0:21:55 - (Brian): I try to tell my students, if you read enough, a sentence can become an icon.

0:22:00 - (Matt): Because you see it as a whole. Right? You see it as one Whole unit. Yeah.

0:22:05 - (Brian): You might say, oh, well, a sentence is a bunch of different words. Well, a word is a bunch of different letters as you just repeat these experiences again and again. A sentence is just a bunch of words in different relations to one another. But after. I mean, I'm almost at the point. I swear I'm not showing off, but I'm almost at the point where I think I can see a paragraph in a single shot. I see the paragraph and I'm like, oh, I know what that means.

0:22:35 - (Brian): I've read so much to where I don't have to read individual sentences anymore. I can just gaze over a paragraph, boom. Next paragraph, boom. I'm not a speed reader, mind you, but I just am trying to get the sense of meaning of these various things. So I think it's natural for humans to do these quick movements. We don't know how it's accomplished necessarily, but I don't think we need to to at least appreciate that fact.

0:23:02 - (Brian): There's the phrase same but different. I think that's what serves graphic designers really well, is they're not making a new asterisk. Right. There's limits to that particular shape that they have to follow, but they're trying to present it differently. Different radii. Right. Different. Slightly different geometry. I honestly don't understand why they do that. Why do we need, like 100 different asterisks?

0:23:33 - (Matt): It's interesting, like how there's meaning behind those angles and the geometry. Right. And people, some somehow pick up on that. I don't know what that is, but it's interesting what the brain does with that. I never would have thought, all these years later, like, how deep these discussions can go. I was challenged by the general idea of design in recent years. Good design should go unnoticed in a sense, because, um, does design done well, there's going to be a sort of intuitive sense to what comes next. How do I make sense of where I am and what comes next?

0:24:18 - (Matt): Good design is in the background, and there's not going to be that cognitive load. Right? But then what I think is interesting in conversations like this is that you're doing guerrilla art on this widely known and understood symbol. You're coming along and you're screwing with it, and you're working within the parameters of what's understandable for people, but you're just tweaking it slightly. That is so interesting to me that you have the official organizations that say, this is the official accessibility icon and what it means, and if you're going to use it in a Public space. It needs to be used in a very specific way, and it needs to be according to these standards.

0:25:01 - (Matt): But you're coming along and saying that doesn't serve this population very well. It's not communicating something true about people. And so we need to make a tweak. Can you say a little bit about how symbols change over time when people come along and poke at something? Do you have other examples of icons that have changed or have been reappropriated over time by a general population or a specific population that are trying to communicate something different and actually were successful?

0:25:29 - (Brian): I appreciate that, but maybe cognitive loads aren't always negative. Right? I mean, I. I totally appreciate that. It's. It's more accessible to have that immediate grasp of meaning, you know, with a glance. And that's why they have these ISO standards. Right. That makes totally sense. Totally total. I guess so. I guess what I'm saying is I want cognitive load, and I want the good kind that makes you rethink the meaning. Like, why does that mean that way to me?

0:26:01 - (Brian): It should mean something else or, you know, something like that. I think we've talked about the peace symbol before. My friend Lee Spielman has an upside down peace symbol. He's the singer for Trash Talk, and he ran a store called Babylon. The O is an upside down piece symbol, but he's not into war.

0:26:26 - (Matt): You.

0:26:27 - (Brian): Know, I mean, it's not like, oh, down with peace. I hate peace. It's a reappropriation of peace. I think what he's trying to do with that is to say, look, there is no peace. We live in Babylon. It's cutthroat. We're in state of nature. And to throw out a symbol like peace and suggest that everything's fine because this symbol is there. I'm not down with that. I want truth. I want reality. I'm doing an upside down peace symbol.

0:26:59 - (Brian): And so Babylon, that upside down peace symbol, is really successful in my little punk, hardcore graffiti culture. And it's the norm. I mean, people will put it up everywhere. Hey, reality is harsh. Stop making it fluffy.

0:27:18 - (Matt): Sure.

0:27:18 - (Brian): Stop making these messy edges all smooth and round.

0:27:23 - (Matt): Yeah. It makes me automatically think of. And this is not. I'm not making a political statement or. Or anything, but when somebody uses an upside down American flag, it could be signaling people know automatically what it means. But they're like, this project is not maybe working the way that it should.

0:27:41 - (Brian): Why? I mean, this is what's interesting to me about following rules, ISO standards. It's so freaking boring, and it's like you have an opportunity to really subvert. I mean, I want an asterisk that makes me think some, like, significant political messages being shared with me. I don't know, is that too much?

0:28:12 - (Matt): The thing is, I'm not sure many people think on that level so deeply.

0:28:17 - (Brian): But don't you see we're seeing these symbols constantly, right. You know, we're processing them unconsciously, low to no cognitive load. And I just want something that will go like, oh, yeah, no to low to no cognitive load. This is great. What's that asterisk Symbol? What are we dealing with? That's really interesting to take a moment, reflect, be human, right? Not be a machine processing symbols, but be human.

0:28:46 - (Brian): This is a long form discussion in what's called semiotics. There is a lot of writing on deeper meanings that can be conveyed through the most simple symbols. You know, the happy face. Right. I think of Alan Moore. He. He has Watchmen, the comic novel. What did he do with the happy face? He put like a splash of blood on it, right? And I'm like, man, I love the happy face with the splotch of blood on it. I used to write that on my peachy folders when I was in high school. I'm like, this is it.

0:29:22 - (Brian): Is it too much to ask to have a little blood on a. On a. On a, you know, on exclamation point here? I don't know, on an ass. And I just think cognitive load should be utilized in a positive, progressive, politically savvy way. Wouldn't it be sick if there was like a urban dictionary for symbols? You know, we have like, the new. And you're like, oh, I have no idea what that word is. I really am old and.

0:29:52 - (Brian): But that's, but it's for like, oh, what a strange symbol. I've never seen that symbol before.

0:29:57 - (Matt): Huh.

0:29:58 - (Brian): Let me look that up.

0:30:01 - (Matt): And then you're part of a conversation, right? I can see what you're saying about the cognitive load. On one hand, you live in a civilized society. You want to be able to get. You want to have recognizable symbols so that people can discern what's happening or what's expected or what's going to come next. But if there's a way to subvert it a little bit, then it sort of wakes them up out of life on automatic pilot. I'm like, oh, interesting. And then they're thinking about something on a different level.

0:30:29 - (Brian): There's power.

0:30:30 - (Matt): Yeah.

0:30:31 - (Brian): I don't think we've even scratched the surface of the political power of symbols. Of icons. And, you know, you have all these graphic designers. Come on, give me something. You know this symbol, right?

0:30:47 - (Matt): Yeah, of course.

0:30:48 - (Brian): Words. Yeah, you. And you feel it.

0:30:53 - (Matt): Yeah, yeah.

0:30:54 - (Brian): The second you see it, I'm like, oh, they. This band and integrity and what's the other band? The vegan band, Earth Crisis. They are touring together and to release it, they just had those three symbols. Crisis symbol, this symbol, and the Integrity skull. You just see those three symbols together and you're like, oh, where's the tickets? You know?

0:31:21 - (Matt): Yeah, exactly. I gotta get to the show.

0:31:23 - (Brian): I think that was way more powerful than the names, right? Something about symbols like, add extra emotion power, and it gets you to just go wild with excitement. I don't know, man. Yeah, now you're getting me. Really, huh?

0:31:41 - (Matt): Yeah.

0:31:41 - (Brian): You got me thinking. I like that question of these new symbols and how do they get purchase? How do we teach people to translate the symbol into meaning? Do you have thoughts? Do you know how?

0:31:58 - (Matt): I don't know, man. I'm no philosopher. Yeah, I mean, but. But it is interesting how, like, what is it about a symbol that. Yeah, that catches on? There's something intuitive about the meaning behind something, and then everybody has a shared understanding of what that thing is. A symbol has to be clear and simple enough to understand it. But beyond that, what makes one symbol meaningful and then another one not? I don't know.

0:32:26 - (Brian): There's this area in our brain, the fusiform face area, dedicated solely to the perception of faces, identifying them. It's tied to the amygdala. Amygdala. And these other emotional centers. And so some faces create just like, sense of happiness, others dread, et cetera, et cetera. And I just have to think, like, in the back of my mind when, since symbols are so connected to our emotions, it's like we have a fusiform symbol area, right. And.

0:33:05 - (Brian): And we just have this repository of symbols. I mean, I'm not saying that. No, no neuroscientist says this. They say this about faces, but I wonder if the buildup of symbols that I have and the emotional qualities that they present to me, they're just so robust. It. It's almost like there has to be these special processing centers for symbols alone. I think that has to be the job of a graphic designer, creating these icons.

0:33:37 - (Brian): Your freaking job is to give me new symbols to light up. Like, you know, my X neuron that is involved with symbols and emotion. Give me some symbols, man.

0:33:56 - (Matt): Well, we have a. A lot of icons, and we also tweaked the software where people can add a secondary symbol called the icon wizard. So you could have like a ban symbol? Like. No. Ah. You could add fire to the little corner of the symbol. And with all of those variations, we have more than a million symbols that we can create, so.

0:34:22 - (Brian): And these are self customizable by the client.

0:34:26 - (Matt): Yeah. So you have a standard icon and then they can add a dozen different variations of it.

0:34:33 - (Brian): I love it.

0:34:34 - (Matt): Yeah.

0:34:34 - (Brian): I want something new that's.

0:34:37 - (Matt): I'll get my icon designers on it. What neuron are you hoping to light up and connect? I'll see if I can get them on that. All right, I'm gonna get my people on that. Brian.

0:34:49 - (Brian): I'm such a. You know, the philosopher is such a crazy critic and that. And I just mean it. I mean it in all good fun. Of course.

0:34:56 - (Matt): Of course. Of course you do, dude. Thank you so much for taking some time. This has been really fun to chat and I just never knew there were so many layers to this stuff and help us to think about it deeply.

0:35:07 - (Brian): Yeah, no, I didn't either. Thanks for giving me the space and the time and dialoguing with me. Yeah, you see how stuff just came out. That could be bonkers. But I really. I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity. That was. Thank you.

0:35:25 - (Matt): Yeah, man. Yeah, likewise. Man, oh, man, what a conversation. I just want to thank Brian for coming on the show today and talking to us about symbols and cognition and for reminding us it's not just about what looks good in design, but what represents truth, amplifies voices, and sometimes makes invisible things visible. And I'm definitely going to be thinking about this cognitive load thing. You know, not having cognitive load when you're trying to make your way around a website or in a public space, it's a good thing. But at the same time, sometimes when you add a little bit of a tweak to it, it can actually start a conversation that's pretty important.

0:36:14 - (Matt): So that was a great reminder and definitely making me stretch my brain muscles a little bit. So thanks for joining us today. If you thought this episode was interesting or informative, just take a second to pass on the URL to a friend right now. Podcast awesome, as per usual, is produced and edited by this guy right here, Matt Johnson. The podcast awesome theme song was composed by Ronnie Martin. The music interstitials were done by Zach Malm, and the audio mastering was done by Chris Ends at Lemon Productions.

0:36:51 - (Matt): And can't forget our good friend Isaac Chase helps us with these video productions. Thanks for the extra lift there, Isaac. Sa.