Lex Friedman - What the Hell

It’s Tuesday, March 19th.

There was never an episode on Monday, March 18th, 2024.

Uh, for which I can only blame you.

No, there’s no one to blame other than Lex Friedman.

Uh, the real one.

That’s me.

But anyway, it’s March 19th.

Now we’re doing an episode again.

And, uh, boy, do I have, uh, weird hobbies.

I guess I’m going to go.

I have weird hobbies.

Your Daily Lex.

I love the puzzle game stuff I’m doing.

I love it because it came up at random.

You know, I enjoyed playing the New York times connections.

Uh, I wanted to make my own.

I didn’t like the tool that I was using to make my own.

That was, you know, some other free websites.

So I made my own thing to make my own connections puzzles.

And then it became a thing where I was publishing puzzles all the time.

Then I made other puzzles and then I made still other puzzles and that’s been fun.

Uh, a side effect of doing that is, you know, I’m thinking about what other, other word games could be.

And, uh, you know, I have a database that’s, uh, from an open source list of words.

Um, uh, and it’s got, you know, tens of thousands of English language words in it of varying lengths and a, uh, a fun thing that I have to do for some games I’m thinking about that are, you know, days, weeks, months, whatever away is you gotta have, you gotta make sure, you know, which words are common and which ones aren’t, uh, you know, when you’re playing my game by a vowel where it’s, here’s a jumble of letters, it’s missing one vowel, figure out the word with the missing vowel.

Uh, when you’re playing that, it’ll tell you if you’ve formed a valid word and it’s doing that by, you know, looking up, does that word exist in my database of words?

In that case, I don’t care if it’s a rare word or not.

If you formed a valid word, I’ll at least notify you by turning that field blue that you found a valid word.

But, uh, there are other games that I’m thinking about where you’d really, if you’re pulling words that the guesser has to guess, right, that the player has to guess, uh, you want to make sure that those are words they’ve heard of.

So knowing that I’ve got these tens of thousands of words, uh, and that many words in English, nobody’s ever heard of, or not enough people have heard of, I built myself a little tool that I can use on my phone or in my spare time that pulls a word from my giant database of words.

And literally right now I have the tool in front of me.

Uh, and the word that it offers me at this moment is brontides, brontides.

And listen, maybe, you know, the word brontides, in which case I’m excited for you.

Uh, I don’t know that word.

Um, it turns out that it’s a sound like that of distant sun, distant thunder, some of which may have seismic origins.

Uh, but I don’t consider brontides, uh, common.

So I press my rare button and then it just gives me another word.

And when in doubt, I’m choosing rare, right?

Like flatman is a word that just came up or in run.

Like these are words that maybe you could grok the context of, but they’re not words that you would ever, I think, think of in real time, uh, while playing a game.

Uh, now this is going to take me forever to do.

So I just do it when I have downtime.

Like if I’m on a conference call, I can just put it up there and click the button over and over again.

Or currently while I’m recording this podcast, I even, I’m so smart.

I built myself this little tool.

It’s got the common button.

It’s got the rare button.

And then it also has, uh, you know, uh, basically an undo button.

So if I’m, if I get too much on a roll, I’m like, you know, I marked that one.

It’s common, but I think it’s rare.

I can just press the undo button and it flips it.

Um, I could have done this alphabetically, but I thought that would be too mind numbing.

So instead I have a pick words at random each time.

And I don’t know, it’s very funny to me that this is part of my life is evaluating the prevoyant prevoyant.

Is that like the opposite of clairvoyant?

I don’t even know what that, I don’t know what that would be.

Prevoyant.

Uh, it comes from the French and, um, it means farsighted.

Yeah.

And I wonder if that means metaphorically or not, but either way, it’s rare.

Um, anyway, that’s a, it’s just, it’s very amusing to me that that’s part of my life because I gave myself homework basically.

Anyway, as you know, we’ve been going through my album and the album is coming to a close.

We have reached the final song on the album.

Track 12 in many ways, track 12 of the album, a sentiment that’s almost true.

It’s my favorite one.

It’s a song called what the hell it’s the last song I wrote for the album.

Nope, actually 73, which you heard on Friday.

It was the last song.

It’s the second to last song I wrote for them.

I was just playing around on the piano, trying to come up with something and, uh, suddenly was struck with the opening line.

It gets lonely here in hell.

Uh, and then of course I was thinking, well, who would sing the lyric?

It gets lonely here in hell.

And the answer is, uh, the devil.

So this is a song by the devil channel through me.

Uh, I honestly, if I’m being totally candid, which why wouldn’t I be?

I wish I had sung it a little bit better.

Like I feel like I’m just, I’m not nailing the notes on this track the way I wish I were.

Uh, but, um, I do love the song.

I think it’s funny.

I think it’s cute.

I think it’s fun.

So here is the last song on the album.

Uh, what the hell, if you haven’t yet, if you’ve been enjoying these songs on my podcast, a thank you, but be, you know, feel free to stream it in your favorite music app of choice, uh, or to tell a friend, Hey, you might like this, tell you they might be giants or barenaked ladies or Moxie Frueva’s liking friends.

Hey, you should check out Lex Friedman.

And then they’ll be like that guy with the podcast.

And you’re like, yes, but not the one you’re thinking of and you’ll clear it up, but you know, they can find it and they should listen to it.

Anyway, here it is.

Happy Tuesday.

It gets lonely here in hell.

Some may say it’s just as well, but honestly it could stand to be a bit colder.

I’m tired of being seen as the bad guy on the shoulder.

The devil’s in the details and the devil’s in the dumps.

The devil, you know, is a lonely guy.

Unlike you mortal chumps.

What the hell?

It gets lonely here in Hades.

It’s hard to meet nice ladies.

Stick a pitchfork in me.

I’m done.

The hell of it is.

I’m not having any fun.

The devil’s in the details and the devil’s in the dumps.

The devil, you know, is a lonely guy.

Yeah.

He’s in a hell of a slump.

What the hell?

Hell, if I know just what’s wrong.

Sometimes I feel like I don’t belong.

No one wants to hear me complain.

And that’s the devil of a pain.

It gets lonely here in the underworld.

My moods twist like my tail is curled.

I live deep amongst these fiery pits.

Hell, if I know why I’m sick of it.

The devil’s in the details and the devil’s in the dumps.

The devil, you know, is a lonely guy.

Sorry if he seems like a grump.

What the hell?

Lex.